Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
Not really. What the 'planters' wanted was expansion and that is the only area where Lincoln could not, and would not compromise.
Well, of course they wanted expansion. Everyone wanted expansion. So why should Mrs. Parks sit in the back of the expansion bus?
Like I said, finding some sort of territorial compromise, either on the lines of Popular Sovereignty or the 1820 Missouri Compromise (and we are talking about amending the Constitution here, so Dred Scott goes away) would pacify the planters enough that secession would go away. But Lincoln didn't do that, did he? IMHO because war was his plan all along, and his goal wasn't exclusion, but extinction, of slavery -- in the South, contrary his platform, never mind what he said on the stump. It's the only explanation that makes sense to me.
There was no chance in hell that emancipation could have passed under Lincoln or any other president without the agreement of the South. The 3/4 state majority required for an amendment with 15 slaves states voting against made it a mathematical impossibility.
I agree, if you are talking about constitutional emancipation, with the participation of the South.
What you propose may have 'pacified' the non-slaveholding whites who had been propagandized to the point of fear and loathing for the "Black Republicans" but I doubt it.
All I'm talking about is breaking the impetus toward secession, period. The idea being, "what could Lincoln have done or said, that would have resulted in fewer or no States going out over winter?" So that when he finally came into office, only one or two, if any, States would have been out, and their representatives would have been present to see him sworn into office.
My point is that there were things he could have done to slow or stop the rush toward secession.
My cousin's wife is Canadian, and they've had their own secessionist movement. Having not heard from the Quebeckers lately, I asked her about it. It seems that, in the last 10 years or so, the Indian tribes up there have discovered their political swing, and when Quebec's government started talking about really leaving the federation, the tribes in northern Quebec laid a marker: if Quebec left the Canadian federation, the tribes would leave Quebec on the same theory of cultural and linguistic dissimilarities -- and they'd take a big chunk of Quebec with them, including a lot of the hydroelectric projects that the Quebecers had just assumed would go out with an intact Quebec, giving them some foreign exchange. When the Indians laid their marker, that was a stopper for the Quebeckers.
Your humble narrator is distantly related to the Keys.
Walt
It's typical of the neo-rebs to say it was okay for Brown to be hanged by Virginia when he was not a resident of Virginia, and to forgive Robert E. Lee for treason against the United States. Lee accepted a commission from the treasonous government in Richmond -before- his resignation was accepted in Washington.
He could easily have been hanged for treason under the law.
Let me ask you this:
What was the cause of the war?
Walt
Nah, he was covered under the 14th Amendment. Trying him and the rest of the bunch would have violated their protections under the 5th Amendment so that's why it never came about.
On Brown....my instinct tells me that the Federal government wanted him stopped and were more than willing to let Virginia handle the wet work even though he was arrested by Federal troops. Brown did have some high profile support but I don't believe he had the support of your run of the mill abolitionist. Frederic Douglass for one pulled out of support for this raid. I believe Harriet Tubman missed the great adventure due to illness.
Correct. Except that Congress agreed, when they admitted Texas. It's a done deal, all Texas has to do is their end now, to do the split. Texas doesn't need any further permissions, as I understand it.
Your reading of Texas demography in 1855 is correct. The slaves were heavily concentrated in the "peach bottoms" of the rivers near the coast. According to a lecture I once heard at a Houston Archeological Society meeting, Brazoria County south of Houston was something like 90% black slaves by the outbreak of the Civil War. The slaveholders were relatively few, tended to be men of English stock (remember that the next time you feel inclined to whip up on the Scots-Irish Southerners) in their 40's who'd immigrated from the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. (Jared Groce, the first man to bring any numbers of slaves to Texas, was from Georgia.)
