Posted on 11/06/2003 7:31:54 PM PST by republicanwizard
lincoln, the tyrant,great bloodspiller & cheap politician, wasn't fit to be on the same earth with President Davis, Marse Robert, Stonewall Jackson & other "giants who walked the land".
lincoln was about the same sort of creature as wee willie klintoon. his MYTH was/is just that: MYTH.
free dixie,sw
It is curious to see that you are content in your idolatry. Perhaps you will join him one day in his well heated abode.
WELL SAID!
free the southland,sw
I also know for certain that all of those former posters I named were the same individual because I helped to get them zotted at the time. There was a period about a year or two back when LLAN-DDEUSSANT showed up, posted for about 2 months until his leftism caught up with him, and got banned. About days later the next showed up, I think it was Titus_Fikus, that time and did the exact same thing - same language, same style, same kooky leftist beliefs. He lasted about a month then got the boot. Two or three days passed then another, Mortin_Sult, registers as a "new" freeper and posts for a while. He too gets kicked off, then another shows up, and another after that, and another after that.
I hadn't seen him for a while (though he may well have been posting under yet another name and avoiding me) when Held_to_ransom showed up a few months ago. Something stood out about the way he posted - a similar style of language, a similar abrasiveness as a poster, a similar near-idolatrous veneration for two historical figures (Lincoln and Charles Sumner), a similar tendency to randomly make up "facts" and post them without substantiation, and, of course, a similar tilt to the left. A few weeks ago I began publicly confronting him in firm but polite queries over his suspected former identities. Other freepers who have noticed the same similarities have done so as well He carefully evaded each and every one by either responding to everything in my post except the one line about his identity or, more recently, avoiding me, and anyone else who suspects him, all together. In short, he has behaved as if he knew that I knew who he really was at a time when he did not want others to know who he really was. Needless to say, the direct confrontations on this thread combined with his evasions here seem to support the theory that Held_to_Ransom is FR's longtime resident schizo Titus_Fikus aka Mortin_sult et al.
Have you actually read the decision?
All the prior case law is cited right there in it.
But that is false. Blacks could vote in five states.
You are misquoting Taney. You left off the first part of his statement. He said that "in the century BEFORE the Declaration of Independence was adopted" primarily in the "more enlightened" portions of the world and specifically was referring to the English government and English people's opinions during the 18th Century. He was NOT referring to the United States of 1860. Here's the full quote:
It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
And in no nation was this opinion more firmly fixed or more uniformly acted upon than by the English Government and English people. They not only seized them on the coast of Africa, and sold them or held them in slavery for their own use; but they took them as ordinary articles of merchandise to every country where they could make a profit on them, and were far more extensively engaged in this commerce than any other nation in the world.
When he said "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" he is not giving his own opinion of the time, he is saying that was the general opinion of the English people and English government in the century prior to the Declaration of Independence.
Please read the actual decision rather than a selective quote from a history book.
But that is false. Blacks could vote in five states.
Taney actually addressed this in his opinion:
So, too, a person may be entitled to vote by the law of the State, who is not a citizen even of the State itself. And in some of the States of the Union foreigners not naturalized are allowed to vote. And the State may give the right to free negroes and mulattoes, but that does not make them citizens of the State, and still less of the United States.
As far as I can tell though (from reading some of the reviews), the hoard of gold hidden in the Arkansaw mountains by the KGC was raised after the WBTS ended, rather than before.
The reviews were wrong.
There is an interesting understory of how Jesse James (all THREE of him!) worked for The Knights Of The Golden Circle to increase the hoard, but the majority of the (so claimed) vast fortune buried from Georgia to the Superstitious Mountains was from the removed Confederate treasury.
You ain't the first person who wondered where it went.
My apologies to the good folks in Arizona.
Of what is there the CSA treasury is indeed the likely source. There is a lot of gold from that era reportedly remaining unaccounted for: gold from the New Orleans mint, gold from many of the Jesse James and other outlaw train and bank robberies, the personal gold holdings of the wealthy in the CSA government. Much of it dissappeared during and after the war with very little record. Some of it probably went to Britain, where several of the CSA officials, senators, and representatives who escaped the invading feds stayed for the next decade. And yes, some of it was indisputably buried.
Accounts abound of southerners gathering up all the gold and silver in the plantation house when the yankees were approaching and burying it in the woods so it wouldn't be stolen and plundered. Some of that is without a doubt probably still buried out there.
Vermont didn't consider herself a sovereign nation in 1861 and certainly didn't recognized southern independence.
And nothing in 1863 or 1864 or 1865. A supreme court just didn't fit in his plans.
Do you know that for sure, Non-Seq? Have you scanned Jefferson Davis' papers and found that it dissappeared in those years from his agenda? If not, you cannot say that conclusively. Besides, it still remains that, just as I stated, Davis sought a Supreme Court. I already told you the reason why Congress didn't give him one. Your constant fibbing about the subject will never change those facts.
