Posted on 05/24/2007 6:03:30 AM PDT by Rebeleye
...he was stunned to see two large Confederate flags flying from trucks...emblazoned with the words "The South Shall Rise Again." I'm stunned, too, that people still think it is cool to fly this flag. Our society should bury these flags -- not flaunt them...because the Confederate flag symbolizes racial tyranny to so many... ...This flag doesn't belong on city streets, in videos or in the middle of civil discussion. It belongs in our past -- in museums and in history books -- along with the ideas it represents.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansas.com ...
No?
Fort Sumter, S.C.,
March 31, 1861
(Received A.G.O, April 4.)
Col. L. Thomas, Adjutant-General U.S. Army:
Colonel: I have the honor to report that we do not see any work going on this morning. Yesterday, in consequence of the members of the Convention coming down, a great deal of firing of shot and shell took place at Fort Moultrie and from the batteries on Morris Island.
The three heavy batteries outside of the Star of the West have certainly guns of heavy caliber; this we know from the great extent of the range and from the reports.
As our provisions are very nearly exhausted, I have requested Captain Foster to discharge his laborers, retaining only enough for a boat's crew. I hope to get them off tomorrow. The last barrel of flour was issed day before yesterday.
I am, Colonel, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Robert Anderson
Major, First Artillery, Commanding
OR, Series 1, Vol. 1, page 228
In a follow-up letter dated the next day, Anderson wrote:
I told Mr. Fox that if I placed the command on short allowance I could make the provisions last until after the 10th of this month; but as I have received no instructions from the Department that it was desireable that I should do so, it has not been done. In the governor permits me to send off laborers whe will have rations enough to last us about one week longer.
OR, Series 1, Vol. 1, page 246
On April 3rd Anderson wrote:
"The governor of South Carolina has not sent the permission alluded to yesterday, and to-day notice has been received that no butter can be sent down and only one-quarter box of soap. These little matters indicate, perhaps, an indication to stop our supplies entirely. I must therefore, most respectfully and urgently ask for instructions what I am to do as soon as my provisions are exhausted. Our bread will last for four or five days."
On April 10, Lieutenant Foster noted the following:
"The supply of bread failed today, and its absence was supplied by rice obtained by picking over some damaged rice..." OR, Series 1, Vol. 1, Page 33
There was no food shortage? Complete and utter bullsh*t.
Sure is.
The continuing argument you got a piece of from your fellow-discussant is an interesting one, but somewhat different from the arguments that roil ACW threads.
For one thing, the argument you encountered is one I've never heard in 50 years of paying attention to affairs in the "Muddle East" but which may have been current in Arab and Arabophile circles for a long time. The Arabs specialize in outre' theorizing, speculation, and canard-generation as a substitute for rational discussion. They have no use for rationality, in fact, since argumentation serves a completely different function in their culture. They don't care about truth, as we understand it. To them, truth is about upholding the family, tribe, nation, Umma -- and about cashing in and making good various claims presented under the rules of vendetta. It isn't that justice and fact-finding are alien to them, it's that group loyalties count for much, much more than mere facts. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, the destruction of Israel and the Jews is the truth, and anything that impedes that truth is a lie, a canard, a base personal insult to the intelligence and humanity of every person who whom it is offered.
I say that in all existential humility, yielding to the better insights offered by people like Bernard Lewis and Fuad Ajami, who try to educate the rest of us. Because one feature of Middle Eastern argumentation, among the Arabs especially, is obfuscation and confusion: they don't want to know your truth, or any objective or objectifying truth, and more importantly, they don't want you to know it either, so they obfuscate and lie continually, to protect the "truth-telling" and claim-presentation processes of their own dysfunctional society.
As far as I can tell.
Which is why, for example, multiple canards, and canards based on completely different lines of logic, are tolerated simultaneously, for their operational value in confusing and disinforming you. So the canard about Gamal Nasser's "real motivation" may have been around for years and quite current in Arab society, and now it is uttered to you, to disinform your understanding of the history of the Six-Day War.
IMHO.
For me, the Western narrative is straightforward and truthful. You're right, the Israelis struck first after detecting numerous fatwas and gross death-proclamations against them, and I know of nobody in the West, other than case-hardened, often white-shoe "Arabist" antisemites and their more recent Leftist supporters, who has professed to disbelieve that narrative.
Non-Sequitur will now quote one of John Marshall's logical demarches to you, from Marbury vs. Madison or Ex Parte Bollmann, etc., etc., etc., etc., prominently featuring Marshall's novel theory -- which he contradicted when he was a ratification convention delegate in Virginia in 1788 -- that the federal government needn't respect the 10th Amendment, but can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, however it wants, praise be the federal government.
