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.
It is implicit in the term “constitution.” There is no Union if states can resort to any reason for withdrawing.
No, its not implicit. Had that been the Founders intent, they would have spelled it out. The 9th and 10th amendments make clear that any power not delegated to the federal government is retained by the states. The power to prevent secession is nowhere delegated to the federal government.
As I’ve said before, its amazing how desperate some supposed “conservatives” are to bash the South endlessly, to worship at the altar of big government, to want to centralize all power and use that centralized power to dictate to others how they must live.
Good thing they’re “conservatives” because otherwise they would be completely indistinguishable from Leftists.
Hamilton never said any such thing. The idea was inconceivable. There was never any person more willing to protect the Union than Hamilton. He spent most of his adult life bringing it into being.
The discussion in the Federalist of the difference between a Confederation and a federal Union shows that it was extra-legal and to be avoided. Washington explicitly warned of the danger of secession in his Farewell Address eight years after Ratification.
I asked you to specify Davis’s statement abjuring slavery or claiming the war wasn’t about slavery.
On other threads on this subject people have posted many of his statements.
I don’t link or post others ideas.
“To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can only exist by the sword?”
Alexander Hamilton, New York Ratifying Convention
Think of a house based upon a foundation each part dependent upon the others. Pull out a beam and it collapses.
That is what a constitution is.
Davis was appointed president of the Confederacy in February 1861. Sumter was fired on in April 1861.
Where did that claim come from? Federal property can be justly seized under no claim of state sovereignty.
It is nothing but theft.
British forts in the West did not automatically become ours and some were held after the Peace Treaty.
Though the comment is irrelevant.
And many said it was.
Of course it wasn’t? What the hell are you claiming?
I never said “slavery” was a natural “right” in my post. In fact -I do state that slavery was indeed a legitimate issue.
I also stated that slavery was being used as excuse for the Federal Government to grab and exercise power for which it was never intended. An issue that is exquisitely relevant to the present. And it IS precisely why this issue remains a legitimate issue today on the national stage. And it is why Federal government still quakes and shivers even today whenever and wherever it sees the Stars and Bars or a statue of Bobby E Lee on the town square in some remote rural, Southern hamlet.
92-95% of Southerners were not “fighting for slavery”
So then what exactly were they fighting for?
“In any case, I think slave property will be lost eventually.” Jefferson Davis 1861
Beginning in late 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war “was for the defense of the institution of slavery” (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim “demagogues.” Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted “the Confederates were not battling for slavery” and that “slavery had never been the key issue” (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a “moral and political evil” years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination.” - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 83
“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.” Union Colonel James Jaquess
“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.” Jefferson Davis
Davis rejects peace with reunion
https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/jefferson-davis-rejects-peace-with-reunion-1864/
We protest solemnly, in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor. In independence we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we have lately been confederated. All we ask is to be let alone—that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms. (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. 1, pp. 283-284; see also Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, p. 367)
Southern secession did no harm the Constitution at all. States come and go. It’s the go part that pig heads don’t understand.
Article I, Section 9: "The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same."
The Confederate Constitution also allowed states to join which did not have slavery - and did not require them to adopt it.
Article IV, Section 3: "The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States."
Oh and of course it was Lincoln who chose to start the war.
Davis started the war.
Clearly we must be thinking of different Souths. The South...Dixie...the Southern states has consistently been in favor of decentralized government, limited government powers and balanced budgets.
Clearly we are. I'm thinking of the Southern United States and you seem to be thinking of a mythical South that has never existed.
No its not. The constitution did not create one centralized polity. It is a voluntary association of sovereign states which delegated certain powers only to the central government. One state leaving does not destroy the whole. The others are free to decide to remain in if they wish.
No one claims Lincoln initial purposes were to free the slaves. At least no one here. That is just a Straw Man.
Had the Slavers not panicked and started firing slavery would have lasted at least another decade, maybe longer.
Slavers DID fight the war to preserve slavery and made no bones about it. Only their apologists here make claims to the contrary.
Lincoln fought to preserve the Union. Not to free the slaves. In 1860 only the Abolitionists had that goal and they were not a majority.
A sovereign authority - like the sovereign states can claim any land within their borders by eminent domain. Compensation will be owed, but they can legally take possession of it.
And many including the president Jefferson Davis said it wasn’t.
The Constitution is the ultimate form for law.
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