Posted on 04/24/2002 9:33:49 AM PDT by wasp69
RICHMOND - It's only a two-hour drive from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House here on Clay Street.
It took four years and more than 600,000 lives to make that same journey during the second American Revolution, now officially known as the US Civil War.
It's odd that this nation's bloodiest war, a war between brothers, stretched from 1861 until 1865 when the capital of the COnfederate States of America in Richmond is only 100 miles south from the capital of the United States of America in Washington.
Thousands of Americans annually visit Civil War battlefields, museums and monuments.
Enthusiasts study in passionate detail the leaders, military strategy and battles of the Civil War.
My fascination with the Civil War has less to do with military engagements than with the motivations of up to 1.5 million Southern men and boys wiling to die to tear the nation in two in defense of slavery, an utterly indefedsible institution.
Had the conflict, also known as the War of the Southern Planters, been fought only by Southern slave owners, it would have been over in weeks rather than years.
As it was, brilliant and charismatic Confederate Generals such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson led armies of poor, non-slave-owning Southerners into battle and came dangerously close to winning the war.
My mother's and father's ancestors were Southerners who fought for the Confederacy. I'm pleased that their side lost.
As a young man I fought for passage of civil rights laws that would eliminate the vestiges of slavery and the continued denial of equal rights to black Americans. What, I wondered, could my Confederate ancestors have been thinking?
I did not find the answer during my tour of the White House of the Confederacy or in the next-door Museum of the Confederacy.
A curator at the museum understood my state of perplexity but could only tell me that it's impossible to judge the decisions of my Confederate ancestors based on todays standards.
Although slavery was central to the decision by the Southern states to break away from the Union, many causes over the years led to conflict.
Sectional rivalry developed as the North became industrialized and gained population with European immigration.
The North wanted to build roads, canals and railroads to accommodate growing industries. Without personal or corporate taxation, revenue was raised by tariffs, which protected Northern products and increased prices of imported goods needed by the nonindustrialized South.
Southerners felt they were being gouged by their Northern brethern. They also felt that the states, not the federal government, had the authority to regulate commerce and other affairs. They also felt that the states had the right under the Constitution to separate from the Union, an idea that had strong supporters in both the North and South.
Deciding whether new territories and states would be slave or nonslave became a North-South fight for power in Congress and within the federal government.
Northern abolitionists demonized the Southerners and backed them into their own regional corner. Many Americans in the early years of the nation felt stronger regional and state pride than national pride.
Lee, who did not want to break up the Union, declined an offer to command the Union Army. He chose fight for Virginia and the South.
There must be lessons to be learned from the Civil War that can be applied to current and future conflicts.
To some degree, yes. I did notice he got a couple details wrong here and there - mostly technical stuff like dates etc. that conflict with those given in the globe and committee reports.
It went through a number of changes and was dead before Lincoln came to town.
Actually, on the Senate side the text that became the passed amendment was the same as the text proposed by Seward before the committee of 13 back in December. The House side was where the changes occurred. CF Adams proposed a different version of the amendment in the house committee of 33, which passed out under Corwin. The House version was reconciled with the senate in late February following a meeting in which Lincoln and Corwin decided to substitute the original seward text for the adams text on the house floor.
Titus (aka the former disrupter LLAN-DDUESSANT who was kicked off of FR a few months ago) is on a random quote and paste kick. He's found himself a new source to paste quotes from. Ironically this one is also a source that he denied to be authentic only a week ago when I indirectly introduced him to it by citing it in a debate with another freeper. See my post 105 for the details on that little embarrassing incident for Mr. Fikus/Dduessant
Sort of like the disasterous results of forced integration (children bussed hours away from their homes, schools packed with more kids than they were ever intended to hold, parents with no way to participate in their child's education due to distance, etc.--yes, I was there.) We would probably be in much better shape now if the attention had been focused on developing new neighborhoods that were integrated from their inception by people who wanted to live there encouraged and prodded by new fair-lending and housing practices. The schools in those neighborhoods would have been naturally integrated, and I think the result would have been much better, even if slower.
I don't exactly know how the transition away from slavery could have been sped up in the South, or even if it needed to be, and I can understand that today we say no one should have been a slave for one day more than they already had been, but things might have worked out better in the long run if slavery had been allowed to exist for a while longer, until it burned itself out. And the eternal optomist in me is sure that it would have, and pretty quickly, too. Northerners didn't have the monopoly on knowing right from wrong. They just didn't have so much to lose by making the jump.
