Burned February 17, 1865
Posted on 02/03/2002 2:25:32 AM PST by bleudevil
Edited on 05/07/2004 6:26:29 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Movies failed to get Civil War, black-white relations right.
Enduring fans of filmdom's Gone With the Wind may be disappointed to learn, in reading The Reel Civil War, that the lovely actress who so convincingly portrayed ultimate Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara knew next to nothing about the history and culture of the American South.
(Excerpt) Read more at indystar.com ...
Mitchell wrote her novel in part as a way of setting the record straight about the scalawags in the South who dominated politics and high society during reconstruction, by showing them in their roles before, during and after the war. It was more an indictment of the Scarlett O'Hara/ Rhett Butler types than a glorification of them.
As a teenager, running projectors in the local movie theatre, I showed GWTW once a year. People referred to the central characters as"Scarlett O'Hoggish" and "Red Butthole". Believe it or not, the two central characters were objects of scorn to many Southerners, not heroic figures.
Seriously, a lot of people may see the neo-confed rant and go, "Gee, I didn't know all that," so it is important to oppose their nonsense. It just seems there is such a constant stream of them, all on the same note:
"Secession isn't prohibited; the war wasn't about slavery; Lincoln was evil; no one was convicted of treason and yadda yadda yadda."
But like I say, cockroaches don't like the light.
Walt
As for GWTW being History, that is of course nonsense. It's a romantic novel, a real "girl's book" if you ask me. And I love it, and I think the movie is great, the casting was perfect, esp. Oliva De Haviland, as Melanie Wilkes, who makes the character much, much more than the goody-two-shoes she is in the book; and my beloved Leslie Howard, also a Brit. He probably had no problem recognizing the song Dixie, and he died a true hero for his country and our civilization during WWII.
People should stop critizing GWTW for being something it's not, and enjoy it for what it is, or don't. It's just a story that was made into a big sweeping Hollywood movie. Anybody who would look to things like that for history is bound to be disappointed.
Good one. Please explain to this uneducated working man what your screename means.
I liked "Gettysburg" over "Glory" for many reasons. First, the scope was accurate. Second, I think Sam Elliot's speech as Gen. Buford, his reaction when he sees the infantry finally arrive, and Jeff Daniels' Chamberlain scenes were fantastic. I especially liked the speech Chamberlain made to the recalcitrant troops. But the movie DID appropriately present the Southern position and its arguments. (The beards were terribly fake, though, and the Martin Sheen/Lee scene with the troops cheering could have been edited to half its length).
Moreover, the Lincoln haters always want to get away from slavery, and will use any contortion they can to try to make the Civil War about something else. Yet isn't it interesting that the most LOGICAL AND VOCAL supporters of Southern slavery, Calhoun and Fitzhugh, were both MARXISTS. Fitzhugh out and out said that in his perfect world, whites as well as blacks would be slaves, because we are all "cannibals, cannibals all!" They HATED capitalism and free enterprise. Lincoln loved it. I've written plenty of articles with the research to prove it. He defended private corporations as an attorney; fought for business rights.
The only people with "feet of Clay" were the slaveholders who wanted a MASSIVE Southern government that confiscated property, drafted soldiers, and even considered freeing slaves (i.e., taking the very property they claimed to be fighting for) to save their butts.
You are suggesting that Margaret Mitchell was a racist? There has probably never been a stronger woman in American literature than the black house slave Mammy who seems to have no compunctions (and rightfully so) chastising Rhett Butler or even treating him as something of an equal in the red petticoat scene. She has competition from Miss Melanie. As I remember it, the field slave Big Sam, well after being freed by the work of Mr. Lincoln and reduced to living in a shanty town, saves Scarlett from a fate worse than death and probably from death too, if the perp had anything to say about it, and Big Sam cheerfully does so because, like Mammy, he is a pillar of moral virtue.
There are white villains too like the Union Army scavenger who is killed by Melanie at Tara.
