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.
I already have proven it, Walt. If you dispute this, please rebut my argument.
It's an assumption on your part.
No Walt. It's a logically deduced necessity of causation. If Y is contingent upon X, for Y to occur, X must be present. Therefore, Y's occurence proves the presence of X.
In this specific case, for Lincoln to convince Corwin to substitute the language (Y), Lincoln's knowledge of the substitute language (X) must be present. Y definately did occur, therefore X must have been present for it is an inescapably necessity of Y's occurence. I have repeatedly invited you to question this logical fact and show otherwise. That is the only way you can get around my argument, Walt. And despite having ample opportunity to do so, you have avoided doing so. You avoid it because you know that you cannot rebut it.
Had you said, "Lincoln was probably lying" you'd be in the clear.
Why should I retreat to the vagueness of probability when I can logically assert Lincoln's lie to have occurred with certitude? If you doubt my ability to do so, please rebut my logical conclusion. Otherwise, live with the fact that Lincoln lied.
Now all you've done is show that running down the greatest American and thereby the whole country
Sorry Walt, but the country is far greater than any one citizen or president. Individual persons are flawed inherently. That much is indisputable. Therefore, when one asserts the greater goodness of the country itself, they assert an institution that transcends the flaws of any one individual. As for your characterization of Lincoln as the greatest American, that is only a matter of opinion held by you and nothing more. It is inherently subjective in its nature and therefore cannot be asserted as anything beyond its own subjectivity.
is more important to you than telling the truth.
That would presume that (a) I am running down the greatest american and country and (b) not telling the truth. I also would venture to say that the first one is by its own nature unprovable for reasons asserted above. The second is provable, but you have not done so. You have established neither to be true nor have you even made an attempt to establish them beyond your own assertion. Therefore, I may reject them in a word. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Why should I retreat to the vagueness of probability when I can logically assert Lincoln's lie to have occurred with certitude?
You can't prove it.
What can be logically deduced is that President Lincoln had no reason to lie, but you did.
Walt
It's too late for that, Walt. I already did. If you dispute that, it is your burden to show why.
I must ask though - did you also shout "you can't fly" at the Wright brothers as their plane buzzed overhead?
What can be logically deduced is that President Lincoln had no reason to lie
If that is so, deduce it. I patiently await the opportunity to scrutinize your deduction. I already speculated at least one possibility of why he lied, therefore violating your assertion that he had no reason to lie, so this should be a fun one to watch!
If that is so, please state what you consider to be a lie and demonstrate it so. Then and only then may you give what you consider to be the reason for doing so, which I also ask that you give in the unlikely event that it becomes appropriate to do so. So there you have it, Walt. You have a lot of work a head of you, so you better get cracking!
Hear, hear. You are exactly correct. Seems to be a lot of cutting and pasting and not much original thinking.
Thanks for the well researched response.
Do I read your correctly? Are you saying it is defensible? Even the most die-hard slavery advocates of the anti-bellem period didn't attempt a straightforward defense of slavery. They only justified it based on the "inferiority" of Negroes who were "born for servitude" to white men saying it was their "duty" to Christianize and civilize them through slavery. Even considering the dominant racial attitudes of that period, I doubt that very many of the slave advocates really believed that justification in their hearts.
Just this: beware of using Adams to establish the cynicism or manipulativeness of people or even the reasons why they do what they do. His perceptions are often the result of his own cynicism, rather than the deviousness or unscrupulousness of the people he writes about.
I quote George Washington, and you quote Clarence Thomas?
You could quote Oliiver Wendell Holmes, or the Grinch that stole Christmas and you would still look a fool.
George Washington was on the lookout for people like you and he nailed you one hundred percent.
‘People like me?’ Now you’ve hurt my feelings. Apparently you missed my Post # 82 (I can’t imagine why – it was addressed to you ;>). Take a look, my friend: I quote George Washington – repeatedly - and Mr. Justice Thomas.
;>)
WIJG: Did you swear an oath to defend “the government of Washington and Lincoln” – or did you swear the same oath I did?
WP: By all appearances you oath is worth about as much as a pee behind a tree. I took the oath several times.
As an officer, I took this oath on August 14, 1981:
"I (state your name) swear or affirm that I will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear truth faith and allegience to the same, and will obey the lawful orders of the officers appointed over me, and that I take this obligation without moral reservation or purpose of evasion. So help me God."
And by “all appearances” you seem to be swapping horses in mid-stream. I see no mention in the oath of “the government of Washington and Lincoln” – do you? I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States – and I know the difference between “the Constitution of the United States” and “the government.”
Damn all traitors to hell.
Given the way you have attempted to retroactively ‘rephrase’ your oath, I suggest you reconsider your words.
