Free Republic

+1.

These bags of sh*t need to be deported back to their sh*thole.

Some people feel very strongly that illegal aliens should have the right to come into this country, vote, and obtain benefits.

These people believe they have the moral high ground.

Do we go with people who claim to have the moral high ground, or do we go with what is the actual law?

The minority of people in the 1850s who broke the law to do what they felt was right, should have pushed to change the law to allow them to legally do what they were doing.

They should have worked through the democratic process to change the law, not defy it.

The United States should look at this as an act of war.

I'm arguing they should have stuck with the original draft, which is much clearer regarding their intent.

I've studied this issue. I learned why they changed the verbiage, and it was a stupid reason. The original draft makes it very clear that illegals don't get 14th amendment citizenship. But then Senator Howard found out there was this thing called "Temporary Allegiance", and so he urged that the verbiage be changed to its current form.

There is a concept in law called "temporary allegiance", but him learning about it only added confusion to what would have otherwise worked better.

"Worth the risk" in other people's lives. Most liberals have no problems letting other people get killed to advance their ideas.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Which is meaningless.

Oh stop. They seceded from the Union so that they might govern themselves instead of sending 65 million dollars per year to Washington DC that got spent in the North.

The Confederates were going to get hundreds of millions of dollars per year simply from being separated from the United States.

Also, President Lincoln urged the ratification of the Corwin Amendment, which passed the House and Senate by a 2/3rds majority and was sent to the states for ratification.

The Corwin Amendment guaranteed permanent slavery in the United States, and our government voted for that.

So the fight wasn't over slavery, the fight was over money. Specifically the money they kept taking from the South year after year.

The North wanted to keep it coming, and the South wanted to stop paying it.

It's that simple.

Everything else is just made up propaganda.

They did in the debates, but they didn't make it clear at all in the text of the amendment.

Ping to progressing America.

A point I wish to make is that in the debates, they referred to this amendment as "naturalization." It is simply a form of naturlization, and it is not at all the same thing as a natural citizen.

If a person is only born a citizen as a result of the 14th amendment, they are "naturalized" at birth.

I doubt they will get it right. The legal colleges are teaching it all wrong.

Another case in which the Jury needs to go to jail because they did not take their responsibility seriously.

This is how they lie. Off year elections never get the votes or percentages of the Presidential election, but they are presenting this information with the insinuation that Trump caused this decline in percentage when it is just a normal condition for off year elections.

Ordering a war fleet to attack someone *IS* starting a war.

A majority of the people of the United States elected an executive who could not ignore the will of the people who voted for him, particularly related to the situation presented to him gy the plantation states.

The majority of the Northern population wanted to let the South go in peace. There is ample proof of this in the Northern newspaper articles from 1860 and early 1861.

The intention of his armed forces was to preserve the Union of States, not destroy it,

Same intent of the Red Coats, but the Declaration of Independence says they have a right to leave. The same right to leave as the original 13 colonies.

As you say, The Southern influential rebellious leaders in their obstinacy had been gathering forces to attack,

You don't seem to know what happened. The issue of the forts came up before Southern secession was voted on and approved by the people of those states, and Secretary of War, John Floyd had assured the governor of South Carolina that all the forts surrounding the entrance to Charleston harbor would be turned over to South Carolina.

Everyone thought the matter was resolved until in the middle of the night, Major Anderson spiked and burned all the cannons in fort Moultrie, took several boats and then moved his forces to seize Fort Sumter. The people of Charleston woke up to discover a belligerent military force had seized the fortress at the entrance to their harbor. They saw it as hostile.

Anderson held the workmen there hostage for a bit, and his officers discussed turning the guns of fort Sumter onto the city of Charleston.

So the first hostile moves were made by the Union, and the Confederates dragging up all those cannons was the response to unprovoked Union hostility.

...in spite of the fact that their slavery plantation system and its economy was unarguably failing;

Failing so bad that it was producing 700 million per year of product (controlled by the North) and providing 60 million into the Federal treasury each year.

The South was sending money and valuable products to the North, and the only reason the South bought any Northern products were because the laws forced them to do so. They would have preferred buying English steel products and machinery, but the protectionist laws made that prohibitively expensive.

...needed the support of the industrialized free states to economically survive.

Yeah, those silly Southern people just didn't understand how badly they needed the Northern products. They weren't smart enough to understand where their own interests lay. Why should they buy everything they needed from France and England at much cheaper prices when they could just buy it from the North at very steep markup prices?

The South fired the first shot, started the war, even invaded the Northern free states, and lost.

Actually, the first shots of the war were by Union soldiers shooting at Southerners at Fort Barrancas in Pensacola. But you want to count General Beauregard firing on Sumter as the start of the war. You just want to ignore the fact Lincoln sent a fleet of warships that had orders to shoot long before General Beauregard did.

But in fact, whether to capitulate and keep the Union, or to start a fight they could not win and lose it; their dying system had to change, and it has.

Nonsense. The Union congress voted by a 2/3rds margin to keep their slavery system intact. The vote was held in March of 1861, shortly before Lincoln's inaugural address. Lincoln actually urged that this permanent slavery amendment be ratified by the states. He said so in his first inaugural.

