Posted on 11/15/2004 12:05:16 PM PST by nosofar
"Nor was there any 'tyranny' threatening the South prior to the War"
Let's see what someone of the time said:
In the following words by as typical a New Englander as Rufus Choate, lawyer, orator, and Senator from Massachusetts:
"The first duty of Whigs," wrote Choate to the Maine State central committee, "is to defeat and dissolve the new geographical party calling itself Republican....
“The question for each and every one of us is...by what vote can I do most to prevent the madness of the times from working its maddest act the very ecstasy of its madness--the permanent formation and the actual triumph of a party which knows one half of America only to hate and dread it.
“If the Republican party," Choate continued, "accomplishes its object and gives the government to the North, I turn my eyes from the consequences.
“To the fifteen states of the South that government will appear an alien government. It will appear worse. It will appear a hostile government. It will represent to their eye a vast region of states organized upon anti-slavery, flushed by triumph, cheered onward by the voice of the pulpit, tribune, and press; its mission, to inaugurate freedom and put down the oligarchy; its constitution, the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence...."
Shortly thereafter, John Brown invaded to incite insurrection.
The Morrill tariff passed the US House.
Abraham Lincoln was elected.
The US Congress authorized rapid improvements at Ft. Sumter, the constructon of modern steam warships, and authorized the President to make massive expenditures without its prior approval.
And the following was being said:
12/3/1860..... When Congress convened, several Republicans, especially from the mid-western states, “swore by everything in the Heavens above, and the Earth that they would convert the rebel States into a wilderness.”
“Without a little blood-letting,” wrote Michigan’s radical, coarse-grained Senator Zachariah Chandler, “this Union will not be worth a rush.”
So you are telling us about your favorite book?
"Fire and conviction" hardly, this subject is not worth getting sweaty about. It is like arguing against lionizing Hitler. Trivial opponents filled with phony nonsense masquerading as facts trying to make heroes of deluded traitors.
How do you figure that?
I don't see surrendering to tyranny and evil as an option so could care less what Choate said.
Some how you forget that the ONLY reason that Lincoln even got close to winning was because the RAT leaders from the South were so stupid that they split the RAT party into three and ran candidates for each. Stephen Douglas, Illinois RAT, was also too radical for them to support because he refused to make kissing slavers' asses a law. Lincoln had 38% of the popular vote because of their insanity.
John Brown was HUNG by the fedgov.
Tariffs hurt Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota as much as they did the South.
Chandler was correct in his understanding that nothing would remove the cancer of slavery but bloodshed. It is unfortunate that much of it was shed by young southerners brainwashed by Slaver propaganda like the young Germans who died for Hitler or the young Iraqis who died for Saddam. They died fighting against their own true interest.
"I think over the next 4 years, there will emerge a Democratic strategy to divide the Republicans based on the issue of slavery."
I saw a black woman, in a TV forum after the election.
She was a political or media figure, and was seething over the loss.
She remarked that the "red states" are essentially the old pro-slavery south.
Even if true, who will this little factoid influence? The dems already have virtually all the black votes, so nothing gained politically.
I guess their strategy is to brand the Republicans as biggoted rednecks.
Yet my ancestors were among the FIRST Republicans in central NY state in the 1850s, and were abolitionists. Also some Mormon ancestors, which were also anti-slavery (among the reasons they were disliked...little know historical fact).
The search for a message which connects to normal people continues.
After a sensational trial, he was found guilty of treason against Virginia and was hanged at Charlestown, amid much fanfare, Dec. 2, 1859.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/johnbrownbio.htm
---the point being that a black author couldn't get a publisher---
I suppose we can all agree that whatever happened there wouldn't be slavery on any part of the continent in the 21st century, but people in 1860 didn't have the same point of view. For a large number of them, the victory of freedom or slavery was at stake in their lifetime and they sides chose accordingly.
Another thing that we ought to be able to agree on is that any emancipation undertaken by the CSA would precisely have "left the freed slaves in a position of serfdom." And it would probably have been the gradual compensated emancipation (possibly with subsidies for emigration) that was discussed earlier in America and other new world countries. It could well have left people in bondage of one sort or another (slavery or serfdom) until well into the 20th century.
Or do you really think the victorious Confederacy would have abolished slavery and immediately admitted the freedmen to all the rights of citizenship and equality with the Whites? That would indeed be quite a fantasy, and would go against so much of what was said at the time!
Was the war worthwhile? I don't know. It's hard to say that those losses could ever be justified. I simply say first, that people going into the war didn't know what we know now, and second, that not all the blame for the war can be laid on the North. We can turn the question that's usually asked around: if secessionists had known the costs that war would bring and the eventual fate of the country would they have been so quick to break with the union?
