Posted on 10/31/2001 4:13:33 AM PST by smolensk
Being one who definitely thinks that our Civil War was an unnecessary loss of life and property, I have finally figured out how the South could have averted war, and stopped Northern aggression in its tracks.
You see the South possessed a 'secret weapon' that it didn't realize it had. What the South should have done, in the late 1850's, is to have realized that slavery was a dying institution anyway and that it could get by for the time being with half or a third less slaves than it had.
The South could have granted immediate freedom to half of its slave population with the condition that after manumission they couldn't remain in the South, but would have to move up North. If politically astute, the South could have 'spun' this relocation requirement as simply a way of spreading 'diversity' to the North.
With this, the abolitionist movement up North would have stopped 'dead in its tracks', in my opinion, and over 700,000 lives would have been saved, and all slaves would have been gained freedom anyway before 1900 due to international pressure.
Your commentary reminds me of an old law school joke. When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you don't have the facts, argue the law. When you don't have the law, argue for justice. Since you don't have the facts, the law or justice, it seems you resort to baseless namecalling. Grow up.
So where did you
get that ILL DEUCE?
Let me know and I will provide
equally appalling counterpoint.
If you want to salvage a degree of credibility then give me cites. I will take it from there.
Oh never mind, you are obviously off your medication again.
Which one, hill or bill?
I could just as easily (and meaninglessly) say that yankees were traitors to their state governments as you can say that southerners were traitors to the federal government. Since we live in a nation under two equally sovereign governments, State and Federal, and one Constitution, the only thing you can be a traitor to is the Constitution. We do not invest our souls in government, as other nations do. Government is derived from the People. IT is our slave. If the Constitution protects the rights of people in the states to secede, (and it does) loyalty to the Constitution means you don't fight a state to keep it in the Union, or else you're a traitor to the Constitution. When Americans go to war, they fight for the Constitution, not their local or general government. The CSA and each state in the South was fighting for the principles in the American constitution, duplicated in the CSA's Constitution which they had established and were going to live under had they been successful. They are not traitors unless they're fighting against the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the laws in the Constitution. The Southerners were therefore not traitors.
Bad assumption. Thirty years eariler, maybe, but with the growth of King Cotton in the deep south, by the 1850s, both the price and the demand for slaves was booming. It was a very profitable business.
You didn't answer my original question - which "Clinton" was a southerner - hill or bill?
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