Just because a politically correct New Jersey government college teacher (Rutgers is a state university) wants to write a book review for the equally politically correct Atlanta Urinal-Constipation, doesn't mean that Gone With the Wind is not highly accurate and the great American novel.
Even Ted Turner (barf) did a very good job with Gettysburg and is now working on Gods and Generals which will cover Stonewall Jackson, one of the most gallant Americans to ever have graced our continent. If and when a movie tells you that, before taking up his responsibilities as Lee's strong right arm, Jackson was threatened with prosecution and jail for teaching slaves (other people's) to read the Bible in his capacity as a Presbyterian elder and responded by defying those local authorities in western Virginia to put him before a jury of Virginians for the "crime" of teaching slaves to read the Bible. believe it because it was so, according to the magnificent recent biography by Professor James Robertson.
Sorry, but Margaret Mitchell was setting the record straight. One of the major underlying themes of her novel was also the fact that while the pre-war planter/aristocrats of the South were indeed often cavaliers, their time had to come to an end as a practical matter and that the Ashley Wolkes type would be replaced by the Rhett Butler type of Bourbon Democrat.
As Margaret Mitchell well knew, the Bourbon Democrats were the practical men of business who would largely set aside romantic nostalgia for ante-bellum days in favor of getting the North off the South's neck and re-establishing the South by commerce and industry. The Bourbon Democrats were not Klansmen. The Bourbon Democrats were replaced, after they ended Reconstruction, by Klansmen including such leftists as Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina who, in addition to his race-baiting Klan involvement and demeanor, was also a devotee of such as the Wobblies or International Workers of the World. We make the mistake of believing our enemies in thinking that racism is always or evn normally a rightist phenomenon. Not long after Tillman came the virulently anti-Catholic bigot Hugo Black who did so much for prying God out of government schools lest the agenda of the left be impeded.
If anything, Margaret Mitchell's Rhett Butler and his real life Bourbon Democrat counterparts were, in the context of their time, libertarians.
Slavery was not a moral good but Secession was an important right of every state.
As with the personal right to leave a nation, but far more important in impact, the right to secede keeps the central government honest and faithful to constitutional principles. The decline of adherence to the constitution (the 10th Amendment, for example) can be traced directly to the pretense and outcome of the War Between the States that, by virtue of the North's superior might and industrial resources, the North proved that secession was prohibited in much the same way as citizens are prohibited from fleeing Red China or Cuba.
Before any southern state voted secession, Wisconsin voted secession in 1859 because it no longer wished to be part of a nation that countenanced slavery (also an essential argument of Henry David Thoreau in his classic Civil Disobedience as to why he was personally seceding from paying taxes to Massachusetts until Massachusetts would secede from the Union over slavery). Wisconsin had a right to do that. Long before either Wisconsin or the 11 Confederate states voted secession, it was proposed by a convention of civic and business leaders from New England at the Hartford Convention of 1815 because these New Englanders were very upset at the way their business dealings with England had been disturbed by such messy matters as the War of 1812 (when southerner James Madison was president).
In fact, those businessmen, no doubt aggrieved by what John Adams called the "suicide" of the Federalist (aristocratic) Party, were probably also upset then and afterwards over Southern domination of the presidency: 24 years of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe (all of Virginia) punctuated by 4 years of the ineffective aristocrat John Quincy Adams) followed by 8 brilliant years of Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, punctuated by 4 years of Martin van Buren, an upstate New York bartender, and a few weeks of William Henry Harrison, followed by more than 8 years of John Tyler of Virginia, James Polk of Tennessee and Zachary Taylor if Mississippi. In the first 56 years of this republic, there were Southern presidents for 44 years. The post-revolutionary history of the United States was very much a history of Southerners and their influence until Lincoln's election.
My opinion is that there are a lot of nice people out there in the world with a few rotten eggs. And it was the same then as now.
While you are at it, you might check out the provisions of the preceding Articles of Confederation that they could only be amended by unanimous vote of the states, that the constitutional convention was called specifically to AMEND the Articles not to write a new constitution AND that the proposed document ignored the requirement of unanimity and proclaimed itself to be in effect, illegally, upon ratification by 9 of the 13 states.
