Posted on 01/11/2019 5:16:40 AM PST by TexasGunLover
AUSTIN, Texas — A historically inaccurate brass plaque honoring confederate veterans will come down after a vote this morning, WFAA has learned.
The State Preservation Board, which is in charge of the capitol building and grounds, meets this morning at 10:30 a.m. to officially decide the fate of the metal plate.
(Excerpt) Read more at wfaa.com ...
Of course, by law you're allowed to "think" whatever you wish, but the fact remains there's no historical evidence to support such "thinking".
The evidence we have points very differently, beginning with the famous quote from Fire Eater Senator Wigfall.
I emphasize Fire Eater because those were the people who lead the charge for secession, so their opinions matter here more than most.
Are there any Fire Eaters who talked about industrializing the South?
That was certainly not what Fire Eater Robert Rhett (not to be confused with the fictional Rhett Butler) said in December 1860.
Yes, Rhett did complain (falsely) that:
"We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor; by which our population doubles every twenty years; by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land; by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world where the Caucasian cannot labor are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions.
All we demand of other peoples is to be let alone to work out our own high destinies."
FLT-bird: "Their expectation of a short war was based on their belief that the Northern states would not have the political will to pay a high cost in blood and treasure to prevent the Southern states from doing exactly the same thing their grandparents had done - secede...throw off the rule of a government they no longer consented to.
That had been the principle everybody claimed to believe in up until 1861."
But it was not the principle anybody believed in 1776 or 1787.
Our Founders believed something quite different.
They believed disunion required " a long train of abuses and usurpations" which they detailed in 1776 or as in 1788 mutual consent to a new constitution.
Neither condition existed in 1860.
The key words there being "at pleasure", words I'm certain you will appreciate since they come from your hero, a man you've defended here at great risk, the Father of our Constitution, President James Madison, right?
The plain fact is yankees frequently acted as terrorists towards civilians in Missouri, Kentucky, middle Tennessee and southern Maryland . Since Americans were very big on sanctimoniousness in the 19th century, I have wondered how the yankees who were complicit in murdering unarmed civilians and leaving children fatherless or orphans , sexually molesting women and girls in lonely farm houses or just raping black women when they felt like it, or burning down some ones home in the middle of the winter, or just shooting livestock in the fields or destroying a family's stock of food for the cold months, not to mention violent robbery of homes and businesses felt when twenty years later they were sitting in some pew at church with their wife and children listening to the reverend rail about sinful behavior.
Interestingly the yankees believed the same. The short war fallacy has a long history. In 1914/15many Englishmen were enraged if someone said that due to the size of the combatants the war would go on a long, long time until someone collapsed. That was just un-English to not believe that the King's forces would soon drive the Germans to the Rhine.
There is an amazing video from this English guy who goes on for like 10 minutes about the idiocy of political correctness.
Specifically about how ‘Little House on the Prairie’ writing were being censored because they contained racial overtones regarding slavery.
And he says “For f***’s sake I would surprised if they DIDN’T- it was written in the 1800’s around the time of Jim Crow laws” - that does not make it bad writing, in fact it is important writing because it shows the cultural thinking of the day.”
And that is THE point regarding old statues and history- We cannot judge them by today’s standards.
To summarize OIFVeteran's post #483 above, long before Confederates formally declared war on the United States, on May 6, 1861 they:
FLT-bird: "Once a war starts, all bets are off.
Were the colonists waging a war of aggression against the British Empire?
They invaded Canada.
Were the Allies waging a war of aggression against the Axis?
They invaded Iceland - and Iran.
An aggressive defense is still defense."
That's a distinction with no meaning and no reason to pretend to.
Of course our Founders fought as aggressively as they could against the Brits, especially on the high seas and most especially in enlisting allies to help out.
That's a point often missed by you Lost Causers -- you keep telling us "oh, the Brits didn't try as hard to win our Revolution as the Union did in Civil War!"
But that's just bogus -- relatively speaking the Brits spent every bit as much in blood and treasure in the Revolution as the Union did in the 1860s.
But there was one key overwhelming difference: the Union fought only one enemy -- Confederates.
