Posted on 05/17/2002 1:51:36 PM PDT by aconservaguy
Read Jefferson's and the Founders ideas of State's rights. You know ... small limited government with primary right of self-determination belonging to the States?! AND the right to seceed if they didn't feel the government was acting on their behalf! After all, that's what representative government is all about. Representative is the key word here boyo!
Once again, if the issue where anything OTHER than SLAVERY, you'd have a case. If the south had severed its ties to the federal government due to shipping lanes, or water rights, or anything other than slavery, the argument of states rights would be be arguable. The fact that the southern states rode the wrong horse (slavery), doomed their argument. And it makes apologists for the Confederacy today look ridiculous. Argue your point, but don't try to refight the Civil War.
I completely agree with your statement, in fact, all of your comment. I'm sure there were plenty of reasons why the Civil War started, and continued for four horrible years...But in the end, the conflict was over slavery. The abolitionists pressured Lincoln to make this issue the focus of the war. Until the Emancipation Proclamation, he resisted, and was conciliatory toward the south if it would lay down its rebellion (again, I think Lincoln's belief was that slavery would eventually collapse of necessity). But by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, he had concluded that the war couldn't be ended, and wouldn't end well, without the end of slavery being a prime goal of the north, as well as union. History is written by the victors. And the change in the terms of the Civil War written by Lincoln in late 1862, ultimately made slavery (and union) the focal point of the war.
I wasn't aware of this proposed 13th Amendment. Thanks for the information.
For someone who claims to support the northern tyrant, do you even bother to read what he said beyond that literal doublespeak called the Gettysburg Address? From his first inaugural address
In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it...I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
Now mind you this came out of the mouth of the slaveholder lawyer, the man who operated as a citizen of the state of Illinois for 7 years that did not allow blacks to move into the state (the northern black codes)
By its very design, the Proclamation was unenforceable in those states to which it applied because they were still in rebellion. But it helped to undermine slavery in those states.
This is some sort of joke right? lincoln himself admitted by the end of 1862 the US had reached the last straw in the war. Most of the support was gone, which led to the Draft Riots in New York in '63, and the only thing the Emancipation Proclamation did was to gather moral support in the north for continuance of the war. Yes, abe had to turn to the very group, that he was quoted as saying he did not want to be painted with an 'abolitionist brush', for continued support in the war. Less than 200,000 people belonged to Abolitionist groups in the north before the proclamation but the numbers swelled afterwards in 64 and 65
But, there is ample evidence that Lincoln thought that slavery was a doomed institution.
You think? Come on now, even DiLorenzo points out in his latest work, that slavery was dying worldwide. Only a few places actually had a war involving the end of slavery of 2 out of 3, historians admit slavery was a red herring to wave in front of the people to gain support for governmental change. Want to take a guess what the third one was? In every other major nation, slavery had about died out. If you bothered reading the Confederate Constitution, slave trade was banned except for receiving slaves from the United States. Now if we are to believe these history books written by such worshippers as McPherson and Sandburg, the whole north was up in arms over the abolishment of slavery and there wasn't a slave to be found up north. So if there were no more slaves in the north, there would be no more slaves coming into the Confederacy. Also I'd like to see where good ol' abe was in relation to teaching the slaves. Perhaps he was closer to his yankee brethren in Conneticut that outlawed teaching a slave to read and write in 1836 versus men like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee that not only taught their slaves but were training them for the day they would be released. Do a little search on lincoln's 'root,pig, or perish' ideals. He could have cared less.
You are fighting against a straw man. There are few people if any who would argue that the North went to war in 1861 to free the slaves. Rather they fought to preserve the Union and maintain their own freedom from what they took, not without reason, to be an expansionist "slave power." By the end of the war, freeing the slaves did become part of the justification for the war.
Think of WWII. We got into it because Japan attacked us and Hitler declared war on us (leaving the complicated questions of Roosevelt's motives and machinations out of the discussion for the time being.) In the course of the war new reasons were found for us to fight, and we've been coming up with still more reasons in the six decades since. There is some validity for some of these grounds. Certainly, if Hitler hadn't invaded most of Europe he wouldn't have declared war on us and we wouldn't have fought him with such passion. So one can't simply rule such reasons out as part of the larger picture of what created the war.
For the Confederacy, the defense of slavery was an important motivation from the beginning. If it reflects poorly on Lincoln that he put the Union above abolitionism, would you think better of him if he put abolition first from the beginning? It could have meant losing the war, and I doubt it would have brought him plaudits from anyone. And if putting union before slavery is Lincoln's sin, what do we think of the Confederates who put slavery before the union?
This article is a fine examination of the conflict and subsequent discussions. Growing up, I was always taught that North and South, Union and Confederacy, Lincoln and Lee were all part of "Our American Heritage." That may have been a naive view. After all, the war was a particularly costly in American lives and there were serious conflicts involved. But I don't see what's gained by making Lincoln a melodrama villain and sterilizing the climate of the era to fit the war into a distorting scheme based on present politics. If there is to be a debunking, let it be a general debunking, that's as quick to see through the Confederate facade as the Union, and no quicker to come up with excuses for the rebels than for Lincoln.
Liberals tend to overlook economic implications of all public policy issues. Owing a slave had an implicit cost. Most employees in the period at the bottom end of the agricultural economy were earning only subsistence wages--a slave included not only the subsistence but also other costs related to security and management. Those costs did not make the institution uneconomic until the cotton gin--however at the point use of the gin because widespread, the cotton farmer with slaves made less money, or lost money, to the farmer who did not have slaves. That spelled clear ultimate end to the system at a finite point in future history.
