MSNBC's Plan to Change Joe Lieberman's Vote: "Punching Him Out" (Ed Schultz is Nuts)

NewsRealBlog.com ^ | December 16, 2009 | Ben Johnson

[Marty62]

So you are in support of attacking a Senator if he is speaking against slavery?
Nothing you said is even close to the facts.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Let's say I insult and slander your beloved elderly relative (even going so far as to make fun of their infirmity !), in front of others in a public forum, a relative who is not even there to answer or respond to such attacks, in violation of rules of etiquette and common decency, what is your response to me going to be ? You're going to wallop my ass, and if you don't, you're not a man. Because THAT is what happened here. Go do some research on the incident. I have. It had nothing to do with slavery, it had everything to do with Sumner's ego and quest for glory. Or do you think gratuitously insulting old people and making fun of their health issues is an admirable quality in an elected official ? Sumner was one of the most dishonorable people to have ever served in the U.S. Senate, and thanks to demogogues like him, did much to inflame our country and push it to war.

[Marty62]

So you do not like the Civil War. do you feel the Democrat Southern States should have been left alone to Practice Slavery.

[fieldmarshaldj]

I’m apologize. I didn’t realize I was talking to a bonafide idiot. Have a nice day.

[Impy]

So you do not like the Civil War. do you feel the Democrat Southern States should have been left alone to Practice Slavery.

Are you being ceral?

You are reading to much into Fieldmarshaldj's argument there.

I remember we talked about this incident before after I mentioned I wished someone would pull a Preston Brooks on some congressional rat (I forget who) and half seriously lamenting that today that would land you in prison. I don't remember the details of the discussion unfortunately.

It's true slavery wasn't the reason Brooks beat him half to death it's cause he made fun of his relative Senator Butler mocking his stroke addled speech and the like. It was then spun into an attack on anti-slavery free speech. I don't know if that's what Sumner wanted (someone to attack him so he could use it) but got more than he bargained for obviously due to the severity of the attack.

We all agree with Sumner that slavery was a great moral evil. I can't speak about his 'honor' or that or Butler since I don't know enough. I can say though if I was a politician at the time I would have worked to avoid the Civil War and end slavery through peaceful means (but still speaking against it and aiding escaped slaves) rather than deliberately fanning the flames of war (that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as well as the first income tax and the first draft and ultimately left most former slaves not that much better off due to the failure and abandonment of reconstruction). If I understand correctly that's what DJ doesn't like about Sumner.

If I was a slave though I'm probably feel a war was a great idea if it meant my freedom.

[fieldmarshaldj]

*I’m pinging LS to this discussion, as he is a historian. I don’t know his take on this particular incident, but I thought he might find it of interest.

I’ve made my point several times on this over a long period, that my stance wasn’t either pro-Southern or pro-Northern, but anti-hypocrisy. I find slavery abhorrent and wish it had been outlawed (or at the very least, phased out) in the Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution. I had no intention of even discussing slavery when it came to this particular episode, since slavery is the way it has been spun by liberal historians, when the facts of the matter AS IT OCCURRED are something else entirely. This was a point of personal honor, something too many people don’t understand today. You had people fighting duels that were in high positions of power over this, the “issues” discussed had little to do with it.

My main beef here is that how I was taught about this incident and how it continues to be described is in the terms of some heroic man with a halo thundering in righteous fury about the evil institution and some troglodytic caveman burst into the Senate and struck down this Messiah-like figure. It’s about as big a load of bull$hit as they come. I’m not the only person who came to the conclusion that Sumner was no heroic figure...

Sumner’s own biographer, David Donald summed him up as follows:
“Distrusted by friends and allies, and reciprocating their distrust, a man of “ostentatious culture,” “unvarnished egotism,” and “’a specimen of prolonged and morbid juvenility,’” Sumner combined a passionate conviction in his own moral purity with a command of nineteenth-century “rhetorical flourishes” and a “remarkable talent for rationalization.” Stumbling “into politics largely by accident,” elevated to the United States Senate largely by chance, willing to indulge in “Jacksonian demagoguery” for the sake of political expediency, Sumner became a bitter and potent agitator of sectional conflict. Carving out a reputation as the South’s most hated foe and the Negro’s bravest friend, he inflamed sectional differences, advanced his personal fortunes, and helped bring about national tragedy.”