If you view secession as illegal, what do you call the bloodless coup that led to this constitution.
Finally, did we not secede from the British Empire??? A good thing we did, but would you call that illegal? The British might well have hanged George Washington and others if they had won just as they hanged Wolfe Tone for running a revolution in Ireland in the late 1790s. Is victory the difference between being a demigod and beuing hanged as a traitor?
By the way, I am a Yankee born in Connecticut and lived there for all but the last two years when I have been in Illinois.
May I respectfully suggest that Lincoln, in the crisis of the war, did institute a personal income tax, later found unconstitutional by Salmon P. Chase, his Treasury Secretary whom he had appointed to replace Roger B. Tawney as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court?
I will certainly grant you that it is a dangerous business to view historical figures through the prism of our own very different times. I don't think Lincoln was ever evil. I do think that his last year in office is the basis of his reputation as Father Abraham and that, if he had lived, the South would have fared much better than it did because Lincoln was perfectly capable of restraining the Radical Republicans as Andrew Johnson obviously was not. I also believe that military reconstruction of the South (Yankee oppression) would not have occurred as was suggested by Lincoln's speech on the State House steps at Richmond on the Tuesday of assassination week.
Finally, free enterprise has its virtues but it is no God.
What always strikes me is how liberal dimwits like this writer will be angrily attacked by "conservative" republicans on any subject except for this sort of subject. Anything which attacks the South or Southerners is just fine and dandy, though all of it comes from the left. It tends to show what the GOP is really made of. Southerners in the GOP are being played for suckers. We're not wanted there and our input isn't welcome, only our votes.
For one thing, as you indicate, by any reading of the 10th amendment where the states retain a right to rend the Union, the people retain a right to maintain it.
That is what they have done.
Secondly, the supremacy clause is a bar to unilateral state secession.
If a state could unilaterally withdraw from the Union, then supremacy would rest with each state, respectively - not with the Constitution and the laws made pursuant to it. As the Constitution expressly declares the Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the land, any act that denies this supremacy (e.g., unilateral withdrawal) must be unconstitutional.
n fact, the much invoked 10th amendment is a sure guarantor of the pemanence of the Union. This is because the people retain the right to maintain the Union in perpetuity. The states may not leave the Union because that thwarts the will of the sovereigns of the United States--the people of the United States.
A fair reading of the Constitution will not provide any basis for legal secession under our system.
Consider the words of the Constitution:
Article One, Section Eight, "Powers of Congress". Congress is charged in Para. 1 to provide for the common defense and general welfare, and in Para. 18 given all powers necessary to carrying the foregoing powers into execution. Having 11 states duck out definitely compromises the general welfare of the United States, you'll have to agree.
Don't buy that? Jefferson Davis did. This is exactly the rational he used to impose conscription on the states of the CSA. The national government has the power to coerce the states. Jiminy Cricket, Davis might well have been reading straight from Cohens v. Virginia.
The Constitution also promises that each state shall be guaranteed a republican form of government. Sort of hard to do if a state withdraws, isn't it?
The Constitution also promises in Article Four Section One, Para. 1 that "the Citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states." Sort of hard to do if a state may withdraw, isn't it?
No one is suggesting that the states may not break away in the face of intolerable abuse of the powers transferred to the federal government. But I challenge anyone to find that intolerable abuse in the record prior to 1860.
Let's consider the words of James Madison:
"The doctrine laid down by the law of Nations in the case of treaties is that a breach of any one article by any of the parties, frees the other parties from their engagements. In the case of a union of people under one Constitution, the nature of the pact had always been understood to exclude such an interpretation." (Remarks to the Constitutional Convention, July 23, 1787).