Just my 2cents
O2
I wasn't, and neither were all you revisionists who try to change history. Far from being shocked or angered at the Union response to secession, the writings of the time show that the overwhelming majority of southerners welcomed a war.
You constantly say that and I think we need a little clarification. Would that be your opinion of traitors to the American Empire (to which the Confederate soldiers were not) or all traitors in general?
I was thinking more about traitors today.
Walt
Again, that is not my concern nor does it address the fact that he did lie.
It's not your concern because you are not interested in a true interpretation of these events.
You are the one caught in a lie, not President Lincoln.
You cannot prove that he saw this language. You attempted to belittle Lincoln and you smeared yourself.
Walt
I was actually thinking about traitors closer to home.
Walt
It is because you are not paying attention. BTW, the word is spelled "understand" not "unserstand." Go and look at your post 28, and maybe you will catch on. I was agreeing with you, in that I doubted most northerners were fighting to free slaves. The riots in NY and other places attest to that. I also think there were economic reasons for the riots, as well as the unfairness of some dirt bag being able to get out of it, by paying $300. If I could have figured out a way to get out of the draft, I would have myself, but I still had to go to Nam, which is about the most worthless conflict we have ever been in, all for your buddy, LBJ's political reasons. It is a sad day when I am forced to admit that I agree with you, but that is only one point. Most of the time, even when I agree with you, I disagree, because it is fun to disagree with you. Now, go back to your own post 28, and you may see the connection.
BTW, the south also had a system of paid substitutes that allowed the well-to-do to avoid conscription, along with deferrments for those who owned more than a certain number of slaves.
Perhaps he should study a bit more World History. People fight for their Societies--it is part of the social compact that Jefferson discussed in the Declaration. One does not have to agree with everything that is established in one's Society, or to benefit from all of its customs and institutions, to recognize a duty to defend it.
One gets the sense that this writer is just now discovering a few of the things that he should have been taught in grade school. But his problem is not so much what he was not taught before, as the pernicious ideas that he was.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Indeed it is not, nor on a mutual note is it within my power to keep you from the same. But that would also presume that I am lying, which I am not and which you have not established to be so. On a similar note, I have caught you in instances of deception and will continue to catch you so long as you continue to decieve.
I can only post your source material
You mean the same source material that only one week ago you publicly declared to have lacked authenticity, Llan-ey?
to establish the fact that you you are lying
Interesting, as I fail to see any credible attempt by you to do so to date.
or that you can't read it intelligently.
To make such a judgment upon me would presume that you yourself could read it coherently in the first place. From what I have seen, you are posting poorly transcribed quotes from it, many of them without proper sourcing, in a pattern of randomness and without substantial or coherent commentary. I am not the only freeper to have publicly noticed this. Therefore I must call into serious question your ability to pass judgment upon me over something that you yourself seem incapable of dealing with in a mature, sensible, or even coherent manner.
No Walt. It is not my concern as historically speaking, evidence exists only to the degree that it permits speculation about Lincoln's motives for his lie and little more. I have already speculated to that end, and see no point or capability carrying it any further.
That having been said, I need only note the simple fact that Lincoln's motive for lying bears no relevance to the fact that he did tell a lie in and of itself. It may explain that lie, but it in no way negates or establishes the fact that the lie was made.
You are the one caught in a lie
Again, please substantiate that allegation. Otherwise, I may again reject it in a word. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. It's a simple as that.
not President Lincoln.
To the contrary. Lincoln was familiar with the Corwin amendment before March 4th. On March 4th, Lincoln publicly denied familiarity with the Corwin amendment. Therefore Lincoln was lying.
You cannot prove that he saw this language.
To the contrary. Lincoln met with Corwin on February 26th to convince Corwin to substitute the Seward language for the Adams language. Prerequisite for Lincoln being able to do so and inherent to his doing so is a familiarity with that which he seeks to be substituted. If Lincoln did not know X, he could not have directed Corwin to substitute X for X would be unknown to him, and therefore could not be the subject of a request made by Lincoln.
Simply put, in order to seek to substitute the Seward text one first has to be familiar with the Seward text's existence. Therefore Lincoln had to have known the Seward text, which was the amendment itself. To know it was inescapable to the situation. Again, my invitation remains to you to demonstrate otherwise, which you have not done, refuse to do, and could not do if you wanted to. Therefore, my reasoning stands.
