Posted on 03/31/2010 3:04:35 PM PDT by TitansAFC
Ron Paul: Why didn’t the north just buy the south’s slaves and free them that way?
Getting down to the last two questions here…. Most people consider Abe Lincoln to be one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest president we’ve ever had. Would you agree with that sentiment and why or why not?
No, I don’t think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have been available to buy up all the slaves and free them. So, I don’t see that is a good part of our history.....
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
If that is so, the South had ample opportunity to redress the issue under the Constitution. They had control of the House and Senate and the Executive more than one during the next 30 years.
I still can’t believe you go by “Who’s the Victor” for whether something is right or wrong.
That's because I don't, though you keep trying to recast the argument by that. Unilateral secession is illegal because the South lost, and was therefore under Constitutional authority.
It was wrong, not because they lost, but because it amounted to abandonment of debt and theft. If they were in a marriage, it is the difference between taking the car and safety deposit box and leaving vs. negotiating a divorce. The method of secession was wrong, not the possibility of secession itself.
You really think the South of today is the same South as it was in 1861? Do you think the South as it exists would be identical to one that would have existed, had the Confederacy won?
BTW,I am a born and bred Rocky Mountain westerner. It's been a bastion of conservatism while the South was voting lockstep Democrat for generations. FDR socialism got its start because y'all voted him and his congress in.
2008 General election:
South Carolina votes for McCain/Palin: 1,034,896
California votes for McCain/Palin: 5,011,781
Looks like we did five times as much as you did, recently.
By the way, some of you really need to learn to distinguish between criticizing the Confederacy of 1861-65, and criticizing the South. They are not the same. You are not the same people. They are all dead, and you live in a land that has been without that system for 140 years.
Just as you cannot be held responsible for slavery by the reparations nuts, neither can you take credit nor blame for any of the actions of your ancestors.
Nice try, idiot.
Population of California 2008: 36,756,666
Population of SC 2008: 4,479,800
Percentage of California population that voted for McCain: 13.6%
Percentage of South Carolina population the voted for McCain: 23.1%
Oops. Looks like we did almost twice as much as you did.....recently.
Boy, you got a lot to learn.
I'm at least a sixth generation Southerner on both sides of the family. Before that, lots of Scots/Irish on both sides of the family. We ARE the same people and it's something that you damn yankees just don't get.
neither can you take credit nor blame for any of the actions of your ancestors.
Perhaps not, but I can be proud of the legacy and heritage they passed down and that's something else you damn yankees don't get.
Mathew Carey supported Jefferson every time he ran. So far as I can tell he supported Jefferson's party as long as it was around. This is an indication that Jeffersonian Republicanism was a more complex and variegated thing than dogmatists make it out to be.
Much political hay was made of this in successor generations, and by the late 19th century it had become an overt political argument in protectionist circles to quote them as evidence that the free-trader Jeffersonians had conceded their own folly and embraced the Hamiltonian program then being extolled by the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge and William McKinley - and it came in pen of the great Agrarian himself no less!
No one said that the Jeffersonian Republicans were as protectionist as Hamilton was, but still, in 1816, the bulk of the party's representatives in both houses of Congress embraced a protective tariff that provided a precedent for Clay and his colleagues to follow. A substantial part of the party believed that Hamilton and the monocratic Federalists had been defeated and it was time to turn the nation's attention to building up the nation's economy and defenses.
Most of these votes came from the North and West, but the vote in the South wasn't as lopsided as one might think (34-23 against with 3 of South Carolina's 4 votes supporting the new tariff). Even John C. Calhoun was in favor of the bill. Southerners thought they would benefit from the tariff on cotton. The remaining Federalists were by no means overwhelmingly in favor of the new protective tariff -- or for Madison's national bank, which they thought would shift financial power away from Boston to Philadelphia. By 1819 things had changed -- Southerners turned against protection and New Englanders embraced it -- but a precedent for Republican support for protectionism had been set.
The 1816 Jefferson letters were almost invariably written as he was answering the political charges of his opponents who had accused him, based on his earlier Agrarian writings, of advocating commercial dependence on the then-hated British for manufactured goods. What is also left out is that even at their strongest embrace, Jefferson's writings on manufacturing never even came close to flirting with the Hamiltonian policy program advanced by Clay.
Nobody said that Jefferson went as far as Hamilton wanted to go in his support for national manufactures, but he did backtrack from his earlier agrarianism due the force of circumstances. Yes, he did write in the Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, which Mathew Carey arranged to be published, by the way):
Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.
