The American Spectator : Shades of Gray

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Shades of Gray

By Matthew Kenefick from the February 2009 issue

H.W. Crocker III is a most provocative and engaging guide to the Civil War.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War
By H. W. Crocker III
(Regnery Publishing, 370 pages, $19.95)

AN OFT-REPEATED TRUISM is “History is written by the victors.” Certainly this has been the case of the War Between the States. Books written about the war must number in the hundreds of thousands by now, and generally they worship at the altar of the Union and the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln. And they keep on coming. The majority of Americans, if asked, would say that the war was principally about the national stain of slavery, that secession was illegal, that the South provoked the war, that the Union was worth preserving at the cost of 650,000 dead, that it was the only solution to the problem of slavery, and that Lincoln was our greatest president. Well, Harry Crocker doesn’t think any of these things are true, and in this enjoyable and provoking book he tells his readers why.

Crocker, a Californian novelist, editor, speechwriter, and amateur British Imperialist, is the author of an idiosyncratic book on the history of the Catholic Church, as well as a military history of the U.S. and other books such as Robert E. Lee on Leadership. His current contribution, the latest of Regnery Publishing’s popular Politically Incorrect Guides, takes on the “Civil War,” a.k.a. “The War of Northern Aggression” (or, as some post- bellum Southerners referred to it, “the late unpleasantness”). Make no mistake, Crocker’s sympathies lie with the South, and Part I of his book describes “why the South was right.” However, as one reviewer put it, he does so with “great scholarship, great story-telling, and great fun.” The book’s many informative sidebars full of interesting quotes and Civil War trivia show that Crocker, although serious about the justice of the South’s cause, maintains his light touch in provoking the reader to think differently about the War that changed us from saying “United States ‘are’ rather than United States ‘is’” and all that came with it.

In a brisk 337 pages, Crocker covers the causes of the war, the fractured 1860 presidential election, the role of the abolitionists, and Lincoln’s dilemma on how to handle what he considered a rebellion.

Crocker also covers the key battles of the War Between the States and offers some short insightful biographies of the outstanding generals (and cavalry officers) on both sides of this tragic conflict. Where could we find such generally admirable men of valor and courage today? What Crocker attempts to make clear is that the war was fought not over slavery but rather over Lincoln’s ruthless—and we presume sincere—fixation on the Union as the ultimate good for the citizens of the United States. From the Southern point of view, which is also Crocker’s, the Southern states were simply following the principles of 1776.

Crocker writes, “In their [South Carolina] Declaration, the delegates (all eminent men and not a rabble of revolutionaries) voted in a special convention 169-nil, that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and under the name of the United States of America is hereby dissolved.” South Carolina had reclaimed its sovereign rights—and had done so on the very same grounds that Jefferson had laid out 84 years before: “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

This all sounds familiar to those who believe in the natural law principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1883)

This may explain why the official newspaper of the Vatican editorialized on behalf of the South during the war, and Pope Pius IX sent a hand-woven Crown of Thorns to Jefferson Davis, ex-president of the Confederacy, as he languished in prison after the War. Crocker puts it this way, “The Church in other words, was the natural ally of feudalism, federalism (or states’ rights) and conservatism. Given a choice between a religiously ambiguous nationalist (Lincoln) and a Catholic-educated defender of states’ rights (Jefferson Davis), it was no contest for the Pope.”

And there was plenty of opposition in the North to the war and to the sudden end of slavery that meant that Northerners could expect a large number of freed slaves to emigrate and compete with them for jobs. Crocker points out that

Pro-Southern Democrats were plentiful in the Border States but also as far afield as Ohio and New York City. Maryland’s were especially worrisome….But Lincoln’s deft suspension of civil liberties, imposition of martial law, and jailing secessionist sympathizers (including Baltimore’s mayor and police chief and thirty-one Maryland State legislators) alleviated most of the trepidation. All told, Lincoln’s administration jailed more than 13,000 political prisoners. The Supreme Court protested that the President had no right to suspend “habeas corpus.” Lincoln replied he had a war to fight. As he had the army on his side, and the Supreme Court did not, Lincoln won the argument.

As for the question of slavery and the necessity of the war to end it, Crocker asks:

Would slavery have persisted to this very day? No, it seems certain that it would have been abolished peacefully, as it found itself abolished everywhere else in the New World in the nineteenth century. Imagine that there had no been war against the South, and subsequently no Reconstruction putting the South under martial law, disenfranchising white voters with confederate pasts, and enfranchising freed slaves as wards of the Republican Party. Without that past, race relations in the South would have been better, not worse, and the paternalist planters would have arranged over time to emancipate their slaves in exchange for financial compensation.

And perhaps there would have been an African American president long before the recent election and much more rapid economic and social equality. History is full of what-ifs. However, this book could not be timelier. Where once there was the “Blue and Gray,” now there is the Blue and Red, and where once there appeared to be irreconcilable issues over the right to secession, the growth of slavery, tariffs, and economic domination, now there are clearly irreconcilable viewpoints on what some consider to be even more important issues, such as the right to life and the national tragedy of more than 40 million abortions since 1973, traditional marriage, and the overweening intrusion of government power not simply in the states, but in the personal life of American families. Rocky times could lie ahead. Avoiding violence of any sort is a priority. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

About the Author

Matthew Kenefick is a Church historian who writes from Washington, D.C. and a Research Fellow of the Faith and Reason Institute.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (201) | Leave a comment Leave a comment

Michele San Pietro| 2.1.09 @ 1:26PM

I totally disagree with Harry Crocker. In particular, I find it senseless to say it was wrong to fight against the Confederacy because slavery would have disappeared anyway over time. It is like saying it was wrong to fight against Hitler because Nazism would have certainly become more democratic over time.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 7:20AM

Michele should read Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln" so she will know the real reasons the Southern states seceded and why Lincoln went to war. She should also read "The South Was Right" by James & Walter Kennedy for primary source quotations that give irrefutable proof that Northerners were not fighting to free the slaves and were never 'friends' of the slaves (except for a very few abolitionists who were mainly the heirs to fortunes made from the slave trade- typical North Easterners). Both of these works are filled with info & footnotes that disprove the publik skrool version of 'The Civil War'. The facts support Mr. Crocker.

Scott Christie| 2.12.09 @ 8:05AM

Great suggestions. Another, from the horse's mouth is "History of the Great Rebellion." Written by a Union Officer at the end of the war. I was shocked to find that even he seem to say that the South was provoked to go to war. He lists the reasons leading to war and I was stunned to find out that none of these reasons were taught to me in school? I thought the war was about freeing slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be like saying WWII was fought to free the jews.

david murphy| 2.12.09 @ 8:27AM

All three of these comments are wrong. It is incorrect to compare permitting the further existence of American slavery with toleration for the Holocaust. Evil as race slavery was, and urgent as its eradication may have been, no one was planning to exterminate the black slaves of the south. But it is also disingenuous (at best) of today's neo-Confederate apologists to pretend that, since Lincoln was ambiguous about black rights, and he was "ruthless" about preserving the Union (I wonder: Is it "ruthless" to be patriotic?) the war was not really about slavery. What exact right of states was it, after all, that the traitorous southerners decided they would have to secede in order to be able to exercise? What did all those white Northern boys who marched south singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" think they were doing, anyway? I am sympathetic to the technical legal arguments for a right to secession, but if you think that anything legally correct is morally permissible you are fit for nothing but politics or the practice of law. The historical reality, attested to time and again in Southern speeches, the letters of Northern soldiers, and other kinds of evidence too abundant to enumerate, is that the matter of slavery was the real issue.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 8:40AM

David Murphy: First, you should read the works cited. Then you will fully understand the comments- and yes slavery was one issue but not the only issue for secession. Second, you apparently have been reading only the publik skrool versions of that war, and I am including college level and other works when I say 'publik skrool'. Read the noted works with an open mind, check the sources, then compare with what you have previously read and if you are objective, you will realize that the conventional version of the war is wildly inaccurate.

PS: I'm not an apologist. Facts are facts.

John| 2.12.09 @ 9:01AM

Nonsense... complete and utter nonsense.

The American Civil War, War Between the States... Great Bloody Disagreement... whatever someone likes to call it as a fashion statement was about, over, and due to the odious practice of chattel slavery and the demand for the spread of the practice to the territories of the United States.

PERIOD. (For proof, one need only read the secession declarations of each of the southern states. )

The perpetuation of the "noble cause" theory is understandable. No one wants to admit that a regoin and way of life was so tied to that horrid institution, it is embarassing.

The southern/Slave states seceded because an abolitionist Republican had been elected. They had, up until that time either controlled the presidency, or compromised it. The Dred Scott Decision had effectively made the entire nation a slave holding nation. It overturned every compromise agreement from 1820 until the Kanasas-Nebraska Act. Taney, by judicial fiat, made slavery a national practice, and in fact thoroughly trampled the south's precious states rights. A weak president would have solidified this status.

Just think... the state right being defended was... the "right" to own another human being, merely by virtue of the race of the person. Humm... I don't think that fighting for that right is particularly noble.

