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Posted on 04/14/2003 8:52:11 PM PDT by Aurelius
Scary.
Unless you happen to be descended from slaves.
I don't know about a monarchy, but we are very close to being ruled by a handful of urban centers.We very nearly lost the last election to Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee/Madison, Boston, Minneapolis, Baltimore and New Orleans. I don't think the Founding Fathers envisioned the child of their making ruled by ten or eleven cities.
What? You STILL haven't donated to the best site in the world?
Yeah, the poverty pimps that now rule us are really special, aren't they?
...but in actuality, the power of the Christian faith and the idea that one person might own another person were moving like a Bradley fighting vehicle though nineteenth century thought. Slavery was wrong. It would have disappeared from the South under far friendlier terms had the Confederacy survived.
I'm going to go with the author's thesis on this one, but I know that Illbay didn't even bother reading or thinking about this argument. The bell went 'ding', and Illbay salivated. ;-)
Judge rules Va. must allow confederate license plates
Pro-Confederacy Group Seeks Reparations for Civil War Losses
I'll freely admit that I don't like the centralization of federal authority that resulted from the Civil War.
But that the Civil War was not primarily fought over the issue of slavery is rampant revisionism.
The sole cause of the Civil War was the insistence, by a radical group of Southerners, that they be allowed to extend slavery as they saw fit, and that slavery be accepted as a just and moral practice by the entire United States.
The Republican Party didn't form with the goal of ending slavery, it was formed with the goal of preventing the Southern-dominated federal government from forcing acceptance of slavery on the Northern states that deplored it.
Fanatic southerners planned invasions of Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, etc., in order to extend their abominable practice into new territories.
In Dred Scott, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court overturned every law in the Northern states against slavery - forcing slavery to be accepted. A Southern-dominated Congress and a Southern President repealed the Compromise of 1850, and opened all new territories to slavery, if their citizens so chose.
And with that a fanatic Southern governor assembled a gang of thugs and bandits to terrorize the free citizens of Kansas, and to force a pro-slavery Constitution upon the new state.
Like I said, it was all about slavery - and the South's insistence that it had the right to force slavery upon people who found it abhorrent, that led to the formation of the Republican Party, to Lincoln's decision to re-enter politics, to his election as President, and to the decision by the South that they would secede. And not only secede, but that they would enter into open warfare with the North, rather than to be forbidden to extend slavery by force.
Yes, slavery was dying. It couldn't compete in the market with free labor. This was why the pro-slavery forces were so radical - they knew that slavery was a dead instituton, unless they could force the system of slavery on competing regions.
But all of this is too simple, for modern-day historians. They insist upon bringing up all these "real" reasons for the war. The tariffs being the most popular.
But all of these have one major drawback, when considered as reasons for the war. The secessionists never mentioned them. Not in their declarations of secession, not in their debates.
What they argued about, what they shouted about, all they were openly concerned about, was slavery. And how unjust it was that a "sectional party" would try to prevent them from spreading it where they willed.
Slavery was the issue, according to those who actually led the secession. I'll take their words over modern-day revisionists.
I think an examination of the John Brown phenomenon produces some thought-provoking questions in the mind of the astute observer.
You, on the other hand, apparently prefer your strawmen. ;-)
There's an interesting scene in the movie Gettysburg, prior to Pickett's Charge. Armistead is pointing out various Virginians in his division to the Brit officer. The pedigrees of some of the soldiers in the Viriginia ranks was astonishing. I can't believe that all those sons of the Founders were motivated by 'radical notions of forcing slavery on their neighbors'.
It was pretty easy to slander them all after many of them died charging Cemetery Ridge, though.
One aspect of history that I like to ponder is what happens to a society when a conqueror slaughters the best men of that society (as a conqueror often has to do). It was pretty easy to paint the beaten American Indians as dirty drunken thieves after we killed their chiefs and holy men. The Nazis and the Jews, Stalin and the Poles, etc., etc.
I wouldn't gloat too hard on the Confederates, because the gloating puts you in some pretty seamy company.
I'm not a flat-earther nor am I an appease-nik. Build another strawman, jam your hand up its posterior, and run it by the audience. You just might get someone to believe that it's got a brain. ;-)
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