Lee, Virginia, and the Union

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org ^ | March 27, 2019 | Fred H. Cox

[DiogenesLamp]

I did not read it because it is too long, and at a glance it looks like your usual crap of distorting the truth to fit your own preferences.

[Pelham]

So once all the clutter is swept aside you admit that colonial Colonel George Washington broke his oath to the Crown.

Like the Lincoln would do 90 years later, George III declared the colonials to be traitors, in rebellion, denied that they had any right to break away and form their own country.

[DiogenesLamp]

Of course, you're still talking about Democrats, North & South, who ruled NY & DC from 1801 until secession in 1861.

Your attempts to constantly point out the irrelevant claim that Democrats are behind all this is deliberate noise.

Urban. Liberal. Wealthy. Race Obsessed people in New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, Washington DC, who like to tax and spend, who are big proponents of organized labor, favor protectionism, love government subsidies to industries, and live in all the areas that are liberal bastions today, are nowadays known as "Democrats." In 1860, they called themselves "Republicans."

Same policies. Same geographical areas. Descended from the same groups of people. Still pushing their race hustle, and big government solutions.

A more accurate delineations is "Hamiltonians" and "Jeffersonians."

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You keep trying to stuff that crap into the Declaration of Independence, but the document does not stipulate any requirement beyond 'consent of the governed.' "

Nonsense, since you found the words "should not" and reframed them to mean "should", otherwise there is not a single word in the Declaration to support your wacked-out "unlimited right of secession" nonsense.

The entire Declaration, from beginning to end, is built around the words "necessary" and "necessity", driven by "a long train of abuses and usurpations" and it's simply yet another Big Lie for you to claim otherwise.

DiogenesLamp: "You also keep failing to understand, probably deliberately so, that what *YOU* consider tolerable, someone *ELSE* may consider completely intolerable, and *YOU* do not have a right to impose *YOUR* ideas on other people of what *THEY* should tolerate."

Well... first, neither of the words "tolerable" or "intolerable" appear in the Declaration, so your argument here is totally bogus, for that reason alone.

Second, the Declaration has nothing to do with how much you personally can tolerate or suffer, and everything to do with the facts about a "long train of abuses and usurpations" showing "a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism".
Do such conditions exist or not?
That's what mattered to our Founders.

DiogenesLamp: "Abuses and grievances are in the eye of the beholder, not yours."

Nonsense, just as in any fair trial, abuses & grievances are matters of fact & law -- they either exist or they don't.
Our Founders laid out in great detail what they considered legally actionable "abuses and usurpations" and I see no reason -- none, zero, nada reason -- to dispute their judgments on it.

[DiogenesLamp]

Another example of your cognitive impairment which doesn't allow you to see anything that contradicts what you wish to believe.

Facts you don't like are simply invisible to you.

[DiogenesLamp]

You ignore the fact that those many British forts & trading posts supported hostile Indians in their war against American settlers and army, leading to the single greatest US Army defeat, ever, called St. Clair's Defeat, in 1791.

You ignore the fact that none of these forts commanded the entrance to New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Nobody would have tolerated any British occupying a fort at the entrance of one of their major harbors.

NOBODY.

[DiogenesLamp]

Not even going to bother. Saw the word “Marxist” and concluded I didn’t want to engage in more pig wrestling.

[DiogenesLamp]

The entire Declaration, from beginning to end, is built around the words "necessary" and "necessity", driven by "a long train of abuses and usurpations" and it's simply yet another Big Lie for you to claim otherwise.

The big lie that you constantly tell yourself is that *YOU* have the right to tell *OTHER* people what *THEY* shall regard as a *NECESSITY*.

"Necessity" is in the eye of the beholder. A concept you simply do not and seemingly cannot grasp.

*THEY* believed their reasons for leaving were a *NECESSITY*.

*YOU* don't get to decide for other people that their concerns are trivial. *THEY* get to decide if their concerns are serious enough to warrant a separation.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "If you mean they were going to take them over, then yes they were.
I keep telling you that the economic powerhouse the Confederacy would have became would have states eventually moving into it's economic, and later political orbit."

First, I meant Confederate takeovers by military invasions, which alone justifies the Union military response.
Second, there's no doubt in my mind that Deep South slaveholders were, in 1860, on average the wealthiest people on earth, let alone in the USA.
However, best estimates of Confederate state GDPs put them at less than 20% of total US GDP, meaning the Union economy was over five times larger.

That does not make the Confederacy an "economic power house", even in the best of times.

DiogenesLamp: "The confederacy would have continued to grow at the expense of the Union in terms of states going over to join it.
I've said that for a long time."

But your theory is based 100% on your claims that Midwest states would want to pay tariffs twice (US & CSA) to use the Mississippi River and New Orleans to export & import their goods.
In fact, that second CSA tariff would more than compensate for any extra cost to using the Great Lakes and railroads for shipping East-West -- one tariff, not two.

Further, if some Midwest state -- suppose Illinois -- were to join the Confederacy just to reduce its tariffs, it would still have to pay the second tariff when trading back & forth to Union states.
The net change in costs of business would be very small, if any.

Finally, Union states could never join the Confederacy without accepting its constitution's slavery conditions, which they were simply not going to do, whether for idealistic or mere economic reasons.

That's why I think your suggestions on this are pure pipe dreams.

[DiogenesLamp]

First, I meant Confederate takeovers by military invasions, which alone justifies the Union military response.

