Posted on 10/19/2004 5:14:54 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Dey sold my mother, sister an' brother to ole man Askew, a slave speculator, an' dey were shipped to de Missisippi bottoms in a box-car. I never heard from mother any more.
(...)
"In slavery time de food wuz bad at marsters. It wus cooked one day for de nex', dat is de corn bread wuz baked an' de meat wus biled an you et it col' fer breakfas'. De meat wus as fat as butter an' you got one rashen an' a hunk of cornbread fer a meal. No biscuit was seen in de slave houses. No sir, dat dey was not. No bisuit for niggers at marsters"
(...)
And here's some more of Thomas Hall's narrative:
"Conditions were bad and the punishments were severe and barbarous. Some marsters acted like savages. In some instances slaves were burned alive at the stake. Families were torn apart by selling. Mothers were sold from their children. Children were sold from their mothers, and the father was not considered in anyway a family part."
In general, the vague statements of nostalgia that you've cherry picked are always countered by statements of the cruelty, and there's no one of them who actually wishes they were a slave again. It's also interesting that the slaves like Debro and Mitchner who do have mixed feelings were house servants and not, like most slaves, field hands. Their statements can also be seen as evidence of the way slavery infantilized blacks. They miss being taken care of. Hall's a different case, and if you think that he's pining for slavery days in his narrative you're crazy. His message is that slavery and freedom weren't that different--it's still the white man oppressing the black man, and from the time he's talked in the 1930s, with sharecropping, Jim Crow and the KKK, he's right. But no place does he say he wishes he was a slave again.
[You being cute] Interpretation.
No, not interpretation.
Lincoln promulgated the Gettysburg Address on a battlefield. That address was his bid to change the Constitution. See the battlefield, smell the corpses. See the gun pointed at the South's head. Fact.
Same thing with the Emancipation Proclamation, same thing with the Thirteenth Amendment. "Here -- ratify this, or I'll kill you."
Lincoln used coercion every step of the way, throughout his presidency -- on judges, on citizens, on members of the Congress.
Fact.
Hey Watie, do you need Dr. Lubar's e-mail?
John Brown raised the temperature a lot -- and no, I'm not going to pull down Fehrenbach and quote him all over again. I posted it, you read it, done deal. You want to go on piddling around and playing games and telling people that John Brown's raid wasn't a big factor in the onset of the Civil War, go ahead -- I'll be there every step of the way to call you on it.
You know something, pal, when you cite a single piece of verifiable evidence for any of your wild claims, when you learn to spell "original," when you conform to the basics of grammar, and when you offer up a Shakespeare quote instead of the cut-and-paste predictability of your little rants, maybe then I'll accept your criticism.
You ought to be able to see that what you've said presents a "straw man" -- an exaggerated or oversimplified opposing argument that it's easy to knock down, without especially saying much of anything or advancing our understanding one iota.
I could do the same: "I have come to the one conclusion: "Convincing people that the Civil War was NOT AT ALL about slavery was the FIRST BIG SPIN JOB!" or (a more venturesome statement and not a straw man) "I have come to the one conclusion: "Convincing people that the Civil War was about tariffs was the FIRST BIG SPIN JOB!"
So now that we've each got the oversimplified, unqualified and blanket statements out of the way, maybe we can procede to say something more substantive about the war.
North or South, we have Valley Forge, Normandy, and Iwo Jima, and such wars are part of what we are (as is all that we've accomplished in long years of peaceful development). So why pick four years of Civil War out of the centuries we've been living on this continent and make fighting for a morally questionable cause the basis for one's group identity? If you do that, you're bound to start to cut corners, cover up, lie to yourself, and work yourself up into unnecessary agitation.
Of course people probably relish that kind of verbal sparring, and like getting emotionally worked up or carried away. That's probably why so many of these articles get posted. But if you spend an inordinate amount of time intemperately attacking the rest of the country, are you really surprised that you provoke angry responses? If your identity has to be based on proving that everything that one side did in a war 140 years ago was right, it's bound to be shaky and threatened.
If you want to complain about articles like Kalajian's then go ahead, but the speed and predictibility with which you guys move from defense to attacking other parts of the country and asserting the moral superiority of a highly questionable cause makes most people write off your arguments, and rightly so. Our past is a mix of good and evil, right and wrong, and we have to hold on to what's good and we can. But there's not much use for an invidious partisanship that dumps all the evil on one side to make the other come off smelling like a rose. If you find things wrong with 19th century America, that's something we'll all have to live with, but faults in the North don't wash away those of the South or vindicate the Confederate cause.
As we can't, don't and shouldn't live entirely in the past, so we can't justify or vindicate everything in it, or everything about one historical cause or another. As Americans we have a heritage that we can on the whole be proud of. If we divide into squabbling factions that claim to have all the truth on our own side, we'll find in the end that we have far less to respect about ourselves and our past.
I'm sure he did. But you blame him for feelings and attitudes that had been present in southern society for decades.
In your opinion. I look at the same address and see no cry for Constitutional change at all.
Same thing with the Emancipation Proclamation, same thing with the Thirteenth Amendment. "Here -- ratify this, or I'll kill you."
The Emancipation Proclamation was a tool for combatting the rebellion. I'm not aware of what part of the Constitution Lincoln is supposed to have changed. And wild hyperbole aside, I'm not aware of what threats were issued concerning the 13th Amendment, either.
Fact.
Opinion.
So you say.
The Fourth Amendment, for openers.
Then there's the due-process clause of the Fifth, concerning uncompensated takings.
Did I mention the Tenth?
And Congressman Vallandigham and the Maryland and Missouri legislatures could have made a pretty strong case that Lincoln used the First Amendment as a doormat.
And at some point, I'm sure that someone or other could point to a violation of the Third Amendment, too. Who was the poor soul who got turfed out of his house at both First Manassas and Appomattox?
Then there's the March to the Sea. Do you really want to start cataloguing that one?
In your wildly errant opinion. Facts are facts.
Except when you present opinion and interpretation as fact.
For the fevered pitch of the letter you cited and quoted as being "typical". It was "typical" of a very turbulent time, as Texas in particular (and the writer is a Texas commissioner) had been particularly galled by the John Brown raid, by rumors of sabotage and slave incitement by Wide Awakes, and by the refusal of Congress to fund any defense of the Texas frontier and its settlers. Texans were riding around lynching people in response to the perceived threats. The comments you cited, at the pitch at which they were offered, were not what you'd have heard from that same person in 1848 or 1888.
An analogy would be to quote emotional statements made by blacks after MLK's murder, and citing them as workaday, off-the-cuff opinions offered by blacks "of the period".
I would disagree with your conclusions. So it looks like a matter for the Supreme Court. When they make a decision then let me know and we can debate it further. Until then, actions are not violations of the Constitution merely because you say that they are.
If an accountant documents 2 over here and 2 over there, then 2=2=4 is not an opinion, an interpretation, an inference, or an insinuation.
"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy" is not an interpretation.
Remember to quote your own fatuity when you're standing in the embers of your house.
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.