No it doesn’t. Under the Confed. Constitution, Congress, doesn’t have the power to abolish slavery, Article I, Section 8:
a state doesn’t have the power to abolish slavery within its borders. Article IV, Section 2:
and a territorial government doesn’t have the right to abolish slavery. Article IV, Section 3:
Point of difference here.
A country is not evil or good, a specific person is evil or good. What happens if an evil person gets into power can be evil but it does not make the country itself evil.
AS an example.
A country has the right to decide that to be pastafarian is illegal. You may convert to riceafarian or you may voluntarily leave the country by 1/1/2011. After that date you will get expulsed. If you reenter teh country or hide, you will get jail time for 1 year then expulsed.
Is that evil? No.
A country has decided pastafarianism is illegal. If you do not move out, you will be put into a concentration camp and worked to death.
That is evil.
Germany began by reducing the rights of Jews, and did in fact try to expulse them. Crap, there was a frelling SHIP full of them that got turned away by every country they tried to land at. I contend that Germany had every legal right to expulse every jew, gay and political dissonent in their borders. They even had the right to make being gay, jewish or dissonent illegal and jail them. What went wrong is the conditions they were jailed in.
We [allies, I am including Britain and USSR in this list] jailed dissonents and gays. About the only thing we did not do was make a specific religion illegal. Well, we did jail Japanese … but that isn’t a religion. The only thing that keeps us from being evil is apparently killing off the gays and the dissonents. Wait, gulags … and the suicide of Turing… I guess we also are responsible for deaths of dissonents and gays. Just not in job lots [other than the soviet gulags … ]
The South and North were settled at the same time. Settlement in this country proceeded east to west, not north to south. If you look at dates of statehood:
Kentucky-1792
Tennessee-1796
Ohio-1803
Louisiana-1812
Indiana-1816
Mississippi-1817
Illinois-1818
Alabama-1819
So, really, most of the South wasn’t settled later, unless, of course, you mean that most of the South was settled later than Philadelphia and New York City, but if that’s what you meant, then so was most of the North.
Apparently some think it is: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/latest/lat_703168.shtml
Yes, the war was about secession. But why did the Southern States want to secede? Because they were terrified of the prospect of being outvoted on issues related to slavery. States rights was really about slavery. Secession was really about slavery. Even the tariff was really about slavery. On every issue that lead to the Civil War, the preservation and expansion of slavery was the root cause.
Of course, it’s not true that most soldiers fighting for the Confederacy were motivated to fight because they wanted to preserve slavery. As has been said, they were mostly motivated by the mixed grab-bag that motivates most soldiers in most wars.
But there wouldn’t have been a war in the first place if the Southern aristocracy hadn’t been determined to preserve slavery at all costs.
Why is the USA not worthy of contempt for the war against Mexico? That war was a land grab, pure and simple.
The average Southerner was a poorly educated person who was barely literate and did not own slaves. He relied on his elected representatives to give him good and honest advice. When his duly elected representative told the Union was likely to invade his homeland and lay waste to everything he had worked so hard to establish, his reply was, “The hell they will,” and he piicked up his rifle, (if he was lucky enough to own one) and went out to fight to preserve what was his. He did not give a damn one way or another about the slaves. Nor did the average citizen in the north. The federal government probably could not have put an army in the field had they not instituted a draft, which resulted in draft riots in several cities, notably New York which was dern near burnt to the ground. And, if one happened to be wealthy and was selected for the draft, he could buy his way out of it by paying a substitute the sum of $ 100.00, which gave rise to the saying “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” **The South could not win and should not have won. **The South had no factories worthy of the name and only two companies capable of producing firearms, one of which was located in my home town of Lancaster, Texas.IIRC, that company manufactured only enough pistols (which was all they could make) to be certified as an arms supplier to the Confederacy. After that, the company was dissolved for reasons I don’t recall.The South fielded an army that was composed mostly of dirt poor, hard scrabble farmers who managed to fight and defeat the union army time and time again. The north won by destroying the south’s infrastructure and by force of superior numbers, many of them conscripts. If we, in the south, choose to honor honest men who faced insurmountable odds, with virtually no equipment, little ammunition, armed with virtually nothing but courage, it is our business and honor those men we will.
I don’t know why I even read these threads because the OP generally is a knee-jerk liberal with no education and no understanding of the issues of that time and place.
You are free to hold your own opinions but I suggest you read a little history before yapping into the void.
I don’t have anything to add.
Except buying and processing cotton apparently.
So you continue to honor a government that lied to uneducated people so that they would start a war against their fellow Americans?
