publius wrote: I think we are just seeing the CW from different perspectives. Evidently your and others position suggests that the moral idealism of the North required the South with it's slaves to be crushed by the pious Northern government as the Mormons had previously.
I haven't said or suggested anything of the kind. Neither has Jack. So quit your straw-manning.
Corruption and cronyism are both endemic to governments everywhere. Including state governments. The presence of corruption and cronyism (which also characterized Botha's government, incidentally) doesn't mean the absence of race problems.
It's possible to have more than one kind of problem, each of which might well arise from a completely separate cause and separate source. Or a separate cause and the same source as one or more other problems. Or any number of combinations. I swear.
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
The reasoning seems to me a moral concern for the slaves. Both you and Jack say the immorality and evil of slavery compelled this war. The secession was strictly because the South owned slaves and wanted to leave the union to keep slaves and possibly expand her slave empire. Is this not morally idealistic? For you both the reason why the North went to war was as much to eradicate slavery as to bring the South back in. The actual non-existence of the old Federal union does not concern you. That is to say only the Federal narrative has merit. The South owned slaves. This is immoral. The South left the union. This is illegal in your analysis, So you operate from the narrative position that the might of the morally righteous North was right.
The question is still self determination. May members of a free polity freely leave? Evidently, even when the Constitution permits this dis-union, the Federal state says one union forever.
Lincoln had to create a War Dictatorship to fight and virtually enslave the North to accomplish his goal of perpetual union. So great was the feeling of unwanted war that he required martial law to wage it and later as a propaganda ploy enacted Emancipation Proclamation. And his forces entirely subjugated the South, like say a prostrate and broken Germany after World War II was by the allies. Subjugated this enemy nation exactly as suggested in the Prince.
My postion is money and not morality concerned the actual realpolitk. Just as realpolitik dictated Mormonism be crushed and not morality. Naturally a moralizing rhetoric is used to justify the conflict. The South left because she saw a raw deal forever coming her way due to demographics and had no trust for this new political party of the North. Tariffs were important to both parties in the conflict. The war had to bring the South back-not because of slavery, but because of commerce. The Federal state would lose 90% of it's revenue if the South left the union.
I question the war not due my love of slavery but from the consequences for this country. Americans slaughtering Americans; Americans treating Americans as conquered subjects; the profound economic damage; and the precedent it set for subjugating the entire nation to Washinton DC. I think I am going to do a sperate thread on the CORPORATE UNITED STATES as this one is all tangled in emotions surrounding the evil of slavery and not the rights of free people to freely leave and form a new nation based on the same principles of 1776.
“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The reasoning seems to me a moral concern for the slaves. Both you and Jack say the immorality and evil of slavery compelled this war. The secession was strictly because the South owned slaves and wanted to leave the union to keep slaves and possibly expand her slave empire. Is this not morally idealistic? For you both the reason why the North went to war was as much to eradicate slavery as to bring the South back in.
Please see below. And elsewhere.
compared2what? wrote:
JackRiddler wrote: How many different ways should I say it? Just one more, to make sure it's finally acknowledged: I dispute the central premise behind this thread, that Lincoln wanted war and started the war, and no one has yet to argue otherwise.(Ignoring me and continuing to call it "Lincoln's war" is not an argument.)
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Indeed. That central premise is just about as insupportable as it's possible for a historical premise to be. And so are all its tangents (about the presumed federalist imperialism of the Union, etcetera). And by "insupportable" I mean: There's nothing anywhere in the historical record at all that lends credence to those hypotheses, which everything in the historical record contradicts.
The Civil War was not fought to free the slaves, true. But nobody seriously thinks it was. So that's effectively a straw man.
I do love this board for its willingness to give just about any idea a hearing as long as it sounds kinda nutty. And I wouldn't want it to change for anything in the world. But Jack's really got a point worth paying attention to wrt non-acknowledgment of his objections. And not just a personal one. When a historical argument can't accommodate a little countervailing evidence it's either not history or it's just not worth making. Because stuff happens messily, not neatly. So there's always countervailing evidence.
If you can't handle that, you can't handle the truth. Historically speaking.
