Posted on 10/06/2002 9:15:34 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Edited on 05/07/2004 9:00:23 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
As commander of the Confederate Cavalry, Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart was a larger-than-life figure best known today for his daring raids and reconnaissance missions -- at times in Union territory.
Despite his reputation for flamboyance and derring-do, James Ewell Brown Stuart was also an intelligent, well-educated, faithful husband and father who spent only a small part of his time as the Army of Northern Virginia's chief of cavalry raiding Northern territory, according to historians and students of his life.
(Excerpt) Read more at publicopiniononline.com ...
Try again, Double D. In the first place his name is Ronald Lee Ermey, not Robert. In the second place he was born in Emporia, Kansas which was in the North the last time I checked. Try doing a little research of your own before criticizing others.
Making God's decisions for him, are we double D? What if you're wrong? Will you turn around at the Pearly Gates and head off down below?
Robert Lee Ermey is a Southerner and a real Marine warrior. You can't emulate him
At least Ive bee called a maggot. Have You?
Walt
Jefferson Davis, white slave owner.
If he can call me 'maggot' I can can call him Robert.
Walt
That is redundant.
Buit since you seem never to have heard the word 'pogue' until I mentioned it the other day, I assume you are insulting me vicariously for people who -have- served in the United States military, but find themselves strangely drawn to the losers' side.
Walt
Ho, ho, ho. Aren't we feeling clever this morning.
Walt
Here's something else from the Clay eulogy you seem to have forgotten:
"If they would repress all tendencies towards liberty, and ultimate emancipation, they must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of this society. They must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. They must renew the slave trade with all its train of atrocities. They must suppress the workings of British philanthropy, seeking to meliorate the condition of the unfortunate West Indian slave.
They must arrest the career of South American deliverance from thraldom. They must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world---pointing the way to their rights, their liberties, and their happiness. And when they have achieved all those purposes their work will be yet incomplete. They must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason, and the love of liberty. Then, and not till then, when universal darkness and despair prevail, can you perpetuate slavery, and repress all sympathy, and all humane, and benevolent efforts among free men, in behalf of the unhappy portion of our race doomed to bondage.''
I didn't say it first, but if you can say that whites and blacks do or can get together in this country in perfect harmoy even now, then you know more than Lincoln did. When you call him a white separatist, you are applying 21st century moral judgments against a 19th person.
But as you have an agenda, and don't seek a balanced or fair interpretation of these events, that is not very surprising.
I say you have an agenda; you make it very plain yourself. When you post these quotes about colonization, you deny the context of them, which invalidates your interpretation and discredits you personally. It discredits you because you continuously return to this interpretation, although more reasonable interpretations have been pointed out to you.
You know full well that President Lincoln never suggested that anyone be forced out of the country. You know he refused to attempt to gain political advantage in 1864; he refused to revoke or modify the Emancipation Proclamation -- in my view his single most unsordid act. You know full well that he advocated voting rights for black soldiers, and that he told Frederick Douglass that there was no man in the country whose opinion he valued more.
When Lincoln was suggesting and advocating colonization, he was faced with a much worse alternative - national dissolution and civil war. It is no surprise at all that given those alternatives he cast about for something less destructive and devastating.
You know that President Lincoln refused to countenance trason trials even for the confederate leaders, and that he favored a soft peace. And yet you still excoriate him.
That says a lot more about you than it does him.
Walt
"Mr, Clay many, many years ago . . . told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us. ...I call attention to the fact that in a preeminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work: blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man, but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of Ohio Republicans, or Democrats , . . that there is now going or among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject."
This government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of slavery impairs the general welfare. . . , I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive-slave law, because the Constitution requires us as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the out spreading of the institution. . . . We must prevent the revival of the Africa slave-trade, and the enacting by Congress of a territorial slave code. We must prevent each of these things being done by either Congresses or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses an courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole con- troversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right. . . .
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fear- lessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contriv- ances wherewith we' are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care, such as the Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, revers- ing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did."
Walt
Is your TV talking to you again, Walt?
Well, I don't feel crabby. Hmmmm, is he six feet tall, 175 lbs. and as pretty as a girl?
Walt
Is your TV talking to you again, Walt?