The Brits had to fight not just Americans but many others -- French especially, also Spanish & Dutch with some help from Germans, Poles and Jews.
Brits had to fight not only in the Colonies but also in Canada, the Caribbean, Gibraltar, India, Indian & Atlantic Oceans, even Africa (Senegal).
So it wasn't that Brits put less resources into the American Revolution, but rather that they had to spread those resources vastly more thinly.
Indeed, we can say the Confederacy was huge -- nearly a million square miles fought over -- but the Brits in our Revolution fought over an area ten times that size.
My point is this: the idea of a "defensive war" versus "aggressive war" is meaningless for 1776 as for 1861.
All sides did what they could without making legalistic distinctions between "defense" and "offense".
FLT-bird: "I believe you are wrong and that the Lincoln administration started and waged a war of aggression to impose its rule on people who did not consent to be ruled by it."
Confederates began their war against the United States long before formally declaring it on May 6, 1861.
Jefferson Davis himself knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the "reduction" and surrender of Fort Sumter.
As for just who "consented to be ruled", it turns out that 4 million slaves also did not "consent to be ruled".
FLT-bird: "Do you confess it was defensive for the Confederates to have an aggressive defense policy once Lincoln started the war?"
I think your differences between "defense" and "offense" are distinctions without meanings.
FLT-bird: "Do you confess Lincoln started the war and waged a war of aggression?"
Confederates began waging war on the United States months before they formally declared war, May 6, 1861.
Seriously, can you even be honest about this topic?****
Can you?
If you could be honest, you’d confess the truth which is that slave ownership varied from very small and declining percentages in Border South states to much higher and growing percentages in Deep South states.****
Growing percentages? I’d need to see evidence of that.
What were those percentages, exactly?
Well, that depends on how you count, but if you figure even a modest sized average slaveholding family, then some Deep South states came in at just under 50% slaveholders.****
the evidence does not support that. Look at the US Census data.
Sure, you want us to believe that some families had more than one slaveholder, that’s fine, but there were many others — i.e., singles or young married couples getting started — who fully intended to purchase slaves as soon as they could afford them.
In other words, they were just as committed to the slavocracy as any large plantation owner.****
Pure speculation on your part. What we have is the Census data which shows the state with the highest percentage of the total free population owning slaves was South Carolina at 8.82%. Even Deep South states such as Alabama, Florida and Georgia had fewer than 7% slave ownership among the total free population as of the 1860 US census.
The rough estimate of 25% came first from Confederate soldiers themselves as to how many of their fellow soldiers came from slaveholding families.****
That may have been true in a few areas but is certainly a high estimate in others.
Some scholars have studied collections of Civil War soldiers’ letters and found that many discuss slavery.
None discussed tariffs.****
LOL! McPherson’s own book on the subject says otherwise...this is chief PC Revisionist James McPherson.
In his book What They Fought For, 1861-1865, historian James McPherson reported on his reading of more than 25,000 letters and more than 100 diaries of soldiers who fought on both sides of the War for Southern Independence and concluded that Confederate soldiers “fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government.” The letters and diaries of many Confederate soldiers “bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self government,” writes McPherson, and spoke of a fear of being “subjugated” and “enslaved” by a tyrannical federal government. Sound familiar?
Further, your total economic argument about “Southern taxes paid for Northern benefits” is contradicted by both common sense and the facts of history.****
Au contraire
Common sense: Democrats ruled Washington and Southerners ruled Democrats, so no spending or taxes passed without Southern approval.****
Pure BS. A fantasy constructed in your own mind. If Southerners controlled Washington as you claim, tariffs would have been much lower, expenditures far more balanced between the regions and the federal govenrment would not have usurped all kinds of powers the states never delegated to it in the constitution.
Facts of history: Actual Federal spending summarized by category and Free States vs. slave states.
The historical fact is that Southerners did not pay more than their “fair share” and did not receive less than their “fair share” from Washington, DC, regardless what Fire Eater propagandists like Robert Rhett claimed.****
Here you are being dishonest again.