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
And yet when I cite you dismiss the cite. Ergo, it is entirely your version of orthodox history. So to procede into the muck of patriotic gore--the South had the right to leave. Lincoln decided on war to preserve revenue and save the union from dissolution. I think he lacked that right. I think once Congress adjourned Sine Die the old union was history. You ignore Lincoln speaking on the tariff. You ignore the naval blockade for the tariff., You ignore Lord Acton saying the South was in the right to leave. You ignore the Virginia Constitution stipulating the right to leave the union. You ignore a one party election with entirely a sectional emphasis. It is as if only slavery motivated the South and nothing but this desire to own human beings mattered.
The Declaration of Independence specifically declares that each state is an independent state in its final paragraph. The final paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states that the states are “Free and Independent States” twice and further declares that they have the right to perform “Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
Contention developed among the colonies when the Constitution of the United States was proposed. The states of Virginia and New York insisted that the right to withdraw from the union of states was written into the Constitution before they would accept it. So the 10th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted which guaranteed the rights of each independent state to govern itself from within. Because our government is founded on the premise that all are equal, this right would extend to all other states as well. So the right to secede is a fundamental right of each independent state that constitutes what is collectively called the United States of America.
Interestingly, after Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, was arrested, he was never brought to trial. Why? Because the Supreme Court recognized that he could not be tried for treason since the Constitution of the United States, ratified by each independent state, guaranteed the right of secession.
I admit the counter-narrative goes against 150 years of Hagiography and represents a Southern or at least a non-union view. And yet, the dead of Antiem and Gettysbug died not for the negro emancipation, but to protect Federal union and Federal power-right or wrong.
“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't ignore them. (Except for the sine-die thing, which I fear might lead to a schizophreniform state if dwelt upon too long.) I note and recognize them as a cherry-picked series of incidents that give the superficial appearance of forming a coherent narrative that falls apart completely when evaluated in the full context of the time and place under discussion.
It ain't about politics. Or hagiography. I actually think it's pure chauvinist sentimentality to yearn for whatever better nation it is that you imagine the United States was on its way to becoming prior to the Civil War. The governance of the country was always reprehensible, imo.
You're welcome to your interpretation, if it pleases you. But I don't think it's wrong out of bias. Or orthodoxy. Or any of that crap. I think it's wrong because it doesn't accord with 99.9% of the information in the historical record.
Please make a note of it.
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
A couple of posts below the letter IanEye linked to above, there's a very enjoyable note that Robert Burns wrote in response to a critic who had taken issue with his grammatical usages:
Ellisland, 1791.
Dear Sir:
Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.
R.B.
_________________ Sorta shines a little bit of a light on what might have made that mouse think it was a good idea to start awa sae hasty, doesn't it?
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
The reasoning seems to me a moral concern for the slaves. Both you and Jack say the immorality and evil of slavery compelled this war.
No. No. This is the 20th time you're forcing your false map on my thoughts. You cannot find anywhere where I said this. You just make up what I said, just like you make up your fantasy history. I'm sick of you.
The South's insistence on expanding slavery in every direction created the conditions for the Civil war. The seceding states started the Civil War.
For you both the reason why the North went to war was as much to eradicate slavery as to bring the South back in.
No. The South went to war.
The actual non-existence of the old Federal union does not concern you.
That's right. Historical fictions from your ass do not concern me.
The South owned slaves. This is immoral.
Nice that you sometimes pay lip-service to the idea (compare to how much more you have to say about the suffering of white southerners) but it's a lot more than that. The South was always at war with the enslaved population, and always looking to expand slavery.
The South left the union. This is illegal in your analysis.
This is irrelevant in my analysis, because the South (meaning the seceding states) started the war.
The question is still self determination.
That's your question after setting up a fantasy history.
May members of a free polity freely leave?
"Free" is funny. And they didn't leave, they ran the federal government for most of eight decades and when they could no longer do so, they attacked.
I question the war not due my love of slavery but from the consequences for this country.
No, you do not. I condemn the war that the South started. You erect an imaginary narrative that exonerates the South of starting it and trivializes a racist genocide as a secondary issue.
Americans slaughtering Americans; Americans treating Americans as conquered subjects;
Your worldview in a nutshell. "Americans" matter - the white male ones who had a Constitution, who weren't 3/5 of a person for the census and zero of a person for anything else. Europeans and Americans committing mass murder on Africans and enslaving people they kidnapped for hundreds of years, that's a regrettable side issue.
the profound economic damage; and the precedent it set for subjugating the entire nation to Washinton DC.