In 1830 James Madison wrote:
"What was to be done in the event of controversies, which could not fail to occur, concerning the partition line between the powers belonging to the Federal and to the State governments? That some provision ought to be made, was as obvious, and as essential as the task itself was difficult and delicate...The provision immediately and ordinarily relied on is manifestly the Supreme Court of the United States, clothed as it is with a jurisdiction "in controversies to which the United States shall be a party," the court itself being so constituted as to render it independent and impartial in its decisions;"
James Madison The forging of American Federalism
Edited by Saul Padover
Harper Torchbooks, 1953 Page 196
In fact, Virginia and Virginians were early exponents of a strong Union.
"The [constitutional] convention was slow to tackle the problem of an army, defense, and internal police. The Virginia Plan said nothing about a standing army, but it did say that the national government could 'call forth the force of the union against any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.'
--"Decision in Philadelphia" by Collier and Collier.
Let's quote Lincoln:
"And this issue embraces more than the fact of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy--a government of the people, by the same people--can or cannot, maintain its territorial integtrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, accrding to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: "Is there in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?"
A. Lincoln, 7/4/61 Lincoln was the champion of the Union brought forth by the founding fathers. More Lincoln:
"This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existance we contend."
A. Lincoln 7/4/61
There is simply no right of legal secession under US law, and the secessionists well knew it. That is why they didn't try to go before the courts and chose violence instead.
But the laws made in pursuance of the Constittution are also the supreme law of the land.Walt The destruction of federalism. Lincoln shattered the old Union, the indictment runs, because he denied the constitutional right of the Southern states to secede. But there never was such a right.
Many have insisted that “there never was such a right” – but no one has yet identified a clear prohibition of secession within the Constitution.
There are plenty.
The Supremacy clause is a sure bar to secession. So is the 10th amendment.
If a state could unilaterally withdraw from the Union, then supremacy would rest with each state, respectively - not with the Constitution and the laws made pursuant to it. As the Constitution expressly declares the Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the land, any act that denies this supremacy (e.g., unilateral withdrawal) must be unconstitutional.
n fact, the much invoked 10th amendment is a sure guarantor of the pemanence of the Union. This is because the people retain the right to maintain the Union in perpetuity. The states may not leave the Union because that thwarts the will of the sovereigns of the United States--the people of the United States.
A fair reading of the Constitution will not provide any basis for legal secession under our system.
Consider the words of the Constitution:
Article One, Section Eight, "Powers of Congress". Congress is charged in Para. 1 to provide for the common defense and general welfare, and in Para. 18 given all powers necessary to carrying the foregoing powers into execution. Having 11 states duck out definitely compromises the general welfare of the United States, you'll have to agree.
Don't buy that? Jefferson Davis did. This is exactly the rational he used to impose conscription on the states of the CSA. The national government has the power to coerce the states. Jiminy Cricket, Davis might well have been reading straight from Cohens v. Virginia.
The Constitution also promises that each state shall be guaranteed a republican form of government. Sort of hard to do if a state withdraws, isn't it?
The Constitution also promises in Article Four Section One, Para. 1 that "the Citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states." Sort of hard to do if a state may withdraw, isn't it?
No one is suggesting that the states may not break away in the face of intolerable abuse of the powers transferred to the federal government. But I challenge anyone to find that intolerable abuse in the record prior to 1860.
Let's consider the words of James Madison:
"The doctrine laid down by the law of Nations in the case of treaties is that a breach of any one article by any of the parties, frees the other parties from their engagements. In the case of a union of people under one Constitution, the nature of the pact had always been understood to exclude such an interpretation." (Remarks to the Constitutional Convention, July 23, 1787).
In 1830 James Madison wrote:
"What was to be done in the event of controversies, which could not fail to occur, concerning the partition line between the powers belonging to the Federal and to the State governments? That some provision ought to be made, was as obvious, and as essential as the task itself was difficult and delicate...The provision immediately and ordinarily relied on is manifestly the Supreme Court of the United States, clothed as it is with a jurisdiction "in controversies to which the United States shall be a party," the court itself being so constituted as to render it independent and impartial in its decisions;"
James Madison The forging of American Federalism
Edited by Saul Padover
Harper Torchbooks, 1953 Page 196
In fact, Virginia and Virginians were early exponents of a strong Union.
