Posted on 08/03/2005 10:47:14 PM PDT by churchillbuff
A city in east-central Ohio in September will celebrate Army Gen. William T. Sherman and the 125th anniversary of his ``War is hell'' speech.
The events will be Sept. 23-25, mostly in Lancaster in Fairfield County, the birth place of the Union Civil War general who marched in 1864 from Atlanta to Savannah through the heart of the Confederacy.
The celebration will include nationally recognized scholars and authors and hundreds of re-enactors portraying notable Ohioans and key Civil War figures. There will be a Civil War tea and fashion show and history walks featuring a Civil War encampment.
There will also be a Sept. 23 opening dinner at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus. The speaker will be Dr. Richard McMurry, a Civil War author and historian. Re-enactors will portray Sherman and Ohio's own President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Sherman (1820-1891) delivered his famous speech on Aug. 11, 1880, at the Civil War Soldiers' Reunion at the Ohio State Fairgrounds (now the Columbus Park Conservatory).
``The war is away back in the past and you can tell what books cannot. When you talk, you come down to practical realities, just as they happened.... There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror; but if it has to come, I am here,'' Sherman told 10,000 Civil War veterans.
Sherman's birthplace in Lancaster is a museum run by the Fairfield Heritage Association.
For more information, contact the association at 105 E. Wheeling St., Lancaster, OH 43130, 740-654-9923. The Internet site is www.lancaster-oh.com/Sherman.
Nonsense. If the government was limited to only those powers explicitly stated in the Constitution then why did the founders not include the word explicit, like they did in the Articles of Confederation. If the government is limited to those powers explicitly stated in the Constitution then every cabinet position is unconstitutional since none are provided for in the document. The Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps are unconstitutional since the Constitution only explicitly allows for an Army and Navy.
Check your history again. In the Jeff Davis confederacy the were frequently thrown in jail.
Again, you cannot point to a clause that prohibits secession. The Supremacy clause simply establishes the order of dominance with respect to the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to the delegated powers within the Constitution, treaties, state constitutions and laws.Okay. But that dominance means that nothing a state can do can overcome the Constitution. The Southerners tried to do just that. Nothing they did was legal, however.
If you want to disbelieve me, fine. I really don't care. People believe in all kinds of false things. The belief in the legality in the South's actions is akin to believe in Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. Frankly, I don't really care to keep repeating the same thing over and over. If you cannot grasp the simple fact that a state law of succession violates the Constitution because it alters the allocation of powers set out in the Constitution, something that is unquestionably precluded by the Supremacy Clause, there is nothing more to say.
Now, I have years of legal studies behind me that says that my analysis of this issue is the correct one. From the fact that you seem to believe that unless there is a explicit provision in the Constitution that addresses a particular question then nothing in the Constitution speaks to it tells me you have no real experience with legal theory, legal reasoning, the judicial system or the manner in which legal decisions are made. There's nothing wrong with that, but, frankly, cocksuredness and a dictionary is no excuse for education and experience.
If the Constitution and thus the federal government were formed by the consent of the governed, then withdrawal of that consent was all that was necessary to void the supremacy of that document or any other. No document and no government are superior to the people themselves, without the consent of whom a government has no moral legitimacy.That pretty philosophy. But we're talking about the Constitutionality of the acts of secession. If what you are talking about is true (which I don't believe it is, except, perhaps, if you have unaninimity on the question), then you are justifying your treason on non-constitutional grounds. The Act would be still illegal, but simply justified. Because by the very terms of the Constitution, nothing, not even the direct exercise of power by the people, can superseded the Constitutional provisions.
The pretty philosophy you espouse is the same as put forth by the heroes of 1776. They committed treason, too. They knew it. The only difference between them and the traitors of 1861 is that the Southerners were losers. The Union government cared not a whit for that consent, any more than the South asked for or cared about the consent of the slaves it held, but at least the South didn't fight 'for the freedom of slaves' and then leave them to 'suffer' for another hundred years simply to elect His Fraudulency for four. The South fought for their right to secede--the North fought for Union by force. Rapists prefer Union by force, too, and we put them in jail.
