Posted on 11/03/2015 6:52:26 AM PST by don-o
The Civil War is, as Shelby Foote noted, at the crossroads of our being. Looked at one way, it marked the end of a long struggle against slavery and the beginning of a long one for civil rights and racial equality. Looked at another, it marked the end of limited government and the beginning of the encroaching, ever-present Leviathan that exists today. These memories can be both in sync and in conflict. After all, it was the deployment of strong government in the form of a dominant army and the passage of federal amendments that played a large role in the freeing of American slaves. And yet, as the government's mechanisms for intruding into the lives of the American people increased from the 1860s on, racial discrimination and segregation remained entrenched - moral suasion had at least as much to do with a broad acceptance of racial equality as big government did.
(Excerpt) Read more at theimaginativeconservative.org ...
I wasn't arguing anything, merely noting that when people say the war wasn't about slavery that's not so. Slavery was the root of the issue. If there was no slavery there would have been no wedge between north and south other than regional differences. But Slavery was the poison pill that made it inevitable that the USA would fail or would be reborn through fire and blood.
But yeah, I do feel that your right to do whatever you want has limits. You can speak about anything you want whether I agree with it or not. But you cannot enslave someone else. If you think there are circumstances where saying "you can't own slaves" is wrong because nobody has the right to put limits on your freedom and you don't see any contradiction in that position, well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
I regard it as nonsense because it is nonsense.
You can call Lincoln a liar if you want, but he said the war was about "Preserving the Union", and not about ending slavery.
The fact of the war is that the Union motivation was to preserve the Union. The lie of the war is your constant claim that Lincoln started it.
Ping
IOW, it wasn’t ever about freeing the slaves. Whether they got freed or not was inconsequential. What it was about was preserving the Union (by force.) If the slaves stayed slaves, OK. If they all got freed, OK. Whatever served the interest of preserving and expanding the power of DC.
All in the name of liberty, of course.
Lincoln said so himself.
Thirteenth Amendment perpetuated the absolute outlawing of slavery as practiced before the War of Northern Aggression and that is clearly about the only good result of that conflict.
The Fourteenth Amendment has served as the Magna Carta of Leviathan government that oppresses ALL of us, North and South, black and white and every other color to this very day and especially in this very day under Obozo and the shamefully leaderless and supine Republican Congress. The Fourteenth is a Pandora's Box for meddlesome, troublesome busybodies. In retrospect, I don't think very favorably of Barry Goldwater because he was a rampaging pro-abort and social revolutionary enemy of civilized moral standards otherwise, but, in casting his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the limited basis that the federales had no business ordering the integration of restaurants and hotels, he was right. Nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment allows, much less demands, the modern interpretation that it trumps property rights. But the radicals of Lincoln's time like Thaddeus Stephens and his ilk were having none of that and they established "Reconstruction" to tyrannize the Southern people who were not "of color." Those who lean on justice to rationalize 660,000 or so dead young Americans ought to have practiced justice and they did not. Only quiet resistance by Southern Bourbon Democrats (and in spite of the horrendous behavior of the KKK) brought some respite from Northern tyranny.
The Fifteenth Amendment provided for the voting rights of ex-slaves (at least the men) but was honored more in the breach than in the performance until recent times.
As to the meaning of the Declaration, you are wrong. That cherished document was adopted by the Continental Congress including many slaveholders but ONLY after the slaveholders obtained the understanding that "all men are created equal" did not include slaves whom they wrongly regarded as less than human. It would have saved post-1860 America a lot of grief and a lot of suffering if it had been otherwise but history, warts and all, is what it is and not what we would have preferred it to have been.
In our time, the left defines the unborn as not fully human beings and therefore as the "property" of their mothers but not their fathers and able to be disposed of in incinerators, crematoria or given over via a dumpster to Mitt Romney's little dead baby disposal profit center or "parted out" for profit as we have recently seen. That the unborn are not human is regarded as a convenient fiction by honest baby-killers and an article of a perverted faith by more simple-minded proponents of baby-killing.
