[DiogenesLamp]

I guess you have no further interest in discussing the cause of the Civil War?

Of course it doesn’t “nullify” Obama’s Presidency. But the fact that legitimate objections to Obama’s eligibility were not raised on the basis of this work on Natural Law and John Jay’s correspondence shows how far we have drifted politically and linguistically from the society that wrote the Constitution, and how restoring that Constitution would require upending an enormous amount of current law and current received opinion.

And about this you are exactly right. People today do not care what the truth is, and the same can be said of the Civil War. They don't care what the truth is.

[pierrem15]

Not avoiding it, I just do not have time to dig into it more. I agree with you in the sense that the economic issues for the Southern states were much more important than they are usually given credit for in terms of the Civil War, but I would point out that slaves constituted 80% of the South's capital in 1860. So the economic threat of emancipation was far greater than the issue of tariffs. My point in the other thread was that the focus by both sides was the institution of slavery, whose continued existence was perceived as a critical element of political independence to the South but which came to be perceived as a threat to the continued existence of the republic by the North.

The emphasis today is almost solely on the punitive effect of slavery on blacks. The original issues surrounding the Civil War are completely covered over for the purpose of a moral condemnation of the US as a whole. This ties these two threads together, because the basic ignorance of Americans of their own history and the actual meaning of the Constitution make it impossible to have the Constitution function as it was intended.