Posted on 10/08/2003 1:34:33 PM PDT by Aurelius
Slavery is certainly to be condemned. But the fact that slaves, and women, didn't vote had no bearing on the legitimacy of Davis holding office. And by the way, they were not disenfranchised, they had never been enfranchised. I am sorry, but I find your comment totally absurd.
The idea of an absolutely morally autonomous state would mean a state that is beyond moral judgement. It's natural that the founders who feared absolute power at the national level would eventually take exception to state claims to be beyond obligations and limits. It would have been a mistake to prevent absolutist rule at the federal level and allow it to the states.
A lot of confederate types attack Northerners for self-righteous moralism and charge unionists with hypocrisy. If you look back at the writings of the period, you'll find a lot of self-righteous moralism and hypocrisy among secessionists as well. This gets lost in retrospect as many take the Confederates as purely passive victims, rather than as actors who were capable of their own emotionalism, self-aggrandizement, and oppressiveness.
Then what emancipation was it?
Correct. They were freed under the terms of the EP. Tens of thousands of them joined the Union Army.
Like the Fugitive Slave Act?
Davis had more than a few of them, he owned over 115 at one time. And since their labor was responsible for an annual income that varied between $25,000 and $40,000 per year I would think that his slaves were of use to Davis.
Sure it was diverse. The closer you examine the confederacy diverse it looks.
One thing jumps out at me, billbears. Davis was saying that if the Lincoln administration would accept them then he had no problem with expelling every slave in the south and shipping them North, thus obtaining an all-white confederacy.
The same "emancipation" of the property of the vanquished that occurs in all wars.
Which is exactly whay Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation called for. Why do you people continue to insist that Lincoln's EP freed no slaves when even in mid 1864, the President of the CSA admitted that half of the slaves in the south had already been freed by it?
Not true at all. Before the EP, slaves were taken as "contraband" or accepted as refugees if they could get to Union lines, but if the owners could get into court the courts would order the "property" returned if owner could demonstrate that the slaves were not providing direct support for the revolution. Without the EP, at the end of the war, owners would be able under the law to reclaim their property. The EP changed that and designated any slave residing in rebelious territory as being automatically a material aid to the enemy and declared them free for all time.
Yes, the EP was a political statement, and a powerful one, but it also had significant real results in permantly freeing millions of slaves.
As I said before, even historians sympathetic to the Northern cause, Bruce Catton for example, do not make that claim. And what about the fact that with the early announcement of the proclamation, several months before the actual issuance, Lincoln implicitely promised that in any states that would return to the Union prior to the January issuance, slaveowners could keep their slaves.
What about it. I doubt that Lincon expected any takers, but he made an offer to help bring the war to a quicker end. The EP was a war measure and a political statement, but it did have the end result of freeing millions of slaves. Look up Juneteenth and tell me it didn't free any slaves.
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
The excepted parts are the areas under Union control at the time. The only slaves really emancipated were those who emancipated themselves. President Lincoln exercised no authority in the unoccupied portions of the Confederate States of America.
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