Posted on 09/30/2003 12:19:22 PM PDT by sheltonmac
The South's unconditional surrender in 1865 apparently was unacceptable to today's Neo-Confederates.
They'd like to rewrite history, demonizing Abraham Lincoln and the federal government that forced them to remain in the awful United States against their will.
On top of that, now they are opposing the U.S. Navy's plan to bury the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley under the American flag next year.
The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. In 1863, it rammed and fatally damaged the Union warship USS Housatonic with a fixed torpedo, but then the manually driven sub sank on its way home, killing its eight-man crew.
It might have been a lucky shot from the Housatonic, leaks caused by the torpedo explosion, an accidental strike by another Union ship, malfunction of its snorkel valves, damage to its steering planes or getting stuck in the mud.
In any case, the Navy found and raised its remains and plans a full-dress military funeral and burial service on April 17, 2004, in Charleston, S.C. The four-mile funeral procession is expected to draw 10,000 to 20,000 people, many in period costume or Confederate battle dress.
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans, generally a moderate group that works diligently to preserve Southern history and heritage, has a radical wing that is salivating with anger.
One Texas Confederate has drawn 1,600 signatures on a petition saying "the flag of their eternal enemy, the United States of America," must not fly over the Hunley crew's funeral.
To their credit, the funeral's organizers will leave the U.S. flag flying.
After all, the search and preservation of the Hunley artifacts, as well as the funeral itself, were paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Also, the Hunley crew was born under the Stars and Stripes. The Confederacy was never an internationally recognized nation, so the crewmen also died as citizens of the United States.
They were in rebellion, but they were still Americans.
This whole issue is an insult to all Southerners who fought under the U.S. flag before and since the Civil War.
But it isn't the only outrage by rabid secessionists.
They are also opposing the placement of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.
According to an article by Bob Moser and published in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine "Intelligence Report," which monitors right-wing and hate groups, the U.S. Historical Society announced it was donating a statue of Lincoln to Richmond.
Lincoln visited that city in April 1865 to begin healing the wounds caused by the war.
The proposed life-sized statue has Lincoln resting on a bench, looking sad, his arm around his 12-year-old son, Tad. The base of the statue has a quote from his second inaugural address.
However, the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised a stink, calling Lincoln a tyrant and war criminal. Neo-Confederates are trying to make Lincoln "a figure few history students would recognize: a racist dictator who trashed the Constitution and turned the USA into an imperialist welfare state," Moser's article says.
White supremacist groups have jumped onto the bandwagon. Their motto is "Taking America back starts with taking Lincoln down."
Actually, if it weren't for the forgiving nature of Lincoln, Richmond would be a smoking hole in the ground and hundreds of Confederate leaders -- including Jefferson Davis -- would be hanging from trees from Fredericksburg, Va., to Atlanta.
Robert E. Lee said, "I surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as I did to Grant's armies."
Revisionist history to suit a political agenda is as intellectually abhorrent as whitewashing slavery itself. It's racism under a different flag. While it's not a criminal offense, it is a crime against truth and history.
I'm not talking about re-enactors here. These folks just want to live history. But the Neo-Confederate movement is a disguised attempt to change history.
In the end, the Confederacy was out-fought, out-lasted, eventually out-generaled and totally over-matched. It was a criminal idea to start with, and its success would have changed the course of modern history for the worse.
Coming to that realization cost this nation half a million lives.
So I hope that all Neo-Confederates -- 140 years after the fact -- can finally get out of their racist, twisted, angry time machine and join us here in 2003.
Could you identify the NYC neighborhood that has this burgeoning population with a southern drawl?
The immigrant Irish, and the southern emigrants. It's always been that way.
Surely, you jest.
Isn't it? Why not?
And let me point out that I'm not the first one to speculate on that. James Madison said, " An inference from the doctrine that a single State has the right to secede at will from the rest is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them." Where does the Constitution show Madison to be wrong?
Do you have a source?
"We can concede they would have done their duty in any case, because if they didn't they would have been hung."
I guess the concept of Duty, Honor, Country is alien to you. In the few weeks you've been registered on this site, have you had the opportunity to share your record of military service to our country?
"Pity their duty was fighting to extend slavery."
No matter how many times you leftists repeat your mantra, it won't make it so. Neither will it diminish the respect and honor the Confederate soldiers have earned.
All of them? Every single one?
More assumptions on your part. But in any case had Mitchell been presenting policy then why did he address it to Lincoln alone? Why did Mitchell refer to the document as a 'plea'. Why was he asking Lincoln to 'aid and influence'? The Mitchell document was his scheme and his scheme alone. The fact that none of the recommendations was implemented shows that.
When it comes to grasping at straws then who better than you would know?
And where in the rest of the opinion did the Chief Justice reverse himself and say that the southern acts were legal?
[Walt] The Supreme Court ruled that the president had power under the Militia Act to put down the rebellion.
And that is irrelevant to the question of whether secession is Constitutional.
Further, Lincoln did not tell the truth to Congress about how the war started, and relevant facts about that were also withheld from the court.
The Prize Cases was about whether the blockade was lawful and about the disposition of several ships and their cargo.