Mea culpa. Wrong thread - Vermont was sovereign before the Constitution. But if the requirement is, in your words, '[a]t least one would be nice', then the several states of the Confederacy, the several Civilized Indian Nations, and the Pope - the official leader of the Vatican State - recognized the Confederacy.
Bush v. Gore and the Dred Scott Decision: Which One's Worse?Bush v. Gore is quite demonstrably the least defensible Supreme Court decision in history. Many people do not want to believe that, and I earned a solid rebuke from the Wall Street Journal for making the point in print. Many conservatives clearly wish the title of "Worst Case" to belong for all time to the infamous Dred Scott decision. But Dred Scott was, by comparison to Bush v. Gore, a well-reasoned and logically coherent decision. It was, in fact, a masterpiece of "original intent" analysis that forcefully demonstrated that the original Constitution was designed as a white man's compact and that the Framers never contemplated that slaves or their descendants could sue in federal court.
Dred Scott was a jurisdictional decision, turning principally on whether an African American could be a federally recognized "citizen" of a state for the purpose of establishing diversity jurisdiction in federal court. Dred Scott, a slave in Missouri, brought suit in federal court against his owner, a New York citizen, asserting his legal emancipation when a prior owner brought him to Illinois and parts of the Louisiana Territory, which were free. Chief Justice Taney disposed of the suit by holding that there was no diversity jurisdiction in the case because no African American could ever be a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution. To support this proposition, Taney assembled a mountain of textual, statutory and historical evidence that neither the Framers nor the states ever considered "Africans" as potential citizens. "On the contrary," he wrote:
they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.We like to pretend that the Court erred grievously in Dred Scott because we want to believe that the Civil War might have been averted by some other decision. But this is fooling ourselves. The Court engaged in unnecessary and unwarranted activism when it struck down the Missouri Compromise, but in interpreting the meaning of the word "citizen," it articulated well the social consensus about the meaning of the Constitution. It would take a Civil War, Reconstruction and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to remake the Constitution. Of course, the type of originalism that Justice Taney practiced (and that is embraced by conservatives today) is not the only theory of constitutional interpretation. This decision was not necessarily "right." Indeed, there were even originalist-type argements on the other side, since the text of the Constitution did not foreclose the possibility of African-American freedmen becoming citizens of states. After all, several states had extended to freedmen their civil and political rights. This was essentially the position adopted by Justice Curtis in dissent. Yet, if we look at the original understanding of the Constitution and the traditions of the time of its writing, which is certainly Justice Scalia's methodology, it seems certain the majority was right. But whatever its final merits, at least the Dred Scott majority decision had a coherent theory rooted in the history and text of the Constitution.
By contrast, Bush v. Gore is an affront to rule-of-law principles. The majority decision has no grounding in textualism or originalism, the interpretive strategies normally celebrated by conservatives. Nor does it have any connection to a progressive constitutionalism, whose focus in politics is on the democratic will of the people and the intent of the voter. These are the very concepts defeated by the Court's reasoning. In order to stop the vote-counting, the majority briefly inflated to blimp-sized dimensions the Equal Protection Clause, the part of the Constitution these Justices have done everything in their power to shrink as it applies to the rights of racial minorities. All of the air has, of course, gone out of Equal Protection since the decision.
From A Practical Companion to the Constitution, Jethro K. Lieberman, 1999, p. 153-4
Dred Scott was a TEST CASE, its jurisdictional facts rigged to permit the Supreme Court to hear it. ...The Missouri Court held that under Missouri law, when Scott reentered the state he again became a slave. That question was not appealable to the Supreme Court, so the issue of Scott's status should have ended there. But fate intervened. Mrs. Emerson remarried and moved to Massachusetts. Under Missouri law, a married woman could not administer a trust, so administration of her late husband's estate passed to her brother, John F. A. Sanford of New York. Because Sanford was not a citizen of Missouri, he could be sued in federal court under DIVERSITY JURISDICTION, and any decision there could be appealed to the Supreme Court. So a new suit was born -- fabricated, more accurately, solely for the purpose of the appeal.
The lawyers alleged on Scott's behalf that Sanford had assaulted Scott and his family. In Scott's name they sued for nine thousand dollars in DAMAGES. The federal trial court in St. Louis ruled that for jurisdictional purposes Scott was a citizen. Sanford (whose name would be misspelled with a d in the Supreme Court Reports) defended on the grounds that he was entitled to lay his hands "gently" on his slaves. In 1854 the federal trial court upheld Sanford's defense, and the case was ready for its rendezvous with Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, slaveholder from Maryland.
The Court could have rested its decision on the narrow ground, consistent with its precedents, of the state to which he returned. Under that rule, Scott would have remained a slave, and the case would have been dismissed. But Taney thought to go beyond the question directly raised. ...
As for Dred Scott, now that his existence as a slave was no longer necessary to a lawsuit, his owners emancipated him. His taste of freedom proved short: he died fifteen months later of tuberculosis.
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