Posted on 08/14/2018 5:54:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can't get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can't go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley.
The supposed "nationalist" rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was anything else significant. No one showed up but cops, journalists and anti-nationalist protesters.
Ho-hum. We're back approximately where we were before the Charlottesville, Virginia, disaster the Washington march was meant to commemorate -- a foul-tempered shouting match that ended in death for a bystander hit by a "nationalist"-driven car.
A vocal coterie continues to think all vestiges of the late Confederacy -- especially, statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee -- should be removed from the public gaze. A far larger number, it seems to me, posit the futility, and harm, that flow from keeping alive the animosities of the past.
The latter constituency rejects the contention that, look, the past is the present: requiring a huge, 16th-century-style auto da fe at which present generations confess and bewail the sins of generations long gone. The technique for repenting of sins one never committed in the first place is unknown to human experience. Nevertheless, it's what we're supposed to do. Small wonder we haven't done it, apart from removing the odd Lee statue, as at Dallas' Lee Park. To the enrichment of human understanding? If so, no one is making that claim.
Looks as though we're moving on to larger goals, like maybe -- I kid you not -- committing "The Eyes of Texas" to the purgative flames, now that the venerable school song of the University of Texas, and unofficial anthem of the whole state, has been found culpable.
Culpable, yes. I said I wasn't kidding. The university's vice provost for "diversity" has informed student government members who possibly hadn't known the brutal truth that "The Eyes" dates from the Jim Crow era. "This is definitely about minstrelsy and past racism," said the provost. "It's also about school pride. One question is whether it can be both those things."
Maybe it can't be anything. Maybe nothing can be, given our culture's susceptibility to calls for moral reformation involving less the change of heart than the wiping away of memory, like bad words on a blackboard. Gone! Forgotten! Except that nothing is ever forgotten, save at the margins of history. We are who we are because of who we have been; we are where we are because of the places we have dwelt and those to which we have journeyed.
A sign of cultural weakness at the knees is the disposition to appease the clamorous by acceding to their demands: as the Dallas City Council did when, erratically, and solely because a relative handful were demanding such an action, it sent its Lee statute away to repose in an airplane hanger. I am not kidding -- an airplane hanger.
Civilization demands that its genuine friends -- not the kibitzers and showmen on the fringe -- when taking the measure of present and future needs, will consider and reflect on the good and the less than good in life, not to mention the truly awful and the merely preposterous. To remember isn't to excuse; it's to learn and thus to grow in wisdom and understanding.
In freeing the slaves, Yankee soldiers shot and blew up and starved many a Confederate. Was that nice? Should we be happy that so many bayonets ripped apart so many intestines? No. Nor should we be happy that so many Africans came in innocence to a land of which they knew nothing to work all their days as the bought-and-paid-for property of others.
History is far more complex, far more multisided than today's self-anointed cleansers of the record can be induced to admit. I think the rest of us are going to have to work around them. In the end, I think, and insofar as it can be achieved, we're going to have to ignore them.
11 states left the union. The USA was still there and there was no threat of it being "destroyed". In fact the USA thrived during the war years and had the resources to complete the inter continental RR.
Think of secession like cell division and not a destructive thing.
Many said slavery was not what they were fighting for.
Citadel cadets fired on the re-supply ship ‘Star of the West’ in January 1861 while Buchanan was still President.
Buchanan opposed secession but he also believed that the Constitution didn’t grant Presidents the right to force States to remain in the union.
His view on force was entirely different when it came to Territories. In 1857 Buchanan sent the army to put down a Mormon rebellion against the Territorial Government.
The Constitution is a contract between states to delegate certain limited powers to the federal government.
Nowhere did those states agree to surrender all their sovereignty or to bind themselves forever. The ability of one or several states to leave does not destroy the whole. The others can maintain whatever kind of relationship they want to have. I’d say respect of the right of unilateral secession keeps the relationship between the states much more healthy - it curbs abuses and oppressive policies if all know any state can leave a voluntary organization anytime.
Secession is, if anything, imposing the Secess’s view on the other states because it attacks the Union itself.
Federal installations and federal property on the sovereign territory of a state reverted to the state when they seceded. You will note that British forts had to be surrendered to the colonies when they seceded.
Bullshit.
Don’t know what you’re referring to.
Ok, so now you want to make the war about a rock and brick pile in the middle of the Cooper River? Which is it? Real estate or slavery?
No he wasn’t. Davis was not nearly as abusive of people’s constitutional liberties as Lincoln was.
you need to make clear what you are arguing about.
Conditional ratification was not an option. The question was to be “yes” or “no” not “well maybe.”
The Star of the West invaded South Carolina’s territorial waters. They fired to drive it away.
Bullshit.
Davis was still on his plantation in Mississippi when Sumter was fired upon.
Correct! Conditional ratification was not an option.
Surrendering the right to unilateral secession was not a condition. It is nowhere stated in the constitution and nobody argued that ratifying the constitution while reserving the right to unilateral secession was a conditional ratification.
No one believes that the EP freed all slaves or that the rate of fleeing the plantation was not encouraged and made easier.
As I said before it was a military action.
The Founders never intended to impose form over substance. Why does the idea even appeal to you?
False, “Contraband” were going to the federal army for protection anywhere that army was in power: parts of La, Ark, and TN. Initially they provided valuable assistance to the armies as construction corps.
Later, against Democrat opposition, he even organized some into regiments in the army (under White officers.”
No is “bashing” the South. Condemning the South because of the Slaver Ruling Class’s war makes as much sense as railing against the United Kingdom.
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