It seems to me that issues are a lot more complicated than that. Are 6 years olds (who have MUCH less political power to influence their desteny than the colonists had) morally justified in starting a war for freedom in modern day America?
SoxFan59 said:
Vance did fight with the central government over these things, but I think you are confusing him with William Holden, the man who ran against him in 1864. Holden was the editor of the Raleigh *North Carolina Standard,*a newpaper which editorially attacked the Confederate government on assorted issues. Eventually this evolved into calling for what seemed to be separate negotiations between North Carolina and the Union, which taken to its logical conclusion would have resulted in the state seceding from the Confederacy. In early 1864 Davis urged Congress to pass a measure suspending writs of habeas corpus, saying this was needed to deal with “citizens of well-known disloyalty” who were attempting to “accomplish treason under the form of the law.” (McPherson, 697.) Holden saw this as aimed at himself, and suspended publication of his newspaper; a week later, he annonced he would run against Vance in the summer election.
It is interesting to note here that while Davis wanted Congressional action to suspecd writs of habeas corpus, he did not simply dispatch troops to shut the North Carolina Standarddown.
A term that is frequently used is “consent of the governed”–democratic governments are theoretically supposed to derive their powers from the consent of the governed. If you look at the Revolution as a conflict about “taxation without representation” and such, it can be seen as a situation in which that consent ended. (Though it had certainly existed in the first place.) But the Civil War can also be seen as a situation where that consent ended, representatives in Congress or not. I don’t think it matters whether we, from our position centuries in the future, approve of the motives or results of these withdrawls of consent or not.
Kerinsky said (to SoxFan, but I’m a buttinski):
Not enough firepower, and they’d be tactical disasters.
Unless you are at a minimum going to argue for six-year-olds to be given the right to vote, this is a silly comparison.
** MysterEcks **
You’re probably right about my inability to distinguish Vance and Holden. Its been a long time since I’ve waded through any detailed histories of the Civil War. I should apologize for arguing specifics through foggy memories.
As for the issue of “consent of the governed,” the crux of my argument is that the Confederates were fatally short-sighted in pulling out of the Union when they had the poltical muscle to negotiate thier way to a reasonable end to slavery over time. You pointed out in an earlier post that you don’t understand why I have a chip on my shoulder over this issue. You’re probably right - - i shouldn’t be so passionate about an issue that was settled a century and a half ago. But when all the puzzle pieces come together, the Confederacy (IMHO) adds up to be a terribly misguided attempt at revolution. Even when the “moral” ground of the slavery and treason issues are discounted, the South could have chosen to remain in the Union and fight Lincoln in Congress rather than on the battlefield. I believe the end result of the abolition of slavery would have come about anyway, with the South having been able to negotiate or even dictate the terms of that change. And the bloodshed would have been avoided. Is it hindsight? Sure, and being a Union sympathizer probably gives me a “told you so” attitude when examining this.
On the flip side, I think many Southern leaders banked on the fact that the North either couldn’t stomach the idea of a civil war, or was too “disunified” politically to prolong a war. i recall from the poltical speeches and personal journals of Confederates the concept of “can you believe these people won’t leave us alone?” Perhaps a more interesting thread debate would be “Why the South didn’t win the war,” as opposed to arguing about its causes.
** Kerensky **
MysterEcks beat me to it, but the color of your herring is definitely “red.”
** To everyone participating in this thread **
Thank you all for a very interesting discussion. Having been a part of SDMB for many years, but mostly on hiatus lately, it was nice to try a few threads and find the kind of debate I used to savor on this board.
SoxFan59
“To ignore or deny the truth does not negate the truth.”
SoxFan59 said:
I agree with you here, and with what you wrote before. I’ll even go further–I think a lot of the racial problems we’ve been plagued with ever since the Civil War are a direct result of the war and Reconstruction. Had the Southern hotheads kept their cool and not provoked secession, and slavery had therefore died off naturally (I suspect it wouldn’t have lasted past 1885, if that long) everybody would be better off today.
I’ll mention here that I’m a natural-born Yankee who is quite happy the Union won the Civil War. I believe in my opinions on the causes of the war, but that doesn’t mean I regard the Confederates as the Good Guys–stupid as rocks is more like it.
