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.
Dickhe3d my ancestors were NOT “slavers’. The were masons and carpenters in the Lynchburg area. Just like everyone in the North was NOT a state-st thug fascist like you are.
Oh, right. I forgot about the freedom of people to free speech and a free press. What, you say they never existed?
Thank you for the further explanation. It is a difficult thing to explain. Especially so to the current crop of public history rewriters and monument destroyers. Yes, Al Smith stands out as an anomaly (as this 2nd klan was also anti-catholic as you point out). D’nesh differentiates, from what I’ve observed the Southern vs. Northern democrat (which was in 1920s also Western democrats) by covering Martin Van Buren, and calling the N. democrats the democrat “Machine” which gathered up the Irish (catholics) and the “immigrant” newcomers into a “machine” basket— taking money from them, handing out patronage jobs (govt. and private-political linked ones, like railroad labor) for the new ‘members’. Then taking the majority of this dough for their coffers and leaving little to the masses they then “controlled” and could pledge for votes in the convention, Congress etc. The regionality differences in the handling of the “machine” in any case, involved an indifference to catholics (except wealthy ones- north or south). Of interest would be to know the activist jewish (practicing Jews or just cultural jewish?) in this regard. Because the timing of this 2nd klan rise also coincided with the post WWI anarchists in Europe and the US (Sacco & Vanzetti for ex, coal strikes, laborites, IWW, etc.). Generationally, particularly in the South- Reconstruction was still in memory, as was the Spanish American War, and not to forget the Depression, and the ignoring of our WWI Veterans that culminated in the Bonus Marcher’s being attacked on the DC Mall by US troops. Shameful.
Thank you, again. Deo Vindice.
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.”
Yes and? I said STATES which did not have slavery could be admitted and would not be required to adopt it.
Lincoln started the war.
Not at all. I’m not even sure what planet you’re from if you think the Southern states have traditionally favored big government or centralized power or massive federal expenditures.
The power to repress insurrection and rebellion is explicitly spelled out as a federal power. No matter what the pretense is for insurrection or the “legal” forms justifying it.
The Southern states were not fighting to preserve slavery. They could have done so in perpetuity by simply accepting the North’s slavery forever constitutional amendment.
Repeating the lie does not make it true.
Very cleverly goading the firebrands to fire first. Always thought there were clearer heads who pleaded with them to just blockade the fort, and they would leave. That is “surrender” the property to them. Because then the Union would have to invade to enforce something that would be difficult to justify. Nevermind the “reasons” for secesh. There was significant economic reasons to need the South staying in... and paying. But, let’s not go down that trail.
What the hell are you talking about wrt free speech and a free press?
Lincoln was FAR more oppressive of both than Davis ever dreamed of being.
Hamilton never said the Union could not be defended or that federal property could be attack or seized. He opposed the NE attempts to secede.
States could not be coerced to join by force. Two stayed out of the new Union for a while and that was legal.
He would have been first in the field to defend the Union.
If secession is legal where does it stop?
But this was not an insurrection nor a rebellion. It was sovereign states exercising their right to secede. Nowhere in the constitution is the federal government granted the power to forcibly hold a state in that no longer consents to be governed by it.
And many said it was. Even Davis - see his address to the Confederate Congress April 1861.
"African slavery is the cornerstone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depoulation and barbarism." - South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt, 1860
"Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." - Lawrence Keitt
"The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South... This war is the servant of slavery." - Rev John Wrightman, South Carolina, 1861.
"[Recruiting slaves into the army] is abolition doctrine ... the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." - Editorial, Jan 1865, North Carolina Standard
"What did we go to war for, if not to protect our [slave] property?" - CSA senator from Virgina, Robert Hunter, 1865
"I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in ... The South was my country." - John Singleton Mosby
"The vandals of the North . . . are determined to destroy slavery . . . We must all fight, and I choose to fight for southern rights and southern liberty." - Lunsford Yandell, Jr. to Sally Yandell, April 22, 1861 in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, p. 20
"A stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost." - [William Grimball to Elizabeth Grimball, Nov. 20, 1860, Ibid.
