Posted on 03/10/2019 7:34:32 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
“In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.” — Robert E. Lee 1856
Could Gen. Robert E.l Lee’s sentiments deter the “tear down those monuments” crowd?
Probably not.
Given their current success in removing monuments to Confederate generals, ignorant politicians and those whose hobby is going through life seeking to be offended, soon will run out of things to be offended by. Why not broaden the list of "offensive" symbols to include slave owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and a host of other founders?
Here in Texas you could add slave owning Texas heroes such as Sam Houston, Jim Bowie and William Travis.
Should we banish from public view all monuments to past historical figures who supported white supremacy, advocated secession or made racist comments?
Consider Abraham Lincoln. In addition to the Lincoln monument in the nation’s capital, there’s probably not a major city in the country without a school, street or park named after Lincoln (Abilene once had Lincoln Middle School).
What do Lincoln's own words tell us about “Honest Abe”, "the Great Emancipator?"
During one of the famous 1858 debates with Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln explained to the crowd: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . I am not now nor have ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Lincoln's prejudices weren’t limited to blacks.
During another debate with Douglas, Lincoln opined: “I understand that the people of Mexico are most decidedly a race of mongrels . . . there’s not one person there out of eight who is pure white”.
In Lincoln's 1861 inaugural address, he endorsed a constitutional amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, which would forever protect slavery where it existed, telling the audience: “I have no objection to its (Corwin Amendment) being made express and irrevocable”. Lincoln's goal was to save the Union, writing to abolitionist Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it”.
Virtually all white men of that time were white supremacists. Lincoln was no exception, and his comments belie his reputation.
Was Lincoln opposed to secession?
Consider his remarks he made in Congress on January 12, 1848: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one which suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much territory as they inhabit.” This is exactly what the seceding states did in 1861.
Another discomforting fact for today’s advocates of political correctness: In 2011 I sponsored a commemorative license plate for Buffalo soldiers, iconic black U.S. cavalrymen who served on the frontier. Couldn’t today's Native Americans claim buffalo soldiers participated in a genocidal war against an entire race of people - the American Plains Indians – enslaving them on reservations?
If we’re going to measure Confederates of 150 years ago by today’s standards, shouldn’t we do the same with Lincoln?
Today, it's Confederates. Who’s next? Buffalo soldiers? Our nation’s founders? Our Texas heroes? The possibilities are limitless.
Jerry Patterson is a former Texas land commissioner, state senator and retired Marine Vietnam veteran.
Someone said upthread that there weren't any. Even if there were, I believe the gains to the rest of the Southern port cities would more than offset any losses experienced by the theoretically existing "Southern shippers."
Still a net gain for the South, and a net loss for New York and Washington DC.
Why?
Then I assume that by that definition, in your mind nothing any southern leader said about the subject can be accepted.
How convenient for you.
"Accepted" has nothing to do with irrelevant. Nothing they said explains why the North invaded the South. The *ONLY* thing that needs to be justified is why people from the North marched armies into the South to kill the people of the South.
If you can explain how some statement made by some Southern person justifies why armies marched from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to kill people in the South, i'll acknowledge it's relevance.
The South already had legal slavery under the Federal Constitution. Had the South remained in the Union, nothing any of these yahoos said was going to change that. It is therefore irrelevant what their opinions were regarding slavery.
The truth is that the North far from fighting against slavery at the time of ratification of constitution, lobbied for an extension of the legality of the slave trade industry. Remember that New England was the epicenter of the slave trade industry and that they were making enormous profits from it. At the time of ratification of the Constitution, almost every state in the North still had slavery. They had it for many years thereafter too. Any claim that they lobbied against slavery is a pure fiction.
We’ve gone down this road hundreds if not thousands of times before. I am not going to waste my time with your responding to respond posts in which you endlessly spew your ignorant and false PC Revisionist drivel. I will just continue to laugh at your ridiculous lies and your pathetic obsession.
18th attempt.
We’ve gone down this road hundreds if not thousands of times before. I am not going to waste my time with your responding to respond posts in which you endlessly spew your ignorant and false PC Revisionist drivel. I will just continue to laugh at your ridiculous lies and your pathetic obsession.
19th attempt.
“… Here in the United States, the communists are bending all efforts to smearing the South and Southerners, because they know that we are one of the strongholds of Conservatism and are likely to resist Communism more fiercely than the large industrial sections of the North and the Middlewest.”
Its hilarious PC Revisionists would even try to trot out this line of argument. Uhhhh hello???? What side of the political aisle does anybody think all those PC Revisionist profs are on???
When did they start pushing their revisionist "all about slavery" BS in colleges and universities? Duh! They're children of the 60's. They're all hardcore Leftists.
Maybe it was Alexander Stephens.
Maybe? Source? Link?