That is a helluva indictment of this individual, who at the time of his slanderous tirade was all of 45 years old and not even a full 6 years in Washington, DC. I submit that Sumner knew precisely what he was doing and was expecting to provoke a response (and I believe that initially he was expecting a challenge to fight a duel — for which he not only would NOT fight, but for which he would get someone else to fight on his behalf, in keeping with his character of cowardice). To Senator Andrew Pickens Butler’s credit, he himself knew that Sumner was a mere blowhard and was apparently even content to let the incident pass, and not give Sumner’s spectacle any mind at all. That certainly speaks volumes to Butler’s character and sense of tolerance.

I’ll add in conclusion as well that absent types like Sumner (whom I will add post-war by 1872 was supporting the Democrat candidate for President, Horace Greeley, and he lost a great deal of his power and died less than a year and a half after the election) we might’ve gone a long way into finding a moderate solution to have averted war and bloodshed (well worth noting, too, that Sumner, once he got his great war, he himself didn’t go charging off to serve — indeed, he never put on the uniform once. Contrast that with Congressman Laurence Keitt who was with Preston Brooks during the incident with Sumner, who unapologetically put on the uniform and died for his cause. Brooks would have as well had he not died before the war).

I’ll throw in one last point as well where it comes to North vs. South, something I’ve also mentioned before, that being always the claim of Northern moral superiority, which after spending some time paying closer scrutiny to that didn’t quite pass the smell test. While Northerners were quite content to click their tongues at the savagery of the South and their proliferating of this peculiar institution, they were always quite willing to tell the South what they should do with themselves and with Blacks, but when it came time for them to do something themselves, the message was loud and clear: keep those Africans south of the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, confronted with the prospect of gargantuan numbers of freed slaves migrating North to live amongst the more “tolerant Whites” would’ve provoked a response of terror by these morally superior folks the likes of which would never have been seen before (the NYC Draft Riots would’ve looked like a Sunday picnic).

Again, this is not to claim Southerners as morally superior, either (having that peculiar institution go on as long as it did, let alone Jim Crow, is testament to that), only that it is very easy for people far removed from a problem or situation to sit in moral judgment over others when they themselves don’t have to face said problems or situations close-up (or outright refusing to face the situation or washing their hands of it entirely). Look at the state of Oregon, which to this day has a very small Black population (like its New England counterparts), and that wasn’t by accident, the “enlightened, morally superior” folks there saw to it that Free Blacks were barred from moving there. Anyway, you get my point here.

[LS]

1) On Sumner, pretty much right. His speech about Butler, as biographer Robert Johannsen (whom I once studied under), was notorious for its sexual lewdness and (for the day) quasi-obscenity. He not only attacked Butler's positions, but made fun of his lisp ("he cannot open his mouth yet out flies an error"). Did this warrant him getting the hell beat out of him? Of course not. But if you walk through a park at night with $100 bills dangling from your pockets, you're not exactly without culpability in the ensuing robbery.

2) On the moral superiority, or non-superiority, of the North, you are right. Obviously, many of the northern merchants made a lot of money by SHIPPING slaves; and certainly 90% of the talk about emancipation envisioned blacks turned loose in the South or Africa, NOT the North. If and when it appeared that free blacks might resettle in the north, a great deal of emancipation ensued. The dynamic was encapsulated in the subsequent comment by comedian Dick Gregory that in the South, whites didn't care how close you got as long as you didn't get too big, and in the North, whites didn't care how big you got, as long as you didn't get too close.