Citing racial and ethnic prejudice is a weak argument. It does not dismiss the overarching reason for the attempted secession of the southern states. Irishmen and southern Europeans were though ill of, and suffered incredible prejudice in their early years in this nation... yet no ethnic group, no matter how reviled, was ever treated so poorly as to call them property.

The American Civil War was about the abolition of the practice and institutions that grew around chattel slavery. All arguments to the contrary are guilty defiance.

r/John

slowtrot| 2.12.09 @ 9:26AM

Crocker asks:

Would slavery have persisted to this very day? No, it seems certain that it would have been abolished peacefully, as it found itself abolished everywhere else in the New World in the nineteenth century.

Please read:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm

Slowtrot

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 9:51AM

What bunkum. As a direct descendent of a Confederate soldier who died in the "late unpleasantness", I agree that is important to view the war from the perspective of how people at the time thought of the war. However, there was no real justification for secession other than preservation of the "peculiar institution". In fact, it was not seriously endangered by Lincoln.

My ancestor never owned any slaves, nor did his father or grandfather. What they did not like and I do not like is being told what to do by outsiders. I think that was a big part of Southern resistence; not wanting to be told what to do. However, no one was telling anyone what do do when Lincoln took office in 1861. "Rich man's war and poor man's fight" is spot on in terms of summarizing the Confederate position. The patrician Fireaters got upset by Lincoln's election because the mudsill Republican Party was a free soil, free labor party. Its principles then and for over a hundred years were anathema to Democrats in the South. The war was their preemptive action to preserve their status and property. There was no nobility in that.

Paul| 2.12.09 @ 9:55AM

Some good arguments throughout, fellow writers and thinkers.

My "quandary." How can anyone subscribe to a society where "you work, I eat." The slavery issue was very important. On the other hand the Union is supposed to be a VOLUNTARY association of states. There is nothing sacred about it.

I think I will always be conflicted by this.

ncatty| 2.12.09 @ 9:57AM

North Carolina's wartime governor Zeb Vance was asked after the war why he urged a continuation of the struggle after it appeared the cause was lost. His answer: To preserve slavery as long as possible and prevent what he thought would be anarchy at its demise. Many, perhaps most soldiers on both sides, fought for reasons other than preserving or abolishing slavery. However, "but for" slavery there would have been no war. As for the gradual elimination of slavery, on the contrary, there were overtures in the 1850s to re-open the trans-atlantic slave trade! Governor Adams of SC advocated it in his message to the SC legislature in November 1856.

LarryK| 2.12.09 @ 9:58AM

If the war was about slavery, why did General Lee free slaves in 1862 and then some of those same freed slave fight for the confederacy? The author is right in that before the war the reference was "The United States are..." and after the war it became "The United States is..." and that meant that the all powerful government in Washington DC then dictated to the states ... If we could bring back to life the founding fathers and let them observe what they created for thirty days, I believe at the end of those thirty days the would they would check their powder, alarm the citizenry, and march on Washington D.C. and take back the Republic of the United States of America.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.

"We're doomed!" C3PO

Doctor Right| 2.12.09 @ 9:59AM

The education establishment, which is decidely leftist, has long portrayed Lincoln as a saintly demi-god who, due to his vast intellect and righteous opinions, boldy held the nation together at it's darkest hour.

Yup...That's pretty much been the de-facto image of Lincoln since I was in grade school in the early seventies.

Well, I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. As a rule, pretty much everything the Left holds dear is the exact opposite of truth, and their intentions are the anathema of common sense.
It's amazing that Lincoln is so loved by the left, despite his utter trampling of the Constitution and the deaths of 650,000 Americans between 1860-1865. These are the things the left pretends to hate. In fact, these are the very things that they claimed George W. Bush was guilty of between 2000-2008, and for which they STILL want him prosecuted.

So I'll be purchasing Mr. Crocker's book real soon. It's subject is, unfortunately, very timely. I personally believe that we may be headed down a similar path in 2009 as the one that shattered our nation during Lincoln's presidency.

How fitting, then, that the current occupant of the White House fancies himself a modern-day Honest Abe...

...Or, rather, given the enormity of the power-grab in Washington since January 20th, how frightening...

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 10:04AM

Paul:

Entry into a federal union is voluntary; however, the issue of exit is not so settled. I believe that is the distinction between federalism and a confederation. In a confederation, the exit is obvious. In a federal system, because of the duality of sovereignty, it is not.

That is the importance of Fort Sumpter; it was a federal installation built with the tax dollars of all Americans. What right did South Carolina have to claim it as her sovereign property? None but the de facto right of force.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 10:11AM

Doctor Right:

Lincoln was our greatest president. He was a genius.

His righteous opinion was that a man deserves to rise in the world commensurate to his abilities and initiative and to enjoy the fruits of his labor. That is the bedrock principle of the Republican Party.

The Left wish to expropriate Lincoln because there was no one like him on their side. The Democrat Party was the slaveholders party and later the party of Jim Crow.

ACynic| 2.12.09 @ 10:25AM

If slavery had never existed anywhere in the USA , would the southern states have had a right to secede??
The question of slavery - an indefensible, odious practice - has always dominated any debate about the Civil War.
But is also obliterates discussion of the central question of when does the citizenry have a right to dissassociate themselves from a govt.
The southern states were merely repeating what the signers of the Declaration of Indpendence sought. Freedom from oppressive rule. Unfortunately, because of their insistence that slavery was their "right," their insistence of "freedom" was perceived as simply an excuse to continue slavery. And in fact, the continuation of slavery was central to the southern states in pursuing independence from the American union.

Lincoln should have insisted that an agreement be reached in which all slave holders were compensated - financially - and all slaves be immediately freed. This would have been far less costly - in lives and money and national unity - than embarking on a Civil War. But Lincoln was intransigent and frankly, it was his way or the highway.

There is no doubt, however, that the Civil War empowered the Federal Govt. with powers that the founding fathers never intended and which rendered states rights relatively ineffective - though not immediately. After all, if the federal govt or the federal courts render a decision against a state, a state has no further recourse. More dangerous, we have a state and federal courts in California, setting precedents that all states must follow.
This is NOT what the founding fathers envisioned.
Previous to the Civil War, a states rights were more sacred and precious and the federal government was more loath to violate them.
Not any more.
The Civil War ended, once and for all, any possibility that a state(s) could leave the union, which, in itself, would have tempered the power of the federal govt.
Today, we still suffer the affects of Lincolns imposition of federal tyranny upon the citizenry.
A massive, suffocating, federal bureaucracy and corrupt congressman - paid off by special interests - dictates and imposes its will upon the citizens, enforces laws selectively, and involves the US in never ending foreign conflicts.
None of this would have been possible if the Civil War - and Lincoln - had occurred.
Perhaps this is payback from a higher authority for bringing slavery into the colonies.

By the way, someone commented about Nazism - which simply utilizes a different political philosphy to excuse a different form of slavery and murder. Do not forget that our conflict with Germany during WWII required that we ally ourselves with Stalin's Bolshevik Russia; at the time the worst mass murderer in the history of the world. He exterminated about 30 million people - before 1940 - and he invaded Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. (Yes, Poland ! look it up). He exterminated about 3 TIMES as many people as Hitler.
Our actions in WWII enabled this mass murderer to expand his bloody rule over all of Eastern Europe, and by his aide to Mao in China, enabled Mao to assume power (and Mao exterminated 70 million people and now holds the record as the worst mass murderer in history!!!).
The USA and England basically saved Western Europe during WWII and sacrificed Eastern Europe. That was the tradeoff.
WWII was not the last "good war."
The American Civil War ultimately began the inexorable assumption of powers by the federal government as well as ended slavery.
The good result - the ending of slavery - was accompanied by a terrible result - an omnipotent federal tyranny . Again, another trade off.

The USA will not survive as a union much longer because the citizenry will rebel against this tyranny. But this time there will be no president to send troops to kill American citizens and frankly, American soldiers will not kill American citizens.
Ironically, Lincoln's efforts to save the Union will come full circle as Americans rebel against the federal tyranny we now endure.

ACynic| 2.12.09 @ 10:25AM

John| 2.12.09 @ 10:31AM

Lincoln is hardly a left wing idol. The assertion is more from some odd blind hatred than reason or fact would dictate. Such distinctions in 1837-1865 (The Period of Lincoln's public life) were non-operative.

1) It is historical fallacy to assert that slavery "would" have atrophied. The war happened. What occurred occurred all counter arguments to different chains of events are completely wild supposition. That being said, the South's reaction to the passing of the 13th and 14th Amendments, the rise of the Klan, virtual slavery and Jim Crow tend to militate against that arguement. There was, in fact, little functional opposition to chattel slavery in the south. How that would have played out if Douglas had been elected instead of Lincoln, is largely for a science fiction novel exploring a parallel universe to ponder.

2) Lincoln trampled no civil rights. How are there any civil rights of any constitutional merit due to those actively rebelling against the constitution? The assertion is absurd and akin to the demand that an umpire at a baseball game throw a penalty flag for holding...