Insightful. [/irony] How about this, instead:
The Southerns were, and some still are, treasonous bastards. All the criminal leaders, the transvestite Davis, the idiot Lee and the rest of those losers should have hanged. Every scum-bag, piece of filth who took up arms against the Union should have been rounded up and shot, and his family made to toil in the fields for the rest of their lives, with their property confiscated and given to the slaves who they oppressed. They and their progeny should never have been permitted to vote, own property, hold office, or enjoy any of the rights decent people enjoy, for a period of 350 years.So, seriously. Tell me, do you want to seriously discuss the issue? If so, that's one thing. If you just want to sit around and hurl insults, I'm not interested. Go take your copy of Southern Partisan magazine into the bathroom and amuse yourself.Further, the delusional losers today who speak well of any of those treasonous bastards today, or who fly the red-rag of treason, the Southern swastika, are themselves traitors to this great nation. They are no better than Jane Fonda or Tokyo Rose, except they give posthumous aid and comfort to the enemy. They, too, should be rounded up and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Fm Webster Online, the definition of Liberalism:
Main Entry: lib·er·al·ism
Pronunciation: 'li-b(&-)r&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
1 : the quality or state of being liberal
2 a often capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b : a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c : a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties d capitalized : the principles and policies of a Liberal party
Truly, N-S, we are the modern-day "Liberals" - the left preemption of language notwithstanding, this truth is undeniable
Thank you for your contribution, but somehow I don't think that was what DSC had in mind.
Some of those verses were on the excellent CD of Civil War tunes from the PBS Ken Burns Civil War series. Thanks for supplying the missing verses.
Sure it was. For it to be illegal, it must be prohibited. The Supremacy Clause establishes a pecking order of powers - the federal government having those delegated to it by the states - the states retaining all others not prohibited. Southerners did not try to overcome the Constitution - they abandoned it by a vote of the people in convention (republican government).
Frankly, I don't really care to keep repeating the same thing over and over.
Because you can't provide a clause prohibiting secession, preventing state conventions, expressing perpetuity or anything else. Three states expressly provided in the ratifications that they could resume their delegated powers at their leisure, and Amendment 10 expressly retains those not delegated.
If you cannot grasp the simple fact that a state law of succession violates the Constitution because it alters the allocation of powers set out in the Constitution, something that is unquestionably precluded by the Supremacy Clause, there is nothing more to say.
Point to a clause PREVENTING the reclamation of powers by the states. Otherwise, the Supremacy clause only applies to members of the union, and only establishes the order of supremacy. Where in the Supremacy clause does it make it impossible for a state to exercise a power not delegated to the federal government?
Now, I have years of legal studies behind me that says that my analysis of this issue is the correct one.
So you have DISCOVERED an argument that has been heretofore unseen by the greatest legal minds in over 200 years? It's exceedingly strange that such luminaries as Paterson, Marshall, Taney, Grier, Curtis, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas et al missed it. Maybe it has something to do with the continuation of the clause, that 'the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding'. Judges in state courts are sworn to note that the federal Constitution and federal laws made PURSUANT to the delegated powers are supreme over contradicting state constitutions/laws.
Are you a member of the Taliban? You sure do post like one. It's YOUR way, or else everyone else is a knuckle-dragging neaderthal.
To refute you insane comments, Lincoln and the Northern Congress admitted West Virginia as a SLAVE state during the war. Lincoln defended slaveowners in court, advocated an amendment guaranteeing PERMANENT & IRREVOCABLE slavery, and gleefully welcomed the addition of a new slave state.
The states that seceded did so for the right of self-government. The UNION fought AGAINST self-government, King Lincoln wanted the money. A dozen years previously as a representative he railed (a drug-induced 'fever dream'?) against the very actions he took as President.
This thread has jumped around a bit from Sherman to a general discussion of the Civil War causes, to how we treated the Indians in our country. I've mentioned Victor Davis Hanson (as a context for my support for Sherman) - read below in VDH's own words (taken from ---
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/5300.html )
Roundup: Historians' Take on the News
Victor Davis Hanson: The Essay Is About Sherman's March, But Is He Really Writing About Iraq?
