I agree! More of the Yankee ass showing going on here.
Posted on 10/09/2002 9:49:51 AM PDT by Rebeleye
I agree! More of the Yankee ass showing going on here.
And more than a few southron ones as well.
The Confederacy requires no revision:
"The Union, sir, is dissolved. That is an accomplished fact in the path of this discussion that men may as well heed. One of our confederates [South Carolina] has already, wisely, bravely, boldly confronted public danger. and she is only ahead of many of her sisters because of her greater facility for speedy action. The greater majority of those sister States, under like circumstances, consider her cause as their cause; and I charge you in their name to-day: 'Touch not Saguntum.' It is not only their cause, but it is a cause which receives the sympathy and will receive the support of tens and hundreds of thousands of honest patriot men in the nonslaveholding States, who have hitherto maintained constitutional rights, and who respect their oaths, abide by compacts, and love justice...
"Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government; they have demanded no new Constitution. Look to their records at home and here from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the disruption of the empire, and they have not demanded a single thing except that you shall abide by the Constitution of the United States; that constitutional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be done. Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all its requirements, they have performed all its duties unselfishly, uncalculatingly, disinterestedly...I have stated that the discontented States of this Union have demanded nothing but clear, distinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged constitutional rights - rights affirmed by the highest judicial tribunals of their country...We have demanded of them simply, solely - nothing else - to give us equality, security and tranquility. Give us these, and peace restores itself. Refuse them, and take what you can get.
"Sirs, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition 'de novo,' yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given to it, and intend to give it, unfaltering support and allegiance, but I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false idea that anybody's blood was shed for it. I say that the Constitution is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that 'the powers not granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people.'
"Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test. The law of nature, the law of justice, would say - and it is so expounded by the publicists - that equal rights...shall be enjoyed. This right of equality being, then, according to justice and natural equity, a right belonging to all States, when did we give it up?
"What, then, will you take? You will take nothing but your own judgement; that is, you will not only judge for yourselves, not only discard the court, discard our construction [of the Constitution], discard the practice of the government, but you will drive us out, simply because you will it...In a compact where there is no common arbiter, where the parties finally decide for themselves, the sword alone at last becomes the real, if not the constitutional, arbiter...You say we shall submit to your construction. We shall do it, if you can make us; but not otherwise, or in any other manner. That is settled. You may call it secession, or you may call it revolution; but there is a big fact standing before you, ready to oppose you - that fact is, freemen with arms in their hands."
Senator Robert Augustus Toombs of Georgia, upon resigning from the Senate of the United States, January 7, 1861
My opinion: Most of the people of the South were just as much sheep to their government as people are today. For example, most had little to say or power over "government", over the issue of "slavery", or unfair "tariffs" imposed by the Northern industrial states. All that was nothing but politics to them. They were busy just trying to make a descent living.
BUT...., when the Northern armies began invading their towns and homes, shooting, killing, burning, arresting local officials (rebels), etc, what do you think they would do? Let it happen? To the Southern people they were fighting a foreign enemy on their own soil, as surely as our ancestors did in the American revolution.
We can possibly debate who started it, and why they started it, but once the fighting started, the South was fighting for their lives and homeland. Slavery, unfair tariffs, were of minor consequence to them then. The invading Northern army never even gave them an opportunity to consider any such concessions. Politics at the end of a gun barrel.
"They are too just to wish that a partial sacrifice should be made for the general good" - such brilliant words, and exactly the opposite of "liberal think" today.
Madison is saying here that the elimination of slavery is a national problem, and that the slave owners alone, should not be expected to bear the financial impact of the emancipation of legal, constitutionally sanctioned property. That would be asking a "partial" segment of the population to bear the brunt of the entire country's inherited defect. That's what many tax-the-rich liberals expect, today!
[From Four Years Under Marse Robert, 1904, by Robert Stiles (1836-1905), Major of Artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia]
Or sideways, for that matter. That makes it almost fool proof.
Well, it does (at least people's perception of it) in the sense that it has been revised down for so long by the victors. Having gone through the government school system, I know the lies perpetrated by the North's version of the story.
Many thanks to the Senator from Georgia.
True. The motives of politicians and the motives of average citizens have never really been the same.
We can possibly debate who started it, and why they started it, but once the fighting started, the South was fighting for their lives and homeland. Slavery, unfair tariffs, were of minor consequence to them then. The invading Northern army never even gave them an opportunity to consider any such concessions. Politics at the end of a gun barrel.
Well said. Bravo!
Another beautiful post!
Such a true statement.
The South are still full of "freemen," those who believe like their forefathers that no one has the right to tell the people of a state what they should do.
As I've said before, the more pure DNA of the Founding Fathers is found in those who sided with the South.
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