Posted on 02/02/2009 6:39:40 PM PST by rogernz
“I’m a southerner whose family has been in the south many generations and that’s why I’ve got no use for the Confederacy. They did much evil to my part of the world. It helps to realize that the South is not the Confederacy and vice-versa. I think a lot of southerners get them mixed up.
I don’t think there was anything legit about the the secession, not constitutionally, nor in the hasty rabble-rousing by which it was promoted and not in the political dirty tricks resorted to when all else failed. It proved its illegitimacy when it failed to sustain itself in the trial by fire. “
As a fellow southerner who has had family in the south on both sides of the family since before the revolution I fully endorse your post. I have little use for lost causers. The confederacy is nothing to be proud of and was never anything noble. At its base they left the union over slavery. People like to argue about states right but its pretty clear which right was the paramount one when it came to the decision to leave the union. I’m glad the confederacy lost and see Davis and his ilk as little more than traitors.
It was a mixed bag. The Pope was in favor of an agrarian life-style that he felt was more humane and, like many people around him, felt that African Americans needed a paternalistic treatment to be introduced to American life. Granted, they were being brutalized, but both the Pope and, before him, Jefferson regretted this and felt that while slavery was not in itself good, the African slaves had been brought to this country and were an established fact here and therefore it was the responsibility of the people who had brought them here to maintain them and educate them so that one day they could be fully mature in American lifee.
Interestingly, the Protestants had a special theory to justify slavery. It was called dual creationism, and the theory was that God had created whites first and then created blacks to be their servants.
The Catholic bishop here in St. Augustine was a Frenchman, Agustin Verot, who had been on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. St A was not a diocese at that point and he was here as the vicar for the bishop of Savannah, only becoming bishop after the Civil War, in 1870 when St A became a diocese.
When the Confederacy lost, Verot adapted and actually even brought in a religious order to teach black children. These children were virtually adrift because they had never been educated, many had been sold without their families or had been sold with only their mothers and in any case had never received any education or training for living as non-slaves and independent workers in an employee culture.
When Verot went to Vatican I in 1869, before St A became a diocese, he went with two ideas: the Church should reject the “dual creation” theory; and the Church should have a positive attitude towards science.
The latter was well received by the heirarchs in attendance, but the rejection of “dual creation” theory never even came to a vote because it was something totally unknown to the European Catholic cardinals and bishops and, in fact, to Europeans in general. They had no idea what Bishop Verot was talking about and simply moved on to other things.
Actually, all of these matters had been resolved when Spain started exploring places where suddenly Europeans found people who didn’t look or act like them. It was resolved at that time, about 3 centuries earlier, that they were all human beings. But since Protestants didn’t accept Rome’s teachings in the first place and also had no central authority of their own who could tell them how to deal with this, regional and “ecclesial” (that is, one Protestant sect as opposed to another) interpretations sprang up, and this was a significant factor in confusing the way that the young US dealt with slavery.
Opus Dei was founded during 1928.making it unlikely that the organization was involved with the assassination of President Lincoln.
I don’t defend the confederacy I am just looking for the truth as to what happened.
however, I am beginning to not believe the view that the south left because of slavery.
I recently watched a video of Thomas DiLorenzo on youtube. http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=nbFty9nZUac this was very interesting.
See previous comment ... thanks
LOL. And here I thought that the Pope was infallible. Plus, African slaves were not here to be educated and be allowed to "mature" in America life- they were here to be owned as slaves, plain and simple. If the Pope supported this evil, then he is just as guilty as the slave-owners.
Maybe he did read the part about rejecting an all powerful federal government?
It’s amazing that so many good people of otherwise sound conservative thinking have such a blind eye to such a greedy power grabbing gang of politicians as those behind the CSA. I think it might be partially because the brave and admirable personal qualities of many reb soldiers from Lee on down blinds them to the incredible rottenness of the political Confederacy. The South truly rose again when the Confederacy was sent into the dustbin of history.
Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Although individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential, taken together they constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo's credibility as a historian. A few examples indicate the scope of the problem: DiLorenzo's own article on Lincoln as "The Great Centralizer" appeared in the The Independent Review in 1998, not in 1988 (p. vii); Lincoln advised sending freed slaves to Liberia in a speech in 1854, not "during the war" (pp. 16-17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an "amendment," and Thomas Jefferson was not among the framers of the Constitution (pp. 69-70); Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242).
Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. DiLorenzo claims, for example, that in the four years "between 1860 and 1864, population in the thirteen largest Northern cities rose by 70 percent" (p. 225). On the face of it, this statistic is absurd and defies common sense, and sure enough, the source DiLorenzo cites says that the growth occurred "in fifteen years." Page 11 says that Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon was quoting his own recollections of Lincoln, but he really was quoting another biographer. A few pages later (p. 14), DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln, in his eulogy for Henry Clay, "mustered his best rhetorical talents to praise Clay," but all of the examples that follow come from the "beautiful language" of a newspaper that Lincoln was quoting at length. Moreover, Lincoln's supposed comment about the "deportation" of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18). In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln "admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure" (p. 37). His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation (not a letter) that portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter (not Chase) had with Lincoln, and at no point do these recollections sustain DiLorenzo's summary of them. Moreover, in the reference for this section, DiLorenzo misidentifies the title of his source as Paul Angle's The American Reader, when in fact the jumbled material comes from Angle's The Lincoln Reader. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words.