That's what the Federalists set up in 1787. That's what Washington did in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. That's what Jackson did, in the service of the Southern slaveowning caste, when he expelled Indians (who had settled, farmed, adopted European ways and lived at peace with the whites) from their lands. That's what Polk did when, in the service of the Southern slaveowning caste and against a mostly Northern opposition, he presided over an aggressive war to seize half of Mexico's territory with the plan of carving it into new slave states.
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline: I am by virtue of its might divine, The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
The reasoning seems to me a moral concern for the slaves. Both you and Jack say the immorality and evil of slavery compelled this war.
No. No. This is the 20th time you're forcing your false map on my thoughts. You cannot find anywhere where I said this. You just make up what I said, just like you make up your fantasy history. I'm sick of you.
The South's insistence on expanding slavery in every direction created the conditions for the Civil war. The seceding states started the Civil War.
For you both the reason why the North went to war was as much to eradicate slavery as to bring the South back in.
No. The South went to war.
The actual non-existence of the old Federal union does not concern you.
That's right. Historical fictions from your ass do not concern me.
The South owned slaves. This is immoral.
Nice that you sometimes pay lip-service to the idea (compare to how much more you have to say about the suffering of white southerners) but it's a lot more than that. The South was always at war with the enslaved population, and always looking to expand slavery.
The South left the union. This is illegal in your analysis.
This is irrelevant in my analysis, because the South (meaning the seceding states) started the war.
The question is still self determination.
That's your question after setting up a fantasy history.
May members of a free polity freely leave?
"Free" is funny.
Yep. It's very humorous, in much the same way that describing apartheid South Africa as "an intact prosperous country" is.
You're a sketch, publius.
My Hero wrote:And they didn't leave, they ran the federal government for most of eight decades and when they could no longer do so, they attacked.
I question the war not due my love of slavery but from the consequences for this country.
No, you do not. I condemn the war that the South started. You erect an imaginary narrative that exonerates the South of starting it and trivializes a racist genocide as a secondary issue.
Americans slaughtering Americans; Americans treating Americans as conquered subjects;
Your worldview in a nutshell. "Americans" matter - the white male ones who had a Constitution, who weren't 3/5 of a person for the census and zero of a person for anything else. Europeans and Americans committing mass murder on Africans and enslaving people they kidnapped for hundreds of years, that's a regrettable side issue.
the profound economic damage; and the precedent it set for subjugating the entire nation to Washinton DC.
That's what the Federalists set up in 1787. That's what Washington did in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. That's what Jackson did, in the service of the Southern slaveowning caste, when he expelled Indians (who had settled, farmed, adopted European ways and lived at peace with the whites) from their lands. That's what Polk did when, in the service of the Southern slaveowning caste and against a mostly Northern opposition, he presided over an aggressive war to seize half of Mexico's territory with the plan of carving it into new slave states.
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, plaudits, and love.
“If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” -- Rand Paul
And that is simply the point. Impossible to grasp i surmise. Why is war approved of if it is thought moral? 1,000,000 American soldiers killed, cities ruined, land destroyed, and an entire region of the nation occupied like Carthage for many years. All this because free people wanted independence. Of course these free people had as much right to leave as any member of the union but important to the cause was the fact that these people had slaves. This slave issue justifes crushing the South. To free the slave hecatombs of dead are raised to the sky. It becomes a different narrative if we say that the North imposed a massive tariff and had one party rule under a brand new sectional political party. There are two sides to each war story. The story of the victor and the story of the vanquished. And then there is the grand narrative of War.
"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.": - Noam Chomsky
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." - Dresden James.
"When we don't actively protest to prevent war, our inactivity demonstrates that we are pro war" - Tom Feeley
In the CORPORATE UNITED STATES thread I will work to establish the connection which i think exists between Lincoln's War Dictatorship, Reconstruction, and the creation of the CORPORATE US. Behind my idea is the notion that this period of the 19th century was the era of the great scramble for territory and power across the world. England was scrambling in Africa for land and in India, Russia drove to the East, Bismarck unified Germany, France put Maximillian on the throne of Mexico and invented Latin America, Italy was unified, Spain was a dying colonial power, and the newly minted CORPORATE USA attacked the Native Americans to the West and began their drive into the Pacific. The zeitgeist of the time was Macht Politik. The Americans slotted in quite well.