The inhabitants of more northerly and westerly homesteads tended more to be younger, thirtyish Scots-Irish from Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky, only one in five owned a slave, and if he did it was a single slave who lived in a dog-run shack with the rest of the family. Their take on slavery and States' rights was rather different from the planters', who owned the legislature: the Scots-Irish were Jacksonian Democrats, equalitarian and narrow. The planters were more Whiggish and more liberal in their deportment (like Gunnar Myrdal) precisely because social distance made them relatively untouchable. Serene in their social inviolability, they received black men through the front door, as Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach tells us, whereas the hardscrabbles who were truly threatened by bond labor, labored themselves at maintaining social distinctions that it was a luxury of wealth and position to affect to disdain.
Nah, he was covered under the 14th Amendment. Trying him and the rest of the bunch would have violated their protections under the 5th Amendment so that's why it never came about.
True. I believe General Grant strongly opposed any treason trials for the members of the ANV, as he had covered that with his parole when teh ANV collapsed.
But it's really hard to suggest, as you say, that Brown was guilty of treason against Virginia any more than say German soldiers were guilty of treason against France or Russia in WWII.
Lee's acts were clearly treasonous, there's no doubt of that.
But he helped immolate his own army, so maybe it all worked out for the best. Same thing with Hood. He wrecked his own army.
Hmmmmmmm......Hood was from Kentucky. Kentucky remained in the Union. I wonder if the neo-rebs would say the same thing applies to Hood, as it did to Brown.
But if one thing has come out on this thread in the last week or so, it was the vindictiveness of the CSA and the mercy of the USA.
Even if you take the 3 examples that RaginCagun said, the CSA hanged more people for treason in one day than the USA has in 226 years.
Walt
Someone offed Key?
Your humble narrator is distantly related to the Keys.
This humble narrator is a second cousin by blood to Chief Justice Marshall and more distantly related to the Marshall who married Robert E. Lee's sister (he was a Yankee colonel). My claim to Southern royalty, such as it is.
Actually with Brown I think it was the other way around. The Buchanan government wanted absolutely nothing to do with trying him because of fears that such a trial would have divided the Congress, and were more than happy to allow Virginia the honors. Which Virginia did, with efficiency and expediency.
Wow, some of us are well-heeled. And some of us are just heels. ;-)
Walt
I think I meant almost the same thing on Brown except that I think the Buchanan government was quite willing to be rid of him. Otherwise why did they send Federal troops to Harper's Ferry?
Thoroughly agree on the appropriateness of her incarceration. I've been by her prison, going by bus from Puno on the west coast of Lake Titicaca to the airport at Juliaca to the north. The reported harshness of the climate strikes me as a bit overblown. We were in Puno in August, which is like our February, and a light jacket is all that was needed, even after dark. Of course Puno is on the lake and protected by rapidly rising land on the shore side, while the prison is at higher altitude and on a plain - the lake is at about 13,000'.
In a word, GREED
More than enough, on both sides, to ordain war. Two different visions of race relations, economics, and the proper relationship between states and central government.
History clearly shows the fundamental flaws of the victors. What a shame we'll never know how the Confederate system would have developed.
I just looked it up and I was thinking of Sedgwick at Antietam, had a brigade in Sumner's division. Marched right up to Jackson and never saw him lying in wait behind some rock ledges, got 2500 KIA in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, his supporting brigade had gotten drawn off to the left somewhere by a Confederate skirmish line and was no longer in support when everything hit the fan (of course) -- that was French's.
Titicaca is prime training ground for competitive free depth divers...training at that altitude enhances their dives at sea level.
I used to go to Huaca, Chimbote, and other northern coastal ports north of Lima on ship's business some 10 years ago. Amazing what a desert NW Peru is.
FR is creeping today...have you noticed?
Trolling again, Wlat? If you're losing at the table, kick it over, shoot out the lights, and start a big fistfight? Is that it?
Bobby Lee was no more a traitor than George Bush is. He resigned his commission in good order, like Longstreet did, and went with his State. He was of the opinion that secession wasn't a good idea (Braxton Bragg thought the same before the issue was forced), but he went with Virginia because they were his People.
That's a kind of principled loyalty you'd never understand, so I won't bother to explain it to you. But he never waged war on his own, in order to receive high rank from a constitutional adventurer the way Admiral Farragut did, or some other prominent Union generals we could talk about.
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