Posted on 12/24/2001 4:25:26 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
You are demonstrating your ignorance. The existence of the single slave that was willed to Grant’s wife by her parents has been discussed many times here, and the idiotic charges that Grant was a 'slave owner' have been repudiated many times. Grant even came under fire at the time the 'slave' was in his procession because he paid the guy cash money to do work. The man was emancipated by Grant. And if you understood the Constitution you seem to want to wrap yourself in, you would know that under that great document, any American, north or south, owning a slave ship and transporting slaves to the US after the year 1808 was in serious violation of Federal law.
Now what other lame excuses will you come up with to justify the millions of humans kept in bondage by the same wealthy Southern landowners who designed the Stars and Bars. Whatever that flag stood for, it never stood for freedom.
Lincoln is the man who saved this country from a gang of corrupt cotton barons who made their wealth by enslaving other humans. You should fall to your knees and thank God for Lincoln instead of repeating mindless propaganda.
And doesn't now.
Walt
Yes, that was the great Virginian, General George Washington, who had the discipline, intelligence, and humility necessary to win a new kind of continental warfare against the mightiest empire on earth.
Don't get me wrong, I think Hamilton is one of the most underrated of our Founders, but, the President of the Convention was George Washington, James Madison has as much or more input into the document as anyone, George Mason wrote the Virginia Bill or Rights upon which the first ten amendments were based (and it was his resistance to signing the U.S. Const. that created the necessity of a Bill of Rights being promised to ensure ratification).
Southerners simply contributed more to the founding of the country when you look at individual contributions.
I agree with you, and am sure that I am more in tune with you on this issue than with WhiskeyPapa. However, this is really a terrible essay that is full of false assertions, and it does nothing for the southern cause.
We, therefore, now have a coalition of people who want the Southern flag taken down and hidden from public view. This coalition is composed of three main groups. First of all are African-Americans, whose emotional position is totally unmitigated by any knowledge of history.
It's the "totally" and the "any" that make the difference.
His survey of the role of Southerners in expansion is a useful antedote to the usual talk about Lincoln and the American empire, though. There was no less imperialist sentiment in the South than in the North. It took the form of settlement more than that of "Dollar Imperialism." It's not clear how colonization, rather than exploiting our economic advantages, would have made us more loved by our neighbors.
Blaming Northerners for not being fully on board in the Mexican War, isn't consistent with singling out the North as the source of American imperial feeling, as some do. But where there's a fault line and people who want to exploit it, anything is "fair" game.
It's similar with his praise of the Confederacy as the "ideal" form of government. Beware the worship of the "ideal form of government," since it eventually leads to worship of government as such and in itself.
Those who think an independent South would have been less "statist" than the Union has been are clearly mistaken. "State sovereignty" is sovereignty and "Southern Nationalism" is nationalism, and neither was apt to be more respectful of the individual than federal supremacy or American nationalism were. One could make a case that they would have been less respectful, at least in certain regards.
In our federal system, we pit the county courthouse gangs against the federal government. Independence means that those courthouse gangs make up the central government, and in time, they're likely to want to assume the same powers. The idea of some that a triumphant Confederacy would have meant blessed anarcho-capitalism is woefully mistaken.
Our country was great because it contained different regions with different strengths and weaknesses which complemented and offset each other. That was the true strength of federalism. To ascribe all virtue to one section is a mistake, since at different times the country has needed the strengths and virtues of the different sections to survive.
Keep preaching your 'it was all about slavery' while you can. We are finally seeing the fruits of lincoln's EMPIRE. Keep up your praise of lincoln and 50 years from now you'll know who to thank for the situation this country will be in.
The Brits moved south because they had most of the North wrapped up.
Trivia time: When General Washington moved south to engage Cornwallis on the Virginia peninsula in a campaign that culminated at Yorktown, he needed to move through northern Virginia very quickly despite its nearly-impenetrable woods and terrain. He called upon his decades-old friend and fellow Burgess from Prince William County, Henry Lee II of Leesylvania, who was the father of Washington's favorite dragoon (cavalry) officer, "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, and therefore, the grandfather of General Robert E. Lee. Henry Lee, Colonel of the Prince William County militia, cleared the way by building a courduroy road through the woods (note to WhiskeyPapa and Ditto: the labor was done by white militia members, not slave labor). The roadway is still in existence and known to northern Virginians today as Telegraph Road.
[...Just here it should be remarked that Sir Walter Scott's romantic, dilettante theory of life produced some most meritorious results. The Southern planters were noted for their charm of manner, for a high ideal of courage and honor and for a passionate love of individual freedom. These qualities are inherent in the Southerner but Scott greatly strengthened them. Sir Walter's South produced some splendid men.
The evil of his influence lies in the fact that he did so much to put the South out of harmony with the world by which it was surrounded. The South had stood in the full stream of eighteenth century life; it stood wholly aside from the nineteenth century. The chivalric ideal served to check the South's industrial development and social progress. Romantic dilettantism in the course of two generations curbed the energies of the Southern people to a great extent, and for this a price had to be paid.
In Europe dilettantism did not check development because the leisure class was too small in comparison with the total population; only the rich could take life quietly. But in the ante-bellum South slavery made dilettantism fatally easy. A man with a good farm and a few slaves need not bestir himself; he might more or less drift along. And since men will, at almost any cost, follow the social ideal of their community, many Southerners ceased to look on the life of strong exertion as the right fashion of living. There could be only one result to such an attitude in this struggling world, and the South began to fall behind in wealth and population.
The North, money-making and modern, though far less versed in the adornment of life, outstripped the South in all those things which are the fruits of energy. In the end it gained political power. The destinies of the American people had once lain in the hands of the South; after 1825 they lay in those of the North. It became more and more evident as the years passed that the nation was to be Northern in essence and not Southern.
And since no society can long endure fundamental differences, it was inevitable that the aggressive, nineteenth century North should attack the unmodern South. The point of assault was found in slavery, that institution supporting mediaevalism, that anachronism in an industrial, wage-earning age. The South was left the choice of conforming to modern life, or erecting its own government. It chose the latter and so we had the Civil War.
Romanticism withered in the fires of war. The South emerged from the great struggle a component part of the American nation, which is Northern in most essentials. The prosperous, matter-of-fact South of today has traveled a long distance since 1865.
It seems that the South made a sad mistake when its planters turned back from democracy, even though it evolved a civilization of much charm and many virtues. For the spirit of democracy, as we know, survived its sins and its mistakes, becoming the impelling force of the nineteenth century. The American people continued to be democratic, though in losing Southern political leadership it lost much. No second Jefferson has come out of the North. Indeed the North is too economical, too unpolitical; it is not prolific of great personalities. The American nation would be farther along the road to the solution of the great problems of human life, if the Southern planters had not lost faith in democracy and sought inspiration in the unsubstantial visions of Sir Walter Scott.]
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