So the Union government was just fine with keeping all the slavery. They just didn't want to let the South leave, because then the South would stop paying most of their bills.

You are still trying to bring a fracas back alive that was long, long ago lost, dead, and buried. And it cost this nation a great deal of lives and limbs, but also wasted hard-earned resources in and for the destruction.

The consequences of that war are still being felt today. Our gargantuan Federal government is one of those consequences. "Gay marriage", Abortion, ban on prayers in schools, anchor babies, redefining "natural born citizen" and a whole host of other ills the nation suffers today are a consequence of that war.

People just don't know how detrimentally the Civil War has affected everyone's lives since it happened.

"Importance" is in the eye of the beholder. While the South created about 70% of total federal revenues, the government might have been able to make it up simply by taxing the North harder, but the wealthy businessmen of the Northeast, having gotten accustomed to making a lot of money from the South, was not about to meekly accept the loss of those income streams.

As the government was their lapdog, they used it to protect their own interests. Now as you know from history, our country has had many instances where government was doing the bidding of their corporate overlords. Other examples of this are the Phillipines, and in industries such as bananas, rubber, sugar, coal, steel, and so forth.

None of this stuff is directly connected to the civil war, but it represents a habit of allowing corporate interests to set government policy for the nation.

So as I said "Importance" of forcing the South to continue sending money to corporations in the North, is a matter of perspective. If you are receiving that money, it is very mportant.

No it doesn't. That's just a straw you are attempting to grasp to explain why it was reasonable for Lincoln to launch a task force to attack them.

That they would resist was baked into the cake. They regarded the property as their sovereign territory and it was unquestionable that they would resist. They had spent the previous three months moving in artillery from all around, and they had built a floating artillery barge

Anderson had sent Lincoln maps showing all the gun emplacements and what troop levels would be present to man all those guns.

Lincoln knew fully well that his war fleet would trigger a conflict, which is exactly why he sent it.

But you didn't even know about it until I told you about it, did you?

Why is that? Why don't they teach that part of history? Why would they cover up the fact Lincoln sent a fleet of warships to attack them?

If they are covering it up, it is because they are ashamed of it. That they are ashamed of it is tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Lincoln started the war deliberately.

Well firstly, they didn't have the power to solve that. Not legitimately anyways.

And Secondly, have you read the 14th amendment? Have you compared how it was written to other amendments that were written by more sensible people?

It's garbage. It's massively wordy without saying anything comprehensible. (Except the first part.)

And it was illegally "ratified."

You must have read something written by someone else. I said nothing like that.

You have no idea what the United States Navy had in mind, nor can you prove that their mission upon arrival in Southern waters was to attack as their first move, rather than showing a force to bring to mind the consequences, should the Southern forces commence outright aggression rather than to take one last look at what the result would be.

We know exactly what their orders were, because we can find them in the various historical archives. There were several sets of orders involved (including the secret Lincoln orders to Lieutenant Porter) and they boil down to attacking the Confederates. They put the qualifier in there "if resisted", but that was a foregone conclusion that they would be resisted.

Lincoln launched that attack with the full knowledge that it would start a war. The matter was discussed in one of his cabinet meetings (for which we have records) and every member of his cabinet told him that if he launched that fleet of warships against them, it would cause a war. The vast majority of his cabinet were against the idea, but the one guy who was not, voiced the position that we might as well get this war started.

Nonetheless, your fictional "Han Solo" distraction has mo merit in this debate.

It is a perfect analogy. There is nobody who does not believe Han Solo was justified in shooting first. This is *EXACTLY* the situation General Beauregard was in when the first ships of Lincoln's task force arrived.

It is no coincidence that when the Harriet Lane arrived and fired at the Nashville, Beauregard sent word to Anderson that he would refrain from attacking if Anderson would pledge his word not to engage, if there was an exchange of gunfire between Beauregard's forces and those warships with their attack orders.

Anderson responded that he *WOULD* engage if Beauregard fired on any of those ships.

Beauregard's next message to Anderson was that in that case, he had no choice but to open hostilities against Anderson, and that his attack would commence in a few hours.

But I bet you didn't know any of this.

In the end, it was God's Will for the good of a nation claiming liberty and justice for all to have the states reunited,

Is it God's will when Vladimir Lincoln tries to "preserve the Union" by taking back Ukraine? (The Soviet Union, that is.)

It is not "God's will" when a much bigger army overwhelms a much smaller army. That's just the normal outcome from having a bigger army.

I don't see it that way. I would like to throw them all in jail for twisting the 14th into the nonsense they enforce as law.

But they have the power, and so they aren't going to jail for their stupid corrupt manipulation of the 14th.

If only the 14th weren't written in such a way that people can accept them twisting it as they do.

You do absolutely believe the North was more than willing to frustrate the North, because that's the Dred Scott judges now being dominant.

The Dred Scott judges did nothing wrong. The argument of Chief Justice Taney was in fact a sound legal argument based on the laws of that era.

You will notice that decision was never overturned, it was rendered moot by the 14th amendment.

And you believe that the North wanted to frustrate the North through the Dred Scott judges without any evidence at all.

I have neither said nor implied anything like that. That statement is all you.