Posted on 06/23/2013 5:55:07 PM PDT by Para-Ord.45
Then on what basis were Americans justified in fighting for their freedom in 1775? If life in slavery is better than a chance of death in battle?
What about all that stuff about “Give me Liberty or give me Death?”
I find it very difficult to believe that someone who thinks of himself as a conservative American can actually believe such arguments. They are not only un-American, they are IMO anti-American. They are in direct conflict with the principles that make America distinctive.
Good God - aren’t you embarrased that you just wrote that?
Wonderful oration! Kinda wordy by modern standards, though.
No they aren’t embarrassed.
Which is kind of embarrassing for those of us I consider real American conservatives, since our opponents tar all of us with the slavery-loving brush.
It’s all very simple. The pro-slavery arguments all make perfect sense, IF you assume that some men are born natural slaves because they are inferior, and others are born to rule them because they are superior. This was, of course, the conventional wisdom of pretty much the entire world before 1750.
What one absolutely, positively cannot do is logically square such a belief with the principles on which America is founded, as most eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence. So to the extent one makes excuses for slavery, he becomes IMO anti-American.
Yeah, but it’s still more timely and important than any of the “news” put out by the so-called media today.
“On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. “Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”
Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.
Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”
- Frederick Douglass
Are you honestly saying that there is any comparison between owning a human being as property and owning a dog or a cat?
Hannibal Rumbold, on the scaffold - 1685: “This is a deluded generation, veiled in ignorance, that though ... slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; though I am sure that there was no man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”
Unless of course you believe slavery is right, in which case you disagree.
Agreed.
“These communities [the Fathers of the Republic], by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
“This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.
“Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.
“Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Declaration of American Independence.”
— Abraham Lincoln, speech in Lewiston, Illinois, August 17, 1858, four days before his first historic debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Printed in the Chicago Press and Tribune.
” “I think he was a bad man,” wrote Lyon Gardiner Tyler, “a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.” “
I totally concur. It was unnecessary. It could have been prevented years prior but the liberals of the North beat on the South in Congress to the point there were hostilities. Even many in the North had no desire for war. When Lincoln called on volunteers he had to turn to the draft to get them.
“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
A. Lincoln, letter to Henry A. Pierce
Fellow-Countrymen:
AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. 1
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
- President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
Considering that the South had to turn to conscription over a year before the North did then would that mean that they, too, had no desire for war and had to be forced to fight?
“Considering that the South had to turn to conscription over a year before the North did “
That’s not a very good question since the South turned to conscription in 1862 and the war was already in progress, but I suspect since they lacked volunteers in 1862 after the war had been in progress for one year that the people of the Confederacy didn’t care for war, either. This was not a war that either people would benefit from. So why was Lincoln hellbent on executing the war?
People talk of the South firing on Ft Sumter a Union fort. Simple reason: Lincoln was fortifying it and had sent Union ships into the Charleston harbor. You don’t wait until the enemy has fully prepared before attacking. The South had no plans to invade the North in any way. Again, this was not a war that had to happen. There were even delegates from the South in the Congress.
“Not only that, but once the CSA was formed it would have gone on a land grab, using slavery to take and hold the new territory.
People in the North and probably quite a few in the South wanted to settle the new territory, and become prosperous using their own labor.
“
Debatable. The North had the money, not the South. It was very poor by comparison. I think by the time the South had the money slavery would have already been a goner. No doubt there would have been a race between the two to expand their territories, but I don’t think slavery would have been much of an issue. If anything I think Texas would have expanded into the western areas.
In order to prevent the war then one side or the other would have had to really want to avoid it. And I don't think that's the case in either the North or the South. The war came because in their own way both sides wanted it to come.
People talk of the South firing on Ft Sumter a Union fort. Simple reason: Lincoln was fortifying it and had sent Union ships into the Charleston harbor. You don’t wait until the enemy has fully prepared before attacking. The South had no plans to invade the North in any way. Again, this was not a war that had to happen. There were even delegates from the South in the Congress.
Lincoln wasn't fortifying Sumter, but even if he was he was certainly entitled to do so. "You don't wait until the enemy has fully prepared before attacking." That's the problem - the south had already adopted an aggressive war-like attitude. The war may not have been one "that had to happen" but the south did everything that it could to incite one and ensure that one did happen.
If the CSA was so poor how did they sustain the war for as long as they did?
“The war came because in their own way both sides wanted it to come. “
There was anger on both sides. It is how wars happen, right? One or both sides become belligerent and takes steps towards something they should have had better sense to stay away from. Lawsuits are the same type of thing. People simply act stupidly.
I think the South should have adopted a strategy to remove slavery once the Constitution was signed and forced the North to sign onto it, too, since they also had slavery. In fact, I think a phase out plan should have been adopted as part of the Constitution. The writers thought that would happen naturally but it didn’t.
Still, that wouldn’t have stopped the various anti-black laws that were in effect in every State. Those stayed in place for 100 years after the 13th was ratified.
I think Lincoln missed a grand opportunity to get the South back into the Union without a shot fired. I am second guessing the political climate but I see the northern congressmen that had no desire to appease the south so Lincoln would have had a tough time getting concessions from both. The South was ticked, no doubt, and did not trust the North, but I still believe Lincoln didn’t take any length of time that he should have to resolve the situation. He could have pulled troops from Sumter, made some concessions, then asked for a roundtable discussions to change all laws, like taxes, the north and south disliked.
I just see the war as a terrible waste that could have been avoided.
“If the CSA was so poor how did they sustain the war for as long as they did?”
It took everything they had. Everything. When the war ended the South was broke. I doubt they could have gone another few months. The North had debt but not nearly as broke as the South.
Frankly, considering their poor financial position to start with, I think they made a mistake waging war of any kind. I know Sumter was an issue as was were several other factors, but I think talking to Lincoln would have been a better choice. Capitulation for a few months might have given Lincoln the time he should have taken to make peace. Maybe get the South back into the Union. That little few months may have been all that was needed for everyone to take a break and let cooler heads prevail.
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