Posted on 11/19/2007 10:09:26 AM PST by BnBlFlag
Death of Jefferson Davis Remembered - The Christmas of 1889 was a sad time in the South. By Calvin Johnson Jr. Staff Email Contact Editor Print
Jefferson Davis - AuthenticHistory.com December 6th, is the 118th anniversary of the death of a great American Hero---Jefferson Davis.
The "Politically Correct" would have you forget the past...But do not forget the history of the men and women who made the USA great.
Caution, this is a family friendly story to be shared.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans have declared 2008, the "Year of Jefferson Davis." Remembrance events will include the re-opening of "Beauvoir" on Jefferson Davis' 200th birthday---June 3, 2008. This was Davis' last home that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The Jefferson Davis Presidential Library and Museum will be rebuilt and re-open about two years after the house. Beauvoir is located on the beautiful Mississippi Gulf Coast. See more at: www.beauvoir.org
The New York Times reported the death of Jefferson Davis;
New Orleans, December 8, 1889---Quote "A careful tally of the visitors shows that about 40,000 persons, mostly women and children, viewed the remains today. This crowd included, in solemn and respectful attendance, all conditions of Whites, Blacks, ex-Confederates, ex-Federals, and even Indians and Chinamen." ---Unquote
Davis' Death was also the page 1 story in Dixie;
Excerpt: http://www.accessnorthga.com/detail.php?n=204067&c=11
(Excerpt) Read more at accessnorthga.com ...
Why is that an oxymoron? Are you saying that anyone who works a job and collects a wage is equivalent to a slave?
...was not measurably better off than many nominal slaves.
Really? Compare life expectancies of an antebellum slave and a northern white. Slave child mortality was double that of whites.
I am not equating the two systems; wage slaves are still paid, and are -- at least ostensibly -- free to seek other employment. But there is less concrete difference between the two than the mere nomenclature would indicate.
Don't forget that the free worker can't have his children sold to the highest bidder.
Basically, it seems, you're making a Marxist argument that capitalism enslaves the proletariat in such a way that is all but indistinguishable from chattel slavery.
Thanks for the ping. Davis was so very poorly treated for a man of his stature. I wish I knew more about him.
I think he was a traitor too. But, right now I don’t want to argue the Civil War all over again, as we have a band of leftists trying to break America over its knee.
That's the sort of thing that leads me down a Google rabbit hole where I learn that the oldest woman in the world lives in the same Indiana nursing home as the tallest woman in the world.
I'm making a Marxist argument that capitalism at its extreme -- as practiced by the robber barons of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries -- is indistinguishable from chattel slavery, and that to a degree, slavery is the preferable form of servitude.
Perhaps a convergence of world records indicate the coming of an apocalypse of sorts. Intriguing, and it makes the head to hurt!
You're arguing the same tautology Marbury did: the Constitution empowers a federal government, and that government interprets the Constitution's powers. But the actual Constitution reads otherwise. Secession is NOT explicit in Article VI, much as you'd like to create it there. Sovereignty IS partial; while you may not be able to apportion each of the functions separately, you can distribute the functions some to one party (in their entirety) and others to another. So while the power to make treaties may be wholly a function of the federal government, the power to secede is bound entirely within the states. Yielding up one right does not yield up ALL rights. That IS explicit in Amendments 9 and 10.
The right of secession, not being enumerated in the Constitution, is a right reserved to the several states.
The states cannot implicitly reserve a right which conflicts with the explicit supremacy of the Constitution.
The Constitution is either the supreme law of the land, or it is not.
And James Madison, Robert E. Lee and Joseph Story thought differently.
I'm not trying to "sell" anything. The caste system of the South was merely a cultural artifact, and one that worked reasonably well in that region. It lent a stability and continuity that was missing in the more malleable North. While it had its downside, it had its benefits as well.
There has never been serfdom in the US.
Tell that to the Chinese who built the railroads. "Serf" was a catch-all term, not necessarily reflective of the literal feudal construction.
Only a small minority of the North's population were factory workers - most Northerners worked in agriculture.
When? In 1800? By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the North's agricultural base was declining exponentially. Somebody had to be living in all those cities that exploded in population in the latter half of the 19th century.
And de facto slavery never obtained anywhere in the North.
Wrong.
Congress is elected by apportionment of the general population and are agents of their districts, not their states.
Not before 1913, when the 17th Amendment was passed. Senators were elected by the state legislatures. There is no law forbidding secession Of course there is. Article VI makes it clear that the member states are relieved of their prerogatives in favor of the federal government in some very key areas.
Yes, those areas specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Secession is not one of them.
The entire point of secession is to be able to remove oneself from federal legal and juridical oversight,
... in some functions ...
to negotiate one's own treaties with foreign powers, etc.