All of which is buncombe, of course, and proof that, on the bench as anywhere else, "personnel is policy".
Which suits Non-Sequitur just fine, since he finds the confines of Original Intent so ..... stifling. I mean, the poor man can't burn down Georgia, until he gets some relief from the party-poops who sat in the Philadelphia Convention.
kewl!
Several important considerations have been touched in the course of these papers, which discountenance the supposition that the operation of the federal government will by degrees prove fatal to the State governments. The more I revolve the subject, the more fully I am persuaded that the balance is much more likely to be disturbed by the preponderancy of the last than of the first scale......
The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former. Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, of themselves determine it. The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures. Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the people, will be chosen very much under the influence of that class of men, whose influence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the State legislatures. Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious than too overbearing towards them. On the other side, the component parts of the State governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little, if at all, to the local influence of its members......
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
http://federalistpapers.com/federalist45.html
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to convene a national recension of the Federalist papers, to revisit its headings and topics seriatim and audit the prospectus, as it were, in view of actual performance.
Substitute North and South and that is exactly what is happening on these threads and has been for the last 7 years.
Truth is a huge casualty in all the discussions over the war for not many are really interested in it. The agenda here is to make sure one side remains untarnished and the other side remains unburnished. That is what all the spinning, lying, and disseminating is about. It is the only game being played out on these threads.
And when called on it... either side... then the howls and insincere protests of innocence begins.
Agenda and not truth. That is the only way most can carry on their campaign against the other side with a straight face.
You make the States sound like some sort of political Barcalounger -- a convenient thing to have around, until you trip over it. They are a lot more than that, but then amalgamators like you and Non-Sequitur have never had any use for States anyway, as N-S posted above. They are an impediment to a Phalangist exercise of unlimited and illimitable federal power, so you derogate them despite their historical and substantive presence.
If King Charles chartered separate colonies under the British Crown are they forever to be sovereign with no ability to form a more general government?
Red herring. Of course they did. They did not, however, as you so fervently wish they had, annihilate themselves when they formed the Union.
...the Constitution is more than a mere league of independent states.
Of course it is. But Madison meant what he said in Federalist 45, quoted above, when he said that "[t]he State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former."
The States are the organic entities of common interest and allegiance that preexisted the Union of the Constitution, and it was to the People of those States that the Framers had recourse, when they sought the People's assent to form the new Union.
But it looks like you're willing to fight over the word "sovereignty." One problem is that the states relinquished most of the attributes of sovereignty at the beginning of the Republic -- separate armies, navies, currencies, embassies, treaty-making, import regulations, etc.
One point I'll "fight" about is your use of the word "relinquish". They delegated and foreswore for themselves the exercise of certain enumerated powers (and, Marshall insisted later, certain ancillary ones -- and, Franklin Roosevelt insisted much later, the power to weigh pigs and produce!), but they didn't alienate them forever. Rather, as everyone from Hamilton to Madison to young John Marshall understood at the time, powers not granted to the new Union remained with the States and their People. Thus Marshall, in 1788:
The state governments did not derive their powers from the general government; but each government derived its powers from the people, and each was to act according to the powers given it. Would any gentleman deny this? He demanded if powers not given were retained by implication. Could any man say so? Could any man say that this power was not retained by the states, as they had not given it away? For, says he, does not a power remain till it is given away?
-- Elliot's Debates, Vol. III, p. 419
And here is Hamilton in Federalist 84, on the general subject of objections to the Constitution, addressing the topic of the Bill of Rights:
It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they [bills of rights] have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations ...bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?
And finally, the People of the United States did not give the federal government a threshhold or irrevocable grant of power, but a temporally durable, perpetually renewing trust of power that the People have the right and power to revoke at any time, and resume their powers intact. This is what the departing States did in 1861, whereupon they were set upon by Abraham Lincoln and his political machine, wielding the United States Army as their own instrument of revolution.
In the American Civil War, the revolution of secession was overreached by a coup d'etat of the servant against the master, and the whole American People lost both war and coup, not least the men of the Union Army who fought, they thought, to preserve the Union, but actually to end it.
The degree and kind of that loss would be expressed, over the coming century, in the progressive marginalization, trivialization, and demoralization of the American People, as what they had lost, or rather what the new ruling class had taken from them, began to sink in.
My basic argument has always been that American history has seen the sad playing-out of a destructive tendency which was present at the Philadelphia Convention, at the beginning, and which now threatens American exceptionalism, as unlimited-government, access capitalists and Marxist-collectivist termites labor in tandem to assimilate America to a despotic new world-state.