WIJG: And where, precisely, is [the right of the government to maintain its own existence] delegated to the federal government by the Constitution?
WP: Article 1, section 8.
There is no more mention of ‘the right of the government to maintain its own existence’ in Article I, Section 8, than there is of “the government of Washington and Lincoln” in your oath. Read Article V: “the government of Washington and Lincoln” clearly has NO “right simply to maintain its own existance” if “three fourths of the several States” should decide otherwise. According to the United States Constitution, the very existence of the federal government is completely dependent upon the continued good will of (guess what? ;>) the States...
;>)
There was a reason the federal draft bill allowed “money payment in lieu of personal military service” – it allowed the supporters of the draft to characterize the legislation as “akin to a tax.” Why was such legal ‘mumbo-jumbo’ necessary? Because (in the words of Dr. Amar, the Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale University) a federal draft is unconstitutional:
“Article I clearly gives Congress authority in actual emergencies to federalize the militia instead of raising an army but only under a system of cooperative federalism designed to maintain the integrity of the [state] militia. Clause 16 painstakingly prescribed the precise role that state governments had to play in training and organizing the militia and in appointing its officers. These carefully wrought limitations in clause 16 were widely seen in 1789 as indispensable bulwarks against any congressional attempt to misuse its power over citizen militiamen. Yet these bulwarks would become trivial – a constitutional Maginot Line – if Congress could outflank them by relabeling militiamen as army ‘soldiers’ conscriptable at will, in time of war or peace, under the plenary power of the army clause...During the War of 1812, ...[Daniel Webster] argued that any federal draft under the army clause impermissibly evaded the constitutional limitations on federal use of the militia. The plan was an illegitimate attempt to raise ‘a standing army out of the militia by draft'...Only in the twentieth century did the Supreme Court uphold a federal draft, in the Selective Draft Law cases decided during World War I. The arguments of the Court can be charitably described as unpersuasive. Less charitably, the Court's opinion can be said to resemble its contemporaneous First Amendment jurisprudence, epitomized by such now malodorous cases as Debs and Abrams...”
Hence the draft-as-a-tax ‘window dressing’...
Well, hells bells, where were you in 1967? I ended up in Nam because of the draft, and now you tell me it is unconstitutional? You should have told me this long ago, I never would have gone to Nam. Oh well, such is life. I hate Lyndon Baines Johnson. Nam was his political war, just to compete with Barry Goldwater. Johnson really sucked.
And yet, it has done so.
Walt
I can't disprove something that didn't happen.
And you can't prove it happened. You deduced something and presented it as hard cold fact.
You could have said, "here is almost certainly what happened", but you didn't. You jumped in and took a plunge that you cannot now support.
Walt
Some crazy gypsie lady told them that, if they didn't go to war and win, the entire nation was going to decay over the next hundred-or-so years into a filthy, pathetic, crime-ridden socialist-in-all-but-name state in which the word 'bitch' became synonmyous with 'girlfriend'. The gypsie went on to describe a lousy world in which children went to the extreme of having their tongues pierced in a vain effort to get their parents' attention - a society in which criminals were hailed as role models by the popular culture and in which God was totally unwelcome.
Crazy southerners!
Let's check the dictionary.
deduction; 1. the act of deducing. 2. logic Reasoning from stated premises to the formally valid conclusion; reasoning from the general to the specific. 3. an inference or conclusion.
Under synonyns for inference:
conclusion, consequence, deduction, demonstration, induction. A conclusion is the absolute and necessary result of the admision of certain premises; an inference is a probable conclusion, towards which known facts, statements, or admissions point, but which do not absolutely establish; sound premises together with their necessary conclusions constituture a demonstration."
You have stated something as fact which you cannot, using your own words, absolutely establish.
Walt
I see two reasons which stand out:
1.) The love and desire to serve God in their own way as guaranteed in the Constitution.
2.} The love of liberty and freedom from oppressive government.
These are two things which do not come naturally for northerners.
The Constitution is a completely secular document. It is often criticised on that basis. There is no guarantee of worship or service to God in the Constitution. There is a little concept called the separation of church and state at work.
As I often point out, ignorance is the hallmark of the CSA apologists.
Don't worry, many of your fellow travellers will nod sagely when they read your post.
Walt
If your claim is true then he must have had a change of heart somewhere
"My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go." - November 27, 1861, in a letter to his father.
"I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the question is forever settled." - August 30, 1863, in a letter to Elihu Washburne.
"As soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle... there had to be an end to slavery." -In a conversation with Bismarck, 1878.
"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true." - U.S. Grant, in his Memoirs, 1885.
The big government wanna-be's who taunt Southerners are no better than the Pharisses.
Can't stand the thought of people living outside of the oppressive, unreasonable controls of your government, can you?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.