No it isn't. Making treaties does not in itself constitute independence.
And the states ceded these prerogatives to the federal government.
The federal government usurped those prerogatives at the point of a gun.
Of course it is. You can't half-have the power to negotiate treaties. You can't half-have the power to command armies. You can't have 15% of the ability to interpret the law.
No, but you CAN have the complete power to fulfill those functions not delineated within the constitutional framework, and to yield completely those that ARE so delineated.
In other words, they were delegated power by the Crown to act in the Crown's name. So they were not sovereigns, but were accountable to the true sovereign: the King in Parliament.
Even if I concede this point arguendo, the Revolution cast off the notion of a detached, tyrannical, centralized authority in favor of local rule. Only to have the centralized model reborn three quarters of a century later over the issue of states' rights.
I never said that Confederacy committed such crimes. You slandered the Union on that account.
I didn't "slander" anyone. You made the altogether ridiculous assertion that the Union was "without sin" in its prosecution of the War.
Were sieges magically declared contrary to the laws of war in the 1860s?
Not the issue. Did innocent civilians die during those sieges? Were those deaths in keeping with the model of warfare you claim the Union so nobly repudiated?
The United States exists, I assure you.
Yes, they do.
Or for the very good reason that this peculiar way of life rose up in armed sedition against the legally-constituted government for no good reason whatever.
Or for the very indictable reason that a band of abolitionists managed to overturn the Constitution in their self-righteous zeal to have slavery banned.
I’m just curious: do you agree that the function of the Constitution is to tell the federal government what it is permitted to do and not to tell what the states and the people what they are permitted to do? Do you also agree that any power not explicitly delegated to the federal government is reserved to the states or the people?
The function of the Constitution - as it states - is to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.
The Anti-Federalists - the opponents of the Constitution who did everything they could to prevent it from being ratified - were the ones who resorted to jurisdictional game-playing that the Confederates enjoyed so much and the segregationists took up as their hobby.
The Constitution was designed to create a more powerful and effective federal government than the inadequate and ineffectual one that existed under the Articles - a more perfect union.
Having read Article I, Section 10 as well as Article IV I would have to disagree with your statement.
Do you also agree that any power not explicitly delegated to the federal government is reserved to the states or the people?
No. The 10th Amendment says that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. The word 'explicitly' appears nowhere in the amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution.
One of its powers, as explicitly stated in the Constitution, is that its Constitution and its statutes are the law of the land.
These means that the relationship of the states to one another, the relationship of the states to the federal government, the relationship of the federal government to foreign powers and the relationship of the states to foreign powers falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
That's what legal supremacy is.
Yes, actually, my argument is an aggregation drawn from a number of sources. One source is Rhodes' discussion of the events leading up to the war in his work History of the Civil War, 1861-1865, an oldie but goodie. Rhodes, BTW, was born in Cleveland and had no axe to grind for the Confederacy. His work is, on the whole, a well-balanced treatment of the war which views both sides onjectively. There is information available from a wide reading of source materials relating to the Civil War which support my statements. I didn't even mention some of the apparent efforts by members of Lincoln's cabinet to push for a military resolution to the Ft. Sumter seige (which was ultimately overruled by Lincoln, at least officially). Lincoln had already been informed by his envoy Ward Lamon that the South would not accept any resupply effort at Sumter, and would view such as an act of war - Lincoln knew that trying to resupply the fort would lead to war. Further, the South was well aware that Lincoln and his cabinet were seriously considering a plan proposed by Gustavus Fox to reinforce the fort under cover of darkness by sending parties of soldiers in small boats into the harbour, since small boats would be more difficult to detect than large ships. This plan was leaked to, and then by, the press, appearing in the 27 Mar 1861 edition of the Albany Evening Journal.
Knowing of this, is it really any surprise that Beauregard was alarmed at the appearance of several Union warships appearing outside the harbour as part of the relief expedition, under cover of darkness, and felt that he'd better act now or lose any hope of having the fort surrender peacefully? (BTW, this section comes from Rhodes, p.11). Beauregard was mistaken, but a mistake which would be easy to make, given the fact that this relief fleet "fit the profile" for exactly the sort of armed expedition Fox (who was commanding the effort) had proposed.
My arguments come from a number of sources besides Rhodes:
Current, R.N., Lincoln and the First Shot, pp 71-74ff
Hoogenboom, A., "Gustavus Fox and the Relief of Fort Sumter," Civil War History, Vol. 9 (1963), pp. 383-98
Lamon, W.H., Recollections of Abraham Lincoln: 1847-1865, ed. D.L. Teillard, pp. 71-79ff
Nevis, A. The War for the Union, Vol. 1 "The Improvised War, 1861-1862", p. 54-55ff
Nicolay, J.G. and J. Haye, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. 3, pp. 389-390ff
U. S. Navy Department Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 4, p. 247.
Seventy-four percent of the states did not ratify the Constitution. They were admitted, and only with the consent of the existing states. Since they were allowed to join, why shouldn't it be required that they be allowed to leave as well?
