No. The ‘’end of the subject’’ is Lee took up arms against his country and could have been hung for it. You Rebs irritate the piss out of me calling yourselves conservatives and you come to a conservative web site venerating a bunch of treasonous Southern Democrats.
The South undertook a violent secession to preserve and economic system based on the use of slave labor and LOST!
Hilarious. You missed the entire point.
Lee understood the laws of the time. The United States were no longer “his country”. He was a citizen of Virginia, which had recently VOTED to become part of a new country. That made him part of THAT country.
Note that the secession was not violent as you state. It was done in their State legislatures quite peacefully. It was not until the intentional provocation at Ft. Sumter that it turned violent, and that was Lincoln’s intent. He started the war on purpose.
As for me being a “Reb”, well that’s hilarious. Guess you didn’t understand the last statement? You’re probably a descendant of post War Between the States immigrants, so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t understand. You’re ignorant of our history! You haven’t been an American all that long!
I noted that my g-g-grandfather was an Abolitionist. That means he was the opposite of a Southern Secessionist, i.e. “a Reb”. In fact, he left the South as I noted, 8 years prior the War on purpose: he was a Southern Unionist. You’re probably not even aware that even existed, except that’s precisely what Andrew Johnson was.
As for the South fighting a war to preserve an economic system based on slavery, that may have been the main theme but of course to the South, it was just the last straw. And the North didn’t fight the war to abolish slavery, they supposedly fought it to “preserve the union”.
And as for “conservatism” equalling mid 19th century Republican Radicalism, that’s even more funny. A de-centralized federal republic - the one that existed from 1787 to 1861 - would be the real “conservative” viewpoint.
And while we’re on the subject of the South “losing”, I would note that y’all Rust Belt folks seem to be pretty much on the ropes these days: factories gone, cities in ruins, everyone on welfare. The South by contrast is an economic dynamo, and will continue to be so due to their antebellum opposition to absurd taxation, corrupt unionism, dumbthug trade protection and sullen technological backwardness. Hell, even Boeing put a factory in South Carolina and I can safely tell you if they thought they could get away with it politically they’d move every damn job out of Seattle tomorrow.
When segregation was ended, the South opened up as there was no longer the stigma of discrimination, leading to massive investment in their largely unregulated states. This started with Bell Aircraft in 1942 in Cobb County, and Larry Bell move his plant there to screw the unions in Buffalo. The rest is history: that plant is now Lockheed Martin Marietta, and it started a move to the South by hundreds of corporations.
So much for your simplistic high school understanding of the issues of the past. The Federal Union was never meant to be an iron cage, because it leads to just what we are seeing now: a mad tyrant pounding the table every day insanely trying to control every aspect of our lives mainly for his own profit. I don’t know of any “conservative” on this platform who would disagree with that. A federal government that consumed 2% of GNP in 1861 and now represents something like 40% is precisely what the Founders were trying to avoid.
Either the Union is a nation of consensual partners or they get a divorce and go their separate ways. Anything else is tyranny.