Lincoln was faced with a disasterously fractured nation, and a constitution that was hanging by a bare thread. His government was halved, and no rational quorum present in the Senate to pass any legislation at all. This arugement hinges on his suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The Constitution gives Congress the right to suspend it. That there was not a functional congress capable of executing the order, Lincoln issued an executive order doing so. If congress so chose... it could have easily reversed the order. But then the Senate couldn't form a quorum.

The truth is that southern apologizes what it both ways. They want the writ, and damn Lincoln for suspending it, while simultaneously they reject the nation and the constitution.

The President is sworn to defend the Constitution against foes foreign and DOMESTIC. The South posed a DOMESTIC threat, and since the document is not a suicide pact, Lincoln was well within the powers of war and the assertion of sovereign rights of a nation over its territorial and governmental integrity.

3) The founding document of this nation, the Declaration of Independence, is a unanimous and irrevocable association. When a state joins the union, it signs on to that unanimous declaration. The Constitution is a governmental/legal affectation that required of it approval of a super-majority, but unanimous consent was not required.

Abraham Lincoln saved this nation from oblivion. He ended the practice of chattel slavery, and paid dearly for the privilege of having done so. He was a man, with flaws, and prejudices. He was not perfect, and would recoil at any attempt to crown him as some sort of messiah. What he did do was save a nation from tearing itself apart, and start the process of trying to right its greatest birth defect.

There are few men of his grand stature in the history of the world, let alone a nation... or state.

Regards,

John

Basil Plumley| 2.12.09 @ 10:38AM

@david murphy & John

I think both of you are going far afield from the reality of 1861. The Constitution for all intents and purposes is a contract. It is a contract between the people and the Government. When a contract can not be performed or becomes unwieldy or oppressive to one party, a party to the contract has the legal right to abrogate or withdraw from the contract. It was a concept understood by the American people in 1861. It is also one of the reasons the Confederates were not tried and executed for Treason; despite the pleas for such action by some in the North.

What Lincoln did in essence was enforce the contract of the Constitution on the South. Today, the Constitution is treated as a code of conduct for how the people are allowed to act. As a result, the Government is allowed to usurp.

Also, one should note that slavery in 1861 was a practice that had very little future. New innovations like Cyrus McCormick's reaper and old inventions like Eli Whitney's cotton gin would/did make slavery impractical.

One should also note that most of the folks who fought for the South were NOT slaveowners or beneficiaries of slavery. Why then would these folks fight for a concept so alien to their being?
A hint-Their state was invaded.

Of course that was part of the problem with the Confederacy. The Confederates had greater loyalty to their States than the Confederacy. I hope this helps.

ACynic| 2.12.09 @ 10:56AM

Lincoln most certainly trampled on civil rights. Most of the folks he threw in jail for protesting against the civil war were northerners.
Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union and he did what he had to in an effort to achieve this goal.
Woodrow Wilson- during WWI and FDR, both followed Lincoln's example by imprisoning anti-war dissenters and potential threats; e.g.., internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
They were merely following precedent set by Lincoln.

The constitution is NOT irrevocable; the signers did not envision, nor insist, that once a signatory to that document, that one is compelled to remain bound by that document even in the face of tyranny. After all, the constitution was written AFTER the Declaration of Independence.

The southern state DID NOT present a threat to the USA. They basically wanted to be left alone. If Lincoln did not sent federal troops to "recapture' the south, the southern states never had any intention of "invading" the north.

John| 2.12.09 @ 11:10AM

Basil,

1. I am a contextualist. It is critical to my analysis to understand the context of the world of the United States between 1775 and 1865.

2. There is a great danger in conflating the Constitution with the Nation. (this is a common legalistic outlook - see Bruce Fein for examples) They operate at very different levels. The Constitution is a governmental compact this compact requires of it national sovereignty to operated. The Nation State of the United States of America predates the Constitution. Therefore its sovereignty (will to nationhood as it were) is not dependent upon the Constitution. In fact if it is dependent upon the Constitution the nation becomes a legal fiction, not a state.

Yes, Lincoln did in fact enforce the contract of the Constitution, and did so as the Head of the State of the United States, and the Commander in Chief of its military.... The first office being constitutionally recognized, and assigned by democratic means, the second predating the constitution, and the declaration, as the first major act of the infant sovereign nation in May of 1775.

Slavery had little to do with labor, machinery, or any other innovation. It was a social affection of the worst kind. Practicality had little or nothing to do with it. It was about power, and power knows no innovation as its excuse to cease to exist.

Regardless of the reason for the individual soldier fighting in the war, some voluntary and some not, soldiers don't dictate the reasons for the war... they merely bleed for them. They ultimately have no say in why they fight.

And yes, the Confederacy failed in large part because of the reasons for its founding. Blind self-interest is hardly a unifying theme or overarching reason for the critical "will to nationhood" required of a sovereign nation-state.

Best Regards, rational discussion with reasoned commentators is fun. Thanks...

John

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 11:26AM

ACYNIC: Nice work, although I think the facts you cite are lost on John. He seems hell bent to believe the public school version of things and no facts are going to deter him. Also, H/T to Basil. Excellent points. I wonder how many readers know that slavery still existed in the North until after the war, or how many know that slavery diminished in the North only because of the large number of free European immigrants who came into northern ports which allowed for cheaper labor than buying, housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical care for slaves, and how many know that the New England slave traders continued their trade after it was outlawed by the Federal government and continued right up to the start of this war, or that 96% of the slaves they forced to endure the middle passage went to the Caribbean or South America where slavery was ended without wars or that the entire economy of New England was based on the slave trade until the fortunes built on this trade helped finance the industrial revolution that employed all those free immigrants?

Oh yeah, I had three Confederate ancestors killed in the war and none of them were fighting to preserve slavery. I also had Union ancestors who fought in it. Anyone with more dead ancestors that fought this war than me, feel free to trump me.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 11:42AM

Lincoln sho' did luv him some black folk!

Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press:

"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

And!

An address by Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol II, pp 408-9, Basler, ed.]:

"A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. Such separation, if ever affected at all, must be effected by colonization The enterprise is a difficult one, but 'where there is a will there is a way:' and what colonization needs now is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and at the same time, favorable to, or at least not against our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be."

And!

Abraham Lincoln 1859 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol III, pp 399, Basler, ed.]

"Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?" --

Are some of you aware that 7 Confederate states has already seceeded during Buchanon's presidency and he said (basically) that although he wasn't happy about there was nothing in the Constituion that he could do about it?

The remaining 4 seceeded after "Honest" Abe amassed 75,000 troops for an impending invasion of the South.

And you all DO know that the "Great Emancipator" only "emancipated" those slaves in so-called "rebel" states? Slaves in Union states? Still slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION:

Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued."

NOTE - Slavery was NOT abolished in one Confederate (Tennessee) and four Union states (Maryland, Delaware. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri).

I'll leave yall with a final quote from Lincoln on those black folk he luved so much.

Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.,: Rutgers University Press:

"Send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit this."

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 11:47AM

Lincoln didn't trample civil rights. Haha! LOL!!!

"Constitutional Problems under Lincoln," James G. Randall, 1951, Urbana: University of Illinois Press:

"Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham - a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff -- protested imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers."

james wilson| 2.12.09 @ 12:01PM

Slavery was not going to just end. Southerners knew very well it had make them stupid and extremely uncompetitive, while the North exploded in growth and population.
But they spoke frankly that they did not know how to let go of the tigers tail, because the numbers were overwhelming against them.
A righteous cause did not defeat an unrightous one. A powerful nation defeated a weak one.
This is what the Founders foresaw in the Federalist, and was the reason Lincoln fought the war--fragmentation meant permenant war.

LJenkins| 2.12.09 @ 12:27PM

Crusader, you hit the ball out of the park on Ol' Honest Abe. Lincoln was not as pure as the driven snow. He disliked the blacks as much as any racist. In fact, the plantation/slave owners may have held their slaves in a higher regard as slavery was an investment. "The Real Lincoln" does not flatter Abe at all.

R. E. Lee, and T.J. Jackson were far more moral and Christian than Lincoln. In an age were blacks were not allowed to read, Jackson taught black children how to read so they could read the Bible. Lincoln's cabinet and most of congress breathed a sigh of relief when Lincoln was assassinated. Lincoln had laid out moderate stipulations for the "rebel" states to re-enter the Union. Lincoln was killed, his VP tried to continue the policy and was impeached, Grant won the next election, and the South was painfully reconstructed. The abolitionists and Unionist had their way. (great motive to have Abe put away)

Paul wrote: My "quandary." How can anyone subscribe to a society where "you work, I eat." Look out the window, watch the news, observe what our wonderful elected leaders are doing, sir, it's happening again, only the tables appear to be reversed. The re-birth of salvery is immenient.

Doctor Right| 2.12.09 @ 1:00PM

To: Teleprompter Messiah

Re: Thanks for the opinion!

So you adore Lincoln??

Good for you! I don't. I share Mr. Crocker's opinions on the subject - Lincoln's war needlessly cost the lives of 600,000 Americans...600,000! Additionally, slavery in the USA would have ended of it's own accord, or at the very least, with political/economic/socioeconomic pressure on the South that simply made the practice unsustainable.

