"As he hears his own lips parroting the sad cliches of 1850 does the Southerner sometimes wonder if the words are his own? Does he ever, for a moment, feel the desperation of being caught in some great time machine, like a tread mill, and doomed to eternal effort without progress? Or feel, like Sisyphus, the doom of pushing a great stone up a hill only to have the weight, like guilt, roll back over him, over and over again? When he lifts his arms to silence protest, does he ever feel, even fleetingly, that he is lifting it against some voice deep in himself?"
-- Robert Penn Warren, The legacy of the Civil War", p.56-57
Walt
"On October 5 [1787] anti-Federalist Samuel Bryan published the first of his "Centinel" essays in Philadelphia's Independent Gazetteer. Republished in newspapers in various states, the essays assailed the sweeping power of the central government, the usurpation of state sovereignty, and the absence of a bill of rights guaranteeing individual liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. "The United States are to be melted down," Bryan declared, into a despotic empire dominated by "well-born" aristocrats. Bryan was echoing the fear of many anti-Federalists that the new government would become one controlled by the wealthy established families and the culturally refined. The common working people, Bryan believed, were in danger of being subjugated to the will of an all-powerful authority remote and inaccessible to the people. It was this kind of authority, he believed, that Americans had fought a war against only a few years earlier."
Not only is it ironic for Wlat to quote someone else while accusing me of parroting other peoples' words, again it is ignorant given the fact that I cite the Constitution, Federal law, and the Federalist Papers while laying out my arguments. Ol' Wlat relies on obvious misreadings of historical documents and secondary sources. I have had one consistent argument that has not been refuted, and Wlat even had to admit there was no prohibition against a state withdrawing from the Union, but he still insists I'm wrong. Self-delusion must be a wonderful state in which to exist...