Yes, your whole line of argument has been rather long on assumption, and short on fact.
What were these manufactured goods associated with their agricultural industry?
That same tariff would have hit North as well as South equally. But perhaps it would help if you could explain for us just what the South needed in the way of imports? What goods were in such demand?
You ignore the dynamics of the situation however, and seem to be assuming that the economic conditions in North and South were equivalent. If so, your assumption is, again, incorrect. The North wanted tariffs to protect its manufacturing industries from foreign competition. The North stood to lose more from competition from more cheaply made foreign goods than it stood to gain from lower prices for imported goods, in terms of employment and manufacturing capacity. Further, while most importation went through Northern ports, the eventual destination of the majority of those imported goods was the South, to whom the expense of the tariffs were passed on.
The South had little in the way of these manufacturing industries to protect (and the Tredegar iron works was hardly going to supply all their needs), and hence saw little need to protect industry at the expense of reducing demand for its exports, especially as tariffs designed to protect Northern industry might provoke foreign retaliation against ALL American products.
What manufactured goods did the South need? What DIDN'T it needs? Iron. Finished cloth. Tools. Construction materials. Railroad ties. Engines. You name it. The South couldn't produce these through native industry, and could get them more cheaply through European mass production than through Northern subsidised industries which were already getting Southern money through discriminatory application of federal tariff revenues anywise.
No apology is necessary. It's all been most amusing.
I'm sure it has. We laugh at what we understand not.
In the South a constitution was worthless.
In the North, a constitution was worthless. Lincoln basically urinated on the Constitution (see Elric's #255), and even before him, among the South's grievances was that the federal government was trampling on the reserved rights of the States. One tariff in contravention to a constitution versus an ongoing trend of ignoring basic constitutional provisions in the federal Constitution? That's peanuts. If the constitution of the Confederacy was worthless, it was because it was so weak as to ill-afford a government at all, much less one trying to fight a war in its first year of existence.
The tariff really wasn't an issue at all, judging from the quotes of the southern leaders of the time.
What are you talking about? The Southerners made many references to the tariffs and to the perceived domination of the South economically by the North, and this sentiment ran up and down Southern society. Missouri's Senator from before the war, Thomas Hart Benton said,
"Under Federal Legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal Revenue. Virginia, the two Carolina's, and Georgia, may be said to defray three fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. that expenditure flows in an opposite direction -- it flows north, in one uniform, uninterrupted and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the south and rises up in the north. Federal Legislation does this."
Georgias's declaration of Secession gave a length rendition of Northern calls for tariffs and duties, as well as for federal spending on public works that exclusively benefitted Northern industrial and shipping interests, as one of that State's reasons for seceding.p> The New Orleans Daily Crescent editorialised on 21 Jan 1861, offering up this explanation for Northern opposition to Southern secession,
"They know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest.... These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are as mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it."
Congressman John Reagan addressed Congress on 15 Jan 1861 saying,
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions."
Was Reagan exaggerating? No. Prior to the institution of the income tax, the primary source of revenue for the federal government was from tariffs and other import duties. The historian Charles Adams in When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Succession reminds us that the South paid an undue proportion of federal revenues derived from tariffs, and these were expended by the federal government more in the North than the South. In 1840, the South paid 84% of the tariffs, rising to 87% in 1860. They paid 83% of the $13 million federal fishing bounties paid to New England fishermen, and also paid $35 million to Northern shipping interests which had a monopoly on shipping from Southern ports. The South, in effect, was paying tribute to the North.
More could be said on this, but won't now for the sake of bandwidth. But yet, tariffs and trade had diddly to do with it, so you tell us.
You provided your opinion.
No, I provided a factual example, you were simply wrong in your argumentation.
And rightly so if I may add.
I don't claim to be a Constitutional Scholar, the South may have well been within their rights to break away from the USA. But Davis, and all the southern leadership claimed to be Christians. There was nothing "Christian" about the way the treated their POW's.
If they were decent and honorable men, then Adersonville would have never happened.
Personally, I would have hung everyone who in the least fashion had any connection with that hell hole, even up to Robert E. Lee if their had been evidence of him having mere knowledge of the conditions there.
But this nation has always rewarded those who abuse our POWs.
I suspect it's due to the fact the post war clean ups are done by fagots in stripped pants who hold warriors in contempt. My tag line reveals the contempt I feel for Dubya by the way.
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