Likewise, slavery was nothing of which to be proud. The Southland defined slaves as outside the human race. It was WRONG to seek to continue and perpetuate slavery and it certainly did so seek if you review the language of the secession resolutions of the respective Confederate states.
Finally, NOTHING in the Declaration of Independence deprived any of the thirteen states of a right to withdraw from the Union just as those who wrote the Declaration had withdrawn from British citizenship. Actually the right of secession seems NECESSARILY implied.
The Continental Congress ceased to be when the government of the largely forgotten Articles of Confederation was established and, in spite of the clear provisions of the Articles that no essential changes be made without UNANIMOUS consent of the states, a constitutional convention was held, drastic changes proposed and ratified by less than all of the states and the Articles passed into history by being ignored. Our current government took effect before ratification by several states who LATER ratified to avoid being orphaned militarily and on foreign policy.
One more observation: If he were alive today, John Caldwell Calhoun would have the Republican Congressional "leadership" hauled before a firing squad. Calhoun did not even get along with Andrew Jackson when he was Jackson's VP. I can only imagine what he would have done to the GOPEE leaders of today who have not a principle to their names. Calhoun sometimes had wrong principles but he was ALWAYS principled, right or wrong! No one will credibly accuse Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush the Elder, Ford, Nixon, McConnell, Cockroach, Cornyn, Alexander, Corker, Boehner Cantor, McCarthy, Ryano and so many, many others of having principles. They only keep their hands perpetually ready for lobbyists' cash and for Muffy's trust fund. Souls for sale! Ka Ching!
This article itself is a great and balanced and nuanced work, relying on the insights of giants of our movement: Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, etc. and not pygmies like Richard Lowry. More, please!
Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, anything named Clinton, and most of all, Obozo. Each of these are emblematic of TODAY’s Demonratic Party.
Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, anything named Clinton, and most of all, Obozo. Each of these are emblematic of TODAY’s Demonratic Party.
Your #50 is superb!
2. Make the proper distinctions. Each of the 13 original states that authored the Declaration allowed slavery and did so allow it at the time the present Constitution was proposed and "enacted." Further, they still allowed slavery when the Bill of Rights, including Amendment 10, was adopted and when the last straggling states (of the original 13) joined the Union. No one claims that the Declaration required perpetuation of slavery. Amendment 10 allowed each and every state, by its own voluntary action, to abolish slavery but only within its own borders, and gave absolutely no such power to the federales and indeed prohibited the federales explicitly from exercising ANY power not enumerated in the Constitution.
Of course.
Thanks for the ping and thanks for bringing up the "inconvenient truth" on racial attitudes of that time. The fact that the abolitionists got their way by war opened the door to all manner of mischief. I hear it today, even from so-called Conservatives.
And that mischief is the promise from the fedgov to "make my life better."
I cringe every time I hear that, however it is couched.
On the issue of slavery. They wrote into the constitution a specific protection for the institution of slavery, and as you say, they did it because they needed the Southern States so that they could be strong enough to resist England's efforts to reacquire them.
But the bottom line is they did it. They compromised on the issue of slavery. They made a devil's bargain.
It's disingenuous to compare that with the CSA, which claimed slavery as its fundamental founding principle and expressly forbade its member states from curtailing the practice.
And the US Constitution expressly forbade other states from interfering with the practice as well. Like it or not, the deal they signed meant they had to protect slavery. All of them.
Another staggeringly facile comparison. The American Revolution was fought to increase liberty for people on this continent, whereas the CSA was expressly founded on the belief that some human beings didn't deserve to be free.
Don't lecture me on being facile when you ignore the fact that the Declaration of Independence asserted that the 13 slave holding states had a right to be independent whether they practiced slavery or not.
You are deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room; That the nation was founded on the principle that slave owning states had a right to leave a larger Union government.