I’m afraid this doesn’t answer the question of why you would want to honor the illegitimate, lying government that did that. Again, that would make me want to look at Jefferson Davis as a liar and a traitor, as opposed to naming a major highway after him.
And the occasion for Lincoln, irate over the issue, making his “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better” speech. Pretty much destroyed him politically; any chance he had of a second term ended with that speech, yet he is a hero and Davis- who represented a government that felt exactly the same way- are condemned.
It’s amazing how many people don’t grasp this simple fact. When there are armed troops marching through your country, you don’t give a damn about ideology or Constitutional principals or the ethics of slavery any more than you worry about whether the burglar in your living room had an unhappy childhood or was cheated out of his birthright by a member of your family. You defend yourself. Sherman- whose terrorism was denounced vehemently and loudly in print and in oration at the time of the march IN THE NORTH- flatly didn’t give a damn whether somebody owned slaves or was a conductor on the Underground Railroad- if you have meat in your smokehouse and chickens in your coop they’re seized and count yourself lucky if your house isn’t burned.
I’d have a lot more time for this argument if the Confederate Army (as opposed to very limited numbers of individuals) had refused to invade Maryland and Pennsylvania. Or attacked Federal forts.
The confederacy was despicable and evil, and the war was about whether slavery would remain as an institution. Anybody who denies this hasn’t read the historical record, including the various states’ articles of secession.
Lee was a competent soldier, but he was fighting for slavery whether he cared to admit it or not. Sampiro had an excellent post in another thread about how Lee resisted freeing his father-in-laws slaves per a will.
The confederacy was about slavery and racism.
This kind of willful reductionism (since when has a war been about any one thing?) is intensely ahistorical and ignorant.
You do know that Lincoln didnt give a flying fuck about anything other than keeping the Union together right ? Slavery or no slavery ?
Gonna use that broad brush on him too ?
Who here honors the CSA government? You’re not going to find that many people here fanatical over the USA government. We’re saying we don’t view the Civil War as a simple Good vs. Evil conflict or view Confederate soldiers as a pack of frothing uniformed racists.
How bold of you to see a man who served two years in prison for treason as a traitor.:rolleyes: Are you always this iconoclastic?
Besides which, are you aware that Jefferson Davis did some things other than serve as President of the Confederacy? His name wasn’t drawn from a hat of all registered voters to go be president of the new nation- it was because of his CV that he was chosen.
He was a war hero in the Mexican War. He is considered- along with John C. Calhoun- the greatest Secretary of War the nation ever had; in one of U.S. history’s great ironies is that the South was defeated by an army that Davis had modernized. (Achievements of Davis as Sec. of War: more than doubling the size of the standing army, revamping the outdated curriculum at West Point, importing new artillery from Europe and funding the building of cannon factories in the U.S., strengthening the fortifications around harbors [to the south’s detriment later], etc.- he did a lot more than just bring over camels [which people make fun of but forget the fact that- it worked].)
Ever notice there’s a great big dome on the Capitol? Bigger than this one? Davis wanted D.C. to rival the capitol cities of Europe in splendor and in culture- he spearheaded and personally oversaw the enlargement and beautification of the U.S. Capitol and the remaking of its dome. He is mentioned in every detailed history of the Smithsonian Institution as a man so important to its history that it likely would be just another museum had it not been for him; he wrote letters from the Mexican War detailing what he wanted it to be, what should be included in it, funding sources, he served on its Regents until his resignation and was offered the post of Secretary of the Smithsonian upon his completion of his term as Secretary of War. (He chose the MS Senate seat instead.)
He toured the nation giving speeches trying to explain the South’s position and that while he believed in the right to secede his greatest hope was that the Union would be preserved; he received major ovations in Maine, Boston, New Hampshire and was actually condemned in his home state for being “too Yankee” for his views. When Mississippi seceded his farewell address, a beautiful was said to have been the most emotional moment in the history of the Senate- not a dry eye in the house. It’s still a damned powerful speech. The ending words:
As for his slave ownership: yep, he owned them. He was a white supremacist even by the standards of 1860 and believed slavery was a natural state ordained by God for blacks. So it only stands to reason that he was a cruel and vicious master…
Odd then that his slaves loved him. Is this based on the fact that they sang in the fields and called him ‘massa’? Not so much. It’s more on the fact that-
-When he was in prison and his family was in near poverty, one of his former slaves who had been manumitted voluntarily sent them his life savings of $1,000 (about $15,000-$20,000 in today’s currency- more than most non-skilled workers will ever save) to them, telling them not to worry about paying it back
-Many of his former slaves traveled at their own expense to Fortress Monroe and begged to see him
-When Union troops came to Davis Bend his slaves, without orders from him, went through the house gathering heirlooms and valuables to hide and refused to take part in any type of destruction (the same with his brother Joe’s mansion at Hurricane)
-He broke the law of Mississippi to have them educated in schools he set up on his plantation.