“The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue,” John C Calhoun Speech on the Slavery Question,” March 4, 1850
“This question of tariffs and taxation, and not the negro question, keeps our country divided....the men of New York were called upon to keep out the Southern members because if they were admitted they would uphold [ie hold up or obstruct] our commercial greatness.” Governor of New York Horatio Seymour on not readmitting Southern representatives to Congress 1866
” If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862
“Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, ‘to fire the Southern Heart’ and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation North American Review (Boston October 1862)
“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.” Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
“They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union.” The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
I can go on and on posting similar quotes. By the way...this is exactly the kind of quotes, facts, sources, etc you claim I have not posted.
Once again, here is that graphic showing which cities paid how much to Federal Revenues:****
ROTFLMAO! Repeating McPherson’s economic illiteracy and showing your own economic illiteracy. The cities paid those tariffs to the federal government did they? They just dipped into their own pockets out of the goodness of the hearts and coughed up the money right?
Or did somebody else pay those tariffs. Gosh...who do you think that might have been?
Hint: Where the ship unloads its cargo is irrelevant.
Of course, by law you’re allowed to “think” whatever you wish, but the fact remains there’s no historical evidence to support such “thinking”.
The evidence we have points very differently, beginning with the famous quote from Fire Eater Senator Wigfall.
I emphasize Fire Eater because those were the people who lead the charge for secession, so their opinions matter here more than most.****
No it doesn’t. The laws of economics have not changed in the last 150 years. High margins attract competitors which drive down those margins. Always has been the case, always will be the case. Everybody could see the enormous power of industrialization by the mid 19th century.
Are there any Fire Eaters who talked about industrializing the South? That was certainly not what Fire Eater Robert Rhett (not to be confused with the fictional Rhett Butler) said in December 1860.
Yes, Rhett did complain (falsely) that:
“The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected three-fourths of them are expended at the North.”****
No, he was correct about that.
But even Rhett nowhere claims the problem is the South needs more industrialization. In fact, he says, not surprisingly, just the opposite, words that Senator Wigfall would certainly approve:
Robert Rhett’s address to slaveholding states, December 1860:
“We rejoice that other nations should be satisfied with their institutions.
Self-complacency is a great element of happiness, with nations as with individuals. We are satisfied with ours. If they prefer a system of industry in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict — and chronic starvation keeps down the natural increase of population — and a man is worked out in eight years — and the law ordains that children shall be worked only ten hours a day — and the sabre and bayonet are the instruments of order — be it so. It is their affair, not ours.
“We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor; by which our population doubles every twenty years; by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land; by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world where the Caucasian cannot labor are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions.
All we demand of other peoples is to be let alone to work out our own high destinies.”
Nothing in Rhett’s words suggest he wanted to industrialize the South.****
He did not say industrialization no, but others could see what was coming. It wasn’t some far off mystery. The Upper South was rapidly industrializing by 1861...and slavery was starting to die out just as it had in other places that industrialized
Rhett was also correctly pointing out just how miserable things were for people at the bottom of the social order up North....and he was right about that. The complete lack of tort law, OSHA, child labor laws, workmen’s comp, etc etc led to horrible abuses - the backlash against with spawned the labor unions which still plague much of the North.
But it was not the principle anybody believed in 1776 or 1787. Our Founders believed something quite different.
They believed disunion required “ a long train of abuses and usurpations” which they detailed in 1776 or as in 1788 mutual consent to a new constitution.
Neither condition existed in 1860.
The Southerners could cite a long train of abuses and usurpations which they detailed at great length in 1861 and which they had been detailing for quite some time. The Founders believed that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. That was THE central point of the Declaration of Secession....err...Independence (same thing).
So did this guy:
“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848
Yes Yes I know. Here is where you’ll come up with some desperate excuses as to why the plain words Lincoln spoke then did not mean what they actually meant and there were all kinds of conditions - which he errrr....forgot to name - that rendered the Southern states doing EXACTLY what he himself advocated a dozen years prior somehow not legitimate. Go ahead. I’m waiting for it with baited breath.
Thank you!! For making a point I've been searching for now a long time -- that the Civil War was indeed "all about slavery", but not just about the enslavement of 4 million blacks, but also about white Southern fears of being "enslaved" in the Union.