You attempted to belittle Lincoln
No, only introduce a little historical honesty onto the record of a dishonest president.
and you smeared yourself.
If that is so, please establish how. Otherwise, your statement is again rejected. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
You can't prove that. It's an assumption on your part. Had you said, "Lincoln was probably lying" you'd be in the clear.
Now all you've done is show that running down the greatest American and thereby the whole country is more important to you than telling the truth.
Walt
You are making the same argument that Fredrick Engles made in 1847 in his "Principles of Communism" which served as the basis for the Communist Manifesto he and Marx produced a year later.
In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.
The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.
The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. The Principles of Communiusm. Fredrick Engles, 1847.
But to say this, Engles (and you) had to do three things. First, underestimate the effects of chattel slavery as practiced in the American south. Unlike other slavery practiced in the western world, chattel slavery by the 1840s did not simply reduce the slave to a position of legal servitude, it actually removed personhood from that individual. They were not recognized as people, but as property to be bought and sold with little or no recognition of any human rights or emotion on the part of the slave, or the master. It was a thoroughly inhuman system
Second, you must overstate the "poor conditions" of Northern factory workers. Their lot was not so bad as many believe, even the worst of it as simple logic would tell when looking at immigration patterns. If their life was worse than a slave, why then did so many save money to pay for more family and friends from Europe to join in those factories?
Fredrick Douglass wrote an interesting little essay on his experiences on the life of poor Northerners vs poor Southerners.
``Living in Baltimore as I had done for many years ... I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise, and high civilization of [the Northern section] of the country.... I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general condition of the people of the free states. A white man holding no slaves in the country from which I came, was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man.... Hence I supposed that since the non-slaveholders at the South were, as a class, ignorant, poor, and degraded, the non-slaveholders at the North must be in a similar condition. New Bedford, therefore, which at that time was in proportion to its population, really the richest city in the Union, took me greatly by surprise, in the evidences it gave of its solid wealth and grandeur. I found that even the laboring classes lived in better houses, that their houses were more elegantly furnished and were more abundantly supplied with conveniences and comforts, than the houses of many who owned slaves on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. This was true not only of the white people of that city....``I was not long in finding the cause of the difference, in these respects, between the people of the North and South. It was the superiority of educated mind over mere brute force.... On the wharves of New Bedford I received my first light. I saw there industry without bustle, labor without noise, toil--honest, earnest and exhaustive--without the whip. There was no loud singing or hallooing, as at the wharves of southern ports when ships were loading or unloading, no loud cursing or quarreling; everything went on as smoothly as well-oiled machinery. One of the first incidents which impressed me with the superior mental character of labor in the North over that of the South, was the manner of loading and unloading vessels. In a southern port twenty or thirty hands would be employed to do what five or six men, with the help of on ox, would do at the wharf in New Bedford. Main strength--human muscle--unassisted by intelligent skill, was slavery's method of labor. With a capital of about sixty dollars in the shape of a good-natured old ox attached to the end of a stout rope, New Bedford did the work of ten or twelve thousand dollars, represented in the bones and muscles of slaves, and did it far better. In a word, I found everything managed with a much more scrupulous regard to economy, both of men and things, time and strength, than in the country from which I had come. Instead of going a hundred yards to the spring, the maidservant had a well or pump at her elbow. The wood used for fuel was kept dry and snugly piled away from winter. Here were sinks, drains, self-shutting gates, pounding-barrels, washing-machines, wringing machines, and a hundred other contrivances for saving time and money.''
Source: http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/fredlinc.htm
The third thing you need to ignore is the fundamental incompatibility of slavery with the founding principles of this country. The founders attempted to deal with that incompatibility as best as they could at the time. Even under the Articles of Confederation, Congress banned slavery expansion into the western territories with the Northwest Ordinance. In the Constitutional Convention, the majority favored the gradual elimination of slavery, and most like Washington saw it as an economic inevitability since slavery in those days an increasingly less practicable system given the economy of the times. They were willing to compromise with the few deep south deligates on slavery because they did not think the institution could long survive. What they did not foresee was the growth of the Cotton empires of the deep south which by the 1820s took slavery from the brink of extinction, and turned it into the most profitable use of capital investment in the nation.
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