And yes he did write in the letter to Benjamin Austin (1816):
We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist. The former question is suppressed, or rather assumes a new form. Shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort; and if those who quote me as of a different opinion, will keep pace with me in purchasing nothing foreign where an equivalent of domestic fabric can be obtained, without regard to difference of price, it will not be our fault if we do not soon have a supply at home equal to our demand, and wrest that weapon of distress from the hand which has wielded it.
So, yes, it certainly does look as though he changed his mind between 1785 and 1816 (and then changed it again after 1816). Note the phrase "experience has taught me ..." Jefferson may have been trying to say that he didn't change his mind, but he actually says that he has. Notice also the phrase "without regard to price." I suppose he's talking about free individual decisions rather than tariffs, but still, today's free traders don't back buy American campaigns to the extent that Jefferson does here.
And here's Tom in 1799 writing to Edmund Pendleton:
What a glorious exchange would it be could we persuade our navigating fellow citizens to embark their capital in the internal commerce of our country, exclude foreigners from that and let them take the carrying trade in exchange: abolish the diplomatic establishments and never suffer an armed vessel of any nation to enter our ports.
To be sure, Jefferson is complaining about European meddling in this letter, but he's not trying to distance himself from earlier comments, and he certainly doesn't sound like a doctrinaire free-trader. The point is that Jefferson had an isolationist/autarkist side that the young nationalists in his own party picked up on. You may see them as heretics, but they could point to things about Jefferson and his administration that supported their interpretation.
The tendency to view Jefferson's final days as those of a senile slaveocrat is itself a mistake, owing to a combination of historian's biases and political discomfort with just how close Jefferson actually came to advocating the nullifier position that Calhoun would take up (with Giles' prodding, by the way) just two years later. Alan Pell Crawford nicely handles this subject as a problem of historiography, rather than Jefferson himself, in his recent work "Twilight at Monticello." Crawford says that those who see Jefferson as sad and embittered and pathetic in his later days can't admit that the views of the old Jefferson on things like state's rights were the same as those of the Jefferson who drafted the Kentucky resolutions in 1798.
Crawford could be right that Jefferson's view on states rights was the same in 1798 and later on after he left office, but it doesn't really matter.
The relevant difference isn't between the young and the old Jefferson, but between Jefferson in power, who was pragmatic and bent his principles to achieve the results he thought necessary, and Jefferson out of power who held others to principles he didn't follow very strictly himself. The contrast isn't between a young radical Jefferson and an old reactionary one but between the Jefferson who understood politics and acted accordingly and a the Jefferson who judged others by standards he didn't come up to himself.
Also, even if Jefferson did follow the same principles before and after his presidency, in his younger days he still had hope that things would work out for the country and for himself. When he was in retirement, his hopes would necessarily be more muted and a bitterness would creep in.
But is Crawford really right? Is inveighing against federal support of road construction as worthy a cause as fighting for freedom of speech and the press? Is defending slaveowners' rights equivalent to advancing religious freedom? Isn't it a comedown to go from breaking with the world's greatest empire, turning back an attempt to restrict basic constitutional freedoms, and leading the opposition party into the government of the new nation for the first time to complaining about government road and canal building and hinting that you just might break up the union over something like that? I don't know. It's not a simple question, but it is one that Crawford ducks in order to go easy on Jefferson.
He doesn't prove his case against the other historians by any means. Some of Jefferson's younger contemporaries considered that he'd moved away from the nationalism and expansionism he'd encouraged to become petty and provincial and spiteful, and later historians have to consider that perception. They may reject it, but it would be surprising if they didn't explore that line of interpretation.
The short version of it though is that, contrary to common assertion, Jefferson's actual writings on the subject were far removed from the subject of slavery.
Are Jefferson's later writings really not concerned with slavery? I don't think slavery was the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing at night. It wasn't yet issue number one in the country. Slaveowners hadn't lost major battles yet -- they could think about other things -- but when there was a perceived defeat or something that could be considered a slight to the slaveowning South, Jefferson took it very hard indeed.
Jefferson's habit of seeing concern over slavery's expansion as a mask for the consolidationist tendencies of Northerners meant that his concern for the prerogatives of slave states and slaveowners was tied to his ideas about state's rights and liberty in a way that would be hard to separate out. I'd have to do more research into the matter, but I wouldn't dismiss a whole generation of historians who understood how important the issue of slavery was in the 1820s.