My personal view of American history to this point is that the tendency has been for the American people to lose sight of their rights and liberties and to fail to defend them, as members of hustling, self-promoting elite groups claim more and more discretion and decision-making for themselves, and seek to reduce the People to a "resource base" at the bottom of a typical social pyramid and concurrently consign their Bill of Rights to an Orwellian "memory hole".
Even Ronald Reagan couldn't keep the pigs from the trough or the rats from getting at the baby.
</mini-opus>
I think Chief Justice Marshall's point would actually be that states cannot abuse the 10th Amendment at the expense of the other states. But I don't doubt that you would disagree with that.
Just as in the Arab-Israeli debate, there those who want to know the truth and discuss it... unfortunately, the argument has been overrun by those who are agenda driven and the agenda (and not truth) is what it is at stake. It is the agenda that causes some to stalk these Civil War threads like junk yard dogs tearing away at anyone and anything that might besmirch the agenda.
There are Freepers on both sides who do not do this but there are Freepers on both sides who do.
Many Freepers have come to the thread believing that this would be a good place to discuss the war... only to be driven away by the antics of the few. I wonder why these Freepers are content to have the same argument countless times with the same Amen corner.
Your mini-opus was wonderful.
Once nominated to the court Marshall seems to have forgot what he stated during debates decades earlier. The Constitution itself notes that the powers were vested/delegated, not surrendered.
Which is why Ronald Reagan and conservatives have always insisted that words have meaning and ideas have consequences. Which is why, too, liberals are all about (all together now!).....feeeeeeelings!!
Just a thought, it seems like it's the best-equipped posters who fight the hardest, and it occurred to me to wonder if that observation correlates validly with something else I've observed, which is that with regards to old social issues and political differences with e.g. Mexico, it is the most comfortable and well-educated Mexicans who resent the U.S. and its culture the most, calling it "racist" and other things -- when Mexicans themselves used to inscribe people's exact admixture of blood in excimiating degree on their baptismal certificates, fixing their places in society forever. And they did this for centuries before the United States even existed. This charge of "racism" surfaces very often, and very hypocritically. But it subserves a further agenda which is driven by a smoldering resentment at the top, not the bottom, of Mexican society, toward gringos and their society.
Suggesting that it's educated people who are the most trouble and start the most fights.
Exactly, it was a "rebe;" flag, nothng more
So, what's yer excuse? < broad grin >
That explains academia.
Obviously, if a power that's forbidden to the federal government is involved or if the federal government oversteps its authority, federal law isn't supreme in that area. But if a state simply decides that federal law doesn't apply to it, the state is in violation of the Constitution.
I don't argue that the federal government is sovereign or that states may not be "sovereign" in certain areas, simply that a state that agreed to the Constitution would have a hard time logically asserting an absolute sovereignty of the sort that lentulus claims for the states.
Some have spoken of a "dual sovereignty" under our system. That's okay with me, but it's a far cry from what lentulus is arguing.
Huh? There must be a syntax error in there. Even my computer can't parse your line.
But maybe I wasn't clear either. In speaking of "experience and understanding," I was refering to our everyday experience of the world. It's inconceivable for most of us to take seriously a vision of California forming an army and demanding Camp Pendleton, Edwards AFB, and the San Diego Naval Station. You could have saved us all a lot of time if you'd consided that reading, which I figured would be clear from the context.
In any event, the Hartford Convention didn't vote to secede. It didn't take that possibility very seriously. I suppose it did issue an "ultimatum" of sorts, but it was of the "make these changes or maybe we'll get together again and do something for real," no comparison to what happened in 1860.
Samuel Eliot Morison disputed that the Convention was ever about secession:
Some delegates may have been in favor of New England's secession from the United States, and forming an independent republic. No such resolution was adopted at the convention. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison rejected the notion that Hartford was an attempt to take New England out of the Union and give treasonous aid and comfort to Britain. Morison wrote, "Democratic politicians, seeking a foil to their own mismanagement of the war and to discredit the still formidable Federalist party, caressed and fed this infant myth until it became so tough and lusty as to defy both solemn denials and documentary proof."
...
Morison, Samuel Eliot. "Our Most Unpopular War," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 1968 80: 38-54. ISSN 0076-4981. Morison calls the War of 1812 undoubtedly the most unpopular the nation has ever waged. Opposition to the war came from other sections besides New England, although the hostility of the New England Federalists was more apparent since they controlled the State governments. He contends that the chief sponsors of the Hartford Convention intended to avoid State secession at all costs, and he scorns the myth that New England secession was thwarted by the Treaty of Ghent and Jackson's victory at New Orleans. Wikipedia
I don't know whether or not Morison's right but he certainly does give one much to think about.
BTW, aren't you supposed to avoid Civil War threads?
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