Posted on 11/26/2009 10:19:55 AM PST by dynachrome
What I think about secession basically is that it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but a dangerous pursuit to advocate publicly. Janet Napolitano and the alphabet soup guys do not take kindly to the notion of freedom in any way, and for the precise reason that Abraham Lincoln did not. When asked why he didn’t just let the South go, Lincoln exploded in a rage, “Let the South go? LET THE SOUTH GO? How, then, should I fill my coffers?”
Documented historical fact. Look it up for yourselves. Winners write history and the North/Leftists have had nearly 160 years to spin their propaganda, but the fact is that the South was the wealthy portion of the country back then. Cotton was, indeed, king, the Feds had gotten themselves into monetary trouble, and bankruptcy was imminent! The back room Congressional brawls were over whether to declare the USA closed at the Mississippi and raise taxes, or to hit tariffs even harder to benefit their factories and shipping businesses, improving their bottom lines and increasing tax revenues. Greed and tariffs won. Hit the South for the enrichment of the North. Hit those who produced cane, corn, and cotton for the benefit of those who consumed and controlled shipping and rail transport and to increase federal control.
(Excerpt) Read more at whiskeyandgunpowder.com ...
A very good read. Hits the button!
Why do so many people find this KKK nonsense amusing? Is it because they imagine themselves as Scarlett in Gone With The Wind? Probably the same people who keep reelecting Robert Byrd.
It is an historical fact that the tariff was a principle cause of the war, if not the cause. Why is it that Lincoln idolaters cannot allow him even the slightest of human faults, such as greed? It is, after all, what made him run for President to begin with.
If prosperity was in the South and the North was bankrupt then the South would have won the war, no?
I’m amazed that there are still yahoos out there debating this. She thinks that slavery was a distraction? If she looked at the statements of succession from the states who succeeded, she’ll find slavery listed. Also, the South was not devoted to States Rights. They once tried to get Constitutional protection for slavery, not only for themselves, but the entire nation, including states where it was illegal. They didn’t embrace States Rights until it became clear that the majority of the nation opposed it.
Here’s another fact the author didn’t mention. Abraham Lincoln could not have exploited the South because they succeeded before he even became President. Lincoln tried to appease them. He offered financial restitution for slave owners. He was even willing to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, albeit it reluctantly. They didn’t like the fact that he wanted to outlaw slavery in any future states to join the Union.
When the South succeeded, they had military bases which belonged to the nation they succeeded from. Those bases had not been built with southern money. If the South wanted to possess them, they had to buy them. But they wanted to take them, lock, stock, and barrell. Also, to cover the spark, it wasn’t the Union soldiers at Fort Sumpter who fired the first shot.
There’s a question of what would have happened if the South had won the war? I don’t believe that we would have won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The United States would have been a second-tier power on the scale of Great Britain, France, and Germany, and the South would have been a Baptist Banana Republic.
There will always be extremists who second guess the obvious. In most other countries, they wouldn’t even have the right to do that.
Why do you assume such a simplistic thing that the richest always wins?
The South only had farm implements and such, the North was an industrial powerhouse able to manufacture millions of weapons, and had ALOT more people (for soldiers) than the South.
A great bit of history is made up of countries being attacked for their wealth. The prosperity claim is a bit dubious nevertheless. The claim is true if and only if you count the squalid factory and mine workers of the North, but do not count the slaves of the South. But Slaves did have money, did make economic decisions, and were economic actors, not just production factors.
Have you read any of the secession resolutions? They all make it quite clear that Slavery was the reason for secession.
While bankrupt?
Here we go again. The war consisted entirely of the North invading the South. It is the motives of the North alone that are important in analyzing the causes of the war. The war could have ended any time the North decided to let "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" actually happen somewhere.
Yes, slavery was used as a rallying cry to get support for secession in three of the state declarations of secession. But the main issues were the tariff and the victory of the Republican party, a party that publicly declared itself to be "a party of the North pledged against the South."
We learned that war can happen here and that the federal government believes it owns the States.
Very interesting read..........
“What Can We Learn from 1860?”
Free enslaved Americans. Give them equal rights, then secede.
Did the secessionists want “government of the people, by the people, and for the people?” Do you know what percentage of the adult population of South Carolina were free, what percentage were allowed to vote?
Only three of them cite slavery. Most of them simply say we secede. There is no question slavery was used to gen up support for secession among the Southern population after the decision to secede had been made. So what? The constant fallacy in these debates is in conflating secession with the cause of the war in the first place. The war was entirely a Northern project and the North pursued the war for its own ends, slavery not being among them.
“Yes, slavery was used as a rallying cry to get support for secession in three of the state declarations of secession. But the main issues were the tariff and the victory of the Republican party, a party that publicly declared itself to be “a party of the North pledged against the South.”
So you are seriously telling me that most of these states just got really hacked off about a tariff and the election of a guy that hadn’t even been sworn-in, and just decided to up and leave the union?
So either they were all about protecting their enslavement of black Americans...Or they were hothead reactionaries.
Either way, the CSA was a basket-case from the go.
Do you have any idea how blacks were treated in the North in those days? What percentage were allowed to vote and so on?
And why stop there? Why not indict the South for not allowing women to vote?
There are two relevant lessons from the Civil War:
(1) The only people who can beat Americans in military terms is other Americans. And it is UGLY. Incredibly UGLY. We killed more of our own than anyone else has killed in any other war.
(2) The side with the larger functional industrial base (esp energy and manufacturing) WINS. Period. Everything else is too equal. That was the North last time. God forbid we end up there again, but if it does, it would be the South this time.
That said, we REALLY don’t want to go there. Sadly, I think many of the statists in DC and the moribund big Northern cities don’t care if we do. They really think that they will win and see it as a shortcut to their marixst state.
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