Columbia University professor George P. Fletcher is generally supportive of Lincoln. In Our Secret Constitution, at page 81, he commented on the remarkable logic of the decision in the Prize Cases, "Lincoln needed a judgment from the Supreme Court that would explain to the english and the French why the United states was entitled, under international law, to impose a blockade and to seize ships that sought to ply southern ports. ... Lincoln's victory was complete -- domestically and internationally. His authority was upheld, his gunboats could seize ships and cargo in violation of the blockades, and the South could not secure the recognition it desired. Not only were the seizures legitimate under the laws of war, but the secessionists could, in good faith, still be branded as traitors. It was international war and domestic war at once. Somehow they were foreign enemies whose goods were subject to seizure and domestic traitors at the same time. Justice Grier's opinion for the majority reasons that the leaders of the Confederacy were traitors and 'none the less enemies because they are traitors.' This is the kind of logic that should be expected when brothers go to war."
I was only documenting that every last word you quoted was long before the court started to consider the merits of the case as presented by the pleadings and the evidence.
But I'm sure you knew that.
The U.S. claimed ownership of the sunken ship from the time of the surrender of the CSA.
Likewise, in United States v. Steinmetz, which considered ownership of the bell of CSS Alabama, the wreck of CSS Alabama was not considered abandoned by the mere passage of time. The court applied the doctrine of sovereign immunity to property formerly owned by the Government of the Confederacy and held that the United States rightfully succeeded to the property of the former. In so doing, the Court recognized that, in spite of the rhetoric used during the Civil War to describe Confederate raiders as pirates and the citizens of the rebelling states as traitors, the Union government had in its prosecution of the war dealt with the Confederacy as a sovereign nation, although an adversarial one (Poser and Varon 1995). This case also interpreted United States' ownership as unaffected by the passage of time or by failing to salvage the property.
It does not, but you'd better watch it. People are going to start calling you a neo-secessionist (whatever that means). However, it should be noted that a majority seceeding to isolate an individual state is a far cry from ejection of a state from the union by congressional action, which is what you originally posted.
First use of the word 'deport' occures in this paragraph:
"The third article relates to the future of the freed people. It does not oblige, but merely authorizes, Congress to aid in colonizing such as may consent. This ought not to be regarded as objectionable, on the one hand, or on the other, in so much as it comes to nothing, unless by the mutual consent of the people to be deported, and the American voters, through their representatives in Congress."
Since it speaks of aiding colonization and requires the consent of those being colonized then it seems that Lincoln is not using the term 'deport' in the same sense as we use it today. Now it means forcibly removing. What was the definition in 1862? Was it the same as today? It would appear not.
The next three uses of the word 'deport' come int he following passage:
"I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization. And yet I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country, which is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious. It is insisted that their presence would injure, and displace white labor and white laborers. If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity. Is it true, then, that colored people can displace any more white labor, by being free, than by remaining slaves? If they stay in their old places, they jostle no white laborers; if they leave their old places, they leave them open to white laborers. Logically, there is neither more nor less of it. Emancipation, even without deportation, would probably enhance the wages of white labor, and, very surely, would not reduce them. Thus, the customary amount of labor would still have to be performed; the freed people would surely not do more than their old proportion of it, and very probably, for a time, would do less, leaving an increased part to white laborers, bringing their labor into greater demand, and, consequently, enhancing the wages of it. With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain. Labor is like any other commodity in the market---increase the demand for it, and you increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and, by precisely so much, you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor.
But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth, and cover the whole land? Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them any more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country, and there would be but one colored to seven whites. Could the one, in any way, greatly disturb the seven? There are many communities now, having more than one free colored person, to seven whites; and this, without any apparent consciousness of evil from it. The District of Columbia, and the States of Maryland and Delaware, are all in this condition. The District has more than one free colored to six whites; and yet, in its frequent petitions to Congress, I believe it has never presented the presence of free colored persons as one of its grievances. But why should emancipation south, send the free people north? People, of any color, seldom run, unless there be something to run from. Heretofore colored people, to some extent, have fled north from bondage; and now , perhaps, from both bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted, they will have neither to flee from. Their old masters will give them wages at least until new laborers can be procured; and the freed men, in turn, will gladly give their labor for the wages, till new homes can be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race. This proposition can be trusted on the mutual interests involved. And, in any event, cannot the north decide for itself, whether to receive them?"
Far from being a cry for booting the black race out, it seems more a call for reason and an attempt to calm fears of what would happen once all blacks were free. Lincoln is saying that the threat of a wave of black labor flowing North to take away jobs is nonsense. That once blacks were free then there would be pretty much a status quo. Yes the government would aid those who wanted to emigrate, but those who chose not to should be welcome to live and build their lives right here in the U.S., in the southern states or in the Northern ones. None of the suggestions of the Mitchell document. In all a far different 'gameplan' than what you insist existed.
A central part of the defense's case was the claim that Texas was not a state in the Union and therefore did not enjoy the right to take the issue to the Supreme Court. What the Chief Justice was laying out was the courts grounds for denying that claim. So the Chief Justice was arguing the facts of the case in the part I quoted before turning to the issue of whether the bonds should be paid.
But I'm sure you knew that.
And your support for that claim is? Thousands of blacks during the 19th century did emigrate to Liberia and other places.
And yet you trot out an obscure memo from Mitchell and claim it was the gameplan, in spite of the fact that none of the recommendations was put into effect. If Mitchell was only the 'agent' then why was he writing policy? If he was writing policy then why wasn't it enacted?
know, it was poured into your head as a child and you have no control over it, but still, you should try.
Actually, what was poured into my head as a child was that Lincoln was a saint, that protectionist tariffs were good, that big government was our friend, and that the people of the several states delegated away all their sovereignty. The I abandoned my childish thinking and discovered the truth.
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