I agree with this, too. Secession was based on a whole catalogue of miscalculations and wishful thinking. As I said in one of the other Civil War threads, the Confederacy has to rank as one of the most abysmal failures of all time in terms of destroying everything they were fighting to preserve. The best thing the True Believing Secessionists could have done for their positions was to commit suicide en massin 1859.
I don’t think the South ever had a hope in hell of winning the Civil War, despite better military leadership. Their only real hope was that the North would manage to lose it…which, it turned out, was at least possible.
I don’t mean to try and argue that the south had a real chance at winning the war, but I find it interesting to speculate as to the major reason why the southern effort failed. If it was just Northern superiority, the war would not have lasted more than a year or so. Even after Gettysburg, the North seemed intent on “losing the war” by its own disorganization and ineptitude. But the one overriding reason for Southern failure, I believe, is due to the Confederacy’s inability to forge a seperate national identity. Perhaps we can start a thread to discuss that sometime.
**
A lot of the revisionist history and neo-confederate apologetics grows out of the bitterness southern society felt toward the roughshod treatement it received from post war treatment. Perhaps the misplaced pride in the Confederacy can be boiled down to a sense of perceived regional inferiority, or the percieved attitude of superiority by the rest of the nation that causes southern folk offense. Had the war not taken place, a lot of this would have been avoided.
**
Well, that’s certainly true in my case. I sometimes feel bitter when I consider that America treated Germany and Japan better at the the end of the Second World War than it treated the South at the end of the Civil War. However, it is a very bitter irony that the horrors of reconstruction would probably never have occurred if Lincoln had not been assassinated by a Southern zealot.
**
I don’t mean to try and argue that the south had a real chance at winning the war, but I find it interesting to speculate as to the major reason why the southern effort failed. If it was just Northern superiority, the war would not have lasted more than a year or so. Even after Gettysburg, the North seemed intent on “losing the war” by its own disorganization and ineptitude. But the one overriding reason for Southern failure, I believe, is due to the Confederacy’s inability to forge a seperate national identity. Perhaps we can start a thread to discuss that sometime.
**
Well, there are historians who have argued that the South lost the war because it failed to achieve a sense of national identity. You’ve got a lot of experts on your side there.
However, I would argue that the South did have a real chance of winning the war, despite its lack of national cohesion.
It seems to me that the war was an all-or-nothing affair for both sides. For the North, anything less than total victory was defeat, and for the South anything less than total defeat was victory. The North simply had no choice - to win the war, the North had to crush all effective military resistance in the South. The real problem for the South was hanging on long enough for popular support for the war in the North to run out. And, as I’ve already argued elsewhere, this was a real possibility as late as the summer/fall of 1864. Popular support for the war in the North tended to ebb and flow with battlefield success or failure (as it so often does) whereas Southerners generally understood that they were “riding the tiger” and defeat could well mean catastrophe for both the individual and the community and so were more willing to “hang tough” when they suffered battlefield reverses. But that’s all Monday morning quarterbacking. Sherman did take Atlanta in the summer of 1864, Lincoln did win the election of 1864, and from that point on the war was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
I don’t mean to suggest that the battle of Atlanta was the turning point of the war. I see it more as the last nail in the coffin.
I guess what I’m saying is, the deciding factor was probably popular support for the war in the North, and that might well have collapsed even as late as the last few months of 1864.
I think part of the “Confederate pride” comes from the fact that people realize that some of their ancestors fought and died in the war–and had nothing to do with the issues behind it. I know that one side of my family is about half poor Souterners, going back for generations. Some of them fought and died in the Civil War, defending their home. They didn’t (nor could they afford to) care about slavery, prices of cotton, or whatever else. But they don’t get recognized because they fought for a cause that was misguided at the upper levels. I can see how this could create some of that sentiment.
Sorry I took so long to respond, anyway back into the fray.
War isn’t about firepower, it’s just about power. On a humorous, yet macabe, note I’d like to point out that residents too young to be citizens hold a lot of power if they could unify. Can you imagine what would happen if half of the US population age 3 to 17 was willing to commit suicide over the right to vote? You could really wreck to economy over a couple generationg if this freedom fight if it regained popularity (ie another mass suicide) every twenty years or so. Yea it’s ridiculous to think that this would ever happen, but it would also be ridiculous to think that people would be willing to start the siege at normandy (I’ve heard the first wave has 95%+ fatality rates)
On a serious note, I do think that we should consider issues about giving six year olds (actually anyone old enough to talk) the right to vote. We have great philisophical debates on the consent of the governed, and taxation without representation, and all the while we disenfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people under our governments jurisdiction.