Victor Davis Hanson, on his website (May 21, 2004):
General William Tecumseh Sherman--a quirky, difficult, and much misunderstood man--deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history. More than any other person, he destroyed the institution of American slavery and the Southern aristocracy that was interwoven with it. In the late fall of 1864 he marched an army of over 60,000 rural, voting Americans--mostly farmers from the Midwest--into the heart of the Confederacy, a patrician society based on bound labor. Sherman’s agrarian citizen-soldiers upended that world of slaves and masters, instantly liberated tens of thousands, and helped therein to destroy forever the idea of privileged nobility in America. In a 300-mile march covering less than 40 days these armed men changed the entire psychological and material course of our national history.
Make no mistake about it--Sherman waged total war. After taking and burning the city of Atlanta, he set off across the heart of Georgia on his way to the Atlantic coast. Moving without an unwieldy supply chain, his men lived off the land. Earlier Northern battlefield successes had neither destroyed Southern morale nor dented the Confederacy’s ability to field new armies. Union forces had gotten to within a few miles of the Confederate capital in Richmond yet the South had not sued for peace and did not, in fact, feel it was beaten.
This army, however, was aimed at the heartland of the Southern aristocrats--their land and slaves--and left them impotent and discredited before their helpless women and children. Facing little opposition once they left Atlanta, Sherman’s men destroyed the very infrastructure that supported slavery and upheld the slaveholding elites--plantations, communications, factories, and government facilities. Southern military officers put great capital in the idea of the sanctity of the Southern homeland. They deemed themselves great raiders and marauders, who harassed fixed garrisons and terrorized timid populations. Sherman, however, gave the Confederacy the raid of its life. The central objective could be summed up quite simply: Freeing the unfree and humiliating the arrogant.
As the war dragged on, President Lincoln and his Union generals persisted in the idea of unconditional surrender and with it the end of slavery. Facing the specter of an egalitarian nation where race and class would lose their power to command, recalcitrant Southern elites dug in deeper for their Armageddon of 1864. There was no tomorrow in defeat, so the entry of Northern invaders created an understandable panic over the end to an entire way of a century-old existence. Many Southerners lived far removed from the mainstream of North American mores. Defeat, the planters believed, would mean surrender to a foreign culture antithetical to their existing hierarchies. It would wash away status gained at birth, and allow neutral, heartless markets to govern the opportunity of all citizens. Success and status would be found solely in profit, not in inherited reputation. An all-powerful and distant federal government, not local oligarchic councils, would to a far greater degree dictate how money was raised and spent.
Sherman’s men delivered much of what the South feared: not only because they were ordered to, but because gradually they became driven, by an ideological furor, to destroy the nature of Southern aristocracy. At the outset, the Midwesterners Sherman led really knew almost nothing about slavery or slaves. Indeed, most Northerners had never seen a Negro or a plantation; many were, in the abstract, racists. But once Sherman’s men observed the conditions in which slaves were kept unfree, and the ideology and venom of the so-called master class, there arose among these small farmers from the mid-American frontier a powerful repulsion. Very quickly, Sherman’s young troops came to abhor the rich Georgians they overran. A soldier from Illinois was only too happy to burn Atlanta; it "and every other Southern city deserve nothing better than general destruction," he wrote, for "buying and selling" other human beings.
Enlisted men talked agitatedly of the exploitation they saw, and their officers nodded in agreement. Given that almost all the regimental commanders of Sherman’s forces had been promoted from within the army, and that almost 50 percent of the army’s captains and 90 percent of its lieutenants had also served as enlisted men, there was an unmatched familiarity between officer and soldier--and thus a deep populism embedded in the ranks. A Southern witness in the Carolinas wrote of the unanimity of spirit and cause within Sherman’s army:
"The officers and men are on terms of perfect equality socially. Off duty they drink together, go arm in arm about the town, call each other by the first name, in a way that startles. . . . A friend heard a private familiarly addressing a Brigadier General as ‘Jake.’ Miss Lee saw another General taking hold with his men to help move a lot of barrels on a wharf. He took off his coat and worked three hours, like a common porter. This seems strange to us, accustomed to the aristocratic system.”....