Finally, as others have pointed out, Lincoln was no lover of African-Americans, preferring that the emancipated slaves be sent back to Africa rather than be made "equals" with whites.

Sorry, but for my opinion (Yes, like you, I have one), Lincoln was NOT our greatest President, nor was he a geniusn as you describe.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 1:05PM

Crusader:

Your quotations all reiterate my point: the South had no real reason to secede, in 1861 Lincoln was not a direct threat to slaveholders. However, his belief in the equality of all people to enjoy the fruits of their labor was.

As for the Emancipation Proclaimation not freeing all of the slaves, that is exactly correct. It was issued under the legal aegis of Lincoln's power as Commander in Chief. Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia (and certain parishes in Louisiana) were not in rebellion. It had nothing to do with freeing slaves there because as President he had no authority to do so. Even in the face of hideous civil war the bugaboo monster of neo-Confederate musing still respected the rule of law.

ACynic| 2.12.09 @ 1:08PM

Lincoln's reputation as an abolishionist preceded him.
The southern states had made if very plain; if Lincoln was elected president, they were out the door.
As CRUSADER shows above, Lincoln made many speeches/remarks that are racist; esp. when viewed from today's world.
But the southerners, in Lincoln's time, knew exactly where he stood vis a vis slavery, and also realized that he presented an existential threat to the their entire economy and way of life.
Unlike modern historians - having to interpret the conflicting messages of Lincoln's speeches - Lincoln's southern contemporaries did not have to rely on textual analysis of Lincoln's speeches to deduce his "real" position on slavery.
If the southern states had any doubts as to where Lincoln stood on the issue of slavery, they would have waited to see his actions AFTER he took office.
They did not wait, nor did they have too. Everybody knew - in 1860, if not earlier - what Lincoln believed about slavery and that he would - one way or another - end slavery.
Of course, how he would end slavery was unknown; until the civil war erupted.

Lincoln was no idiot. He realized that if he was to prevail, he first needed to get elected !! And, to become president he needed the votes of northerners. Further, once elected he realized he needed time to garner support for emancipation from what remained of Congress and from the northern populace.
This was only possible after it became clear that the confederacy was going to lose the war.
His timing was impeccable; he was very, very shrewd, if not devious.
Certainly one of the smartest politicians in all of American history.

david murphy| 2.12.09 @ 1:10PM

It's funny to see the South's apologists and defenders keep pointing out that Lincoln didn't like black people. So? Is this in any way relevant to the issues you all keep raising? No matter what spin you like to put on your US history, the fact remains incontrovertible that the final end of slavery was initiated by the policies of A. Lincoln, and that by the end of the war he saw that this was happening and approved of it. There is no way to refute this if one wishes to remain in the realm of coherent historical argument. And it is hilarious to see how people who hate Lincoln want to defend R. E. Lee, who did more than any man to try to keep race slavery a viable practice, or to preach the virtues of the deranged heretical Christian "Stonewall" Jackson.

gregg patten| 2.12.09 @ 1:12PM

Say what you will, even a democratic president today is attempting to identify himself with a Republican president. Lincoln was no lover of war nor did he romanticize human nature. He bore the loss of the soldiers and their widows and orphans, and was killed for his troubles. And you cite Jeff Davis as a hero? When did we elevate the Confederacy to 2oth century Victim Class?

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 1:28PM

Doctor Right:

600,000 Americans did die needlessly because a bunch of morons in South Carolina, without justification, decided to bombard a federal installation.

You absolutely miss my point. What, as president, could Lincoln have done to end slavery in the United States in 1861? Why was secession necessary? The slaveholding elite who controlled politics in the South are who drenched this country in blood and ruined the Confederacy economically.

There was no threat of invasion in 1860 when South Carolina rebelled. Later, the "invasion" threat was used as a pretext by slick politicians to push wavering border states over the abyss.

In your opinion was James Buchanan our greatest president? I mean he was passive in the face of all of this so that is the antithesis of the "Real Lincoln" thesis.

Doctor Right| 2.12.09 @ 1:29PM

To: ACynic

Re: Lincoln/Obama...

Obama keeps comparing himself to Lincoln. If I borrow from one of the paragraphs in your post, we arrive at the following:

" Obama was no idiot. He realized that if he was to prevail, he first needed to get elected !! And, to become president he needed the votes of northerners. Further, once elected he realized he needed time to garner support for socilaism from what remained of Congress and from the northern populace."

Pretty neat, huh?? And, hopefully, not prophetic.

Also, one part is glaringly wrong - Obama IS an idiot. Or, as Rush Limbaugh eloquently says: "The dangerous thing about Obama is that he doesn't even know that he doesn't know what he's doing..."

Paul| 2.12.09 @ 1:31PM

L. Jenkins, Teleprompter Messiah:

I much appreciate your measured responses/comments.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 1:34PM

Using David Murphy's logic, Hitler deserves thanks for the creation of Israel, which could only have been brought about by WW II and the holocaust. Darn those bigoted Brits who wouldn't let the Jews back into the Holy Land. Therefore, David, you are correct insofar as your logic goes. LOL

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 1:40PM

T-Mess, slavery was not on Lincoln's radar as far as starting the War of Northern Aggression in 1861. For my norhern apologist friends, google the Wilmot Proviso and it should help you understand the beginnings of the war a little differently.

As far as the South "starting" the war buy firing on Ft Sumter, what wa a sovereign nation suposed to do when an aggressor attempted to move military supplies into it? Believe me my friend, Lincoln knew exactly what would happen when he ordered those supply ships to go to Ft Sumter. Lincoln forced the South's hand. He had a hard enough sell (for the war) in the North without appearing as the one who "started it," let alone if he did.

Vern Crisler | 2.12.09 @ 1:43PM

Gees, how many more of these neo-confederate puff pieces is the American Spectator going to publish? Lincoln bashing or pro-South views of the Civil War are based both on ignorance of natural law philosophy, and the nature of the American system of government Go to the Claremont Institute for some sane analysis:
http://www.claremont.org/

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 1:44PM

T-Mess, I also refuse to label the war a "Civil" war or call the seceeding states "rebellious." A "Civil War" implies two or more entities all fighting for control of the sme thing. In this case, the "thing" would be control of the US Gubmint. The seceeded Southern States were for all intents and purposes a whooly, different, sovereign nation called teh Confederate States of America. They had their own government and had no designs to control the United States of America's government. Also, by redefining secession as "rebellion" you are basically saying that if you enter into a contract with me, I violate the terms of the contract, and you dissolve our partnership, that YOU are now in rebellion against me, the one who violated the terms of our initial contract.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 1:46PM

T-Mess, p.s., Ft Sumter wasn't fired on until April 1861, as Lincoln was not inaugurated until March 1861. Just lookin' out.

Tom| 2.12.09 @ 1:47PM

Since every single alternate cause of the war can be directly tied to the slave trade it is senseless to say that slavery was not the primary cause of the war. That is the closest thing to undeniable in the debate .

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 1:50PM

One more thang. The Morrill Tariff. Take from the South, give to the North. Money, not slavery, really forced the secession of the initial 7 states.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 2:06PM

Crusader is correct. The Union signed a formal peace treaty with The Confederate States of America that ended the so called 'civil war'. You don't sign peace treaties with insurrectionists. You sign them with sovereign nations. Secession was taken for granted as a legal right of each state prior to the war. Only after the war did secession become 'illegal' and the Declaration of Independence become a one time only manifesto-to some.

For those really into Lincoln hagiography, do go to the Claremont Instutute site. You'll be in Lincoln nirvanna. They are falling all over themselves beatifying Abe over there.

LJenkins| 2.12.09 @ 2:15PM

In no way should it be misconstrued that I harbor a distaste for Lincoln. In fact, I keep a copy of "Lincoln Leadership" isbn 0-446-51646-5 on my desk. By default, Lee went with his home state when offered the entire leadership of the Union Army by Old Fuss and Feathers, and this default defended the institution of slavery, but it should be pointed out that his wife owned the slaves in the family as an inheritance from her father. "Tom Fool" Jackson did not own slaves yet he stayed with his home state, and by default defended slavery. They had a great loyalty to their state, not the Federal Government. (Call them crazy, but no more than our current day leaders.) State loyalty is something we all need a bit of these days considering the magnitude of DC. But Lincoln made the freedom of slaves a reason for his part of the war after the battle of Sharpsburg, Sept. 1862. Annulifications by most rebellious states included wording that slavery should be kept as an institution. But think: Why did Abe maintain a military presence in most of the South's harbors instead of withdrawal? ie, Charleston, SC? Did he do that to protect the slaves? or get the South to fire the first shot so they'd appear as the aggressors? (Test question: Who fired the first shot? A capt. James under the command of Beauregard or cadets from the Citadel?)

Abe kept the presence to collect import duties. There were no personnal income taxes until 1861 to pay for the war!! The US treasury made its money from the importation of foreign goods and the south, because of its agrarian (yes slave) based economy was a milk cow for those very duties. Look up the Morrill Tariff (or Tax of Abominations 1828) which became law in 1862. Pre-civil war 90% of the Federal income came from tariffs paid by the South on goods imported from Europe. (They were cheaper than American made). And the income was used to build infrastructure in the northern states.

