Posted on 01/06/2005 8:00:30 AM PST by cougar_mccxxi
Child labor was the equivalent of slavery for the time the child was forced to work, only age-emancipation could set him free.
Do you have evidence that Lincoln (or his wife while they were married) ever owned slaves?
Unbelievable.
I thought you guys might be interested. This thread needs an injection of common sense and historical accuracy.
What evidence do YOU site? The financial ledgers at that time indicated that the cost to keep a slave population was through the roof. Contrary to Disneyland fantasies about slavery, it cost money to keep them. (Oh my!) An expensive piece of property needs to be maintained if it is to be any use, and slaves are no different. The cost just to feed a slave population skyrocketed in the late '50s.
What machinery was that?
Oh, golly gee, let me think: how about the steam engine? modern thrashing machinery, milling machinery, ....Non farmers don't think of these things. What was the north MAKING if not modern machinery?
The cotton gin made slavery profitable by automating the removal of the seeds from the cotton boll.
But you already said slavery was profitable BEFORE machinery, which is it? Another point here is that it still cost the farms money to maintain the slaves.
"Do you have evidence that Lincoln (or his wife while they were married) ever owned slaves?"
GEEZ LOUISE!!!! Are you blind or merely illiterate? I never said Lincoln or Mary Todd ever owned slaves.
I said Mary Todd's FATHER owned slaves!
Maybe we understand Jim Crow to be two different things, but my understanding is that southern segregationist laws stayed on the books until the 60's.
But I fully agree that Yankees could be even more racist than their Reb counterparts. When Klan membership peaked in the 1920's, it was strongest in those notorious Deep South States of Illinois and Indiana. Northern enlightenment often lasted only until the first black migrant worker showed up on their street.
I owe my soul to the company store.....
No he was suggesting that the states were sovereign nations who delegated authority to the federal government with the express reservation that the states had the right to resume such delegated powers any time the federal government sought to overstep it's authority.
Do you mean that the Constitution is a legal contract that is binding on both parties and void if one party fails to keep it's commitments?
Let's grant that, then.
What relevance does that have?
Most of Lincoln's wealth didn't come by way of dowry but rather from his very lucrative law practice, particularly from railroad clients.
But perhaps you are trying to get at Lincoln's views on the subject: that he wasn't so enlightened or that he was a hypcrite. I don't see the hypocrisy, as I said, though I think it might be better directed at men like Jefferson who railed against slavery while keeping slaves himself. But as for Lincoln, his views certainly evolved. Convinced from an early age that chattel slavery was wrong, he took until the final eyars of his life to begin approaching a point where he started considering blacks as something like real equals. You can find all kinds of apparent racist comments from Lincoln in the 1850's. Frederick Douglas, however, noted the enormous growth in Lincoln's views on race by the time of his Second Inaugural.
LOL, just a bunch of RECONQUISTAS exercising their RIGHT to "take back" what is "theirs"!
None of the anti-southern federalists will even notice.
"But I don't think most Founders would have understood the states in 1789 as "sovereign nations."
You are incorrect. Every state constitution contained a clause providing for the re-assertion of that states sovereignity in the event of an over reaching federal government.
Until the mid 1800's the right of succession was never seriously questioned. Many states had threatened succession including New York and Masachussetts.
Even during the Civil War many people even in the north asserted that succession was constitutional. In fact this was one of the issues which moved Lincoln to shut down many northern newspapers and jail writers and editors.
It is true that several of the founders argued against succession in these early cases but only from the standpoint of what was best for the state - never was it argued that succession was on it's face illegal or unconstitutional.
If the founders had argued that succession was somehow illegal they would have been undermining their own assertions against England
States' Rights are nice in theory. But then some State comes along and legalizes medical marijuana or assisted suicide, and we can clearly see the folly in the idea.
Yes, some state does something stupid and only the citizens of that state who are stupid enough to stay suffer. Making everything national just means every issue is a fight to the death winner take all struggle(like abortion). If that's the way you want it, fine, but don't whine about all the divisiveness and maybe actual war.
"Do you mean that the Constitution is a legal contract that is binding on both parties and void if one party fails to keep it's commitments?"
That certainly seems to be the way the founders viewed it. Every state retained the right to reassert it's sovereignity under certain conditions. Even Texas included this right in it's constitution when they joined the union in 1845
Indeed. Slavery was very profitable for southerners. Any perceived threat to that insititution was certainly serious in their view.
Slavery was abhorrently wrong. Were slaves as consistently ill treated as northern factory workers? Debatable.
It seems to me that the War of Northern Agression, in the larger sense, achieved in dissolving the very thing the constitution largely set out to define, that being that our freedoms a duely derived from God, and those rights, once ursurped from the people, then dismantled the rights the people granted the states. The ancillary changes of emancipation proclaimaition, though desirable and a good outflow of the conflict, were well on their way to being constitutionally recognized, as this concern against slavery had gone on since long before we fought the war of independence. Federalism continues as a juggarnaut against those freedoms which only God can give or take. Those given to the individual can be taken by force and that is what the federal government is...It is raw force, becoming more and more unrestrained. Starie decisis is one of our biggest enemies. Our congressional leaders need to represent the people.
In a true constitutional republic, that would be a right reserved to that state. However, enactmaent of a particular law or legislation does not prevent citizens from either choosing to stay, or choosing to go.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.