Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
A truly farcial statement unsupported by any credible data --- and don't call me "honey."
And with the Homestead Act of 1862 which the Democrats and Slaveocrats had blocked repeatedly before the war, the ownership millions of acres of "federal land" was transferred to small farmers, greatly increasing the total ownership of land and creating a lasting middle class. The slavers did not want lands broken into small parcels for family farmers. They demanded large parcels suitable for plantation-sized estates. The Homestead Act was the greatest land transfer from Government to private ownership in history and Lincoln and the Republicans did it.
The problem with your interpretation is that you take today's corporate predominance and project it back through the whole history of the republic, first as conspiracy then as reality. But it would have been hard to forsee in 1787 or 1860 what happen generations later. For every one, far-sighted individual who had a long-range plan, there were hundreds and thousands who responded to the events and passions of the day. Moreover, it's not the case that the sides were fixed in stone. Planters and other Southerners like Washington, Marshall and Pinckney were important federalists. Southern Mountaineers, recent immigrants, and poor farmers all flocked to the Union cause.
What comes out of a war isn't always what caused the war. We didn't go to war in 1941 in order to split up Germany, though that became an important option later on. In retrospect things look determined, but at the time one always had to take into account the possiblity that the other side might win.
Nor was what happened after the war pre-ordained. Switzerland went through a civil war similar in its origns to our own at about the same time. The Federal side won there as well. But the end results were different, perhaps because of institutions like referendum, perhaps because the conflict never became a total war, perhaps because language and religion made it much harder to consolidate the country. Perhaps America might itself had followed something more like the Swiss pattern had Southerners stayed and worked within the Union, perhaps not. In any event, it was their choice to put slavery first and let the alliance with the West go. All they had to do was stand by the Northwest Ordinance and there would have been no secession crisis or war, at least in 1860-1.
And there was a powerful planter aristocracy. Had history turned out differently, would one be justified in viewing the whole thing as their conspiratorial plot? Certainly many free men perceived slaveholders' designs to spread slavery and increase their power before the war and concluded that such attempts would continue once an independent slaveowning republic had been established. From the perspective of the time their interests were more likely to be damaged by teh expansion of slavery than be the development of capitalism, though in retrospect one might disagree. But in asserting that industrial development was a greater threat than slavery, you lose the moral high ground.
The assumption seems to be that exploitation was an essential part of that capitalist development from which we have benefited, while any connection between agrarianism and slavery or exploitation was a non-essential, easily dispensible link. Certainly the latter assumptions is dubious. Slavery would have lasted longer had the other side won, and what replaced it would have been another form of exploitation, made even more oppressive by ethnic differences or tensions even sharper than those in Northern industrial cities.
How much better was the life of a sharecropper than that of a mill hand? Industry provided a way of providing for small farmers who were driven off the land by the increased productivity of agriculture, and those who were oppressed by landowners and mortgagers. It also gave them opportunities for advancement they would not have had on the land.
In any event, vulgar Marxist attacks on millowners or mercantilists aren't any improvement over the old "Slave Power" theory. They just put the blame on the other side.
It's a pity that your comments indicate envy of a culture and society that you can only aspire to, but never achieve.
If you like losers, Robert E. Lee is the man for you.
Thanks, but I always preferred "Fighting Joe" Hooker, who bequeathed an undying heritage to booking sergeants and vice squads everywhere.
Lee took up arms against the United States before his letter of resignation was accepted.
You're weaseling. Lee made no secret of where he was coming from. In a letter to Rooney Lee on December 3, 1860, Lee wrote "As an American citizen, I prize the Union very highly & know of no personal sacrifice that I would not make to preserve it, save that of honour." [Emphasis added.] And where did honor lie? In a letter to Annette Carter, written a week before the quote you cite, he wrote this sentiment, reproduced by Bonekemper (p. 21) from Emory Thomas's Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York, Norton & Co., 1995): "If the Union is dissolved, I shall return to Virginia & share the fortune of my people." He repeated the remark on January 22, the day before your quote, in another letter cited by Bonekemper quoting Thomas again, "If the Union is dissolved, I shall return to Virginia and share the misery of my native state...." Bonekemper cites as one of Lee's hallmarks the felt need to prove himself (though he was already a hero of the Mexican War), and to uphold the honor of his family's name -- a burden that pressed down on him all the more heavily because of the misfortune and misconduct of other male family members in the recent past.