Alan Pell Crawford writes that Jefferson's attitude toward slavery was "at once more searching than has generally been granted, less self-serving than might be supposed, and yet nearly as imprisoning to thought and inhibiting to action as the political and economic realities that it attempted to explain." There's something to be said for that. Jefferson may not have become as sour and pro-slavery as some have said, but slavery held him in it's grip and he didn't manage to shake loose.
If current historians are hard on Jefferson, look at some of Jefferson's allies in his last days:
Examine again, the constitution of the U, S. and you will perceive your error. If Congress can make canals they can with more propriety emancipate. -- Letter from Nathaniel Macon to Mr. Bartlett Yancey, 15 April 1818.
If Congress possess the power to do what is proposed by this bill, they may not only enact a sedition law, — for there is precedent, — but they may emancipate every slave in the United States, and with stronger color of reason than they can exercise the power now contended for. -- John Randolph, speaking against the 1824 roads and canals bill.
That's the same public works plan that Jefferson drafted a dry and airless "Declaration and Protest" against. It's hard to tell what was on Jefferson's mind when he wrote the "Declaration and Protest," but given comments like Macon's and Randolph's it's not hard to see why some people have assumed that the defense of slavery was behind it all.
I'd just as soon give Macon and Randolph the benefit of the doubt -- and Jefferson as well. But when the same tolerance and suspension of judgment is not extended by their defenders to their opponents, it can be hard to do so.
While Jefferson didn't explicitly tie slavery and opposition to internal improvements together as tightly as Macon and Randolph did, one does have to wonder, why did Jefferson find those meddlesome quids who'd savaged him when he was in office, such congenial company after he retired?
I doubt Thomas Jefferson told himself that opposition to road and canal projects was the best way to protect slavery, but he choose the Macon-Randolph-Taylor ideology over the competing national republican one and wasn't put off by the close association of the Quids with the defense of slavery.
In other words, it may not be that he heard "internal improvements" and thought "threat to slavery," but a desire for limited government, hostility to Northerners, and a combativeness in defense of "Southern ways and institutions" (like slavery) were part of the same great idea in Jefferson's own mind.
Jefferson may not have described all expansions of government power as threats to slavery, but as he grew older he did come to see all proposed government anti-slavery actions as part of the same consolidationist conspiracy as tariffs and public works projects. That's not something later historians invented.
BTW, isn't this one of those Civil War threads you are supposed to stay off?
Be proud of your ancestors all you want, but it still doesn’t make you one of them. You’re a modern day, 21st century American. You are no more a Scot or Irish or Confederate than Jesse Jackson is a West Coast African or a slave.
You’ve more in common culturally with a California suburbanite than you do with a South Carolina cotton grower of 1861. And, if you enjoy modern plumbing, supermarkets and internet, you should give thanks that it is so.
What I am is a native born American, of conservative heritage, neither Yankee nor Reb. I can dispassionately look at the past and acknowledge the flaws as well as the triumphs of our shared national history. I also don’t get upset when I discover that some of my ancestors did things and believed things I find repugnant, nor do I steal their glory to myself for the things they did which were heroic. Glad they did them, or you and I wouldn’t be here, but it wasn’t my or your doing.
My point is that there were more conservatives voting in CA than the whole population of SC. Yes, we are outnumbered in the cities, but it is arrogant to dismiss us. Without us, you'd have 19 fewer Republicans in the House.
Just the type of idiocy I’ve come to expect from some elements of the Neo_confederate wannabes that inhabit this forum.
You realize that 13.6% of the population of California is GREATER THAN the entire population of South Carolina right?
And no, you didn’t do twice as much as California’s voters did. You did about 1/4th less.
Here’s a math lesson: California has nearly 9x (that’s 9 times) the population of South Carolina.
South Carolina had less than 1/4th of it’s total population vote for McCain, but I’ll give you 1/4th.
California had just above 1/8th of its’ people vote for McCain. So I’ll give them that even thought their percentage is higher (trust me doesn’t do you any good anyway).
4479800 x 0.25 = 1119950
36756666 x 0.125 = 4594583
Even rounding down for the percentage for California means that MORE people in California voted for McCain than did those in South Carolina and indeed, more Californians voted for McCain than the entire population of South Carolina.
Your statement = fail.
Whatever.....
I don't “take credit” for the actions of my ancestors. I give them credit, they earned it!