"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; ...." and "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." Lincoln's 1st Inaugural Address

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 2:29PM

ACynic:

In 1860 the Democrat Party cracked up. It held two conventions and nominated two candidates for president: Stephen Douglas (Northern) and John Breckinridge (Southern). As well, the Southern Whigs and the Nativists joined together to form the Constitutional Union Party.

In 1860 the Republican Party was a new party cobbled together from groups of the old Whig party, including abolitionists.

Southern political leaders for years had been ratcheting up the rhetoric about violence and rebellion. At its base it was always about preserving the "peculiar institution" under the canard of "states rights".

The election of 1860 showed how messsed up and fragmented the country was politically. However, there was still no excuse for rebellion in the results.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 2:38PM

Crusader:

You have yet to tell me one thing that Abraham Lincoln could have done to end slavery in 1861.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 2:47PM

LJenkins:

The forts at Pensacola and Charleston were federal installations. Neither Florida nor South Carolina had any sovereign claim on either of them. Just like today, Cuba has no sovereign claim to Gitmo until our lease ends. By attacking Sumpter the rebels knew exactly what they were doing too.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 2:49PM

T-Mess, what were the Southern States "rebelling" against?

It is troubling that some of today's conservatives turn decidely liberal and big, oppressive, government types when good ol' Abe is brought up. Truth be told I was a born and bread Yankee, bought the story of the civil war as told in me parochial school. Thought Lincoln was our "greatest" president. When I got older and started voting, I really looked to find what I considered the "Truth" about things. When it came to the "Civil" War, the Truth is Lincoln was a tyrant. He oppressed or outright suspended civil rights, unconstitutionally took control of RRs, threw newspapermen and even state legislators in jail (or had them exiled), bullied the MD legislature into not voting on secession, and approved of the war crimes commonly called "Sherman's March to the Sea."

Lincoln was no friend of the Constitution. I mean, if Barry the muslim trying to model himself after Lincoln doesn't raise red flags about ol' Abe, I don't know what would.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 2:55PM

T-Mess, forgive me but I didn't see where you asked. Anyway, Lincoln could have tried amending the Constitution but in 1861 that would not have worked, so for all intents and purposes there was nothing CONSTITUTIONALLY he could have done. That's the point bro. Lincoln is a tyrant because he went outside the bounds of his constitutionally outlined powers and started an aggressive war against a sovereign nation WITHOUT Congress' approval, BTW.

I mean, again, is what you are saying is it was OK for Lincoln to act unconstitutionally because his heart was in the right place (if we assume he went to war against the CSA solely to end slavery)? That is a bad precedent to set.

Hypothetical Q for you:

Would you support a Republican president who started a "Civil War" to end abortion?

As much as I oppose abortion and find it immoral, I could not.

Al Adab| 2.12.09 @ 2:55PM

The truely great irony of American history is that the South was right in the wrong cause while the Union (the central government) was wrong in a right cause. What would they have said of bush had he suspended habeus corpus, arrested say the Calif. legislature or exiled dissenting Congressmen? There is the proper mirror.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 2:58PM

Al Adab, you forgot shut down the NYT, Wapo, LA Times, etc.

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 3:01PM

This is typical neo-Confederate propaganda. There is absolutely no question that the main reason the South withdrew from the Union to form a separate nation was to preserve slavery into perpetuity. All of the rebel states' articles of confederation say precisely that. The bulk of their content is fulmination about the 'wrongheadedness' of the U.S. government denying Southerners the "God-given right" to hold other human beings as chattel forever.

President Lincoln grew as person from his campaign through the end of the Civil War. He developed great respect for black soldiers, appreciated the counsel of Frederick Douglas and came to oppose repatriation of people who had become Americans to Africa. Only by dwelling on his pre-Civil War rhetoric, and ignoring his views subsequently, can one claim he remained a stolid white supremacist.

The fact that so much neo-Confederate drivel is peddled at the American Spectator confirms that it is manned mainly by anti-intellectual hacks. These people are impervious to facts.

The dwindling of the GOP to a Southern regional party will continue as long as a significant segment of Republicans hold neo-Confederate views. The Republican National Committee managed to save its bacon by electing Michael Steele chairman instead of someone who is part of this segregationist nonsense. Katon Dawson is a participant in several segregationist organizations that idealize the Confederate South, despite his claim to have quit one of them, a country club. But, rejecting one neo-Confederate sympathizer is not enough. The GOP needs to reject all of them.

Nor is it incidental that we are seeing an increase in neo-Confederate propaganda after the election of the first African-American president. President Obama is a repudiation of white supremacy. He has rocked the racists' world.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 3:06PM

Again I say when a big-gubmint nanny-state metro lib pansy like Interloper sings the praises of ol' Abe, you can have him.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 3:08PM

Lib playbook: Disagree with Obama's socialist policies and you are a racist. When you point out that we can't disagree with Obama's policies without being called a racist, call us a racist louder (like what the knee-pads did to Rush).

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 3:20PM

Crusader:

There was nothing constitutionally that Lincoln could have done. To amend the constitution would have required the acquiesence of Southern states and that was not going to happen.

South Carolina seceded before Lincoln even took office. The 13th Amendment was not adopted until after his murder.

Prior to Fort Sumpter there was absolutely no justification for secession. I hate to agree with Interloper on anything, but it was motivated solely to extend the slave empire.

All those here who subscribe to the "union as a contract dissoluable at will" please tell me why any money approriated from citizens of other states should go to build your highways. The Constitution is a different animal than the Articles of Confederation.

LJenkins| 2.12.09 @ 3:28PM

Correct. There is no argument that the forts were or were not Federal property. They were there to protect the harbors, and enforce duty collections. On April 6th Lincoln had a relief supply ship, under the protection of the US Navy, dispatched to relieve Ft. Sumter. Previously the unescorted Star of the West had been dispatched with supplies for Ft. Sumter, but Cadets from the Citadel fired the first shot over its bow, and the ship withdrew. Beauregard was sweating bullets, Anderson was about to be starved out and admitted so in a dispatch to Beauregard, but would it be before the relief ship arrived? (Note that Anderson was Beauregard's artillery instructor at the Point and he had trained him well.) With time running out the war began. No one died during the bombardment, death for thousands came later.

The Secretary of War, L.P. Walker, sent to Beauregard: "'Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter. If Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the meantime he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this, or its equivalent, be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.'

A second communication was sent to Major Anderson, based on the above instructions, which was placed in, his hands at 12:45 A.M., April 12th. His reply indicated that he would "evacuate the fort on the 15th, provided he did not in the meantime receive contradictory instructions from his Government, or additional supplies," but he did not agree to not to open his guns upon the Confederate troops, in the event of any hostile demonstration on their part against his flag. This was unacceptable to Beauregard and his superiors.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 3:29PM

Interloper:

There is a good faith basis to debate the constitutional points raised here. It is obvious that even 120 years after the civil war, it is still not resolved.

To conflate those issues with the race issues is not a good faith matter. It is not 'backlash" against the election of a president of African origin to discuss them.

The barbaric legacy of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow that belongs to the Democrat party is somewhat atoned by Obama's elevation.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 3:34PM

INTERLOPER: Please site your sources for Lincoln's increased respect for Black people during the war. LOL You can't because it does not exist. Yep, all of us who see Lincoln the way he really was, instead of some kind of saint, are all neo-Confederate bigots. LOL Just ignore all the facts about how slavery was still legal and practiced in the North too, and how Lincoln offered to make no move against slavery if the Southern states would remain in the Union, and how the Northern slave traders were still slave trading up to the start of the war, and how Lincoln planned to send all Black people back to Africa..... I could go on, but you get my drift. Gee, Abe was swell!

So what we have is a region, the South, that practiced slavery and wanted to be free of a region, the North, that practiced slavery, practiced the slave trade, had many laws on the books preventing ANY black people from entering their states (Illinois was one of these) and various other "Jim Crow' laws discriminating against Black people, and imposed HUGE taxes on the South but not for the benefit of Southern states. Hmmmmm. Yep, those Nothern states certainly held the moral high ground.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 3:36PM

T-Mess, EXACTLY. NOTHING int eh Constitution gave Lincoln the authority to act the way he did. So I guess that means he acted--what's the word--UNCONSTITUTIONALLY?

Wilmot Proviso and the Morrill Tariff were certainly "justification" to 7 states to seceed.

Again I ask you, if a Republican president started a "Civil War" (a la good ol' Abe) to end abortion, would you support it?

Further, why is it that the USA was the only western country in the 19th century to actually go to war to "end slavery?"

Further, how do you justify Sherman's atrocities and Lincoln's implicit consent to them against CIVILIANS in the South? We threw a borderline retarded Army private in jail for putting a bag on a terrorist's head, but another hero of the North, Gen Sherman, was a vile, evil, wicked man who committed war crimes against CIVILIANS (women and children) and he is celebrated.

