[MamaTexan]

To attribute to the Government the authority to obstruct that Natural Right in any way, on the basis of "doing it Legally", is nothing but Atheistic Communism.

Thank you, Sir. I' happy to see someone else understands this simple concept that the Founders wrote so copiously about:

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Good post... but please copy it to Non-Sequitur. I already know this stuff (I’m not being “snippy”, honest — he just needs to read it more than I do).

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Incidentally -- if the Unionists can understand that it was a Moral Abomination for Southern Slaveholders to compel kidnapped Blacks to suffer subjection under a "Government" (that is, the whips and chains of the slave-drivers) from which they wished to "Secede" (that is, to enjoy their Natural Rights as Individuals)...

(and it certainly was; Southern chattel-slavery was a gross Evil which violated all Biblical rules of Indentured Servitude, and the Southern States compounded their immorality by demanding such evils as the Fugitive Slave Law in order to buttress their immoral Slave-economy...)

Then why CAN'T the Unionists understand that it was ALSO a Moral Abomination for the Federal Government to compel, by blockade and invasion, the Confederate States to suffer subjection under a Government from which THEY wished to Secede?

It's clear to me, as an Iowa Yankee, that BOTH sides were in the wrong in many, many ways. But two Wrongs don't make a Right -- and I just don't see any logical consistency in the Unionist argument.

It would have cost Lincoln's Federal Government $3 billion dollars, and ZERO lives lost, to simply BUY UP all Southern Slaves at $1,000 a head and say, "Congratulations! You're Free!" Instead, Lincoln decided to spend TWICE that much money, and 600,000 American Lives lost, on a War of Federal Aggression to Collect Federal Tariffs (he made clear in his First Inaugural that he didn't care about Slavery; he just wanted to Collect Federal Tariffs from the South). Call me a "Copperhead" if you want -- but I think "let's kill off 600,000 Americans in order to collect Federal Taxes" is just about as Un-Righteous a basis for War as I can possibly imagine.