If I wish to pick up were they left off, that's my decision to make. During my youth, I didn't fully appreciate the differences. I do now. We are different people. Nothing more needs to be addressed.
There Is Nothing New Under The Sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9-14
You’ve more in common culturally with a California suburbanite than you do with a South Carolina cotton grower of 1861. And, if you enjoy modern plumbing, supermarkets and internet, you should give thanks that it is so.
What I am is a native born American, of conservative heritage, neither Yankee nor Reb. I can dispassionately look at the past and acknowledge the flaws as well as the triumphs of our shared national history. I also don’t get upset when I discover that some of my ancestors did things and believed things I find repugnant, nor do I steal their glory to myself for the things they did which were heroic. Glad they did them, or you and I wouldn’t be here, but it wasn’t my or your doing.
What I am is someone watching another double talking politician from Illinois finish the job that the first one started; whom doesn't want to sink with your ship.
Its really pretty simple. Either you support the Natural Right of Secession or you don't.
There's no such thing. You're conflating two different concepts. Secession is a legal process and takes place within the construct of a government and the existing social contract. Natural rights transcend law. If you want to appeal to natural law, fine. It's called rebellion. In it, you overthrow the existing order and social contract, revert to the "state of nature" and can then construct a new social contract more to your liking.
Did slaves have a natural right to secession? Of course not. They weren't even considered part of the social contract. Who would they secede from? On the other hand, of course they had a natural right to rebellion. A natural right, that the slaveowners were under no legal obligation to recognize.
Here's a question: Do the Palestinians in Gaza have a legal right to secede and establish their own nation? What about the natural right to do so?
Shooter,
I have no patience for debate which is not constructive.
But, I’ll give you a hint your question @ 1336.....I own some very, very old quilts....they’ve been handed down in my family for generations now. I’ve got other neat things, ie: Confederate troop gear, gun, money, personal papers, photos, etc., which too belonged to ancestors.
State archives, public libraries, national archives,and historical societies, are great places for research. If you’re like me, you’ll end up with piles of books and papers. It just takes patience. State by state worked best for me. Good Luck!
Hairsplitting nonsense. You're inventing stuff now.
They were sovereign acts, which is all you need to know.
First off, Natural Rights belong to people, not States, so secession, being an action of a State, is not one. States have Powers, not Rights. The question is, do States have the Power, under the Constitution, to secede without regard to the other States in the compact.
I do believe that there is a right for a group of people who form a substantial majority, and are dissatisfied with their State being in the Union, to enter into a negotiated secession with the other States. Rather like a divorce, instead of abandonment. One cannot just walk away with half the property and claim it was the same as a divorce. This viewpoint is the one supported by Texas v White.
The only time unilaterally abandoning a govt. is justified is when the abuses thereof have become oppressive, and no other recourse is available. That method is called rebellion (rising against) and revolution (overturning). Reading the various statement from the Confederate States declaring their causes, I do not believe they met this level of justification.
If I wish to pick up were they left off, that's my decision to make.
If what you wish is to form a new Government under the Confederate Constitution, I don't think you'll see much support. Most of us are over that desire to enshrine slavery thing.
1. The matter of Matthew Carey's sympathies is no more "complex and variegated" than the plain and explicit terms in which Carey himself placed them. When he spoke of his political economy, he spoke glowingly of its Hamiltonian origin - the "light" to Adam Smith's "darkness." And when he spoke of Jefferson, it was only in denunciation of his "errors" rendered "highly pernicious" by the acclaim his name attracted.
Though I risk of repeating my #1147 in stating this, it is simply not a matter of legitimate historical contention as to where Carey got his ideas. They came from Hamilton. He openly stated that they came from Hamilton. And he offered Hamilton his highest praises while simultaneously denouncing the "folly" of Jeffersonian political economy. No amount of equivocation upon which of Jefferson's books Carey published in 1786, or who he cast his vote for in 1804 will alter the far more conclusive and explicit evidence of his own words on the subject, causing me only to wonder exactly what your point, if any, may be in pressing that subject further.