Rob Hobart| 2.12.09 @ 3:45PM

None of the Confedaracy-defenders here -- including the author of the book under review -- are being in any way honest about the nature of Southern/Confederate society or its desperate addiction to slavery. Far from being a free people who just wanted to be left alone, the Southern leaders were aggressive expansionists who dreamed of a slave empire spreading across the Carribbean. Knights of the Golden Circle, anyone? The notion that slavery would have naturally faded away is absurd, given that the south's entire economy was based on it, their entire political system was demanding the right to spread it wherever they wanted, and their entire justification for secession was the fear that it might be constrained IN ANY WAY. The south was in fact a nascant totalitarian state, in which opposition to slavery was suppressed -- it was southern congressmen who instituted the "gag rule" so that so petitions against slavery could be read in Congress, for example.

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 3:51PM

Someone asked:

"One should also note that most of the folks who fought for the South were NOT slaveowners or beneficiaries of slavery. Why then would these folks fight for a concept so alien (sic) to their being?"

I'll answer that in two words: White supremacy.

As another commenter alluded to above, white supremacy and its practices, such as slavery, have deep psychological hooks. ANY white person, no matter how ignorant, poor or depraved, can consider himself superior to ANY person of color, no matter how brilliant, wealthy or moral, under white supremacist belief. That is a major reason why many a white Southerner lacking even a change of underwear without holes went gallivanting off to fight for planters' 'right' to continue to hold their scores of human chattel. Some of these fools doubtlessly entertained the notion that they would someday own slaves. Others were set on not seeing blacks put on an equal footing with at least poor whites via the abolition of slavery.

About half of Southern families owned or had owned a slave at some time before 1860. About 25 percent of Southern families owned several slaves at the time of the Civil War, ranging from a handful to thousands.

If only healthy, young males from the multiple slave owning class had fought in the Civil War, it would have ended in six weeks or less. But, the oligarchy's ability to rely on white supremacy to motivate those who did not own slaves resulted in the years long conflict that actually occurred.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 3:55PM

Crusader:

Roe v. Wade is akin to Dred Scott. No state in this union has not respected that awful decision. I fail to see a parallel.

The Wilmot Proviso sought to restrict the expansion of slavery into territory acquired from Mexico. How did this imperil the Southern states?

The Morrill Tariff fell on the South disproportionately because the South was not a manufacturing base. The grievance caused by that could have been cured by legislation. Recall that the South was also disproportionately represented in the federal government by the inclusion of slaves in the census. Recall too that the admission of new states always was predicated on maintaining senate parity between free and slave. Nothing could be done to cure that but amend the constitution which would have been an impossibility.

The fact that 7 states rebelled does not mean that their stated reasons for rebelling are adequate.

Lincoln saw it as his duty as president to preserve the union. As the person lawfully charged with preserving and protecting the constitution of the United States he was empowered to act as he did.

As for Sherman, the debate over tactics and strategy is an altogether different thread. I do ask, was the 8th Airforce guilty of war crimes in your eyes?

LJenkins| 2.12.09 @ 3:55PM

Crusader: You left off Sheridan's 1864 rape of the Shennandoa Valley. That's wasn't a pretty sight either. Burning, plundering (called foraging), starvation, and mayhem became trade marks of the Union Army. Sherman and Sheridan will be remembered for that, not military genius. Those "darn pesky hick hayseed dirty Rebs" were gentlemen compared to Sherman's bummers.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 4:00PM

Again, nobody is saying slavery would have just "faded away." Technology would have made it less economically sound. Again I ask, how come the USA needed a war to end it, but no other industrialized Western nation did?

Oh, and the North had only honorable reasons for passing Morrill? Money had nothing to do with it, right? Free trade? Naaah.

As far as Interloper goes, one day libs will let go of the race card. Maybe.

2Anglico| 2.12.09 @ 4:04PM

Amazing comments by the TV addicted. I guess we're supposed to recoil in terror at being called "neo-Confederates"!! Man, that is just mean. The "stupid" Southerners managed to inflict 100% more casualties on the Union forces (400,000 dead Union troops-200,000 dead Confederate troops, roughly). The "enlightened" Union troops behaved themselves nicely in Fredricksburg, didn't they? Most of the Confederate troops fought because they were invaded.
The southern states would not have voted to ratify the constitution had they known they were not allowed to secceed. Attacking Ft. Sumpter was dumb, granted.
But do not EVER tell me this issue was not settled, i.e., reparations. Our nation paid with the most valuable currency known to man-BLOOD.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 4:10PM

Interloper:

But for the cotton gin and the Spinning Jenny, slavery would have died in the early 19th century. The cotton trade was the ruin of the South because it made slavery profitable.

To maintain that trade in that form required a Faustian bargain. In exchange for lucre you had to shut your eyes to evil and always maintain the stus quo.

The expansion of slavery into new territory meant more wealth for the planters. It was inconceivable to them to permit any change or amendment to that system. It had to be preserved at all costs. They had a wolf by the ears and could not let go and they knew it. That is why they chose war.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 4:13PM

T-Mess, how was the "grievance" going to be cured by legislation if the new territories being admitted to the Union were only admitted if they were free states, as Wilmot said? Do you not see the parallel between Wilmot and Morrill? That's why Wilmot is important.

Its disheartening that you say Lincoln saw his duty to "preserve the Union" but then misguidedly claim because he was charged with preserving and protecting the CONSTITUTION that he was empowered to start a war to do so. "Preserving the Union is not in my constitution under the heading of "Executive Powers."

Conservatives usually get on libs for finding rights and powers not specifically outline in the Constitution of the United States of AMERICA. It is scary that conservatives give Lincoln a pass on this. Again, you have to be careful what you allow your party to do or what laws you pass when you are in power, cuz you won't be in power all the time.

As far as the abortion thing goes, I think it is not that you fail to see the parallel, its that you just don't want to answer the question. Its a hypothetical question. If a Republican president began a Civil War over the issue of ending abortion, would you support that decision? Basically substitute abortion for slavery in your Civil War argument, fast forward 150 years, and then answer me. Abortion is about as close to slavery as you can get. Should be easy to see the parallel.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 4:16PM

Crusader:

April 1861 is as tragic as August 1914. Everyone at the time thought that it would be a short jaunty matter. Instead it became a human abbatoir.

The war did not end slavery. The 13th amendment ended slavery.

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 4:19PM

I must disagree with a certain guilty party's remarks:

"There is a good faith basis to debate the constitutional points raised here. It is obvious that even 120 years after the civil war, it is still not resolved.

To conflate those issues with the race issues is not a good faith matter. It is not 'backlash" against the election of a president of African origin to discuss them."

It is all related. From the decision to condemn blacks to chattel slavery in what would become the United States after their roles as indentured servants and free men in the 1700s, to today's discrimination against people of African descent is one thread still unwinding.

It is the vestiges of slavery that are the core of other forms of discrimination against blacks. (Colonialism and imperialism are also core reasons for racial disparities.) White supremacy is the belief that holds it all together, and, white supremacy is still very much with us.

No lesser former Republican than David Duke has taken considerable umbrage about the election of President Obama. But, Duke carries his outrage farther, condemning the elevation of Michael Steele to chairman of the RNC, as well. He, and other white supremacists, perceive such events as death knells for the beliefs dearest to them.

Now, it isn't difficult to understand why someone calling himself "Teleprompter Messiah" would be upset by the point that white supremacy explains why the Civil War occurred, and, why much of the opposition to Obama's rise to the presidency is occurring. The screen name implies that President Obama is incapable of speaking without content provided (by a white person, of course) on a teleprompter. In other words, the person sporting that appellation believes that a Harvard Law graduate, law professor and respected memoirist is illiterate because he is of African descent. That, sadly, is an example of white supremacist thinking in 2009.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 4:26PM

Crusader:

Abortion is a constitutional "right" all over the USA. Slavery was only a "right" in certain states.

If states started to declare their independence from the United States to escape the application of Roe, I submit that the Constitution permits the president to uphold the constitution. If you believe that the application of Roe justifies such a declaration, then you will conclude the president is a mad tyrant.

However, Roe could be overturned by amendment. It would not take a war to do so.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 4:37PM

The Colonies that became the states that supported Lincoln’s crusade were the same colonies that requested (begged actually) the Southern slave owning colonies join their little unpleasantness with the British in 1776. What ever one thinks about the slavery that existed then, it was no less than that in 1776 and again when the Constitution was ratified. From that unpleasantness of the 1770s, came a binding document, a framework for self government that held at the very least that disputes would not be resolved by force of arms but by the rule of law. In that document ratified by all the colonies, was a prescribed procedure for amending the Constitution and slavery was legal.

What Lincoln precipitated, was a force of arms change to the Constitution that voided the compact that had bound the 13 ratifying colonies and all the States admitted to the union to that point voluntarily. Fort Sumter just didn’t happen because someone got a wild hair up their butt. Not unlike today, simple majority rule law changes were used to void the limitation of Federal power outlined in the Constitution and attack slavery via economic means and so it was before Lincoln took office and so it would be after. It became clear in enough people’s minds of the time that the social contract signed into law nearly 75 years earlier would not be honored by the Federal government any longer. Nor would the prescribed method of amending the Constitution be honored. Nearly 4 million fought that war and over 618,000 died so the precise reason it was fought is kind of in the eye of those that did the fighting and dying at this point. It is moot.