Well, if I met him, I'm sure he would call me a maggot, if only for old time's sake.
Walt
"Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we' are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care, such as the Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did."
--A. Lincoln
Dude rocks, doesn't he?
Walt
One reason for the fire-eaters' success was that they didn't simply parrot one line of argument. Some stressed slavery and race, while others downplayed them -- especially when the hope of winning English support was still alive -- in favor of economic or constitutional arguments or state sovereignty or Southern nationalism.
We are justified in viewing slavery and the anxieties surrounding its expansion or extinction as the major factors in the coming of war, because other sectional conflicts in American were generally resolved peacefully through the political process, but that doesn't mean slavery was the only topic of conversation or that there weren't other questions at issue. Racial politics would grow more pronounced after the war and the abolition of slavery, once the chains of bondage had been broken and new means of segregation were sought. In the antebellum period race didn't always have to be dealt with so directly. The issue of race was subjected or ordered or contained by the institution of slavery, and slavery and race were an important part of other ideas and watchwords of the time. That's not to say that slavery or race was the key to everything or that people were being deceptive or insincere, or that they didn't pursue their own goals and projects which they understood differently from us, just that one can't wholly dismiss slavery in discussions of the era.
At the time of your quote, Wigfall saluted the new prosperous King Cotton, and spoke of economic obstacles that the North put in the way of Southern economic development. In the same period he talked on several occasions about a state's right to leave the union for any reason or no reason. He also spoke of secret abolitionist societies allegedly stirring up trouble in Texas. He refered to the Republicans -- always the "Black Republicans" -- as a party of the "non-slaveholding states," whose principles were offensive and dangerous to the slaveholding states. If he said North and South or agricultural and industrial one might claim that slavery wasn't on his mind, but to frame the dissention as being one between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, suggests that he wasn't indifferent or unconcerned about slavery. Some weeks later, in a clash with Stephen Douglas he discursed on colonial history and slavery among the biblical Hebrews, and the biblical support for slavery.
Latter-day Rockwellite free marketeers want to keep secessionist agitation against the tariff and throw away the even more passionate anger at the violations of the Fugitive Slave Law and the demand for still stricter enforcement of slavery. But that can't be done cleanly. The same people were passionate about both questions at the same time and regarded the refusal to return runaways as every bit as much a theft as wholly Constitutional protective tariffs. Even if one gives Wigfall the benefit of the benefit of the doubt, that subjectively slavery wasn't important to him personally -- which is unlikely -- there's still the objective question of just why secession and war came at that moment and not any other time. And those who reduce the Republican belief in Union to the Whig economic program or a scheme for enrichment, surely can't ignore the material interests and conception of property that would underlie and be promoted by the new Confederacy.
If you can argue that subjectively Wigfall had no liking for slavery -- there's no evidence for that -- still, slavery would be the base of the new country he envisioned. Wigfall's desire to create a new country, a powerful new force freed from Northern interference was strongly, overwhelmingly emotional and deeply felt. If he would have been willing to give up slavery, or if he differed in any regard from his fellow militants on the subject, if he would have been any gentler to gradual compensated emancipation than to any other obstacle in the progress of the new cotton empire, he could have given some indication at some time, and so far as I can see he did not.
Our views of the causes of wars tend to be idealistic and rational: our own side fights for ideals, the other for rational calculations of gain. But in fact, emotional and "irrational" factors can be very important. That's certainly true of the Civil War. The 1850s and 1860s saw passions take over from rational factors. Of course there were roughly rational disputes and much idealism, but also pride, anger, arrogance, rage, vengeance and other emotions. Wigfall's taunt to the North, "Your flag has been insulted; redress it, if you will dare. You have submitted to it for two months, and you will submit to it forever," is a pretty good indication of the mentality, or rather emotionality, that produced the war. It's also a good indication of why all our rationalistic arguments and moralistic interpretations don't get at the real atmosphere of the Civil War era.
Were Wigfall truly a leader in Congress, there would have been much more written about him by now. He certainly spoke often in the last pre-Sumter session of the Senate, but he was only in Washington for less than two years. Most of the existing record suggests that Wigfall was too emotional and erratic to play much of a role in government. If you find his ideas palatable today, it may be because his role at the time was rather peripheral and his paper trail more limited than that of his associates.
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