Our government shows that we do NOT truly belive in consent of the governed, yet we pay it great lip service. I do realise that there are many things that are great in theory, but just don’t work in relity (true Communism for example) But if we realise that something doesn’t work in the real world we should identify what it is that differs between theory and practice, and stop aspiring to the theory until we figure out a way to compensate for this disparity.
To me it seems hypocritical to say that a government only exists on the consent of the governed, while denying the vote to a group of the governed simply because they have no power.
If a 14 year old commits murder they can be tried as an adult. How does this work? You’re not legaly an adult until you’re 18, unless you do something really mature like murder? With a life sentence on top of this someone can be 55 before they ever have the legal right to petition for the ability to vote.
I don’t know what a perfect solution would be, I just know that what we do (and the entire rest of the world does) is not right. Maybe we should go to the political system Heinlen outlines in Starship Troopers. Maybe you should have to pass a (fairly administered) test before you can vote.
What I do know is that we shouldn’t flipantly justify this age discrimination simply because children aren’t powerfull, might does not make right.
I don’t have all the answers, but maybe the questions are more important,
Kerinsky
I pretty much agree with your last post. The “all or nothing” conceptulization of the war for both North and South is true.
But I also think that as the war progressed, there was a movement in the South to end the war just as there was in the North. I don’t have reference materials available, but there was a political faction in the South that never really believed in secession, but went along once the war began because of the perception of “defending the homeland.” This movement was particularly strong in states where the major battles were not fought (North Carolina and Florida come to mind) but where manpower and resources were drained away into “the cause,” where many a southern powerbroker read the writing on the wall and thought that a negotiated peace would be better. As argued in earlier posts, some of these state leaders even proposed that thier individual state (as I recall, this also was North Carolina) enter into a seperate peace deal with the Union.
As I recall, there were two movements in the South for peace. One was a famous “camp david” style summit where the South urged a negotiated peace, but Lincoln’s government refused because they would not recognize southern independence. The second movement was less official (because the Confederate government did not recognize it and considered it treasonous) and proposed an end to the war and a negotiated re-unification of the southern states with the Union (again, rooted in the sense that the South really had no national identity anyway). The stumbling block for this movement was the slavery issue. This Lincoln administration (as the war went on) was less and less prone to negotiate on preserving the union while allowing the institution of slavery to continue. This is the one issue that most southerners seemed bent on NOT negotiating at that time. There was a movment in the south later in the war that would have accepted peace, defeat, and re-unification as long as slavery was still legal. The emancipation procamation, the terms for admitting West Virgina to the Union, and the growing abolitionist sentiment made this an unrealistic option. Further, I think it became clear to the Union high command after Gettysburg and Vicksburg that victory was inevitable. As you point out, the turning of public opinion with Lincoln’s re-election and the fall of Atlanta allowed the North to hold out for total victory.
Your first name wouldn’t happen to be Ben, would it?
Nope, if you really want a little puzzle try to figure out what it is from my e-mail addy 
em rof hguot oot!
Kerinsky said:
This isn’t the thread for it , but what we’re talking about here is where age laws draw the line for whatever purpose. No matter where you draw them, you are going to exclude some individuals who would qualify on a case-by-case basis. Yes, certainly there are those younger than 18 who would be perfectly competent to exercise the franchise…but I somehow doubt there are more than two six-year-olds in the entire country who might qualify, if that many.
(Since six-year-olds aren’t being taxed, I don’t think “taxation without representation” is much of a slogan in this case. And the concept of “consent” must necessary assume capacityto consent.)
Be an interesting thread if you wanted to start it, though–what should the voting age be? It would go with the age of consent thread that was here recently–the same thing from a different angle.
Well my point was more that their shouldn’t be a voting age and that it should be decided on a case by case basis, of course this is rather impractical. So the arguement seems to fall to should we allow ourselves to make a legal distinction which we know is unfair and imoral just because it isn’t practical to do otherwise.
Of course I seem to have hijacked this entire thread away from Catholic birth control issues a long time ago… But you’re right, this isn’t the place to debate this. Maybe I will start a new thread later…
Kerinsky