“I really don’t understand how these lost causers can disregard what the secessionist wrote for themselves.”
its funny they would even try to make that argument. I go miles out of my way to directly quote original sources. Its the PC Revisionists who can't stand it....especially when you quote something inconvenient for their dogma. Then they have a million excuses as to why the plain words somehow don't mean what everybody can see that they do.
Nice switch there, but you should know the founding fathers never called themselves or what they were doing secession. It was a rebellion. Here is Mississippi’s Declaration of secession. Read it and let me know why you think they were seceding. A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union 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. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove. The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory. The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France. The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico. It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction. It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion. It tramples the original equality of the South under foot. It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact, which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain. It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice. It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists. It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause. It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood. Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England. Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.
Secession was not the fashionable word to use in 1776. Declaring Independence IS secession. Its the same thing.
You bring up Mississippi's declaration of causes which was the ONLY one of the 4 which only mentions slavery. Specifically violation of the fugitive slave clause WAS unconstitutional. You don't bring up that 3 of the other 4 went on at length about other causes....especially economic causes that were NOT unconstitutional.
You also "somehow" fail to mention that when offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment by the North, the original 7 seceding states REJECTED the offer.
Somehow it also slipped your mind to mention that the 5 (arguably 6) states of the Upper South seceded only after Lincoln chose to start a war. Obviously they were not seceding over slavery.
I like how it takes this knot-head three days to crawl out from under his rock and this is the bet he can cobble up. Why bother?!
Franklin was indeed the author of many pithy quotes, but this one in particular is not cited by more reputable quote sources -- it sounds "off" for his time & station.
It does. You can find it attributed to Franklin online, but it sounds too modern for him. Would he have used "gang" so freely? Was "beautiful theory" a concept in 18th century America? Or was it something a 20th century scientist was more likely to say?
You can also find the quote attributed to the 17th century Duc de La Rochefoucauld, but that's no more likely. Herbert Spencer and Thomas Henry Huxley are more likely sources. I suspect it's one of those ideas that gets polished and reworked over time. Whoever said something like that first, later writers adapted it to their own time.
Its funny how rocks in his head still obsesses over this....and can’t fathom that some of us have a life and cannot be bothered to waste time responding to the same PC Revisionist idiocy day after day.
Having adopted a constitution that protected slavery even more than the Corwin Amendment why would they go back?
Having adopted a constitution that protected slavery even more than the Corwin Amendment why would they go back?
Why not just accept the North's offer of slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment?
By the time the Corwin Amendment passed congress, 7 states had already announced themselves to be a different country. They couldn't even consider the amendment without admitting that they were, in fact, still part of the United States and that secession had been a charade, something southern pride would not accept. It was a Catch-22 in that sense.
No evidence has been presented on these threads suggesting Lincoln ever did more to "support" Corwin than use the words:
"I have no objection..."
Lincoln did fully support the 13th Amendment and the results were drastically different from Corwin.
That suggests Lincoln's "support" for Corwin was more notable in its absence than presence.
And some of the best answers I've seen come from DoodleDawg & Bubba Ho-Tep's posts above:
Bubba Ho-Tep #457: "By the time the Corwin Amendment passed congress, 7 states had already announced themselves to be a different country.
They couldn't even consider the amendment without admitting that they were, in fact, still part of the United States and that secession had been a charade, something southern pride would not accept.
It was a Catch-22 in that sense."
You may have heard, Confederates in those days were no so big on eating crow or humble pie.
I argue about the Civil War on other sites too, and on this one site I made people aware of the Corwin amendment who had seemingly never heard of it before. Do you know what this one delusional idiot kept trying to argue?
He said that the Corwin Amendment would not make slavery permanent because they would amend it later. He said Lincoln's support for the Corwin Amendment (and he did admit Lincoln supported it) was just a clever trick to get the South to stay in the Union, but after the danger was passed, they were going to go ahead and abolish slavery.
Pointing out that the amendment specifically said it could not be amended or repealed had him claiming "Oh yes it could!"
No amount of discussion would get him off of his theory that the Corwin amendment was just a clever trap Lincoln said for the Southern States, so I asked him if Lincoln was just LYING about it?
"No no no no no!" He didn't mean to imply that Lincoln was a *LIAR*, but then he just started calling me names.
Apparently I put him into the logical contradiction zone, and he couldn't deal with trying to believe two different things that were contradictory. Lincoln couldn't have supported making slavery permanent, and Lincoln also couldn't have been a liar.
Somehow he wanted to believe that Lincoln's support for the Corwin amendment was both a clever trick to fool the South, but wasn't a lie.
And it's this sort of nonsense we have to deal with all the time. People just want to believe what they want to believe.
Yeah! Cause 500% support for slavery beats 200% support for slavery!
As if there is a difference between 100% support for slavery in the Corwin Amendment and anything else.
No, once you've got to full support, the needle is pegged to the max, and no further claims of support will do anything more.
The Corwin Amendment pegged the needle to the max.
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