What is not moot however is the outcome. A vile abomination of an institution was removed from this nation, an entire region was subjugated by force of arms and economically held back for decades breeding hate and mistrust of the Federal government even to this day, lack of respect for the Rule of Law too numerous to mention here and the ancestries of all those slaves have rejected the principles and Political Party that freed them 95 to 5 in election after election after election for going on 5 decades and are the kept “negros”of the same political Party that founded and fought for slavery, the Democratic Party. If the irony of all this isn’t plain to see I can’t help you.

At the end of the day, in 2009 we are very close to where we were in 1861 with the same Party of Slavery in control again and a new kind of forced economic slavery riding high for the moment. In deed the new Lincoln seems intent on resolving another kind of Wealth injustice and this Lincoln’s butcher bill would be nearly 6,000,000 dead Americans today to reflect on the scale and scope of the tragedy the American Civil War represents both for those that died in vain on both sides and for the ungrateful ancestries of those freed slaves. That which made this the most prosperous Nation on the planet and allowed a person that looks like those that were enslaved prior to 1865 become the President is almost wholly an alien concept in the African “villages” that make up the bulk of the this Nation’s black population and are shared in common on the continent where black Africans are not only 95% of the population but 95% of the ruling class too. There’s a tragic irony in the view that it is better to live off someone else’s labor and sacrifice than leave the comforts of the modern Democratic Slave Plantation of handouts, seconds and scrapes from what the Princes and Princesses of the Democratic Party don’t consume.

What ever the overriding reason was that nearly 4 million men were willing to take up arms that cost over 600,000 their lives I can assure you all that it had a common thread all the way back to 1776 and will be found in the next civil war too. Maybe a hundred years from now some Americans will be arguing about what the true cause of the next civil war is(was). When you P_ss on a social compact signed in the blood of those that bore the burden the odds are you will get more blood. That’s were we are today. The social compact, founding documents ratified into law and soaked in a lot of American blood mean nothing to the majority of the population and so will follow the barest respect for the Rule of Law if we continue on this path.

Simplistic minds always seek an uncomplicated banner to hang the cause on such as pro slavery and anti slavery. The same Union Army that freed the Southern slaves by force of arms enslaved the Indians all across the country both before and after the Civil War. Ten percent of the African decedents living in the South were “freed” former slaves when the war broke out. They lived a poor life but weren’t under anyone’s lash either. Lots of contradictions and complexities that simple minds don’t want to deal with because it soils the moral high ground they’ve staked out for themselves. That’s the nature of humanity and the war fought between 1861 and 1865 was no more or less a confusing mass of contradictions and complex interactions than any of the other wars fought before or after. The important point for me at least is, what ever the positives were that came from that late unpleasantness, there also came some very serious negatives that haunt us today and aren’t something that can just be dismissed because the victor wrote the bulk of the history books on the American Civil War and Lincoln got the big monument in DC. I seriously doubt the bulk of those that ride the moral high ground about Lincoln’s singular accomplishment would be willing to pay that price today if slavery still existed. Look around, I see slaves everywhere today, they just don’t grasp that there is a different kind of bondage today. That may change in a few years.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 4:40PM

Interloper:

The last resort of a scoundrel in debate is the ad hominem attack. It is also the weakest possible argument.

David Duke and his moron followers are an abomination.

You are correct that I adopted this moniker to mock our Dear Leader. Unlike yourself, I have judged the empty suit of a man to be a fraud. Dissent is patriotic, I have been told.

I love my country always but my politicians only when they deserve it.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 4:43PM

T-Mess,

Assuming you are correct, I guess the question is does the US Constitution apply to the Confederate States of America?

If Alaska seceeded and became its own sovereign nation, how does the US pres uphold the USA's constitution there?

The 9th & 10th amendment gives the states the right to seceed (can not disparage to the stes or people rights not enumerated & powers not specifically outlined to the fed, delegated to the states and the people). There is nothing in the US Constitution that says the president has to "preserve the union" by any means necessary.

Lincoln was a tyrant.

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 4:58PM

Though I teach this stuff, I had not even considered the notion of a state or states trying to secede from the Union to form a separate nation in which abortions would be outlawed. Of course that wouldn't happen, but, for what it is worth, I believe the U.S. government could put down such an insurrection and force the rebel state(s) to behave constitutionally. I don't believe there ever was a right to secede, but if one did exist, the Civil War ended it. 'States rights' is largely an empty phrase, now.

The scenario would not occur because, in the modern world, a referendum on leaving the Union to set up an anti-abortion alternative would be needed. The secessionist position would lose. The state(s)' oligarchy would not be able to control the entire population as the Southern planters did before the Civil War.

The neo-Confederate secessionists of today have largely given up the claim they will take up arms. They entertain the belief that the Union will allow them to go if they can take over the government of a reactionary state such as South Carolina. T'aint so.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 5:03PM

Crusader:
The state constitution of New Hampshire says that the people have a right of revolution. However, when does that right exist? What has to happen to constitute the moment when tyranny must be overcome?

I think that you and I disagree whether or not those conditions existed. I am unconvinced that there were any legitimate grounds for the South in 1861. So was Mr. Lincoln.

Michele San Pietro| 2.12.09 @ 5:22PM

Mr. JimP, thanks for your advice, but I'm not interested in sheer propaganda. Books like the ones you mentioned can be palmed off at a Taleban school, not to someone who objectively and quietly wishes to analyze history. To me, that the North wanted to abolish slavery and the South wanted to keep it is a fact. Thank God, the North won and the South lost. If being a conservative means being for slavery to someone, then I am definitely a liberal starting from this moment.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 5:52PM

Ms. Michelle San Pietro, if you would actually investigate you would find that the books I recommended are not propaganda tracts. Then, however, you would have to leave your comfort zone of simplistic propaganda that you memorized at the publik skrool that brainwashed you into thinking that the North fought this war to free the slaves. Yes, if to you 'the North wanted to end slavery' is fact by all means quietly analyze to your hearts content and don't forget to get that warm fuzzy feeling all over while you muse. Fantasy does not change facts though. I too once believed as you. Then after University, where I learned to research history and separate fact from fiction, I discovered that the North wasn't the sainted land of all that is good and nice and fair and smote those nasty 'ole Confederates because they loved all the slaves. I discovered the things that are in the works I cited. But never mind, just go back to your fantasies.

Warm personal regards,
Mr. JimP

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 5:55PM

T-Mess,

Yeah, we will agree to disagree. Those pesky 9th & 10th amendments be damned! :) Just because you are unconvinced there was no grounds for secession doesn't mean there wasn't. Are you aware the New England states threatened secession in the 1810s for the same reason the Southern States actually seceeded? Even held a convention in Hartford to consider it. I don't know about you but this is a pesky piece of history I was never taught in school. Wonder why?????

Anyway I guess to answer your question,

"What has to happen to constitute the moment when tyranny must be overcome?"

Umm, that may be a question a lot of us are asking ourselves, and maybe will have to answer, sooner rather than later.

Interloper, please read my questions again. I did not ask about states seceeding to OUTLAW abortion, I asked about a president starting a civil war to outlaw it. Would that be cool with you Lincoln apologists?

Again, T-Mess, don't you think its awfully strange that out of all the republican presidents Obamanator would want to compare himself to he picks Lincoln? Not TR, or Coolidge, or Ike, or Reagan? Again, this should be filed under the law of "Whatever the Left embraces I repulse." Lincoln is about the only repub pres today's lefty kooks like. Even without knowing the Truth of the War of Northern Aggression that would be enough for me to not hold onto him too dearly.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 6:14PM

Crusader:

The 9th and 10th Amendments aren't pesky. They reinforce the idea of the federal government having limited power and those powers NOT enumerated in the constitution are reserved to the states or the people. However, they do not talk of any right of dissolution of the union.

The best comparison of Obama is not Lincoln, its Franklin Pierce. Like Obama, Pierce was a youngish lawyer and senator with no real experience. The biggest difference between them is that Pierce was a war hero. I expect the Obama administration to occupy the same relative position as Pierce's among historians (sorry Interloper for being such a white supremicist by equating Lightworker to a dead white man).

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 6:20PM

Some responses:

• TM says, in pertinent part:

"...I have judged the empty suit of a man to be a fraud."

The question is: Why?

You've not given substantive reasons for your antipathy toward President Obama. Nor have you given any reason why you do not similarly mock any or the previous presidents. That leads me to believe your contempt for President Obama is rooted in him not 'knowing his place,' which is white supremacist thinking.

• Michelle's take on the 'texts' the neo-Confederates rely on is accurate. They are propaganda produced by a little cottage industry of apologists. For example, Kennedy of "The South Was Right," is a nurse, with no real grasp of history. DiLorenzo, trained as an economist, has been denounced by actual historians for his denigration of President Lincoln. Wilson is a long-term member of racist groups such as the League of the South.

There are excellent books about the causes of the Civil War by respected scholars. People who seek out neo-Confederate apologia do so because they want their biased views confirmed, not because they are seeking facts.