The death of over 400,000 Americans was simply not necessary to enforce the ultimate end of slavery. The only slavery issue was timing.
I don't mind the Confederate flag, because it is a symbol of brave kids who fought and died to protect their families, homes and way of life. That's honorable. I'm glad South Carolinans told the world to stick it - people of communities can choose their own cultural icons, and the offended can hit the road if they can't abide the insult.
We need to get past all the 137 year old humiliation and obsessing though. That War is no longer a legitimate grievance for inter-generational poverty, lagging health and poor education in much of the South. We're Americans - Army Rangers don't care if the brother next to them is from Maine or Mississippi, black or white, Christian or Jew - he's kin. Geez, Abe Lincoln took an assassin's bullet in the head for his trouble. What more do some here want - General Sherman's ancestors to walk backwards replanting their tobacco fields and rebuilding livery stables?
Sure. But the point of this argument is that the War of Northern Agression was not necessary, and was not instituted, to the purposes of bringing an end to slavery. There is little doubt that slavery would have collapsed eventually--economics drive everything and the cotton gin made slavery uneconomic--the end was in sight in the near term.
The elimination of slavery argument added moral force to Lincoln's later position in management of the war--the whole point of the current authors is that elimination of slavery was an afterthought by Lincoln in support of his conduct of the war.
"History is written by the victors." That is the argument--the history of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator is a fraud--he wasn't. He instigated the war for the purpose of enforcing the will of the majority to preserve their economic interest in protectionist tariffs against the interest of the minority in the south of whom they were destructive. The south's only remedy was the threat to secede which was clearly the basis for the the original unity of the states under the constitution--if a majority state interest is ultimately unacceptable to the minority, the minority had the clear right to leave.
It's fine to say in response, as this author does, that preservation of the capital-property interest in the slaves was an objective of a large portion of the political constituency that supported defense of the war in the south--but the war was unnecessary to bring an end to slavery nor was it necessary for the south to secede to prolong the institution. So at the end of the day, slavery was not the issue.
The real issue all along was to eliminate the protection of the minority from the ability of the majority (as the majority does today with the federal income tax) to exact money and other economic benefits from the minority by sheer force of the block of their votes. Lincoln did that--it will ultimate bring about the end of the republic.
Sorry X, that just doesn't add up. All during March and most of April, 1861 all the leading northern papers were editorializing that Lincoln should just let the south go. Then once word of the Confederate Constitutional convention started to filter back up north establishing a free trade zone in the south the drumbeat for war started. These same big newspaper editors that just weeks before called for peace began to lead the charge demanding Lincoln call up the troops and blockade southern ports. Northern ports told Washington they wouldn't collect the tariff duties and soon themselves were calling for a free trade zone. Washington and Lincoln saw their revunue base about the collapse.
Well stated!
OK, now I see where you're going with this....Excuse me, but who fired the first shot of the Civil War ("War of Northern Aggression"...cute spin)? Who withdrew its delegates from Congress? Who rebuffed overtures to return to the Union in peace? Do you think anyone would have let the southern states withdraw without opposition? Even Stephen Douglas saw the primacy of union; so it wasn't just Lincoln who rejected the south's "right" to go their own way.
And it's to the advantage to the south that the union was found "inseparable." Had the Confederacy succeeded in its rebellion, had slavery been perpetuated for another 20 or 30 years, had the perversion of Jeffersonian democracy the south held dear been pursued (which was a perpetuation of an agrarian society, a refusal to develop a diversified economy, and the faulty presumption that democracy was dependent upon small farms), had that national entity been allowed to be formed on a denial of the foundational premise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are endowed by God with, among other things, the inalienable right to liberty, the Confederacy today would be nothing but a backward third world nation. Could such a nation, founded on racism and dependent on the servitude of slaves, whose society was grotesquely deformed because of the perpetuation of the plantation slave system, amounted to anything of value? It's to the benefit of the peoples of the south that their mad experiment in sucession failed. The whole premise of the Confederacy was false, and degenerate.
You're nuts.....
Whatever you do, don't remind the Confederate glorifiers about the Amish and other religious groups that helped the escaped slaves evade the fugitive slave law. According to these guys, there were only a few thousand people in the Northern States who gave a damn about negroes circa 1860.
What happened to government, by the consent of the governed?
The last presidential election proved how divided we are. The North-east and the West-coast wants their gun-control, centaralised government, welfare-state, secular-humanist schools. The South wants a Christian Repubic, limited by law, with an armed citizenry. We recongnise that man is a sinful creature, and that government must be limited, seperated, and divided, because man is inherantly sinful.
The South is different from the rest of the Empire, and we want FREEDOM...
What we want, is to be left alone....
For an independant Southland,
Larry Salley
So much for your familiarity with the U.S. Constitution, history, and historical literature. For one thing, James McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom, 256) discusses the amendment proposed in 1861. He notes therein that 3/5 of the Republican Congressman (i.e. the "Radicals") voted against this amendment (which was passed by the House on February 28, 1861), even though it appeared to be the only thing that may keep the Southern States in the Union and avoid a war.
Secondly, Lincoln was not even President at that time, having not yet been inaugurated, and the President doesn't have any formal role in passing Constitutional Amendments anyway. (Art. V.) Although McPherson characterizing Lincoln as having "passively endorsed" the amendment, that obviously wasn't a strong enough position to sway most of the members of his own party, and it is questionable whether the required 3/4 of the states would ratify it anyway. In any event and perhaps fortunately for the cause of abolitionism, the Confederates refused any compromises and attacked Fort Sumter.
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