Posted on 04/30/2008 9:12:42 PM PDT by BnBlFlag
Petition Seeks to Remove Denton Confederate Statue(Denton County, Texas)DENTON - While to some the statue of a Confederate soldier that stands before the Denton County Courthouse represents a piece of history, others say they believe it just represents hypocrisy. That stand has incited two University of North Texas students to start a petition for the removal of the historical landmark, a statue of a Confederate soldier holding his gun to represent the South in the Civil War. "It's really very frustrating that so many people would look at this and clap," said Aron Duhon, one of the students behind the petition. Duhon said the statue, with its two separate fountains, is a standing ovation to racism. The two fountains were originally made separate for whites and blacks. "A confederate soldier who took up arms in defense of a regime based on slavery is the farthest thing from a hero possible," Duhon said. The word "HERO" was etched in the memorial nearly 90 years ago. "We live in a diverse population," said Jason V. Waite, another student behind the petition. "We have the University of North Texas here. We have lots of foreign students, lots of commuters and this only puts a damper on entrepreneurial interests in Denton." Denton County Judge Mary Horn said the students' petition is the third time the confederate statue issue has caught the attention of the commissioners court. "We did take it up with the Texas Historical Commission and their feeling is it is part of history and it does need to stay," Horn said. There are those who agree. "When I see a Confederate soldier memorial, I got to stop to have a picture of that," said Sandy Kolls, a self-professed historical buff. Kolls came across the statue while visiting Texas from Illinois. "I'm a northerner and I honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, okay?" she said of the statue. "So, I get a good feeling." There are also others who disagree. "I believe it represents hatred," said Coby Williams. "That's just like having, I guess, like a slave owner with a whip," agreed Leah Herford. The UNT students say they will collect signatures now and throughout the summer to try to convince the Texas Historical Commission to remove the statue. In the past, the Commission has stood firm on keeping the memorial standing on public ground. E-mail ddenmon@wfaa.com Print this story Email this story
You mean the county commissioners went to the Texas Historical Commission three times and asked them to remove the statue?!
What kind of nitwits are these commissioners?
Our amigo posts for himself and I post for myself. So whom do you post for?
Whose scumwater are you carrying?
Since you're absolutely determined to be unpleasant and all.
If I recall correctly, all I did was break the original artcle into paragraphs for easier reading. bnblflag mayknow the answer to your question.
Then why does he defer to you with almost puppy-like devotion?
Since you're absolutely determined to be unpleasant and all.
I'm gear my answers towards the comments directed at me. Unplesantness is met with unplesantlness.
I believe the issue has been before the Court three times with no success. Then they asked the Texas Historical Commission once.
I believe the issue has been before the Court three times with no success. Then they asked the Texas Historical Commission once.
Excuse you, but I would appreciate a courtesy ping, especially when you are insulting me!
I am LG’s friend, not his puppy, and just because I defer to someone more knowledgable than myself, doesn’t mean I worship him, as you imply.
As for unpleasantness, you dish that out on a regular basis. To accuse someone of that is like the proverbial “pot calling the kettle black”.....
You're foot stamping high dudgeon is duly noted.
As for unpleasantness, you dish that out on a regular basis. To accuse someone of that is like the proverbial “pot calling the kettle black”.....
In response to the unpleasantness dished out towards me.
I don’t recall insulting you recently....we do highly disagree at most times, and I do “pull your chain”, but I have always respected your right to disagree.....
Someone just pointed out to me that Lincoln didn't have a solicitor general; the post didn't exist until 1870. A rough job description of SG is to argue the case for existing law to the Supreme Court, defending the constitutionality of all the laws Congress has made and executive orders the presidents have signed. That would explain the SG's homering brief for the D.C. gun laws in the current gun case that will be decided this week or next (or rather, announced -- decision's made).
Yes, the AOL member linked that data, too.
Sorry for my tardy reply, by the way.
