Posted on 11/27/2018 3:32:30 PM PST by C19fan
I think those who authored the plaque neglected to consult a piece of their own history. I will agree it was not a rebellion but to claim that slavery was not chief among the causes of secession is a long river in Egypt. As proof I offer “Texas Ordinance of Secession.” Slavery is mentioned.
http://www.lsjunction.com/docs/secesson.htm
if you read the original Confederate constitution, it said "to preserve slavery" so that IS why they fought the war.
Butt-hole O’Rourke
Two thumbs up!!
Freepers like things simple
Really simple
Get your own plaque then C.
Put it wherever you live
Dixie sucks
democrats always bad
Republicans rock
Southerners are racist
Yankeees are morally superior
And so forth....
Send me a link if you do a go fund me for it
Meanwhile
Leave us alone to be morally less righteous than you
Please
We’re fine being archaic
He must have missed the article that says the Dems are done with White males....else he’d be shutting his yap...
He should be consistent and say Texas was wrong to rebel from Mexico. Maybe if they beg, Mexico will allow Texas back in. In the meantime, at the least he should call for removing any plaques at the Alamo which glorify the defenders fighting against the lawful Mexican authorities.
“But why did South Carolina and the other Deep South states secede? “
For the same reason that the British North American colonies seceded from the United Kingdom. Independence and self-government.
Charles Francis Adams Jr wrote eloquently about it in his “Shall Cromwell Have a Statue?” essay.
And being the heir of John and John Quincy Adams, as well as a Union officer he can hardly be dismissed as a Confederate apologist.
They seceded to preserve slavery in their own state. They fought a war because Lincoln assembled a 75,000 man army to force them to remain part of the Union. A look at where the battlefields are should give you an indication of who invaded whom.
What could they do in the Confederacy that they couldn't do in the US? And why was separation so urgent that they couldn't work it out in advance with the rest of the country?
And being the heir of John and John Quincy Adams, as well as a Union officer he can hardly be dismissed as a Confederate apologist.
CFA Jr. led an African-American cavalry regiment in the war and his experiences and reactions turned him against any notions of racial equality. He wasn't the only New Englander to repudiate his earlier idealism after the war. It wasn't any surprise that Adams became such an admirer of Robert E. Lee and such a critic of African-Americans and the Union cause later on.
“CFA Jr. led an African-American cavalry regiment in the war and his experiences and reactions turned him against any notions of racial equality. “
I take it that you have never read the essay in question since it never once mentions African Americans, racial equality, or anything resembling the subject.
It’s entirely about the legality of secession and treason. In the original understanding of the American union as held by the South, versus the evolved understanding as popular in the North, and in regards to the United States own birth in the secession of 1776.
“if you read the original Confederate constitution, it said “to preserve slavery” so that IS why they fought the war.”
If you read the original United States constitution, it enshrined slavery. President Lincoln twice took an oath to uphold the pro-slavery U.S. constitution.
Did you know the Union forces, ostensibly, were fighting to preserve the pro-slavery U.S. constitution? (Arguably, Union forces were fighting to overthrow the pro-slavery U.S. constitution.)
But, after the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln actually did add another slave state to the Union.
Look it up.
“What could they do in the Confederacy that they couldn’t do in the US?”
Avoid confiscatory import taxes.
Adams's speech isn't a very convincing defense of secession or the Confederacy. It's more rhetorical than a close legal or historical analysis. Adams doesn't convince me that George Washington would have supported Southern secession. He also all but admits that the secession movement wasn't peaceful and was originally inspired by the desire to protect slavery and create a "great semi-tropical slave-labor republic."
But being from one of the First Families of Massachusetts, Adams had much sympathy and fellow feeling for the First Families of Virginia. Nice sentiments, maybe, but what he wrote and said doesn't amount to a convincing justification for the Confederacy.
I’ll take Occam’s Razor over that tortured rationale you’ve invented for why Adam’s wrote what he did.
Adams tells us in his essay why he chose to examine the legal issues of secession so long after the war that he had fought in. Because no one else had bothered to examine it, and he was both an historian and a scholar.