-Former slaves interviewed by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s referred to their years on Davis Bend as the happiest in their lives
-After the war he sold his plantation to one of his slaves
-Til his dying day in 1889 many of his former slaves wrote to him, and their letters are often beautiful.
How did they know how to read and write? Davis broke the law by building to schools to educate them on his place. He never once separated a family- that’s something that neither Thomas Jefferson nor George Washington could say- and when a slave was accused of an offense they were tried before a jury of slaves. Davis served as judge but his only power was that he could reduce the verdict, he could not make it more severe and in his writings he notes the slaves usually came up with much harsher verdicts than he would have.
This same propensity to mercy led his inner circle to stop if they could any appeal for clemency for deserters. Like Lincoln (with whom he had a lot in common actually- tall, thin, born in Kentucky to Virginia parents, married to much younger crazy women who made homelife hell, etc.) he pardoned every soldier who was sentenced to die or imprisonment for desertion.
So yeah, what’s remotely honorable about him?
Now was he perfect? Of course not. His arrogance and stubborness was to the point of the neurotic and unbearable and clouded his judgment on matters of extreme importance. He signed an executive order ordering the executions of all black soldiers in uniform and their white officers, an order so drastic and cruel that most of his officers disregarded it and that led to the end of prisoner exchange which led to Andersonville. He absolutely refused to acknowledge the South could not win the war even though he himself had said it was impossible MANY TIMES before the war was an actuality and insisted that the men in the field keep fighting even as he and his cabinet were fleeing Richmond. He had many flaws.
But what equally famous and powerful political figure hasn’t?
My point is not that Davis was a saint or a perfect person or a man who deserves a Washingtonian obelisk or a crown of thornspersonally woven by Pius IX for his suffering (though he got both obviously) or that he doesn’t. What he was however was a man of extraordinary complexity, elements of evil and good in him and neither having more than plurality in his composite. In this respect he was the embodiment of the South- of slaveowning- of the entire Nation at this time.
I detest the simplification of history and the viewing of these people under the lens of presentism. Judging them for the fact they owned slaves is almost like judging them for the fact they shat in chamberpots and rarely bathed, or judging Benjamin Franklin because he pondered whether electricity might be alive or Isaac Newton because he believed witchcraft likely existed. They must be judged within the factors of their time and place.
Sometimes even then, you’ll be glad to know, they still come up wanting. Other times they don’t. What they never are is black and white but a mixture; ethically we are and have always been a mulatto nation.
True. They should have waited for the North to invade Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and the border states before they did something like that shouldn’t they?:rolleyes:
Well, that’s quite obviously false, since it was the question of slavery that got Lincoln back into politics, led to the debates with Stephen Douglas, and directly led to his standing for President, for which he ran as the candidate for an anti-slavery party that he helped crate… Lincoln expressed revulsion and hatred - “hate” being a word he used quite specifically - for slavery on innumerable occasions.
It’s certainly true Lincoln prioritized preserving the Union but to suggest he didn’t care about the issue of slavery is complete nonsense.
Denying that the civil war wasn’t about slavery is ahistorical and ignorant.
Without the issue of slavery there wouldn’t have been a war. That’s simply a fact. Nations don’t dissolve into civil war over issues of whether a tariff should be 19% or 26%.
As Sampiro says, the Southern economy depended on slavery. And while it’s true that a majority of southerners weren’t slaveholders, the ruling aristocracy were all slaveholders, and their personal fortunes depended on the plantation system.
And so the realization that the North and West now had the votes to resist expansion of slavery, to upset the delicate balance of introducing slave states and free states in equal numbers, was intolerable to the slave masters. And so, secession. Which was entirely due to the fear of encroachment against slavery.
Again, the South fought to preserve slavery. That doesn’t mean southern soldiers fought to preserve slavery, or that the North fought to destroy slavery. But it is clear and incontrovertible and a simple matter of the historical record that the State Legislatures of the South voted to secede to preserve slavery, and the constitution of the Confederacy explicitly enshrined slavery forever.
Are you suggesting the North invaded Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and the border states before the Confederacy attacked federal forts?
Yeah, but the Cubs might (don’t laugh) someday win a Series and be Winners, thus validating the Cubs jerseys. The South rising again, though? That’s a little less likely than the Cubbies taking it all (now isn’t THAT saying something?)
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