That said, I strongly disagree that there was any solution to slavery other than war. I refer everyone to James Huston's book, Calculating the Value of the Union, which shows that the overriding, unavoidable issue was property value in slaves. Either slaves were property or they were people, and as Lincoln said, you couldn't have it both ways. By 1860, southern value in slave property exceeded all northern railroad and textile values combined! What the territorial issue threatened to do was to reintroduce slavery into the free North, and this was precisely the wording of John C. Calhoun earlier on the territorial issues. In fact, Calhoun took the logical, very modern PC-approach to slavery, saying "if" it was legal, then even to attack it in speech or in print constituted a violation of southern "civil rights" and there had to be a gag on ALL criticism of slavery (can you say "homosexuality?"). So if property is property in Alabama, it must also be property in Ohio, and if a person is a person in Ohio, then he must be a person in Alabama. The inevitable clash of this simple proposition was apparent to Lincoln and every slaveholder in the Union, as well as most of the free men.

The Civil War was not about slavery in the territories, but the ultimate, inevitable reintroduction of slavery into free states or the equally disastrous emancipation of slaves by law in slave states. Either way, you would have a nation either all slave or all free, but not a house divided.

[Marty62]

“demogogues like him, did much to inflame our country and push it to war.”

HIS words NOT mine

[Marty62]

ceral?
What is this?
I will assume you mean surreal.
The answer is no.
By you and your friends reasoning.
“you Lie” should have been met with a beating due to the insult to the beloved dear leader.
You all can’t have it both ways.

[Impy]

A)That was a South Park reference. In the cartoon Al Gore said “cereal” instead of “serious” I guess because it kinda sounds like that when the real life Gore pronounces “serious”.

B)I never reasoned that Sumner deserved to be beaten. I don’t think he did. I would have tried to stop it if I was there.

C)You continue to fail to understand that it was the personal insult on his family member and state that led to Brooks assaulting Sumner not merely that he gave an anti-slavery speech so your Joe Wilson comparison is not valid. If someone insulted my family I’d probably want to beat him up. That’s why fieldmarshaldj replied to your well intentioned first post that the Sumner incident was a bad example because the motivation was personal not political.

[Impy]

You might be interested in this.

[fieldmarshaldj]

I guess I’m in the minority being supportive of Sumner getting walloped. I think personally I’d have preferred to administer a more publicly humilating back-handed bitchslap. To bad he had to sacrifice a perfectly nice gutta-percha cane, though (but lots of people mailed him new canes, a lot of folks were quite happy to see this loudmouth demogogue get what was coming).

We were thinking of the same thing with the Dick Gregory quote, I’ve referenced it many times. ;-)

Ultimately, you’re probably right on the war being inevitable, but had I been an elected official at the time, would’ve tried to find every possible solution to averting war (even if it meant the feds buying up slaves from the South in exchange for a phase-out of slavery, and relocating them to the Plains states (such as Kansas) and granting them property). Without going into a protracted discussion here, in a lot of ways, Blacks were worse off in the South after the Civil War then before (up until prior to the 1960s). At least as slavery was an institution, it legally required the owners to care and provide for them (so much as that was), but afterwards, freed slaves were owed nothing, and if they could not be subjugated, they were to be run out or exterminated.

The North pretty much exposed itself when they were not willing to go to the mat for Black Civil Rights in the Reconstruction period, reaching the point of just letting bygones be bygones, and left Blacks to twist in the wind. I can’t even imagine were I Black in that period what I would’ve felt. To have a brief taste of de facto equality, only to have it violently taken away by the people I was liberated from, and to have my so-called liberators shrug their shoulders and look away. It makes one wonder why the Civil War was fought at all, as hardly anything changed aside from removing the institution itself, only to be replaced with another injustice of second (or third) class status, where you had even less protections as a free man (or rather, the protections were only guaranteed on paper from a gov’t that wouldn’t enforce them, less than worthless). Shameful.

[LS]

I completely agree on Reconstruction, but historian Paul Johnson has a point: in a democracy, ultimately the people have the final say, and in the South, the people spoke. There comes a point where you just can't force people to do what they don't want to do. They will find ways to avoid laws and do what they want.