...dividing the number of slave owners by the number of families gives a good indication of how widespread slave ownership was
No, it doesn't. It makes an assumption favorable to the inculpators' case, in order to get a higher proportion of the Southern population involved in slavery for purposes of polemical blackening and political finger-wagging.
Notice that we aren't discussing the proportion of Yankee sea-captains involved in slaving here!
A lot of slave-owners may have been single businessmen; slave-owners will have been disproportionately, even overwhelmingly, male in the first place, because of the state of property, marriage, and inheritance laws in the 19th century.
Some slaveholders will have been businessmen involved in manufacturing, others planters (who married later in life than the nuclear-familial Yankee and therefore stayed bachelors longer), still others merchants or tradesmen. But slaves were essentially labor and all about business, and lots of Southern businessmen remained single into their late 30's and 40's, in order to establish themselves first, before marrying. It was customary, and a fact of life.
Therefore the eagerness to distribute slaves among putative or assumed families is statistically suspicious for greasy polemical intent.
Out of a population of over four millions, 178,000 men is not anything like a preponderance, or even "critical mass" for deciding an election, if yeoman opinion ran against them.
The huge proportion of the Southern soldiery who owned no slave hollows out your attempt to say that the Civil War was "all about slavery", the Marxian historians' mantra.
Give[n] the widespread dependency on slavery
Depends on your definitions of "widespread" and "dependency". A farmer who owned no slaves, or only one slave, was in no way "dependent" on slavery! He might have been glad of his helper, but if he had children, he wasn't "dependent" any more than the Lincoln family had been, growing up without any slaves, in Indiana and Illinois. Your "given" is not agreed to.
.... then why is it so surprising to you that they would rebel in order to protect it?
False premise, and false conclusion.
Southerners didn't rebel -- going out in their States, as States, is not "rebellion", and not one governor or legislature certified "rebellion" or "insurrection" to the federal Congress or the President.
Southerners left the Union to protect their future from people who hated them.
No I think it makes the very real assumption that the overwhelming majority of Southern slave owners had families. In any case it is a far better indication of just how widespread slave ownership was than the usual Southern statistic of only 5% or 6% of Southerners owning slaves. When I was growing up my mother didn't drive and our only car was registered in my father's name. You might say that only 20% of the people in the family owned a car. Yet 100% received benefit from that car ownership. Same with slavery and families.
Notice that we aren't discussing the proportion of Yankee sea-captains involved in slaving here!
Why would we want to? Yankee sea captains didn't rebel to protect slavery.
A lot of slave-owners may have been single businessmen; slave-owners will have been disproportionately, even overwhelmingly, male in the first place, because of the state of property, marriage, and inheritance laws in the 19th century.
I will agree that virtually all slave owners were male, almost all of those white. But when you start saying 'a lot of slave-owners may have been single' then you're speculating without any foundation. Given our society it is far more logical to assume that almost all slave owners were married than to assume a significant percentage were not.
But slaves were essentially labor and all about business, and lots of Southern businessmen remained single into their late 30's and 40's, in order to establish themselves first, before marrying. It was customary, and a fact of life.
I would disagree. Look at the census data, compare the number of men in their 30's and above with the number of families and the numbers don't come close to matching. Many men married young then.
Therefore the eagerness to distribute slaves among putative or assumed families is statistically suspicious for greasy polemical intent.
However greasy you want to label them, the statistics are there. What you offer in rebuttle is your opionion that the statistic is skewed and your opinion men married late but nothing concrete to refute the statistic itself.
Their slaves.
I quoted him in Federalist 39 and 40 on the subject of the relationship of the States to the federal government and the nature of the Union, and its relationship to the sovereign People (pace your fascist dissent) and their States.
In an October 1787 letter to Thomas Jefferson outlining the Constitution that came out of the convention, Madison wrote ......
Yes, I know that letter, I've quoted it myself in other discussions.