Somewhere I've seen a quote from Jefferson Davis himself to that effect, but have been unable to relocate it.
So I think it's entirely fair to say now that slavery was entirely the issue, the only real issue, the one which kept Confederates fighting for months even years after it was clear they'd lose, slavery for 4 million blacks and for 5 million Confederate whites.
Clear, obvious, irrefutable!
To summarize OIFVeteran’s post #483 above, long before Confederates formally declared war on the United States, on May 6, 1861 they:
Seized by force dozens of Federal forts, ships, arsenals & mints.
Threatened, captured & held Union troops & officials.
Fired on Union ships.
Attacked & killed Union troops in Union states.
Repudiated debts owed to Northerners.
Sent military aid to Confederates fighting in Union states.
Individually & collectively, those amount to Confederates waging war on the United States long before they officially declared it, May 6, 1861.****
They seized military and other governmental installations on their own sovereign territory. As I outlined to him, this was no different from what the colonists did when they seceded from the British Empire in 1775...a year before the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
That’s a distinction with no meaning and no reason to pretend to.****
No its not. Its a truism in war which is very inconvenient for your argument.
Of course our Founders fought as aggressively as they could against the Brits, especially on the high seas and most especially in enlisting allies to help out.
That’s a point often missed by you Lost Causers — you keep telling us “oh, the Brits didn’t try as hard to win our Revolution as the Union did in Civil War!”
But that’s just bogus — relatively speaking the Brits spent every bit as much in blood and treasure in the Revolution as the Union did in the 1860s.*****
Straw man argument. I never said the Brits did not try to put down the colonial secessionists. They did.
But there was one key overwhelming difference: the Union fought only one enemy — Confederates.
The Brits had to fight not just Americans but many others — French especially, also Spanish & Dutch with some help from Germans, Poles and Jews.
Brits had to fight not only in the Colonies but also in Canada, the Caribbean, Gibraltar, India, Indian & Atlantic Oceans, even Africa (Senegal).
So it wasn’t that Brits put less resources into the American Revolution, but rather that they had to spread those resources vastly more thinly.****
OOOOOOK. I never disputed any of that.
Indeed, we can say the Confederacy was huge — nearly a million square miles fought over — but the Brits in our Revolution fought over an area ten times that size.
My point is this: the idea of a “defensive war” versus “aggressive war” is meaningless for 1776 as for 1861.
All sides did what they could without making legalistic distinctions between “defense” and “offense”.****
My point is that once a war starts, those who are fighting a defensive war...ie not seeking territorial aggrandizement...may well adopt aggressive tactics and strategies. Its the nature of war. Them adopting aggressive tactics and strategies does not mean they were the aggressors.
Confederates began their war against the United States long before formally declaring it on May 6, 1861.****
No they didn’t. They exercised their sovereign rights to seize and control installations on their own territory.
Jefferson Davis himself knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the “reduction” and surrender of Fort Sumter.
As for just who “consented to be ruled”, it turns out that 4 million slaves also did not “consent to be ruled”.
Jefferson Davis did what anybody else would have in his place. If you’re going to use the “slaves didn’t consent” argument then the founding of the US was just as illegitimate. The slaves didn’t consent then either. Neither did women. Yet somehow you want to apply this standard only to the CSA and not to the USA.
I think your differences between “defense” and “offense” are distinctions without meanings.*****
No they’re not. The Southern states were content to go their own way in peace. It is Lincoln who wanted a war.
Confederates began waging war on the United States months before they formally declared war, May 6, 1861.****
Wrong.
Thank you!! For making a point I’ve been searching for now a long time — that the Civil War was indeed “all about slavery”, but not just about the enslavement of 4 million blacks, but also about white Southern fears of being “enslaved” in the Union.***
LOL! OK. If that’s the twist you want to put on it, then I won’t dispute that part. Southerners were fighting for their own freedom - not the right to hold others in bondage.
Somewhere I’ve seen a quote from Jefferson Davis himself to that effect, but have been unable to relocate it.