There was never going to be a "military" invasion of those states by the Confederacy. They would have gotten them easily just by becoming prosperous in the coming years.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Only condition in the Declaration of Independence is "consent of the governed."
No other conditions mentioned. *YOU* keep trying to put in conditions, but the founders did not.
They urged caution, but made no specific requirements other than the one I named."

Sorry, but that's just another of your Big Lies, repeated endlessly in hopes of making it true.
It's not.

In fact the Declaration is full of terms like "necessity", "abuses and usurpations", "design to reduce them under absolute Despotism" -- then it becomes their right & duty...

So you have located one use of the words "should not", retranslated them to mean "should" and declared from that an unlimited "right of secession" at pleasure.

Sorry, but that's just a lie and nothing else.

[DiogenesLamp]

Sorry, but that's just another of your Big Lies, repeated endlessly in hopes of making it true.

Here I will paraphrase Lincoln.

Just because you call a truth a "lie" doesn't make it so.

No conditions in the Declaration beyond "consent of the governed."

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "No, it's just the simple truth. You can tell by all the "hate blacks" laws passed in the Northern states.
Funny that the "land of Lincoln" had particular nasty laws to drive black people out of their state."

But laws or no-laws, the freed black population in Illinois increased at a faster percent than any other state between 1820 and 1860.
What this tells us is that some politically active people could get laws passed, but a larger number ignored them.

DiogenesLamp: "This is something else I have been fed all my life; The idea that northern people were against slavery because it was immoral.
If you study it enough, it becomes clear that they weren't against slavery because it was immoral, they were against slavery because they saw it as a threat to their wage earning ability."

Any Northerner who went to church, and most did back then (you should try it too), knew that slavery was immoral long before they figured out the economic consequences of having to compete with slave labor.
So the morality of it came first, then the economics.

DiogenesLamp: "These states went on to become "Organized Labor" states, otherwise known as "UNION" states.
Which side of the political spectrum are all the Union members on?"

Are you talking about the ones who elected President Trump for promising to "put Americans first" again?

Seems to me our President has been accused of a lot of crazy things, but "anti-Union" is not one of them.
Anti-Union would be our Democrat globalists.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "No.
They have no bearing on why armies from Northern states invaded the Southern states.
The only motivation in the Civil War that matters is the motivation that caused armies to march from the North to kill people in the South. "

And yet DiogenesLamp freely confesses Confederates wanted to take over Union states, by military force where possible, which seems like plenty of reason enough for a Union military response.

It only became more an "invasion" of Confederate states after Confederates were defeated in the Union!

[DiogenesLamp]

But laws or no-laws, the freed black population in Illinois increased at a faster percent than any other state between 1820 and 1860.

Which is probably why they passed all those anti-black laws. Like I said, the Northern people hated blacks. Charles Dickens summed up the truth perfectly.

"Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."

Abolitionists of that era were like the LGBQT activists of today. A bunch of liberal kooks which the rest of society mostly ignored.

[DiogenesLamp]

And yet DiogenesLamp freely confesses Confederates wanted to take over Union states, by military force where possible,

Here you go again, trying to put words into my mouth. I said the very opposite of this. I said that all the border states would have quickly joined the South had the South been able to establish normal trade with Europe. I've said this over and over again, and I have pointed out constantly that no military effort would be necessary because all the border states would go willingly once they saw that their economic interests would be better served by the Confederacy.

I think even you have, during your occasional periods of sanity, acknowledged that the border states would have eventually gone over to the Confederacy.

Stop trying to attribute to me positions I have never held.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You don't get it.
You cannot have *ANY* moral high ground after the Corwin amendment.
My study of history has revealed the North to be a bunch of liars who pretended to care about "Freedom" for slaves, 18 months after the f***ing war started! "

Like near-all of DiogenesLamp's claims, the one here that he studied history is just another Big Lie.
DiogenesLamp has never studied history, not a word of it, he's only consumed Lost Cause propaganda and simply cannot deal with anything outside its constructs.

The proposed Corwin amendment was a Democrat initiative, begun by Senators like Mississippi's Jefferson Davis in hopes of keeping more states from seceding.
It was supported by 100% of Democrats, North and South, opposed by most Republicans.
It was passed in Congress (only) because Republicans thought it mere eyewash and changed nothing really.

After that Corwin failed utterly.
So like everywhere else, DiogenesLamp's outrage here is simply misdirected.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Just as the United Kingdom required the assent of the rest of the Union. Right?
Wrong. Clearly wrong. Wrong on so many levels."

Nothing in the British "constitution" allowed for reframing government by any means other that war.

[DiogenesLamp]

Trying to deflect scrutiny of what the Corwin Amendment meant. Yes, I understand why you are doing this. If you don't successfully refute the Corwin amendment, all your pretty justification for the invasion and bloodshed just disappears.

It's a very different thing to have men "Die to make men wealthy" than it is to have men "Die to make men free."

It's no use though. The very fact that the Corwin amendment passed the House and Senate, and that Lincoln supported it puts the lie to the claim that the war had anything to do with slavery.

The war was about power and control, and "slavery" was just incidental to it.

[DiogenesLamp]

Nothing in the British "constitution" allowed for reframing government by any means other that war.

That is correct, but our founding document acknowledges it as a right that should be respected with no conflict in a nation founded on such an idea.

Once we supplanted the British law with our own, there should have been no conflict over the right of separation.

Lincoln rebelled against this newer paradigm.