Posted on 04/14/2003 8:52:11 PM PDT by Aurelius
The founding fathers of the United States of America knew exactly what they meant by freedom, or liberty, and the liberty for which they fought and established this nation.
I'm concerned that our generation doesn't understand liberty. It is the right to make free choices within the boundaries of laws that protect the citizens. Freedom is the right to live one's life according to one's own choices, also within a framework of laws designed to protect people from one another.
Freedom is not anarchy and it is not "government" or unauthorized control of one set of people by another. Anarchy obliterates freedom because it takes its own as being superior to that of others. Government control is the antithesis of freedom because laws enacted by the few without the consent of the many are the substance of tyranny.
It is decidedly regretful that the Union won over the Confederacy and that the fiction of emancipation of the slaves was used as the cover-up and many people to this very day, if they know there was a War between the Union and the Confederacy, believe that Lincoln freed the slaves and that the North was morally superior to the South ... the former being good and the latter being evil. That such a myth could be foist upon the American people in the first place is bad. That it should persist to this very day is absurd, an evidence of the lack of substance in our system of education.
Union was not the objective of the founders. King George III (the British king, not the present George II) made an agreement with the thirteen individual colonies, not with Washington D.C. or a union called the United States. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights enumerating what government may not do, stated clearly that states' rights prevailed over any government power not specifically delegated to the central authority.
For many years the moniker "states' rights" has meant -- to most Americans -- the right to forced segregation and prior to that, the belief in the benefits of slavery. Actually, at the time the Union was fighting the Confederacy, "northern" states also had legalized slavery. All slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was credited with freeing the slaves 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.
Additionally, the survival of the Confederacy would have prevented America's future ills by prohibiting the federal government from seizing powers that belong to the states via Supreme Court interpretations and opinions that override the original Constitution and Bill of Rights without power to do so, other than that granted by the courts to themselves.
Why is this important? Because the more Union we have the less unity we have as a nation and the less freedom we have as individuals. Just as cultures differ between nations, they differ in regions of large nations.
The plain fact is, the United States was designed to be a confederacy and not a centralized union. The idea of union simply crops out as some individuals saw "needs" that were more in their own ideas than in the facts of the time. What Lincoln did was not to free the slaves as much as to make slaves of us all to the Union system of centralized, powerful government that has now grown into a budding monarchy.
Various documentaries have tagged Lincoln's many failures and then shifted gears to show his outstanding "success" as the man who liberated the slaves. Malarkey. In the 1820's there was a plan afoot by the churches and some states, with the approval of the fed, to buy Liberia (which was done, incidentally, and I think the US would do well to enforce its ownership of that piece of Africa) as a home for all blacks who wished to return to their native land. It could now be used as a base for saving white Afrikaners and others who oppose the African National Congress and other communist/Marxist organizations that are destroying the people and animals of the dark continent while raping its enormous mineral wealth.
As I said, slavery was on its way out long before Lincoln. His contribution, if it can be called that, was not in freeing the slaves but in establishing union over confederacy as the governmental model for the USA.
What we would not have if we had a confederacy as originally constructed is a burgeoning bureaucracy where the idea of control of the masses grows like toxic mold amidst the marshes of government employees and departments, bureaus and administrations so that it is hardly known just how much money the government actually spends, on what, with what results, and at what cost to the people. No federal income tax could have been perpetrated on a confederacy. With a union, it was a cinch, legal or not.
Even at the birth of this nation there were those on hand who wanted a strong central government rather than a free confederacy of sovereign states.
When the Union won, this nation was on its way to a quasi-monarchy or oligarchy that the founders would have found reprehensible, noxious and contrary to the intent of the entire Revolutionary war. The moment much power is vested in or appropriated, unchallenged, by a central government and a central leader, then the freedoms guaranteed to the people become privileges extended to the masses by the elites. That is precisely the opposite of the original intent of creating the US.
If we were a confederacy, then each state would have to debate whether or not we wished to go to war, and Congress would not dare delegate its constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. Executive orders would be few, far between, issued in emergencies only, and never used as a substitute for legislation that a president feels he might not receive from Congress.
A confederacy would put a sudden halt to the bizarre globalist world. A sovereign nation comprised of sovereign states would never go along with the objectives and tyranny of globalism, so the question of America becoming a part of the Global Village would be totally moot. It could not, would not happen.
Each state could defend its own borders with our neighbors to the south and north of us, protecting the persons and property of the owners and occupants of the land and with undisputed authority to do so. As it is, a whole bunch of ineffective government agencies are figuring out ways not to offend illegal aliens to the detriment and endangerment of our own citizens.
This travesty on freedom is ridiculous and deadly.
Over two hundred and fifty thousand Americans died on U.S. soil in the war between the North and the South or, more correctly, between the Union and the Confederacy.
Oddly enough, our strongest patriots are still in the South. The North is home to most of the liberals who have not only joined hands with the globalists but have led the march toward tyranny and anti-American sentiments that delight our enemies abroad.
In its own way, the war between the Union and the Confederacy not only devastated the South for generations, but it paved the way for all those ills that now plague us by reason of a strong, bloated and tyrannical central government.
Slavery would have been abolished eventually in every state. Public pressure and churches would have eventually caused abolition to come to pass.
What we would not have is slaves of all colors to a federalized regime that is totally out of control by the people who are supposed to be the "consenting governed."