Now, I know you really haven't thought this out cause you are way too bright for this: "even if it meant the feds buying up slaves from the South in exchange for a phase-out of slavery, and relocating them to the Plains states (such as Kansas) and granting them property"

What happens to the price of scarce goods? Without slave importation, each new emancipation would have driving up the price of the next slave, theoretically to the point that the government couldn't POSSIBLY have freed slaves as they neared the theoretical end point of zero, because each succeeding slaveowner would have started to say, "Well, if they are paying x for Bill's slaves, I'll charge y." The only answer was force.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Actually, that’s the problem right there. With respect to the South, the people (there) didn’t speak, the White Democrats spoke. White & Black Republicans weren’t largely silenced following Rutherford Hayes and rapidly stomped out up until 1900 (with little exception), making said states about as close to 100% Democrat one-party as you could get. Undemocratic entirely, and certainly not reflecting the will of those that should’ve been permitted a vote. MS & SC, for example, were Black majority at that time.

Clearly the North was willing to look the other way, because the few that might’ve had the will to carry out Reconstruction weren’t going to be able to do so. The 1876 election made sure of that. Tilden would end it, and Hayes wasn’t going to be allowed to continue it or his quite possibly fraudulent certification as President would never have occurred. It’s a black mark for Republicans at that point, because it would’ve been better off to have let Tilden win and have it be said the Dems officially ended Reconstruction, not a nice little “deal” by Hayes to get him the Presidency at the expense of selling out Black people (which is what it was).

Sometimes in this argument it sounds like I take both sides, I side with both Brooks in his actions against Sumner, all the while I agree with Sumner on the issue of slavery. You’d think some of our country’s best minds at the founding of our country could see where this was going to end up before long. How a well-intentioned and sensible institution as indentured servitude, paying off your costs for coming to America and learning a trade, transmogrified into permanent servitude exclusively fixated on one race should never have occurred. It’s sad that our giants like, for example, Jefferson weaseled out on settling this nightmare at the get-go, using the equivalent of so many modern liberals today with respect to the abortion issue, “Well, I’m personally opposed, but...,” which doesn’t matter, because if you’re not doing something about it in policy, it doesn’t much matter how you “personally feel.”

Residing in some of those states at the time, especially the Deep South ones, as a White person, I’d have felt like I was sitting on a ticking time bomb. How long did they think they could have it reach a point where they (Whites) were outnumbered and feel like they could maintain complete control ? You’d think Haiti would’ve been a big warning sign right there. If I’d had been a Southern Black with even a modest amount of knowledge of that (and there had to have been more than a few) with a revolutionary mindset, I’d have probably tried to set myself up as a Toussaint L’ouverture type. Obviously there were Whites that did have that fear that a large enough slave revolt was always possible, and that with the right leaders, they could be facing a disaster. They’re quite lucky such an incident of a major proportion didn’t occur prior to 1860.

Anyway, on my point about the federal government buying the slaves their freedom, I was just throwing out an idea. The costs, obviously, would’ve been stratospheric, but would it have been cheaper and easier than what the Civil War ultimately cost ? I don’t know. Obviously, in my opinion, better bucks and running into debt for this than bodies and bloodshed.

What’s amazing, too, is that the South, upon secession, could’ve won the war if they themselves had emancipated the slaves as the UK was suggesting, which would’ve immediately caused their intervention, and halted the war (and, then, of course, Lincoln would’ve gone down in history as the man whose election ended the United States as it was known). If I had been Jefferson Davis, I’d have signed the proclamation (of course, there would’ve been mass hysteria in the South), but reminded the White populous rather quietly, “Look, we don’t have to legal “retain” the institution of slavery. What you can have now is de facto slavery. We’re not going to give ex-slaves the right to vote or hold office or the like. Etc, etc.” Blacks then would’ve become essentially what they were from either after 1876, or definitively after 1900 when Jim Crow was firmly in place. De facto slaves without rights, and without DC to interfere, they could’ve remained that way for perpetuity (although even at that, you would’ve been back to other problems, such as revolts and the like).