Historians operating with the modernist assumption that idealism is only a veneer for self-interest, that war is always amoral rather than on occasion utilitarian, and uncomfortable with absolute notions of good and evil, have downplayed the actions of Sherman’s soldiers as political avenging angels. But the root of the fearsome spirit and success of Sherman’s Union soldiers in Georgia was their collective fervor for emancipation and destruction of the tyrannical Southern ruling class. Sherman and his Midwestern farmer-fighters had a keen appreciation that the landed lords of the South, for all their proclamations about states’ rights and the preservation of liberty as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, had championed secession mostly to preserve and expand their own vast estates and multitudes of slaves. Property and position, not ideas, were the ultimate issue of this war. This Sherman, almost alone of Northern generals, understood.
After Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas, every child of the South knew that the will of the Confederate people, as well as their army, had been crushed. Yet, Sherman killed very few, and with genuine reluctance. Rapes during the march were almost unknown. But he and his men were harshly unkind to the elitists running the Southern plantations. In the process, these soldiers did more than any abolitionist or liberator ever born in our country to guarantee the American proposition that each man is as good as another.
"Nonsense. If the government was limited to only those powers explicitly stated in the Constitution then"
That is the ghastliest display of ignorance I have ever seen.
Go somewhere and take a third-grade civics course, before you embarass yourself further.
"Truly, N-S, we are the modern-day "Liberals" - the left preemption of language notwithstanding, this truth is undeniable"
Well, I'll give you this: you suck down rewritten history like a liberal.
Oral history's very important, no question. But do we have oral history passed down from Sherman's soldiers that they committed atrocities? Not everybody could have kept their mouths shut.
Well then you need to reread some of your own posts. Or read the Constitution. Or both.
My comment only looks like I don't take your ravings seriously. There is no poster on FR more deluded, anti-American, hysterical or foolish than you. As for your family "history" (histrionics accually) more accuracy should be expected from Saddam Hussein. You probably would believe THAT liar just as readily as the nonsense you post as fact.
"Well then you need to reread some of your own posts. Or read the Constitution. Or both."
Ignorance, arrogance, and a closed mind.
I think I've had about enough of that from you.
Idiocy, bluster, and an empty head.
I think I've had about enough of that from you.
Depends on what you post next.
"But do we have oral history passed down from Sherman's soldiers that they committed atrocities?"
I wouldn't know, not having any of Sherman's louts in my ancestry.
However, I don't think families would be very likely to pass down, "Grandpa was a rapist and a murderer" from generation to generation, if they could get away with just not telling the kids about it.
These clowns revealed themselves long ago and have been repeatedly refuted on EVERY point but go on as though the truth has not been told over and over again. There is NO validity in ANY of their assertions, no honesty in their arguments and no integrity in their positions.
They know enough history to be able to confuse those who have not studied these issues closely and excell in specious and sophistic irrelevencies. But the outright LIE is closest to their hearts.
I believe that most sophisticated of them use this forum as a recruiting tool for their crackpot movement but that intent is sabotaged by the plainly mentally ill who also post. The LATTER'S problems lead to the question of how he got out of an institution at all.
Out of context comments are another speciality. Fortunately there are enough patriots who can call them on every one of their absurdities and falsehoods and even find the exact source of their distorted quotes as N.S. did above.
You do not understand the Constitution. It was NOT an instrument changeable by one state. It is a FOUNDATION document unchangeable except by the means prescribed within it -amendment or a convention of ALL the states not some. Certainly it could not be legally changed by those with no authority to change it. And to pretend the South was democratic or governed in true republican form is to distort the meanings of both words so perversely as to make the terms meaningless.
NONE of the Founders believed secession to be anything but a disaster and Washington's Farewell Address was devoted to warning about it and its dangers.
Given that you do not understand the Constitution it is not surprising that you fall for the false doctrines concocted by the Slaverocracy and its modern-day syncophants. This was the class opposed to Freedom and willing to drag the entire section down in its fight to prevent America from fulfilling its historic goal. Certainly nothing any "libertarian" should support.
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