If we don't consent then we are tagged as enemies of the state. More properly, the nation.
Meantime, our freedoms have been absorbed, abrogated or negated by a central government against which there is, absent a time machine, no way to control or downsize.
Thanks a bunch, Abe.
I'm not "gloating". And like I said, the war had consequences I don't really care for.
As for the founders, I don't know many of them, North or South, who were defenders of slavery in anything but the "we're stuck with it and we don't know how to get out of it" sense.
Have you read Lincoln's Coopers Union speech? It was his introduction to national politics. In it he tracks the writing, and the voting records, of those who ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
There was a solid majority who had voted to restrict the expansion of slavery.
But by the 1820s, perhaps as a part of Jackson's extension of the franchise, the politicians of the South no longer saw slavery as an unfortunate inheritence, but as a positive good, and a fundamental right that justified violence in response to any attempt to restrict it.
Read the secession declarations. They weren't angry about industrial policy, or immigration, or tariffs. They were angry about slavery - they were outraged that the North had made it clear that it would not stand for the extension of slavery beyond those states where it already existed.
And for that, they began a war.
Geez, just read the articles of secession -- they positively rant over their right to slavery and how the north is trying to interfere with its spread. The Republican Party grew out of anti-slavery groups forming around the country. There is so much evidence leading up to the civil war with the battle over slavery as its core.
Lincoln wasn't even sworn into office yet and the southern states were already revolting and attacking federal fortifications in their aggression against the north.
If some hippie freaks attacked federal fortifications today you'd rightly call them treasonous. Same thing with those slave holding southreners who sought to violate the US Constitution (which prohibits the formation of confederations).
The seceeding states violated the US Constitution and Lincoln rightly put them down for it. Good on him.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as free labor. I know I don't work for free. Slaves didn't get wages, but the owners surley had to provide for them if they were to live very long. Not free labor from the owners point of view either. The immigrant labor force in the North wasn't free labor either. Low wages, abysmal working conditions were more akin to indentured servitude.
The fight was ultimately over control of the branches of our government, which tied to the voting population in each state (Compromise of 1850/Kansas Nebraska Act). Political control was the real issue at hand, slavery was just the vehicle (much like Pro-Life/Choice is the political litmus test today). Of course slavery was A central cause of the WBTS, but it isn't an issue that I'm convinced the little man was willing to die for. The WTBS was a "rich man's war, poor man's fight", as most wars are. The WBTS was not, and never has been a black and white, neatly packaged part of our history. It is gray through and through. I believe that is why the likes of us are attracted to it. God Bless America!
Article I. Section. 10. Clause 3: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress ... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State ... or engage in War
Article III. Section. 3. Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
Article VI. Clause 3: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution;
All of this became irrelevant once the respective states SECEEDED. The fight settled it, and forcibly brought the rebellious states back into the Union, but the South DID leave. REadmission into the Union being contingent upon the ratification of the Reconstruction Ammendments proves that the South DID leave. If she was out, then the Constitution couldn't apply anymore than it did for England or any other nation. The fight DID preserve the Union, and centralized governmental control over the country.
But none of the southern leaders of the period agreed with that, nor did virtually any of the white southern population as a whole.
Neither can I. Of course, there are a lot of FR's that will want to dispute that. If the South had won, at least we would still have the Constitution, as left us by our Founders. Not the twisted pro big government version we have today.
Article XVIII: Every State shall abide by the determination of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this Confederation shall be be inviobly observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.
Yes, we later changed our form of government, when we adopted the Constitution. But the Union we formed persisted, and the individual States had no more authority to unilaterally secede under the latter than they did under the former.
Be that as it may, the South would have been allowed to secede, had it not decided to begin open warfare against the Union.
But be that as it may, the war began because the South insisted on being allowed to extend slavery as they saw fit.
There were no other first-order causes.
And when would that have been? There was no motivation by the aristocracy to do it, and for white tradesmen, the thought of freed slaves competing against them would have been anathema. Hell, it took concerted Federal action 100 years after the war in order to compel the extension of full voting and civil rights to blacks in the states that comprised the old Confederacy - and they didn't have any plans whatsoever for doing that Christian thing voluntarily.
Quit pining for a society that never was - praise their forces for volor on the battlefield, praise the political leaders for gambling and taking a chance in the face of pretty formidable odds. Never, ever, however, praise the enterprise as a noble one - because it was not.
Just as Patton could admire Rommel, and ID White could later befriend Manteuffel, we can admire skill and courage. That doesn't mean that the cause the latter served was any less reprehensible.
I'm a Yankee born and raised, Palpatine. My Civil War heroes mostly wore blue.
I just prefer not to view a complex event through Nickelodeon eyeglasses. ;-)
Did you remember to get your taxes in on time today? ;-)
Now you're describing the situation up north as described by many northern papers of the day and one of the many causes of the New York Riots. But keep trying Chancey
Like the Constitution, the Articles did not forbid a state from leaving the Union. Once a state left, it was no longer under any obligation to abide by the conditions of that document. As far as the "perpetual" Union was concerned, if the South had been allowed to secede, the Union would have continued to be perpetual. It just would have perpetuated with a few less states.
Show me where secession is expressly forbidden and we might be able to debate Lincoln's war honestly. Until then, all arguments against the Confederacy are moot.
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