Further examination of the endnotes leads into a labyrinth of errors beyond the ingenuity of Ariadne's thread. On page 281, for instance, note 1 cites page 66 of David Donald's Lincoln, when in fact the quotation comes from page 66 of Donald's Lincoln Reconsidered. On the next page, note 7 cites Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, but the quotation comes from the debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858. Moreover, hardly a single citation of the Basler edition of Lincoln's Collected Works includes the volume number (see notes 25, 26, and 33), and several of the remaining citations of the Collected Works turn out in fact to be references to Basler's Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (notes 24, 31, and 44). Note 9 on page 282 again cites Lincoln's 1858 debate with Douglas at Ottawa, but the quotations this time actually come from Lincoln's 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay. Note 14 leads down another blind alley to no trace of the quoted material. On page 287, note 3 cites the wrong page number from Donald's Lincoln, and although note 4 immediately following says "ibid.," it actually refers to Basler's Abraham Lincoln. On page 293, DiLorenzo cites Federalist No. 36 as his source, but the quotation comes from Federalist No. 46. Sad to say, this catalog of errors is only a sampling. Readers looking further into the matter will find incorrect titles and subtitles as well as misspelled publishers' names. Obviously, in view of these problems, the maze of endnotes does not provide the "meticulous documentation" promised by the book's dust jacket.
Infallibility applies to doctrine, not to thought on social issues. The Pope knew only what people told him. Even Jefferson said that slavery was wrong, but that Africans were not prepared to deal with the society into which they had been brought against their will and thus it was the responsibility of whites to educate them and protect them from exploitation.
Jefferson seems to have done that with his slaves, and there probably were other slave owners who did. However, the worst ones (South Carolina, particularly) were people who didn’t even regard slaves as human. Certain Protestant counties in the South forbade (Protestant) religious instruction or baptism of slaves, threatening people who attempted to preach to slaves with the death penalty. This was never carried out, but the reason for it was that the slave owners felt that if a slave could be preached to and baptized, he might become a full human being and would have to be treated differently.
The Protestant “two creations” theory was an attempt to justify this, and because Protestants had no central authority to tell them this was nonsense, they had to fight it out between them.
Then why did the reb gang put up so much effort into setting up a second oppressive federal government? Before the CSA expired, people like Georgia's Gov. Brown were already having enough of the central Confederate government. Tyranny is as much a burden from Richmond as it is from Washington.
I think the issue is a separation leading to an idealized conception not closely conforming to reality. Pius was separated by distance, contemporary reb admirers are separated by time and/or regional defensiveness. The details of the Deep South civilization were unpleasant, unnatural and oppressed by a constant fear of racial conflict and insurrection. Not a real agrarian ideal except for those raking in the big bucks on slave labor.
It was not the only reason but it was the most important. I’ve yet to see a credible case made that we would have had the war without that issue in play.
If you do an intenet search and find the secession justifications of the seceding states, you’ll see that these documents are dominated by worry about the future of slavery. Other issues were minor irritants.
The Confederacy fought against an all powerful Federal government. I know you dont like the idea but its simply a fact.
Yes slavery was wrong but its reallt a moot point considering its would have been done away with before 1900 without a shot fired, much like Brazil.
That doesn’t change the fact that the North fought for a dictorial Federal government that now dictates when & where your children can pray, whether your community supports abortion & soon will force gay marriage on your children.
Now go celebrate that yankee doodle dandy.
I think a point was made earlier regarding the Confederacy itself being an 'all-powerful' form of government.
That was General Grant
Just a historical FYI rahbert, the South was not entirely the “pro-slavery side.” The North was pro-slavery too at the time. Some of the northern states were slave states, Lincoln said the war had nothing to do with slavery, and General U.S. Grant said that if he thought the war was about freeing the slaves, he would turn in his sword and fight for the other side. Grant was also a slave owner before, during and after the war.
In contrast, General Robert E. Lee was an abolitionist. Many Southerners shared his views. President Jefferson Davis requested land owners to promise their slaves freedom in exchange for military service. The abolition movement was growing in the South before the war. The 13th Amendment that legally freed the slaves, (not the Emancipation Proclamation), was ratified by many Southern states before many Northern states.
The historical fact is that the Civil War was a conflict between TWO slave nations - the USA and the CSA. Granted, the USA had already banned slavery in some states, but the same movement was growing in some CSA states as well. Historical revisionists have spent a little over 100 years trying to paint the Civil War as some idealistic holy crusade against the injustice of slavery. That image doesn’t hold up to the historical facts. The Civil War was mainly about money, particularly taxes and resources. What the South did was no different than what the Founding Fathers did during the American Revolution. Both were acts of rebellion and armed insurrection. Both attempted to establish free and independent nations. Both were dominated by slave economies. The only difference between them is this. In the American Revolution the rebels won. In the American Civil War they didn’t.
Opus Dei didn’t exist during the American Civil War.
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