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.
Yes. Have you?
And the Capitol was in Montgomery at that time. Later moved to Richmond.
But you continue to put form above substance. I am not a Hamiltonian, but he was more rational than you represent him to have been--and he definitely recognized the States' rights to resist possible Federal tyranny.
Yup. They enshrined slavery in it. All the intellectual gymnastics doesn’t change the fact the South went to war to preserve slavery.
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.
I’ve read it and it was legal with the USA. It was NOT permitted with other countries. A provision allowing for the African slave trade was voted down.
You’re talking about territories, NOT about states. The Confederate constitution explicitly allowed states which did not allow slavery to join.
“. . . delegates from the Deep South met in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4 [1861] to establish the Confederate States of America. The convention acted as a provisional government while at the same time drafting a permanent constitution. . . . Voted down were proposals to reopen the Atlantic slave trade . . . and to prohibit the admission of free states to the new Confederacy. . . .
“The resulting constitution was surprisingly similar to that of the United States. Most of the differences merely spelled out traditional southern interpretations of the federal charter. . . .
“. . . it was clear from the actions of the Montgomery convention that the goal of the new converts to secessionism was not to establish a slaveholders’ reactionary utopia. What they really wanted was to recreate the Union as it had been before the rise of the new Republican Party, and they opted for secession only when it seemed clear that separation was the only way to achieve their aim. The decision to allow free states to join the Confederacy reflected a hope that much of the old Union could be reconstituted under southern direction.” (Robert A. Divine, T. H. Bren, George Fredrickson, and R. Hal Williams, America Past and Present, Fifth Edition, New York: Longman, 1998, pp. 444-445, emphasis added)
Repeating the lines doesn’t make me right. FACTS do.
They’ve never favored big government or massive federal debts or highly centralized power. I don’t know where in the world you got the notion that they ever did.
They are the ones who invaded South Carolina’s territorial waters with a heavily armed fleet. The attacker is one who invades the territory of another - not one who fires to drive an invader away.
Yup. They enshrined slavery in it. All the intellectual gymnastics doesn’t change the fact the South went to war to preserve slavery.
They recognized and protected slavery in the exact same way the northern dominated federal government offered to do. NO amount of lies or spin will change the fact that the Southern states did not go to war to preserve slavery. They could have had that for nothing.
They began to bombarded Sumter before the resupply effort got near South Carolina territorial waters.
and with that....167 posts and several hours in....enough. This is the same old same old with the usual Leftists who claim that they are “conservative” infesting each and every thread about the South or Southern history even though this goes directly against everything real conservatives stand for:
Limited government
Balanced Budgets
Decentralized power.
But when the constitution was adopted they considered the USA a foreign country. Foreign source for slaves. Slave imports. Protected in the constitution.
You’re talking about territories, NOT about states. The Confederate constitution explicitly allowed states which did not allow slavery to join.
Can you quote the clause that explicitly allowed that please?
Repeating the lines doesn’t make me right. FACTS do.
You're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
They’ve never favored big government or massive federal debts or highly centralized power. I don’t know where in the world you got the notion that they ever did.
Looking at the history of the Confederacy and the actions of Southern senators, congressmen, and presidents over the last 150 years. Where did you get your idea from?
“If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” - Howell Cobb
Toombs said much the same thing. Lincoln recognized these pitiful efforts meant the CSA was finished.
The Act on the eve of surrender allowing slaves to join the army included so many stipulations that it did nothing but infuriate some of the Slavers.
It also made it clear that doing so would not mean freedom for prospective soldiers and in no way would slavery be affected.
There was never any chance that a gradual emancipation was of interest to France or Britain both of which claimed that slavery was not of interest to them. Since the governments did not recognize the CSA as a real country worthy of recognition.
States cannot “come and go” it is a ridiculous contention.
More BS.
“I don’t like the farm bill, we are going to withdraw.”
“I don’t like the Treasury’s monetary policy, we are going to withdraw.”
“I don’t like the railroad bill, we are going to withdraw.”
Where does such idiocy end up?
I wasn't ridiculous to the founders and the signers. The Constitution would have never been ratified if their was a no secession clause in it.
There needs to be an amendment which dissolves the union every 5 years with a mandatory re signing convention of states to renew or not.
They chose war to preserve it. Hey dude, let ask you something. Is the war over? Did the South lose? The answer to both questions is YES! End of %$#!*^) story!
Slavery was a drag on your ancestors since it was very difficult to compete when your competition are slaves. It was one of the reasons the insurrection failed, there was no industry or labor force in the slave states so they could not produce the goods necessary to win an industrial war.
Dear idiot, I never said that all those fighting for the South were Slavers. They were the ruling class and pulled the wagon of insurrection.
You are becoming a caricature.
Thanks. I totally agree. It would be nice if we could just talk about war strategy and the personalities of the warriors and leave this north/south divide outside.
The subject of anti-slavery was forbidden from the time of the Union’s creation, literature was seized from the mails, newspapers attacked and destroyed, people were attacked even killed for espousing that view. It only got worse after the shooting started.
Slave owners at the best were autocrats in no way concerned with freedom.
A couple of newspapers were shut down during the war for a very brief time. They were as treasonous as the Fake Media is today.
If Lincoln was such a tyrant why did he not just get rid of the Radical Republicans who were his biggest opposition.
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