Posted on 03/17/2005 8:14:05 AM PST by Grand Old Partisan
The Lincoln-Reagan Freedom Foundation is dedicated to promoting greater appreciation for the heritage of the Republican Party, founded as a civil rights movement in 1854. This "Grand Old Party" has an extraordinary, though overlooked, record of achievement in advancing civil rights in the United States and around the world.
Celebrating a Century and a Half of Civil Rights Achievement by the Republican Party
For the past century and a half, the Republican Party has proven to be the most effective political organization ever to champion equality and human rights in the United States and around the world. From President Lincoln's victory in the Civil War to President Reagan's victory in the Cold War, the GOP shares credit for the ability of hundreds of millions of people to live in freedom.
To increase our appreciation for this heritage, the Lincoln-Reagan Freedom Foundation brings together Republican officeholders, activists and staff, academics, and the media.
(Excerpt) Read more at lincolnreaganfoundation.org ...
Everything is viewed through the lens of slavery because that is how the SOUTH viewed everything. Have you no interest whatsoever in the MULTITUDES of studies of southern laws, local communities, etc., that overwhelmingly place slavery at the core of their being? No, of course not because that would mean Lincoln was right . . . as he was.
Davis also said several times emphasized the sigularity of slavery in the Confederacy. It's all about the slaves, and he knew it. As do you.
I only asked because you said that you never had heard before that the original Republican Party was founded on an anti-slave and civil rights platform. I'm in my 60s and we were always taught that in school.
I don't know when they started changed the way American History was taught -- or whether it was a regional thing - but my children in their mid 40s did not get the same lessons I did. I had to teach them myself! LOL.
I know that by the time my oldest child was in elementary school, the teachers were hard at work tearing down any vestige of patriotism or honor for our forefathers. But we lived in Berkeley at the time, so it was to be expected.
Correct me, but iirc Fitzhugh was the slavery-theorist who reasoned that poor whites might make good candidates for enslavement. He was widely read, but not widely credited. People in the South were willing to put up with African slavery, because of their belief in essential racial differences. But white slavery wasn't going anywhere.
That's not true. You got to the Nullification Crisis without slavery, and that was over two things: the Tariff and States' rights under the Constitution.
Slavery was a wedge issue. Because it was the prop of the latifundist planter economy and the huge cotton market, of course attacking it meant attacking the entire Southern economy; and so of course people like Rhett got excited about that (who wants to be impoverished by a political movement?) -- but the point of the wedge issue, as Rhett explains in his address (if you bothered to read it), was to "consolidate" political opinion in the North for a concerted assault on Southern resistance to an industrial policy, the Morrill Tariff (which was more than just a tariff), and infrastructure improvements in and exclusively for the Northern interests but paid for largely by Southern and Western tax revenues.
The Civil War was about Northern businesses punking everybody else and making the rest of society their chumps. It worked, as shown by the manifest abuses of the Gilded Age.
And no, this is not a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc; the Civil War really did enable, and Lincoln intended it to enable (he was a Whig, after all), the industrialization of American society that followed the Civil War.
That includes the proletarization of American labor, rampant wage-breaking, time-clocks and other forms of industrial tyranny, urban political machines, factory towns, and of course the protective Tariff.
It's all about the slaves, and he knew it.
No it wasn't, and no he didn't. You're being an ideological troll.
As do you.
Now you sneeringly accuse me of disingenuousness, of lying on the boards. This is where you get off. Get lost.
They deserve to live in a state of perpetual terrification, just because of the way they are. Being afraid of you civilizes a Frenchman. The English always knew that and acted accordingly.
He was the worst of "big government" types because he lacked any true principles or values for doing what he did, except to wield power, unlike Lincoln.
Even in real percapita $$, the government grew under AJ, and by giving the EXECUTIVE (as you rightly point out) so many more powers, you cannot say he didn't give that the FEDS, because once you excercise the muscle, it has grown nonetheless.
The "control" of the laws was only for one purpose, and that was to preserve slavery, period. Southerners could dress up their pig anyway they sought in constitutional language, but it still came back to being all about slavery.
Yes, Fitzhugh wanted to enslave poor whites, and no, he wasn't widely read. But when you say "slavery wasn't going anywhere" with whites, that was PRECISELY the logical end point of Lincoln's argument, because if something was morally wrong in New York it was also morally wrong in North Carolina, and if it was morally right in South Carolina, it was morally right in Wisconsin. You can say "state's rights," but ultimately evil is evil. Southerners well remembered the days of "indentured servitude" by whites (many historians think that the end of white indentures was directly tied to the racialization of slavery), and if it happened once, logical whites might think, what's to keep it from happening again?
You've asserted that everything is viewed through the lens of slavery as if it were some sort of unquestionable "fact," used that purported "fact" to respond to counterexamples offered by others including myself and LG such as nullification, and upon responding declared your "fact" validated by itself. That's called affirming the consequent, LS.