"This country without slave labor would be completely worthless. We can only live & exist by that species of labor; and hence I am willing to fight for the last." - William Nugent to Eleanor Nugent, Sept 7, 1863, Ibid., p. 107
"Better, far better! endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar." - William M. Thomson to Warner A. Thomson, Feb. 2, 1861, Ibid., p. 19
"A captain in the 8th Alabama also vowed 'to fight forever, rather than submit to freeing negroes among us. . . . [We are fighting for] rights and property bequeathed to us by our ancestors.' " - Elias Davis to Mrs. R. L. Lathan, Dec. 10, 1863 Ibid., p. 107
"Even though he was tired of the war,” wrote a Louisiana artilleryman in 1862, “ I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free [n-word]s. . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.' " George Hamill Diary, March, 1862, Ibid., p. 109
"Some of the boys asked them what they were fighting for, and they answered, 'You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the [n-word]s.' " - Chauncey Cook to parents, May 10, 1864, Ibid.
"The South had always been solid for slavery and when the quarrel about it resulted in a conflict of arms, those who had approved the policy of disunion took the pro-slavery side. It was perfectly logical to fight for slavery, if it was right to own slaves." - John S. Mosby, Mosby's Memoirs, p. 20
”We have dissolved the Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. Now, is there any man who wished to reproduce that strife among ourselves? And yet does not he, who wished the slave trade left for the action of Congress, see that he proposed to open a Pandora's box among us and to cause our political arena again to resound with this discussion. Had we left the question unsettled, we should, in my opinion, have sown broadcast the seeds of discord and death in our Constitution. I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution; we have sought by no euphony to hide its name - we have called our negroes "slaves," and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.” - Alabama Congressman Robert H. Smith
As the last and crowning act of insult and outrage upon the people of the South, the citizens of the Northern States, by overwhelming majorities, on the 6th day of November last, elected Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, President and Vice President of the United States. Whilst it may be admitted that the mere election of any man to the Presidency, is not, per se, a sufficient cause for a dissolution of the Union; yet, when the issues upon, and circumstances under which he was elected, are properly appreciated and understood, the question arises whether a due regard to the interest, honor, and safety of their citizens, in view of this and all the other antecedent wrongs and outrages, do not render it the imperative duty of the Southern States to resume the powers they have delegated to the Federal Government, and interpose their sovereignty for the protection of their citizens.
What, then are the circumstances under which, and the issues upon which he was elected? His own declarations, and the current history of the times, but too plainly indicate he was elected by a Northern sectional vote, against the most solemn warnings and protestations of the whole South. He stands forth as the representative of the fanaticism of the North, which, for the last quarter of a century, has been making war upon the South, her property, her civilization, her institutions, and her interests; as the representative of that party which overrides all Constitutional barriers, ignores the obligations of official oaths, and acknowledges allegiance to a higher law than the Constitution, striking down the sovereignty and equality of the States, and resting its claims to popular favor upon the one dogma, the Equality of the Races, white and black." -- Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. --Mississppi Declaration of the Causes of Secession
SIR: In obedience to your instructions I repaired to the seat of government of the State of Louisiana to confer with the Governor of that State and with the legislative department on the grave and important state of our political relations with the Federal Government, and the duty of the slave-holding States in the matter of their rights and honor, so menacingly involved in matters connected with the institution of African slavery. --Report from John Winston, Alabama's Secession Commissioner to Louisiana
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last. -- Speech of Fulton Anderson to the Virginia Convention
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. -- Texas Declaration of the causes of secession
What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Convention
Gentlemen, I see before me men who have observed all the records of human life, and many, perhaps, who have been chief actors in many of its gravest scenes, and I ask such men if in all their lore of human society they can offer an example like this? South Carolina has 300,000 whites, and 400,000 slaves. These 300,000 whites depend for their whole system of civilization on these 400,000 slaves. Twenty millions of people, with one of the strongest Governments on the face of the earth, decree the extermination of these 400,000 slaves, and then ask, is honor, is interest, is liberty, is right, is justice, is life, worth the struggle?