Article 1, Section 10 forbids states from making treaties or alliances or separate confederations with each other. Put that together with the Supremacy clause (Article 6, Clause 2) and you have a pretty good argument against the Constitutionality of secession. At the very least, Southern leaders shouldn't have been so rash and hotheaded in acting unilaterally, but should have worked through Congress if they really wanted to leave the Union.
Well there are always economic considerations to any conflict but there was no unbridgeable gap between the North and South except slavery. Southern leaders deserted the ideals of their forefathers who desired to see slavery eliminated and even, like Jefferson, took steps to prevent in from spreading to the NW territory. They knew full well that it was evil and incompatible with the theory of rights implicit to the DoI and the Constitution. There is no protection of any rights but natural rights and therefore it is impossible to justify or excuse slavery based upon any theory of natural right.
If there is a right to slavery then there was no right for Americans to revolt they should have resigned themselves to slavery rather than resisted.
As to the question of allegiance to a state rather than the Nation it is not difficult at all when considered in clarity and history makes that clarity exceedingly stark. A German today must admit that there was no good choice in joining Hitler so must the Southerner today admit the fight to preserve slavery was wrong. Our ancestors were wrong in revolting and duped by the aristocracy of the South the only real aristocracy this nation has ever known.
Truth must be faced squarely. The truth is the South was an aberrant episode in Western Civilization and in complete contradiction to the reasons for our founding and the trend of the West to establish more freedom.
Tried by a county magistrate no less. How odd he was captured raiding the federal arsenal by federal troops and not tried in a federal court. I smell the stink of Buchanan's advisors in that decision.
The last thing the UN is trying to do is reduce slavery throughout the world!
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.
Read about Todays Child Sex Slaves!<
Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219
Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners.
-"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90
Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'
Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html
I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.
Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html
Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html
"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.
Richard Rollins
After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.
Initially that was true and was why the Founders sought to put it on a course for extinction. After the cotton gin it developed an ideology of racial supremacy to justify it.
Thus, the absurd claims of its benefit for all.
No Lincoln attacked those who attempted to destroy the Union. States have no interpretive power wrt to the Constitution.
Lincoln would not have declared slaves free without a constitutional amendment though it is not really necessary since the only reference is that importing slaves could not be forbidden until 1808. After that Congress was free to write laws affecting slavery and had every power to do so under the Commerce clause. There was no ruling giving slavery a constitutional protection from Congressional action not even Dred Scott did that.
Your premise that northerners fought for an end to slavery is wrong. Lincoln said, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it." The north has no moral superiority on this issue. They were simply using the premise of freeing the slaves to promote their economic and political power. Had Lincoln not given the EP, the British (where slavery had been abolished) would have lended their support to the South and the war would have been over by the spring of 1863.
When the Southern states formed their confederacy they were no longer bound to the rules of the constitution since they had already seceded, which the constitution did not prohibit.
I can see how people think the South rushed into secession, but these feelings of being oppressed by the north went all the way back to before the creation of the U.S. And whether they rushed into it or not, the northern armies invaded the south.
And after the war, the cause of much of the resentment that is held today, the north did everything in their power to destroy the Southern economy and political rights, in what they called 'Reconstruction'. The 14th amendment was passed with less than quorum, with the southern states not being allowed to vote, and with a dissenting senator from NJ being kicked out. So, the paramount objective of saving the union was a lie to cover up the economic an political ambitions of the north, for they did all in their power to destroy the South during and after the war. See my tagline.
In an addition to an economic issue, it was also a moral issue. This occured both in the South and the North. I have old documents dating back to the early 1800's in the Broad River Area of Georgia where it was put in wills by owners that upon death some slave owners gave the choice of remaining slaves to return to Africa to Liberia. Some were freed, some were given the choice of which relative they wanted to go with (the slave was given the choice, not the relative) and some were treated as just a piece of incidental property.
The War Between the States was basically a clash of cultures and would have sooner or later been fought over something else. Slavery was a major issue, but not the only issue. The idea of the so called Slave State was basically saying as of today, a new state would be admitted to the Union but it had to be either a liberal or conservative state. There were many, many differences.
You have to remember that prior to the War Between the States there was the Whiskey Rebellion which was basically a civil war. It was fought between regions about the ability of the Federal Government to tax whiskey. I think we can all agree that the wrong side won that one.
p
Garbage. Barely 80 years separated the start of abolition in New England and the final abolition in the south and yet you claim they were "different people"? Also contrary to your claims, many northern states did have slavery well into the 19th century. New Jersey did not enact manumission until only 20 years before the war and still had a small number of grandfathered slaveowners at the time it broke out. Delaware still had slaves through the war itself and Illinois had a race-based indentured servitude system that was slavery by any other name. Yankeeland was as guilty as anybody else
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