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.
New York still had a few old slaves as late as 1860.
Connecticut did not abolish slavery until 1854.
New Jersey had “apprentices for life” who were not free to leave.
Even after the grandfather clause for the slave trade in the constitution expired, New England kept right on slave trading with bribes, winks and nudges right up until 1861. New England was in fact THE epicenter of the slave trade industry in the entire Western Hemisphere in the 19th century - most of those slaves were transported to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Again, New England + New York City were only too happy to generate huge profits from goods (Cotton, Tobacco, Rice, Indigo, Sugar, etc) produced at least in substantial part, by slave labor. That too continued right up until 1861.
Many prominent businesses some of which still exist today as well as the endowments of many Ivy League schools were the product of profits generated from trafficking in human flesh as well as the goods produced by slave labor.
Somehow the Lefties conveniently overlook this....
No they didn’t. They could have simply accepted the Corwin Amendment which would have preserved slavery effectively forever - had preservation of slavery been their primary concern. The original 7 seceding states turned down the Northerners’ offer.
That is a load of crap.
You cannot claim slavery was a “natural right” without getting rid of the meaning of the concept.
Lincoln was leader of a Representative Republic established by the citizenry as a free choice. Georgie Porgie tried to rule subjects without guaranteeing their rights to representation and his duty to protect and because of which they were justified in rebellion.
Totally incorrect analogy which can only be made by those desperate for a fig-leaf to justify rebellion or those ignorant of history.
All false. States were and are sovereign and the union is based upon the consent of the governed.
Oh and of course, slavery was not the primary issue. Had it been the Northern government would not have offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment and the original 7 seceding states would not have turned that offer down.
Nevermind that the Upper South seceded only after Lincoln chose to make war.
Its truly amazing how some who claim to not be Leftists do everything they possibly can to worship at the feet of big government, try to centralize all power in the hands of Imperial Washington and go miles out of their way to denigrate the most reliably conservative/libertarian region in the country while doing so.
That is pretty laughable and the Constitution did not eliminate (or want to) incivility.
Lincoln fought the war to preserve the Union, the South to protect slavery. Claiming otherwise is the real “revision of history.” Perhaps no one told the insurrection’s leaders who admitted their goal.
False. The Southern states were not fighting to preserve slavery. Repeating the lie does not make it true.
Oh and of course Davis said several times that they were not fighting over slavery.
And then there is the matter of the Southerns states turning down slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment. Its right there in Lincoln’s inaugural address.
New York City was opposed to the war for the reason you point to and remained a hotbed of Copperhead beliefs.
I guess you think comparing molehills to mountains is persuasive.
The Union is based on the Constitution and that was what was in question.
There was never any real “sovereignty” of the states outside those allowed by the Constitution and rebellion is not one of them. This is one of the unique aspects of the document.
States had the power to leave a Confederacy, they had no such right under the Constitution.
Yes NYC was as you say. New England however was all for trying to claim moral superiority - even with the blood money still jingling in their pockets. They’ve never changed in that respect.
There was NO “big government” before the war. It’s growth was a direct result of the insurrection.
Nor does the claim of “tyranny” hold even a drop of water. It is amusing to see it trotted out against ALL facts.
Where in the constitution is a state forbidden the right of unilateral secession?
The states were sovereign before there ever was a constitution. They never surrendered their sovereignty. They only delegated certain limited portions of their sovereignty to the federal government and retained the right to reclaim those powers whenever they saw fit.
Why not? They announced their secession and adopted a constitution that protected slavery to an extent never dreamed of in the North. Why would they throw all that over the side and come slinking back?
Nevermind that the Upper South seceded only after Lincoln Davis chose to make war.
Fixed it for you.
Its truly amazing how some who claim to not be Leftists do everything they possibly can to worship at the feet of big government, try to centralize all power in the hands of Imperial Washington and go miles out of their way to denigrate the most reliably conservative/libertarian region in the country while doing so.
They aren't talking about Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. They're talking about the South.
But linking your future with specific others, certainly implies mutual respect. That the Founders had that may be demonstrated in many ways--as, for example, the last lines of the Declaration (Declaration Of Independence--With Study Guide)--as, for example, the unanimous (electoral college) election of George Washington;-- as, by analogy, Washington's Farewell warning against the rise of factions, or regional animosities (Farewell Address).
A lot of other Southern leaders said that they were.
You cannot believe that with any integrity. It is common knowledge and easy to verify that the insurrection’s leaders proudly and repeatedly declared the war was about slavery. Argue with them.
The federal government was steadily usurping ever more powers the states never agreed to delegate to it. Everybody could see which way the wind was blowing.
Lincoln was a tyrant. He censored the press and all telegraph traffic, he imprisoned between 13 and 38 thousand people without charge or trial, he ordered the chief justice of the supreme court to be arrested for ruling in ex parte Merryman that he could not simply suspend habeas corpus by diktat and throw a man into a federal gulag, the list of his abuses of constitutional liberties is a very long one.
That is their problem. I am originally from the South and am old enough to remember the 50s and 60s and the unrest and oppression there.
the Confederate Constitution was not notably different from the federal constitution in protection of slavery. It was more express about it but Lincoln and the Northern dominated Congress were prepared to offer that anyway.
and of course it was Lincoln who chose to make war.
Yes they’re talking about the South....which has been ideologically consistent in opposing centralized power and favoring smaller government for well over 200 years.
and plenty said they weren’t. Davis was the president. He had actual power. He said they weren’t.
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