Thank you, Sir. I' happy to see someone else understands this simple concept that the Founders wrote so copiously about:
That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774
Good post... but please copy it to Non-Sequitur. I already know this stuff (I’m not being “snippy”, honest — he just needs to read it more than I do).
Then why CAN'T the Unionists understand that it was ALSO a Moral Abomination for the Federal Government to compel, by blockade and invasion, the Confederate States to suffer subjection under a Government from which THEY wished to Secede?
It's clear to me, as an Iowa Yankee, that BOTH sides were in the wrong in many, many ways. But two Wrongs don't make a Right -- and I just don't see any logical consistency in the Unionist argument.
It would have cost Lincoln's Federal Government $3 billion dollars, and ZERO lives lost, to simply BUY UP all Southern Slaves at $1,000 a head and say, "Congratulations! You're Free!" Instead, Lincoln decided to spend TWICE that much money, and 600,000 American Lives lost, on a War of Federal Aggression to Collect Federal Tariffs (he made clear in his First Inaugural that he didn't care about Slavery; he just wanted to Collect Federal Tariffs from the South). Call me a "Copperhead" if you want -- but I think "let's kill off 600,000 Americans in order to collect Federal Taxes" is just about as Un-Righteous a basis for War as I can possibly imagine.