[sheltonmac]

*ping*

[stainlessbanner]

Sheltonmac ping!

[2banana]

What is also interesting is that owning slaves was not a "white" thing in America. Free Blacks, Mexicans and Indians owned Blacks slaves (and Indians also had slaves before Whites ever came to North America but that is another topic).

For example, about one-third of the 10,600 free blacks in New Orleans in 1860 were slave owners.

[blaquebyrd]

Who the hell cares? When are we as a country going to get past this issue? Our country is being infiltrated by terrorists and illegal aliens by the thousands while we continue to fight and debate the civil war. We should be focusing on the threat today (the terrorist are), instead of reliving the civil war.

[lunarbicep]

bttt

[advance_copy]

The PC crowd never acknowledges that the United States did not establish slavery in North America, we ended it. Slavery was the product of European Empires trying to make more profit from their colonies. Firmly implanted in the U.S. at the time the Constitution was ratified, efforts to end slavery were culminating when the war between the states started. Any historian worth their salt acknowledges that slavery would have ended before the 19th century without the war, and race relations today would be much better.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Lincoln defeated the Slaver rebellion which instigators had been trying to provoke for almost a decade prior to the war. By doing so he ensured that the ideals of the revolution were preserved and that the US would become the most powerful force in history to spread Liberty. Had the tyranny of the Slavers been successful Freedom's greatest light would have been extinguished. Thanks Abe.

It is particularly amusing that the Secessionist plot to elect Lincoln and split the nation failed. The foul plot hatched in Charleston to split the Democrat party so that Lincoln would be elected and the South revolt was crushed by those who understood and cared about what America stood for.

[4CJ]

in her book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860, points out that some militant groups even made a practice of "conducting terroristic, armed raids on urban black communities and the institutions that served them."

Hypocrits.

[4CJ]

Lee, great post!

[Noachian]

Trying to turn what Lincoln did into a moral crusade that justified the deaths of over 600,000 Americans is no better than defending the institution of slavery itself.

This is the part that the anti-south crowd never seem to address.

How can Lincoln claim that he had the moral high ground, while sending troops to kill and maim fellow Americans in a civil war?

We can see that it was wrong now, and it was wrong then. Lincoln may have won a war, but he inflamed passions that run deep even until today.

[KarlInOhio]

Even Southern leaders realized slavery wouldn't last. In language far more explicit than its U.S. counterpart, the Confederate Constitution included an outright ban on the international slave trade: "The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same." Clearly, there is no reason to believe that slavery wouldn't have died of natural causes in the South as it had in every other civilized part of the world.

I have a hard time believing that they did this out of love for their fellow man. More likely it was the slaveowners wanting to maintain value of their slave capital by preventing new cheaper imports.

[Non-Sequitur]

Even Southern leaders realized slavery wouldn't last. In language far more explicit than its U.S. counterpart, the Confederate Constitution included an outright ban on the international slave trade...

Bull. The same confederate constitution that protected slave imports also contained a clause that stated "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." Slavery wasn't going anywhere if the confederate founding fathers had anything to do with it.

[Non-Sequitur]

Clearly, there is no reason to believe that slavery wouldn't have died of natural causes in the South as it had in every other civilized part of the world.

More bull. There is not a single instance of slavery dying 'of natural causes.' In every instance in our history slavery was ended through government intervention and over the objections of the slave owners themselves.

[Soliton]

Absolute nonsense. Lincoln was anti-slavery. The republican party was formed as an anti-slavery party. The South seceded because Lincoln was elected ( because the Republican party was anti-slavery).

This article is equivalent to the holocaust denier's crap.

[marty60]

the vast majority of slave owners were not cruel,

ANYONE THAT PRACTICES OR BELIEVES THAT INSLAVING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING FOR ECONOMIC EXPEDIENCY, IS NOT A NICE PERSON. Denying freedom to human beings is not an admirable trait to be herald as benevolence.

But then I guess the Dums want to soften the image of their forefathers.

[frgoff]

Lincoln was never an abolitionist. Yeah, right. That's why he joined ran for office in the political party formed around one issue and one issue only: ending slavery.

That's why he railed against slavery in the Lincoln-Douglas debates when running for senator. That's why he wrote the emancipation proclamation at practically the beginning of the civil war and simply debated the correct timing to issue it.

That's why the Southern states were furious when he was elected president and determined at that point to secede.

Yeah, all because Lincoln really didn't want to abolish slavery.

This guy is an idiot.

The rest of his arguments are just as stupid. The idea that a state can secede from the Union just because the other states and peoples representatives across the nation do something it doesn't like? This guy doesn't want a Constitutional Republic, he wants 50 sovereign nations under the old Articles of Confederation.

At least he didn't hammer the 'states rights' issue to death sparing me the need to remind him of the all the contradictios the South engaged in with respect to states rights. (Basically they were for it when it promoted slavery, and were against it when it thwarted slavery).

Here's the bottom-line fact. Southern aristocracy traded in human beings as a commodity and fought a war to preserve that practice. End of story.

[Ditto]

Some people cannot grasp the fact that slavery was once a social reality in this country, and at the time of the War Between the States it was practiced in the North as well as the South. In fact, the slaveholding states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union during the war.

Not this s**t again. First off, in 1860, no one considered Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky or Missouri to be "Northern States". People would have thought you were an idiot if you called any of those states "Northern" All were considered Border States and all were on the South side of the Mason/Dixon line. Three of them were even represented by stars on the Confederate flag and both Missouri and Kentucky had "representitives" recognized and seated by the Confederate Congress and secessionist "governments in exile".

The only difference between those Border states and the 11 Confederate states was they all had relatively small percentages slave populations and their economies did not depend upon slave labor. The same is true for the western counties of Virginia who refused to go along with the secession of that state. There were very few slaves in Western Virginia. In fact, throughout the Confederacy, they was a very direct correlation on a county by county basis on the percentage of slave population and support for secession.

[Ditto]

For example, Lincoln (a.k.a. the "Great Emancipator") was not an abolitionist.

Another straw man argument. Very few people who were antislavery were Abolitionists. Abolitionists demanded an immediate, unconditional end to slavery. The represented a very small percentage of the overall antislavery segment. Most antislavery people favored restrictions on expansion, a gradual ending of slavery, with some proposing compensation for slave owners and some even looking to the return of Freed slaves to their "native lands". Those people were not called Abolitionists.

Lincoln was from the "Free Soil" movement who wanted to stop the expansion of slavery to the West. He never claimed to be an abolitionist. Free Soilers believed that if slavery were isolated where it then existed, it would die under it's own weight. Lincoln also favored compensation and Colonization of free slaves.

[TMSuchman]

In my reaserch there was less than 10% of the South owned slaves and that the practice was coming to an end.

[Paige]

History is history and for the ultra politically correct crowd to try to destroy historical artifacts from an era of American history is inept and criminal. I see historians will have to fight with these bigots from the left in order for Americans to stop their history from being revised in the name of Ultra Left Politically Correct balderdash!