It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States. A voluntary observance of the federal law by all the members could never be hoped for. A compulsive one could evidently never be reduced to practice, and if it could, involved equal calamities to the innocent and guilty, the necessity of a military force, both obnoxious and dangerous, and, in general, a scene resembling much more a civil war than the administration of a regular Government.
Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which, instead of operating on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them; and hence the change in the principle and proportion of representation.
This ground-work being laid, the great objects which presented themselves were: 1. To unite a proper energy in the Executive, and a proper stability in the Legislative departments, with the essential characters of Republican Government. 2. To draw a line of demarcation which would give to the General Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the States every power which might be most beneficially administered by them. 3. To provide for the different interests of different parts of the Union. 4. To adjust the clashing pretensions of the large and small States. Each of these objects was pregnant with difficulties. The whole of them together formed a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it. Adding to these considerations the natural diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects, it is impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.
I would say it's clear from that that your viewpoint of what is meant by state sovereignty and Madison's idea are not even close.
Not really. Dig out Federalist 39 again, and look at it closely. Look at the supporting passage in Federalist 40, "The Same Continued". Madison did not submerge the States in a National Power, or the People in a lumpen "uber-People".
The People were not redefined from the Union of the Articles of Confederation to the new Union. They were, as he pointed out in Federalist 39, sovereign and the ultimate source of all power and legitimacy. They had won their sovereignty and freedom on the battlefield and had had that victory subscribed and affirmed by George III himself in the Treaty of Paris.
There was, pace you, no Power this side of the Invisible High God of Abraham, that could, either then or now, speak to the People in the voice of command. None. Nothing. Nobody.
That is rock-bottom sovereignty.
The key thoughts in this letter that you appear to rely on occur in these passages:
It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States. A voluntary observance of the federal law by all the members could never be hoped for...the alternative of a Government which, instead of operating on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them
Madison refers to the difficulties the Congress faced in getting conscribed funds and manpower from the States, and the idea of devising a new federation that would operate on individual persons rather than State governments and their politicians.
That's why the Constitution had to be submitted to the People for ratification, not the State governments. But in addressing the People, the Framers addressed the States in their sovereign estate as well: the People of New York ARE New York; they are the Polity called "New York".
Why do you keep trying to separate the States from the People? Except to say that "the People can't be wrong, but the States were -- they have to be, because we killed them."
You'll play hell proving that Madison and Hamilton intended that the People somehow recreate the Monarchy with an irrevocable, against-interest, threshhold consent, and by sleight of hand made the U.S. Government the People's new King, Overlord, and Little Brass God-on-Earth.
I’m wondering if these two students, with their thorough grasp of history, will be petitioning for the removal of all United States flags flown around Texas? I mean, after all, didn’t “Old Glory” fly over slavery for several hundred years? Wasn’t “Old Glory” there at the massacre of Indians?
Again, you're deliberately skewing the statistics. As you noted in your earlier post, virtually all slave owners were adult males, white males as I pointed out. According to the 1860 census there were 1,276,533 white males over the age of 20 in the confederacy. And 316,662 total slave owners. So 25% of all adult males probably owned slaves. And 14 percent owned five or fewer. Now I will grant you that there were no doubt some women who owned slaves. But I suggest that that number is not enough to throw my figures off that much. And you have to admit that this is a far different proportion than the 4.5% you would have had us believe.
Oh, and there were 1,027, 967 families.
The huge proportion of the Southern soldiery who owned no slave hollows out your attempt to say that the Civil War was "all about slavery", the Marxian historians' mantra.
But if you look at the fact that, depending on which state you're talking about, anywhere from 1:4 to 1:2 Southern soldiers probably came from a family that owned slaves, and perhaps a larger percentage than that came from families who derived some of their income from families that owned slaves, then it's easy to see why those young men would troop off to defend an institution that they took so much direct benefit from.
Depends on your definitions of "widespread" and "dependency". A farmer who owned no slaves, or only one slave, was in no way "dependent" on slavery!