You don't want to contemplate this point, because you have absolutely no response for it, because there *IS* no valid rebuttal of this point. You also overlook the fact that Lincoln was going to let the South keep slavery, but he was not going to let it keep Independence. You are trying to argue his ex post facto justification as an ante bellum justification, and this is simply intellectually dishonest.
Lincoln had no intention of uprooting slavery when he started that war.
Look, I get it. Nobody wants to think that their grandfathers fought (and died) in the service of the most evil nation this continent has ever seen.
No, you don't get it. None of my ancestors were in this country until after 1900. None of my people took part in the war. They also didn't settle in a Southern State, and I myself am not from a Southern State.
What this means is that I am objective. That I don't have a dog in the fight, and therefore can clearly see things that biased people, such as yourself, cannot perceive.
The Declaration give absolute carte blanche to any states seeking independence. It does not make exceptions for states who's morality of which you disapprove. Said another way, their right to leave the union is not contingent upon your moral approval. That right is inherent, and is in fact the basis on which *THIS* nation was created. If that right is not legitimate, than this nation is not legitimate either.
You don't like comparisons to the American war of independence from Britain because such an objective analysis simply doesn't support your favorite conclusion; That a larger, more powerful government had the right to march massive armies into the lands of people asserting independence, and subjugate them.
No, I get it. It sounds much better to say that you were protecting people of which those Union states never really gave a sh*t about in the first place, but who could serve the purpose of justifying ex post facto, the horrible thing which was done.
And then there is the matter of those five Union slave states which continued to practice slavery until nearly the end of the war. Have you ever heard the concept of the mote in your brothers eye while you have a beam in your own?
Question 1. How would "they" have "ended" slavery in those "five" Union slave states?
Question 2. Can you name those "five" Union slave states?
No it wasn't. Did you not read the letter Lincoln wrote? He specifically says the war is not about slavery, it is about "Preserving the Union."
You can't have a War about Slavery, when the disposition of Slavery is optional. The war was about Independence, because that was the one thing which was NOT OPTIONAL.
Look, I get it why you want the war to be about Slavery, because supporting a war to crush other people's independence does not sound so very nice in your own ears, but the fact remains that Lincoln was going to continue slavery in the South, but he was going to stop their Independence.
The War was about Independence. Yes, their reasons for seeking independence was to protect their economic interests in slavery, but the reason the North fought them was not to end slavery, but to end their Independence.
Their independence was costing the Union a fortune. The Union was fine with slavery so long as they were reaping some significant profits from it.
What was the Union's intentions on slavery at the start of the war? Let's see if you can also tell the truth about that.
Clement Vallandigham was a former pro slavery Democrat Congressman and a leader of the pro-Confederate Copperhead faction in Ohio. He openly advocated for Confederate victory. The Confederates did not send him back... they sent him to Canada where he worked with confederate secret agents seeking to create revolution in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.
By an definition, they guy was guilty of treason.
Thank you. I think it is beneficial to remind people just how closely the 13 states seeking independence in 1776 resembled the 11 states seeking independence in 1861.
I am certain the break away states of the confederacy regarded what they did as no different from what Jefferson, Washington and Adams did.
Well, if your claim about the war being fought over slavery was correct, they would have sent in a 35,000 man invasion force led by Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell to take over their capitol city.
That's what they did when they invaded the South. Again, their supply lines would have been very short invading the slave state of Maryland.
Question 2. Can you name those "five" Union slave states?
Sure, but I think you will better remember it if you went to the trouble of looking them up yourself. :)
Truth is a novel concept when dealing with your posts so I will try to provide a good example and perhaps you will follow it. One needs to look at Lincoln and the Republican Party's intentions towards slavery at the time of the election first. The Republicans came into office recognizing that there was nothing they could do about slavery where it existed. A constitutional amendment to end it would require 36 states to ratify, an impossible task. Their goal was to prevent the expansion of slavery to the territories, and to let it just wither and die out over time where it still existed. By the time the South started their war I'm not aware of any change in that position by either Lincoln or the Republicans.
Happy?
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