So I think it’s entirely fair to say now that slavery was entirely the issue, the only real issue, the one which kept Confederates fighting for months even years after it was clear they’d lose, slavery for 4 million blacks and for 5 million Confederate whites.****
No not for 4 million blacks. That was never threatened within the US prior to 1861. Fighting to prevent their own subjugation and enslavement by a tyrannical federal government? True.
Clear, obvious, irrefutable!
Cite credible historical sources for the accusations you make. An SCV pamphlet is not credible.
Plundering , thieving, abuse of non combatants was far to much the rule with yankees in the rural South.
Which laws required ships to unload their cargos in New York or Boston instead of Charleston or New Orleans.
The Navigation act of 1817. Couldn't use foreign ships or crews. Had to use the New York/North Eastern shipping companies which pretty much controlled all shipping.
Mail and cargo carrying subsidies paid to them by the Federal government made it harder for Southern based shipping companies to compete.
I daresay I have seen only you bring up "SCV pamphlet"s. If someone has cited one as a source, I'm unaware of it. I don't think I have ever seen one myself.
As for credible sources, I did cite some credible sources when I related to you the strange and mysterious tale of David Porter taking the command of the Sumter expedition, ordering his crew to disguise it's outlines so it wasn't recognizable to people who "knew her well", hoisted a British Flag, sailed way out into the Atlantic to avoid being noticed by his own Navy, and then got to Pensacola with the intention of opening fire on the Confederate batteries there, only to be stopped by Captain Meigs putting his own ship directly in the path of the Powhatan.
I don't recall you commenting much on this odd series of events when first I mentioned them to you. I seem to recall that you thought I was making it up before I showed you the sources.
So what are we to make of the curious doings of Lieutenant Porter? (Two ranks below Captain in that era's Naval ranking system.)
How on earth did he get secret orders from the President to disrupt the Sumter expedition and try to start a war in Florida? Lincoln said it was all an error, and that he signed so many documents, he didn't realize he was tasking the ship to be in two places at once, and this might be believable were it not for the fact that these were hand carried "secret" orders, not routine ship orders.
How does one forget that one wrote specific secret orders relieving a specific Captain (Captain Mercer) of duty, and handing his powerful warship to a Lieutenant? And why did they need to be secret?
Why did quickly made Admiral Porter never release them to the public? He only alludes to what was in them, never getting into details or specifics.
Back to the original question, you claimed that law jiggered most shipping to New York. What law did that.
The Navigation act only deals with intercoastal shipping
and the warehousing act deals with cargo unloaded by not having the tariffs paid. So what law required ships to off load their cargos in New York.
Do your sources mention Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson when discussing the fighting in Missouri and Kansas.
the Navigation act of 1817 was passed in retaliation for the British closing their Caribbean ports to American ships.
Not as a measure to stick it to the South. Nothing in the Navigation act requires the use of New York or Northeastern shipping companies.
How on earth did he get secret orders from the President to disrupt the Sumter expedition and try to start a war in Florida? Lincoln said it was all an error, and that he signed so many documents, he didn’t realize he was tasking the ship to be in two places at once, and this might be believable were it not for the fact that these were hand carried “secret” orders, not routine ship orders.
How does one forget that one wrote specific secret orders relieving a specific Captain (Captain Mercer) of duty, and handing his powerful warship to a Lieutenant? And why did they need to be secret?
From what I have read, Seward drafted the order and Lincoln signed it. When Welles found out about the change to Powhatans’s orders, he demanded Seward and he, discuss the issue with Lincoln. When the discussion ended, Lincoln directed Seward to countermand the original set of orders and direct Powhatan to join the Sumter expedition. Seward did as directed, he sent an order to Porter to join the Sumter expedition. Those orders were delivered to Porter as Powhatan sailed. Porter read the order, and chose to disregard them because only Seward’s name was on the order, and he was not in Porter’s chain of Command. Seward seems to have injected himself in some affairs that were not his to deal with, and for some reason Lincoln allowed that to happen. Lincoln did apologize to Welles, later.
As far being secret was concerned. Welles had advised Lincoln that he had serious doubts about the loyalty of a fair number of the Navy Department staff. The fact that officials in Charleston knew about the details of the resupply mission, that seems to have been the case.
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