Had that occurred, of course, the North then more than likely would’ve been forced to heavily militarize their Southern border to keep out escaping slaves (and you better believe they would’ve done it). Of course, in the end, such a situation would’ve left the USA and CSA as rather weak entities. What we would’ve looked like by the 20th century would’ve been vastly different. The USA would’ve looked like a type of Canada. The CSA, which by then would’ve extended themselves into the Caribbean and annexing perhaps all the way to South America, would’ve been much like, say, Mexico, with extreme poverty on one side and a small, wealthy elite that controlled most of the country and its politics. With those divided interests, its also highly unlikely either could’ve definitively reached the point of becoming THE world leader, and may have been scarcely prepared to face off against the regimes that rose in Europe and Asia (Hitler, Stalin, et al). The America entering into the 21st century might’ve been a fully subjugated territory of a foreign entity and third world nightmare. Something to ponder.

[LS]

But there are two flaws in this line of reasoning, and they are not insignificant. First, there was no "cost" to freeing the slaves because the economic models show that you never would have achieved zero---in fact, with each new slave purchase toward emancipation, it only would have driven up the incentives to breed and hold slaves. If you have chinchillas and with each one you sell, the price of the others you own goes up, you soon seek to own even more.

Second, it's pie in the sky to think, as is said in the movie "Gettysburg," that "we should have freed the slaves first, THEN declared independence." This is utterly ridiculous, excuse me. The entire POINT of independence was to hold slave property. That was the only point. It was never, ever, ever about "states' rights." The only "states' right" that they were interested in was the right to hold slave property. They mentioned it no less than THREE TIMES in the Confederate Constitution, even to the point of having an article that said that if by some strange occurence any state emancipated its slaves, slave holders from all other states would still be safe in bringing their slaves into that state.

But go back to Calhoun's comment which was that it was more than just having slaves---their goal was, as in homosexual marriage today, not just to have the act inviolate, but to force ATTITUDES to change, namely, the South was already working on ways to prevent anyone from criticizing slavery in public. Talk about speech codes! The "gay lobby" doesn't come close to what the Southerners practiced. Slavery in every respect was an assault on the freedoms of all, and not just blacks in the south.

As for Johnson's comment, yes, we were a democracy (i.e., majority rules) and yes, the free whites in the South did FULLY support denying civil rights to blacks, so he is 100% correct: in the south, after Reconstruction, the voters got what they wanted, regardless of what the black minority said.

[Marty62]

I don’t watch SouthPark. Apparently I’m the only one.
Sorry my Bad.
After what ole alfrakenstein pulled yesterday. I wonder If we will see so fist a cuffs from this bunch of wussies.

[Impy]

I didn’t watch it either but I started recently. It’s good.

Franken should be punched and so should everyone who voted for him.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Well, I won’t contest your points. As I said, it may have been ultimately unavoidable. We had a brief window of opportunity between 1776-1789 and it was lost. Another problem with the Confederacy is that a pure states rights republic simply wasn’t going to be workable. Even in conducting war policy, that was apparent, you’re going to have to have some level of centralization or you’re going to have to have each state as an independent republic (and I could imagine there being another Civil War within the CSA before long).

You cited the “gay lobby”, an example of that is the current push for marriage. You can’t have it so that your marriage is valid in one state (albeit by however contorted means they arrived at it being remotely legal or permissable under a given state Constitution) and yet not in another, so all they merely need do is get it “approved” in a few states, go to another demanding their marriage of another state be recognized and have it set up to go to SCOTUS to have it imposed on the rest of the country (a la Roe v. Wade).

[LS]

On the "gay lobby," exactly right and as we know, once you've devalued the definition of marriage as other than between a m & w, it opens it to many men/women, or to men and animals, or men and children.

The Constitutional Convention/Continental Congress was probably the only time to deal with slavery, so it was a catch 22: either you had a nation with slavery, or you didn't have a nation---but you'd still have mini-nations with slavery.