2. The notoriously mild tariff of 1816 makes a slothful comparison to the aggressive protective regimes of 1824 and 1828. The former was born of fleeting political naivety and post-war nationalism; the latter of an extremely aggressive form of interest-group rent seekers and favor trading under the cloak of a "new" system of political economy. It is folly to speak of the 1816 tariff as a partisan measure of Jeffersonian-Republican progeny for the simple reason of the Federalist Party alternative effectively ceasing to exist as a national organization from that year forward, and even as a regional one by decade's end. The partisan reorganization that occurred around its demise resulted in many strange bedfellows, not the least among them being the thoroughly Federalist John Quincy Adams becoming the presidential standard bearer for a party that ostensibly bore the name of Jefferson's own creation, and much to the disdain of Jefferson himself.
3. It is historically difficult, and indeed somewhat flippant, to maintain that Jefferson's recurring resurrection of the 1798 resolutions in his politics "doesn't really matter." For better or worse, Jefferson is a weighty authority of founding era political thought. His very real embrace of nullificationist principles in 1826 is at least as valid and informative to the historical discussion as Madison's rejection of the same from 1828 after Jefferson's passing. So long as Madison is cited as authority in the case against the nullifiers - and he is, frequently and widely - it must also be admitted that Jefferson serves a similar function on the contrasting side. Furthermore, your attempted contrast between philosophical and pragmatic Jefferson as a simple matter of being in and out of office does not really withstand scrutiny. Jefferson was indisputably "in office" - in fact the second highest political office he ever attained - when he penned his 1798 resolution, an act your interpretation would deem wholly impractical. And even in his old age, Jefferson's assaults on the Adams canal and tariff programs had very little about it that was impractical philosophical musing, and everything to do with his attempt to orchestrate a political move against Adams from the Virginia legislature. His late-life embrace of nullification was in essence a brief last foray into politics from retirement (and he even said as much in his letters!), in which he crafted and lined up sponsors behind the nullification resolution in Richmond. One of his letters describing the plot to Madison even referred to having lined up his man in Richmond to push the thing through. And while it is far less known that Calhoun's 1828 Exposition and Protest, Jefferson actually succeeded in this effort from beyond the grave - William Branch Giles, using letters Jefferson had written him, revived the thing in 1827 and pushed it through the Virginia legislature.
4. On your particular statement:
But is Crawford really right? Is inveighing against federal support of road construction as worthy a cause as fighting for freedom of speech and the press? Is defending slaveowners' rights equivalent to advancing religious freedom?
As Jefferson made no reference to "slaveowners' rights" in his 1826 efforts, your second question is but a mooted distraction. Turning to the first though, you are confusing the particular instance of Jefferson's grievance (roads and canals) with the larger principles that were being violated (just taxation and the constitutional scope of federal power). Jefferson did not launch his protest out of the road-hating caricature you seem to convey, and in fact the opposite was true. He openly stated that he hoped they might consider a constitutional amendment granting Congress a limited power to build roads and canals. His grievance was with the way Adams was using and abusing the "General Welfare" and "Interstate Commerce" clauses to tax and spend in matters well beyond the federal government's constitutional means. And in terms of their gravity as items of protest, yes I do consider freedom from oppressive taxation and limitations to the scope federal power to rank up there with such lofty principles as freedom of speech and religion.
5. It is not an easy case to maintain that the Tertium Quids, who formally broke with Jefferson in 1806-7 and did not truly reconcile with the mainline of his party until Andrew Jackson's election, were making statements even remotely representative of his views in the late 1810's or early 1820's. Randolph never really forgave Jefferson's perceived "betrayal" of the Revolution of 1800, and was still attributing the country's "ruin" to Jefferson as late as 1828. And to reach out to the North Carolinian Macon as your second-best case of a thoroughly Virginian political matter is evidence that you are truly reaching. Jefferson took great care in urging his actual correspondents - Giles, Madison, Taylor before he died, and the allied newspapermen in Richmond - to differentiate himself from the "hot-headed Georgians," who frequently did blend slavery with their motives on other issues.
But what is more telling is this statement of yours: "It's hard to tell what was on Jefferson's mind when he wrote the "Declaration and Protest"..." No! In fact it is not hard to tell at all what was in his mind, because he laid it out explicitly in three different letters to three different recipients - Giles, Madison, and the resolution's sponsor in the Virginia House of Delegates - all composed during the same week. The sole and explicitly elaborated motive in each was the abuses he saw the Adams administration taking in their liberal construction of the Commerce and General Welfare clauses, and the particular instance was the tariff and canal programs. Not a word about slavery, or anything even remotely related to slavery, appeared in any of them. To read it in where it is not is to invent it out of thin air, and in that both you and the historians who have done so are simply mistaken as to your facts.
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