Alabamians Divided on Jefferson Davis Holiday

The Wall Street Journal ^ | une 1, 2014 | IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN

[MinorityRepublican]

Alabama state offices will be closed Monday for an annual holiday that some residents celebrate, others would like to eliminate and some just don't understand: Jefferson Davis's birthday.

The Confederacy's first and only president was captured in Georgia in 1865 and accused of treason and helping to plot to kill President Abraham Lincoln. He was imprisoned for two years but never tried, and shortly before his death in 1889, he advised Southerners: "The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations."

[Kenny Bunk]

Newsflash!

St. Lincoln was a politician. He did his damndest to keep out of war, by placating the South as much as was possible. Many ideas were floating about; colonization, buying the slaves from their "owners" with government bond issues, gradual emancipation, etc. etc. with some emancipation programs even put forward by Southern politicians.

Lincoln's speeches can be a little like the Bible in that one can find something somewhere to show that he backed a variety of positions. It is an unpleasant fact that the maintenance of slavery was reason the South demanded the states' right to to secede, thereby queering the states' rights proposition forever.

It's also a fact that until Emancipation in some of the Border States, The Federal Government under Lincoln ordered area commanders to return runaway slaves to their masters. This of course, was to keep states like Kentucky in the Union.

Although St. Lincoln was an Abolitionist, many Northerners who were needed in the Army and to pay taxes were emphatically not. So the government rather shamelessly promoted the Union cause to keep the war going. This part of our history is a very grey area of mixed motives and initiatives. From it date not only Emancipation but the very idea of an all-powerful central American government with the potential of overwhelming military force, in charge of everything and the power to tax citizens of every sovereign state to support itself.

For this unintended consequence the Southern elites and their insistence on keeping an agricultural system based on slavery is, IMNVHO, the root cause.

[Kenny Bunk]

Ping

[ontap]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I would suggest that you conveniently interpret Lincolns words to fit your scenario of what happened. Relatively few southerners owned slaves or benefited from slavery. But it made a good moral argument to wage economic war against the South.

[DoodleDawg]

You missed this part of the quote: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.” – August 22, 1862 – Letter to Horace Greeley

[ontap]

That changes nothing......he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. That’s the point!!!!

[Kenny Bunk]

But it (slavery) made a good moral argument to wage economic war against the South. \

Absolutely.

[Rome2000]

That’s his moocher wife and he is in Kenya campaigning for his cousin Rail Odinga.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Thanks.