“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Everybody wants to be free. Fascists want to be free. Slave owners want to be free. Slaves want to be free. Nazis want to be free. Anti-nazis want to be free. Christians want to be free. Jews want to be free. Muslims want to be free, etc... Blacks, whites, browns, yellows, everybody.
It is impossible to stop any person or group from attaching themselves to the principles of the word 'sovereign', and odd to find it strange that they would. Attempts to cross label, take the worst attributes of the worst, and paste it onto the best attributes of the best, is the modern day slave owners greatest feat of black magik. By this magik the good be made to look like the worst, and any seeking sovereignty over themselves to be a plague.
There is great power in naming things. He who can confuse the names controls the message. He who controls the message controls all.
I had higher hopes for this place and i'm sad. But I must say that watching the endless dance around the elephant in the living room is most instructive. The evil reasons given for seeking sovereignty are always the best place to find the most valuable golden nuggets of information. So all in all the dance around the elephant in the living room is very instructive.
Both sides of this conversation have agreed that freedom and autonomy of black people were not the main motives of the architects of the Civil War. (excluding AD of course) This point has been beaten beyond a dead horse also. Can't we give that one up by now?
If freedom, autonomy, and compassion for black people were not the main motive for the war then something else must have been behind the war. I suggest that since compassion was not the main motivator, it was the fact that slavery was a money generating industry, and that slaves were viewed as units of production, as disgusting as it is.
The architects of war usually use, religion, race, gender, etc...to bludgeon the population into war for their own purposes (money/power) and I refuse to believe that any regular RI readers don't know this.
Above being said, why can't the thread move on to the real purpose of war which is money and power over other human beings? This conversation has progressed at a level that CNN/Fox would find admirable.
jackriddler I know you see importance of money in the big picture because of the "End of The Wall Street Boom" thread you authored and diligently maintain. By the way my hat is off to you for that thread too. That thread is a colossal archive of good reading. I applaud you for it, sincerely.
The above brings me to my question. Why the resistance to noting the importance of tariffs in the Civil War? It seems by the very mechanical workings and value of a tariff, and who had control of the ports and the power to collect the tariffs, that it is an important factor in the motives of the main players in the Civil War. Leaving this out of the equation creates a huge gap in history.
There was also a major currency war going on at the time. Lincoln in the north had the Greenback and Secretary of State Benjamin in the south had the Greyback currencies. There was both interest bearing money and interest free money floating around in the mix. This link to tariffs is obvious. He who controls the currency collects the tariffs. I admit that control of currency is a bigger issue than the tariff itself but they are obviously linked.
There were fleets of Russian warships at New York, parked virtually at the door step of the northern banking headquarters, and also parked in San Francisco, both important port locations for the collection of tariffs. The fact that the Russians brought fleets of ships into the port areas is a point of no small importance as Europe was their nemesis and a discussion of why that happened would fill a lot of gaps in the conversation.
And then on to the act Act of 1871 which publius has alluded to. This seems to be the point at which a Republic became a Democracy, figuratively speaking, and we see how that has worked out. It worked out great for some and terrible for the majority of citizens in the U.S. This effectively shifted control of the U.S. to European banking concerns and made puppets of U.S. lawmakers. The British Empire has a long glorious history of domination beyond its shores. Remember the cry of U.S. citizens "the British are coming, the British are coming." Remember India? Just to name a couple.
For freedom loving people of RI I also don't understand why it is necessary to link the word "sovereign", which simply means "free", to all the hysterical tropes (AD) of nazis, militia, slave owners, etc...This is not a conversation up to par with RI capability and it plays directly into the hands of the slave masters all RI participants claim to abhor because it fits the divide and conquer model and template perfectly. It fulfills slave owner necessity to cross label the worst to the best and keep conversation at a low level.
I find the above far more interesting than the derailment of the train I am watching, but the derailment is also very instructive for those that can read between the tracks.
, plaudits, and love.