Furthermore, going to your point about his honor, his motives, and his honesty, and particularly to your mischaracterization of his resignation, Lee was at his duty station in San Antonio on February 13, when on the same day that Virginia's Constitutional Convention -- the Sovereign People, sitting as the People -- voted down secession, Lincoln ordered Lee to Washington; he arrived at the Custis-Lee mansion on March 1st, writing letters in the meantime that made it crystal-clear that his future course would be determined by what his State, acting as the People of Virginia, decided to do. Fort Sumter fell on April 13, Lincoln made his proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers on April 15, Virginia's Constitutional Convention reversed itself and took Virginia out of the Union on April 17; and the next day, April 18, Lincoln and Winfield Scott offered Lee the command of the Union Army. Lee immediately declined the offer, called on Scott the same day, and Scott told Lee "he was making the biggest mistake of his life". Lee left Scott in no doubt about where matters stood; indeed, as of the day before, Lee was no longer a citizen of the United States, any more than the American sailors impressed into the Royal Navy three generations before had been subjects of King George IV.
Lee's letter of resignation from the United States Army was written on the night of the 18th and hand-delivered to General Scott the next day, the 19th. On the 20th he drafted and sent a letter to Secretary of War Cameron resigning his colonelcy in the First Cavalry, and on the same day wrote Scott another letter (both of the latter reproduced by Bonekemper on p. 22) explaining his decision -- a draft-quality letter, containing at least ten strikethroughs and interlinings.
Lee went up to Richmond on April 22nd, where the governor of Virginia offered Lee a commission as a major general in the Virginia Militia -- a Virginian command, not a Confederate one. He didn't receive a Confederate commission until May 10, as a brigadier in the Provisional Army. The People of Virginia voted their plebiscitary affirmation of secession on May 23rd by a vote of 3:1. Lincoln sent Irvin McDowell across the Potomac the same day, and the next day killed the first Southerner in the Civil War, a civilian, over the incident of the Arlington tavern-keeper's flag.
Your weasel consists of the word "accepted": by which construction, Lincoln could have made a deserter and traitor of every officer who went with his State, by simply refusing to accept his resignation. Lee laid all his cards on the table, face up, days before he accepted a Virginia commission in the Militia (of which, of course, he was already a member, and had been, since manhood), and three weeks before he accepted a Confederate commission.
[You, quoting Robert E. Lee] "It was intended for 'perpetual union' so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession." [January 23, 1861]
Lee wasn't a secessionist in his politics; his "druthers", as your quote points out, were for continued Union. Presumably, then, he was one of that quarter of Virginians who voted against secession. However, his quote contains an error which I'll tax you for bringing up again without clarification, since we have discussed this point with you before and disciplined your anticonstitutional impulses by explaining the People's right to revolutionize their affairs by secession (among other measures).
The term "perpetual union" which Lee employs, you know from your own posts is a quotation from the Articles of Confederation, not the United States Constitution, and so Lee's use of it is a mistake, which we have pointed out to you before. His is a fair journeyman's understanding of the secession issue, but he errs, in that he does not display awareness that secession is an unenumerated right of the People under the Ninth Amendment -- as if that were needful, since they were exercising their power as Sovereign to take their State out of the Union, for causes of their own which needed satisfy nobody but them, and after careful deliberation.
Walt
Please take no offense at the manners of these yankees. They are just carrying on an ancient yankee tradition of attacking innocent women and children. Their forefathers did it before them - their kind have long held that no one's opinion but theirs matters, and resort to such attacks in a vain effort to hide the true facts of their attack of a sovereign country. They don't believe that people have the right to self-defense, and weasel out of legal contracts as it suits them.
Just remove yourself to the front porch with your husband and a few mint juleps, relax, and thank God you are Southern.
No reasonable person could read the Preamble's "...to form a more perfect Union" as anything but a pledge of perpetuity. And you'll not be able to show Lee meant anything else.
Walt
B.S. ALERT!
Read your Jefferson and Madison correspondence particularly during the framing of the Constitution. The Founder's hoped ... repeat ... hoped that it would be perpetual, but they also realized that secession was something that the States had the right to do!
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