Have you no interest whatsoever in the MULTITUDES of studies of southern laws, local communities, etc., that overwhelmingly place slavery at the core of their being?
Did I ever suggest they should be ignored? No. I did not. I simply chose not to engage in single-minded obsessions over slavery to the point that I habitually introduce it as the end-all single issue explanation for every last historical event that happened in the southern United States between the years 1789 and 1861. If and when its relevance to a topic deems its necessary to examine slavery, I'm perfectly content to do so. That's called responsible contextualization.
But when you start making far fetched interpretations of a discussion over U.S. tariff policy to the effect that slavery is said to be the underlying explanatory instrument by way of the export trade's connection to its agricultural suppliers who are in turn connected to slavery by way of a absolutist and reductionist argument around the labor component of their production functions, it becomes a problem.
Your slavery reductionism, in its raw form, is little more than a direct variant on what turned out to be the fatal flaw of marxism: labor reductionism. Marx's single-issue reductionist approach to history attempted to explain the entirity of human interaction as the product of an inherent struggle between the labor portion of the capitalist's production function and the owners of production, concluding that nearly anything and everything the producers did was explainable as a part of their exploitation patterns. The only difference between that and your own view of the south is that you specify those laborers as slaves then proceed to the exact same end as Marx.
The Southern post office was one of the more successful pieces of the CSA. Don't be too quick to judge limits on free speech in the South - the North was not a glowing example of constitutional freedom during the War.
To your second point, of course slavery was intertwined with government power. Where there is money, there is power. No different than northern industrialists
Backstabbing Euroweasel bump right back at you! -- LOL!
I'm sorry, but that's just a polemicist's chestnut. I've explained it to you, and if you want to insist on being a South-bashing neoliberal, I guess you're at liberty. But you won't go uncontradicted on this board.
In the South, he was -- someone quoted sales figures to show it. The planter class read him, but his ideas didn't gain currency.
But when you say "slavery wasn't going anywhere" with whites,...
No, I didn't say that -- be careful. I said the idea of enslaving whites didn't go anywhere. Southerners used race as a firewall, to keep slavery from touching them the way it frequently reached free blacks, who were always at risk of being "claimed" by someone -- sometimes, they were sold into slavery by e.g. the State of Illinois, if they violated Illinois's black code by attempting to settle there.
......that was PRECISELY the logical end point of Lincoln's argument, because if something was morally wrong in New York it was also morally wrong in North Carolina, and if it was morally right in South Carolina, it was morally right in Wisconsin.
Abolitionists were the minority in holding that moral view, and to put it bluntly, many of them "believed" that for operational purposes, rather than sincerely. The moral argument -- like all moral arguments -- was turned out as a political prostitute the minute it was picked up by politicians claiming to act under its color. Southerners had the entire Bible on their side: if Deuternomy laid down rules for slave and master, where did the Yankee Abolitionists, to whom the accusation came so cheaply, get off saying that slavery was immoral?. Inconsistent with small-r republican principles, perhaps, but that doesn't rise to the level of a moral indictment by the Almighty, which big-A Abolitionists said it was. Southerners had only to crack open their Old Testaments for a little comparison study, to refute the claim.
You can say "state's rights," but ultimately evil is evil.
It isn't evil just because you say so. What, is smoking "evil" because you don't like it? Does that give you the right to damn to hell anyone who disagrees with you? Get a grip.
Northerners who wanted to abolish slavery were in the position of petitioners. They wanted to make a major change in society that would overhaul everything from received morality (yes, that's right) to the Constitution. They achieved it by yelling, bulling their necks, instigating a war, and imposing their values by force and violence. How "moral" is that? A million dead for "morality"? Funny how "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" doesn't mention anything about the cost, or about burning out half the country so you can feel smug in church.
Proposing a better policy is always a good idea, but if you haven't the right to impose it on others, it is incumbent on you to accept the fact. Moral arrogance doesn't entitle you to bash your neighbor's brains ina, call it "justice," and treat his children as if they had the mark of Cain. But that is exactly what the Abolitionists did, led by Lincoln, and that is the position you are taking now.
It's especially obvious, when the victors then sink themselves in the kind of moral corruption that attended the Gilded Age. Congressmen who'd called for Jeff Davis's neck on a plate and for burning out the planters, happily signed on for the Credit Mobilier. They were hypocrites, and their moral invective against the South has to be seen through that corrective prism.
"Speaking-truth-to-shower" concurring bump.
Resorts to reductionism witness to a thinly-equipped toolbox, or an enthusiastic hammer-murderer who's happy in his work.
I can go "contradicted" all you want and that still doesn't change the fact (not chestnut) that the war was all about slavery. All you neo Confeds can scream tariff all you want and there is no support for it.
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.