Did the farmer who had one slave get any less benefit from that ownership than the plantation owner who had a thousand? The South's economic well-being was built on plantation agriculture, requiring slaves. Southern society was built on the easy availability of slaves to do the cooking and washing and cleaning and all the other drudgery. The South was joined at the hip with slavery, and could no more see themselves without their chattel than they could see themselves flying to the moon. That is why they were willing to rebel to protect it.
False premise, and false conclusion.
Not in the slightest.
Southerners didn't rebel -- going out in their States, as States, is not "rebellion"...
They certainly did.
...and not one governor or legislature certified "rebellion" or "insurrection" to the federal Congress or the President.
Irrelevant. There is no such requirement in the Constitution, not withstanding your misreading of Article IV.
Southerners left the Union to protect their future from people who hated them.
You're drifting off into hyperbole land again.
But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy. ....It has gained some advantage also, by mixing itself with the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partisans
Madison uses the term 'secede at will' but it is evident from his other writings that he is referring to a state seceding without the consent of the other states, what I refer to as unilateral secession. I'm open to using either phrase. But in any case, Madison makes it clear that in his view unilateral secession, or secession at will, is "a violation of a faith solemnly pledged.
Madison was writing during the Nullification Crisis that arose over the Tariff of Abominations, when he had become more of a Federalist again, after the Kentucky Resolutions episode.
First, the idea of "nullification" was bad doctrine, constitutionally, and subsequently even secessionists said so. Jefferson Davis confuted it in his inaugural speech as the president of the Confederacy.
Secession was not, however, and the Nullifiers, in pushing their beef over the Tariff, were on firmer ground. The Tariff was indisputably intended to prosper the few at the expense of the many, and it had a sectional incidence as well, since its beneficiaries tended to reside in the Northern States. The Southerners had an honest complaint.
But Madison's test of secession in this letter is self-refuting, since it sets an impossible standard of consent. Any secession would be a "violation" of a "faith solemnly pledged", whether anyone agreed to it or not. Therefore Madison's statement, on its face, totally excludes secession as a possibility for anyone at any time, or for any reason. Furthermore, even if a State were, beyond any peradventure of a doubt, the outrageous victim of "intolerable oppression", would the oppressor agree that "intolerable oppression" had occurred, and relent? Would he accede graciously to your idea of secession? Fat chance. Instead, his newspapers, just like the 1861 Indiana editorialist's, would announce that "we will learn them that it takes two to make a bargain" and the war would be on -- intolerable oppression or not.
Madison's attempt at a distinction is thus impossible to resolve under any likely scenario.
He also seems to deny to the States the eclat everyone concedes the Supreme Court on its every decision, viz., the ability to discern and decide things for themselves, and to reserve it instead to bullies and malefactors under the rubric of "faith solemnly pledged".
In fact, "secession at will" is the only kind possible, and if the People of a State call a convention, go to the trouble of actually issuing a secession act, and then carrying it through in a plebescitary referendum, then I guarantee you that it hasn't been done for "light and transient causes", and would only be done as a result of a solid grievance -- an "intolerable oppression".
Any argument to the contrary is just denial of the right, out of interest or malice.
This is dishonest.
You know very well, as well as I do, because it's been posted to you in the past with documentation, that Madison was inconsistent in his views of secession. He was uncongenial in the Federal and Nullification Crisis periods, when getting the States to cohere was the political problem du jour, and much less so during the Kentucky Resolutions period, when he and Jefferson were much more concerned about the States' receiving abuse.
Madison's veering back and forth on the subject is one of the main problems of Federal period historical scholarship.
And you knew that when you posted that crap to our friend.
Or are only those who agree with your position valid, and men like Madison or Marshall or Webster or Clay or Chase simply idiots who don't know what they're talking about?
On the matter of secession, the controlling document is the Constitution. Black letters on white paper. And you have YET to show anyone the passage you think ought to be there, the one that confirms your own opinion.
It. Just. Isn't. There.
So is pleasantness, when it differs from your opinion.
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