Gentlemen, I have thus very rapidly endeavored to group before you the causes which have produced the action of the people of South Carolina. -- Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention
This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable --- -- Address of William L. Harris of Mississippi
But I trust I may not be intrusive if I refer for a moment to the circumstances which prompted South Carolina in the act of her own immediate secession, in which some have charged a want of courtesy and respect for her Southern sister States. She had not been disturbed by discord or conflict in the recent canvass for president or vice-president of the United States. She had waited for the result in the calm apprehension that the Black Republican party would succeed. She had, within a year, invited her sister Southern States to a conference with her on our mutual impending danger. Her legislature was called in extra session to cast her vote for president and vice-president, through electors, of the United States and before they adjourned the telegraphic wires conveyed the intelligence that Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to equality with ourselves and our children, and coupled with all this was the act that, from our friends in our sister Southern States, we were urged in the most earnest terms to secede at once, and prepared as we were, with not a dissenting voice in the State, South Carolina struck the blow and we are now satisfied that none have struck too soon, for when we are now threatened with the sword and the bayonet by a Democratic administration for the exercise of this high and inalienable right, what might we meet under the dominion of such a party and such a president as Lincoln and his minions. -- Speech of John McQueen, the Secession Commissioner from South Carolina to Texas
History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity. -- Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention
Well how do General! Ain’t see ya ‘round these parts in a long while. Oh, right. I forgot. In your fevered brain the North lost.
I do too. It may not be in their memory to even know about the reconciliation. But numerous examples, many involving major figures. Including CSA veterans as being US Veterans, by Act of Congress. Peace was Made by these actions. And these clowns today are able to be manipulated to try and open the wounds so many devoted their lives, and indeed, died— to heal. Senseless.
The union was not being attacked. Leaving it is not attacking it. There was nothing to “defend” except imperial ambitions for those in the federal government.
The line about states could not be coerced referred to the exercise of federal power against states that did not wish to be ruled by it......the rule of the sword.
Secession is legal. It stops where all legitimate exercise of power by government stops - CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
It defines the delegated functions of the Federal Government--no one of which is the imposition of the will of one State on the inhabitants of any other, outside of the very specific grants to the Federal agency.
It creates an agency for common purposes among allies (comrades in arms).
Read it. Constitutional Overview
Read that again - "importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America." Slave imports. Slave trade.
Yes and? I said STATES which did not have slavery could be admitted and would not be required to adopt it.
But if the constitution required that slave be allowed in the territories, and if the constitution protected the right of a person to bring their slaves into any state they wished, do you honestly believe those slave territories could have become free state on admission? Really?
Lincoln started the war.
We can keep repeating our lines on this but that won't make you right.
Not at all. I’m not even sure what planet you’re from if you think the Southern states have traditionally favored big government or centralized power or massive federal expenditures.
They do now. They did during the Civil War. They never stopped favoring that for one moment in between.
Bombarding a fort into rubble certainly is.
And don’t forget the China trade... the Opium Clipper ships to San Fran and other places. Boston owners. Foundations still exist with all that dough, made with their Brit partners.
The Skull and Bones founder at Yale (one big example.)
Yes there were politicians in the Southern states who said it was. Of course there were many including the President who said it wasn’t. Many of those who said it wasn’t included some of the most powerful men in the CSA including Davis, including the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Duncan Kenner, including one of most prominent cabinet ministers Judah Benjamin, Bradford, Phelan and Davis were all Senators who did not. The entire high command of the Confederate Army said that’s not what they were fighting for.
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