He never once mentions race, but your explanation is based upon the idea that race is what motivated him. That reads like the Left’s most popular explanation for everything that they disapprove of, attribute it to hidden racism. Don’t know why you’d want to go there.
Well at least this time the target of a racism accusation is the scion of the most prominent New England family in American political history instead of the usual Southern whipping boy, so you deserve credit for breaking new ground.
Preserving slavery was not an issue. In 1861, Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio (a Yankee) proposed the Corwin Amendment which was a Constitutional Amendment that would enshrine slavery where it was being practiced (primarily the South). This amendment passed the House and the Senate but guess what? None of the representatives or Senators from the South voted for it. The North was trying to remove forever the issue of ending slavery in a bid to "preserve the union" so they could continue to financially rape the South.
The South had enough and was fed up that politically, no new slave states were going to be allowed which would continually weaken their ability to defend themselves from the North's imposing their will on them. The North had a sweet deal going for itself and did not want the gravy train to end. The South fought the war against their will and against their best interest as without some sort of foreign assistance, the deck was stacked against them winning in the long run. The North FORCED them to fight the war because the South had to defend themselves and their homes and families. Slavery isn't the cause. The Greed of the North was.
You would do well to study the financial impact that the Southern economy had on the North to see just how much wealth was being stolen from the South. The North made forty cents on the dollar from the profits of the South yet the South is who did all of the work and bore the responsibility for maintaining their large work forces. The North was not as pure as some history books would have you presume.
The Adamses felt that the country was slipping away from them and from people like themselves. That explains a lot of CFA Jr.'s life and writing. Same thing for his brother Henry.
Read CFA Jr.'s 1913 Founders' Day Address at the University of South Carolina.
In this all-important respect I do not hesitate to say we theorists and abstractionists of the North, throughout that long anti-slavery discussion which ended with the 1861 clash of arms, were thoroughly wrong. In utter disregard of fundamental, scientific facts, we theoretically believed that all men — no matter what might be the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair — were, if placed under exactly similar conditions, in essentials the same. In other words, we indulged in the curious and, as is now admitted, utterly erroneous theory that the African was, so to speak, an Anglo-Saxon, or, if you will, a Yankee " who had never had a chance," — a fellow-man who was guilty, as we chose to express it, of a skin not colored like our own. In other words, though carved in ebony, he also was in the image of God.
Adams still believed slavery was technically wrong, but his conviction that Whites and Blacks were not equal did much to explain his increasing softness towards the Confederacy.
As I said before, he doesn't go deeply into the historical and legal background, so it's not out of place to attribute his conversion and his very emotional essay to his views on race.
“As I said before, he doesn’t go deeply into the historical and legal background”
Well you can’t possibly be referring to “Shall Cromwell Have A Statue?” because that’s exactly what he does do. All he does is discuss the history of secession and it’s legal standing. That quote in your post is from a different essay a decade later.
But if you can produce even a single sentence from “Cromwell” discussing race and/or African Americans I’ll concede that race tinged his position in it.
Of course I’ve read that essay enough times to know that there is absolutely nothing in it like that, and that this is simply you reading an agenda into it. The Left loves to psychoanalyze their chosen targets to explain them away.
And you’re emulating that.
If that's what you think, you don't know the speech as well as you think you do. Nobody would mistake it for a serious legal or historical study. In all his meanderings, he doesn't make a strong legal case for secession. Maybe he didn't even mean to.
He admits that George Washington wouldn't have believed in secession and that by 1860 secession wasn't going to be accepted by the rest of the country. He makes a case that Lee was a decent man who meant well, but not any convincing case for secession or the Confederacy.
That quote in your post is from a different essay a decade later.
You can also look up Adams's 1906 essay, "Reflex Light From Africa" where he says much the same thing about Northerners being wrong about racial equality.
Adams had formed a mutual admiration society with many Southern segregationists. He expressed views similar to theirs, and they praised him for overcoming his Yankee prejudices and seeing the light about race. Their praise made Adams all the more well-disposed to Lee and the Confederacy. That is the background to his speech and it's hard to deny it.
You've found something you agree with and nothing's going to change your mind, I guess, but look around. When we find somebody has said or done something objectionable, doesn't that affect our opinion of him or her? Or do we just wave everything away and go on believing what we want to believe?
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