"The [constitutional] convention was slow to tackle the problem of an army, defense, and internal police. The Virginia Plan said nothing about a standing army, but it did say that the national government could 'call forth the force of the union against any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.'
--"Decision in Philadelphia" by Collier and Collier.
Let's quote Lincoln:
"And this issue embraces more than the fact of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy--a government of the people, by the same people--can or cannot, maintain its territorial integtrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, accrding to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: "Is there in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?"
A. Lincoln, 7/4/61
Lincoln was the champion of the Union brought forth by the founding fathers.
More Lincoln:
"This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existance we contend."
A. Lincoln 7/4/61
There is simply no right of legal secession under US law, and the secessionists well knew it. That is why they didn't try to go before the courts and chose violence instead.
Part of WIJG's campaign of half truths is his asking for prohibitions against secession -in- the Constitution. As we've seen, there are many. But the laws made in pursuance of the Constittution are also the supreme law of the land.
According to the Militia Act of May 2, 1792, as amended Feb 28, 1795, Sec. 2:
"And it be further enacted, That whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. And if the militia of a state, where such combinations may happen, shall refuse, or be insufficient to suppress the same, it shall be lawful for the President, if the legislatures of the United States be not in session, to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto, as may be necessary, and the use of militia, so to be called forth, may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the ensuing session."
You'll note it says nothing about a state having passed an ordnance of secession to be a bar to federal action.
So Lincoln had the law plainly on his side when the war began.
Lincoln's other 1861 actions were also approved retroactively by the Supreme Court and the Congress. From a newsgroup:
"However, in 1862, the court heard on appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts a collection of suits, collectively called the "Prize Cases" [67 U.S. (2 Black) 635]. The technically turned on whether the US had the right to declare a blacked of the ports of the states in rebellion, and, if so, who had the authority to authorize the blockade, the president or Congress.
President Lincoln issued a declaration of a blockade at the end of April, 1861. Congress retroactively approved of his actions when they met in July. The owners of the ships captured by US Navy ships and claimed as prizes of war, argued that a rebellion was not a war and therefore the ships were not prizes. Having good attorneys :>), they also argued that, even of a rebellion *was* a war, under the US Constitution, only Congress could authorize the blockade, so ships captured before July should be returned.
The US attorney for the District of Massachusetts argued the case for the United States. You have probably read one of his books: _Two Years Before the Mast_. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. got his start as a lawyer because seamen came to him after reading or hearing about that perennial best seller. He had become a Republican and was appointed by President Lincoln as US Attorney.
This was one of the two important lawsuits that Dana was involved in: the other was the treason trial of Jefferson Davis. Dana was appointed as a sort of special prosecutor by Andrew Johnson to try Davis. Because treason is such a hard crime to prove under the Constitution, Dana urged that Davis not be tried.
In the Prize Cases, Dana was spectacularly successful. The Court ruled unanimously that putting down a rebellion was a legitimate function of government (Chief Justice Taney supported this). To the second question, about who could authorize the resistance to the rebellion, the court split 5-4 in favor of the president. The minority, including Taney, argued unsuccessfully that only Congress had the power.
....the official syllabus to the decision says:
"A state of actual war may exist without any formal declaration of it by either party, and this is true of both a civil and a foreign war.
"A civil war exists, and may be prosecuted on the same footing as if those opposing the Government were foreign invaders, whenever the regular course of justice is interrupted by revolt, rebellion, or insurrection, so that the Courts cannot be kept open.
"The present civil war between the United States and the so-called Confederate States has such character and magnitude as to give the United States the same rights and powers which they might exercise in the case of a national or foreign war..."
Everything LIncoln did was legal. Everything. Consider Lincoln's words concerning habeus Corpus: I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I have publically declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving by every indispensible means, that government--that nation--of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensible to to the preservation of the of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it..."
7/4/61
People who love the United States will agree with Lincoln's words.
Walt
One thing's for sure. We're being played for fools by the GOP.
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