• The Tenth Amendment does do one very useful thing. It allows state governments to go beyond the federal constitution in providing protected rights to their populations. For example, the Oregon constitution provides more protection of freedom of expression than the First Amendment does. What the Tenth Amendment does not do is allow the states to lessen the protections of the federal constitution.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 6:20PM

Interloper said “Though I teach this stuff, I had not even considered the notion of a state or states trying to secede from the Union to form a separate nation in which abortions would be outlawed. Of course that wouldn't happen, but, for what it is worth, I believe the U.S. government could put down such an insurrection and force the rebel state(s) to behave constitutionally.”

Really? What Constitution would that be based on? The one that says the States or the people retain the rights not enumerated in the Constitution to the Federal Government? Outlawing abortion does not kill people by the millions who have no means to defend themselves outside of respect for human life from its very beginning. That’s an odd position for someone to take that thinks violating the enumerated Constitution in 1861 with force of arms to free a people living under a ratified Constitution that legalized slavery. You probably rationalize the difference between treating an unborn child as mere property to be discarded or used for what ever profit the mother may make of that vs. keeping those that escape the womb alive in bondage for profit their entire lives. If any State were to succeed and outlaw abortion the worst that would happen is that those living there would have to move to some other state or country where it was legal. You don’t have to succeed to accomplish that under the existing enumerated Constitution and 10th Amendment that but the point is still made. You are making the case that all that really matters is force of arms.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 6:29PM

Interloper: Once again, you are wrong. You are the one with an agenda. If you wish in to believe something that is not true, that's fine, but you should refrain from trying to deligitimize people for not being historians. After all, it was 'historians' such as yourself that gave all of us the Lincoln hagiography in the first place. Never trust history to the historians alone folks. Especially the Interloper. He IS a propagandist.

Interloper| 2.12.09 @ 6:30PM

Nope! I just know that embryos have no protection under the U.S. Constitution whatsoever, Thom. Only viable fetuses have any protection and that comes from the state's interest in population maintenance. In fact, only the born alive are American citizens. A still-born full-term baby is not a citizen.

The other scenario offered, of a president dissolving the Union to end abortion is so alternative reality that I'm not even going to bother with it.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 6:46PM

Teleprompter Messiah said “The 9th and 10th Amendments aren't pesky. They reinforce the idea of the federal government having limited power and those powers NOT enumerated in the constitution are reserved to the states or the people. However, they do not talk of any right of dissolution of the union.”
Silence by definition at the Federal level means it is up the States…. What did you expect the 9th and 10th to say after it said it was up to the States or the People….? The Federal Government was meant to be VERY “limited” in power where as what went on in the “several states” were concerned. That’s what gets lost in all this conjecture about what the Constitution says vs. what is practiced today vs. 1861. Practice today bears little to what the founding documents actually say (and still say even with the limited number of amendments there are). Practice is not consistent with enumerated words therefore the words mean little to nothing and everyone has their own idea what the Constitution says or means when what it meant is what it said and was understood to mean between ratification and 1865 without much bother. There are 300+ million opinions today on what it means because words have no legal or binding meaning in our society today. Examples of this are bountiful.

ACynic| 2.12.09 @ 6:57PM

The founding fathers of this union would disagree with INTERLOPER.
Nowhere in the constitution does is state that once admitted into statehood, that state is compelled to remain in the union, even when confronted by a tyrannical regime.
The Declaration of Independence laid out rather nicely those conditions in which a people may seperate from their existing government.
The US Constitution does not state anywhere that states must forever remain part of a union. This should not be surprising because the writers of the constitution, if perhaps not actual signers of the Declaration of Independence, were certainly informed by that document and ALL were alive when it was written. Certainly, they ALL agreed with the basic and fundamental notion that all individuals are guaranteed the right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness.
No one, no government can infringe upon these rights.
Slavery, and your example of abortion, merely confounds and obscures the issue of when states have the right to secede.
They have the right to secede when they believe their rights are being trampled upon.
What if there had never been slavery in the USA and the southern states in 1860 wished to secede?
Would the northern states have the right to invade the south to preserve the union?
No, absolutely not.

Lincoln ended slavery and preserved the union using legal, extra-legal and military means; whatever it took.
The trade-off was the birth of an omnipotent, all powerful, federal govt., that runs roughshod over the states and our individual liberties. A federal govt. that answers to the very wealthy elites and cash-laden special interest groups.

We essentially have today a federal tyranny., that, in perhaps our lifetime, will compel some state(s) to secede. This is the only way left to check the unlimited power that is now imposed on the citizenry by our corrupt federal govt.

It remains to be seen if American soldier/citizens will shoot to kill other American civilians who merely wish to live by the central tenets of the US Constitution and who wish to have a society governed by the words and SPIRIT of that document.
I suspect that American soldiers will realize which side , in fact, has the Constitution in its corner.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 7:03PM

Interloper, then why are persons who kill a pregnant mother and her unborn child prosecuted and punished (even executed) for that "fetus" as you call it at State level?

You are making my larger point that the Federal government has all the power and the States and the people are just along for the ride. State Constitutions mean nothing in the scheme of things. State Constitutions and governments have extended protections to unborn children and been struck down by the Supreme Court despite the Federal Constitution being silence on the matter entirely. The Supreme Court or Federal Court system in general can not create “rights” out of thin air but that is exactly your position. The Constitution has not been amended to create a “right” to abortion in any shape or fashion. By your thinking some future court could legalize slavery again simply by majority rule in complete deference to the enumerated rights there in. Under your logic the States will either have to “succeed” to form their own Nation to have their existing State Constitutions enforced or simply tell the Federal Government to stick it and see how well that works out. Either way, our government practice is way out of synch with what the words and practices were over a hundred years ago. If the written words of the highest law in the land don’t mean what they say then it does not matter what they say. Eventually that will be the law of the land.

JimP| 2.12.09 @ 7:10PM

Re Interloper: he is a fraud folks. He may be an 'historian' who "teaches this stuff" but he is a shining example of what is wrong with many of our teachers. Anyone who read his comments should note that not once did he cite a primary source for any of his 'facts'. Not once. That's because he isn't dealing in facts, he is dealing in his opinions; formed partly from an incomplete fact factual basis, partly from wishful thinking and partly from his own prejudice.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 7:38PM

the big mistake was imperialistically bringing slaves to America, we should have unimperialistically left them in Africa and today we wouldn't have so many unwed mothers and deadbeat dads.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 7:39PM

Mencken,
where are you now when we REALLY need you?

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 7:44PM

Interloper:

As a man, I believe our president is a commited father and husband. He generally appears gentlemanly in his manners. On this level, the personal, I find nothing objectionable (how white of me).

In the ceremonial aspect of the president as Head of State I think he is a fine example of how this country has moved beyond the white supremicist past of the Democrat Party. He's our first Hawaiian president too.

However, as a thinker he is a statist. His reflexive response is comfort with government as a cure all solution and the use of the power of compulsion. He believes in the nanny state. If something goes wrong in someone's life, its because government failed them in some way. He is right now happily expanding Big Brother beyond anything we have known since FDR. He is an acolyte of Alinsky and none of those guys are to be trusted. Who;Whom.

As leader of a cult of personality he does make Huey Long look like an amateur. The vacuous "Yes We Can" rahrah is a fill in the blank battle cry for whatever you think he can do, he can do. He thinks he can do anything. Already he thinks he is a great man of history. He is just a politician. He is not Nelson Mandela.

He is incredibliy naive about the real world and America's place in it. He has never held a job where he was expected to produce economic results. Finding out how hard it is to make a buck really humbles and wizens one. Because he has never had to do this, he will never recognize when his actions will hinder and not help.

Knowing how to make flowery speeches is not the same as leadership. Words are dwarfs; deeds are giants. His deeds have always been about advancing himself.

The great memoirist wrote his great memoir before he was thirty. What life experience outside of an Olympian or veteran at that age is even interesting? His memoir is a rumination on his figuring out his racial identity. Having read it, I believe he is still conflicted about his American identity. As trivia, his memoir made him a multimillionaire when he decided to run for president (just like Mein Kampf made Hitler a wealthy man too when he became Chancellor and dictator).

Our president believes that anti-Americanism is just a construct which will disappear by talking with the people who hate us. Having lived abroad a great deal of my life (prior to the Bush administration) I will let you know we were hated before 9/11, Bush was just an excuse to go hog wild by hateful Leftists. We will be hated whenever we do anything in our national interests.

As the great man will learn, diplomacy with rogues is like honor among thieves. When you negotiate with a liar the only thing you can trust are his "noes". He is ripe to be rolled but will be too blinded by his hubris to see it. When things don't work out like he thought, prepare for a lot of pouting and blamegaming a la Clinton.

He is a president with training wheels on and it shows.

Because I can do nothing to stop him at this moment I can only point to the naked emperor and his risible followers and laugh. I plan to give him as fair a shake as the Left in this country gave Chimpy McHalliburton and Darth Vader. I pray he won't get any of us killed.

In sum, I look at him and see James Earl Carter but even a more naive version. All hat and no cattle.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 7:44PM

Jim, (re: Interloper) Typical liberal argument. They don’t understand or respect the principles of law and why that is important to any society. At first it is, “might makes right” is all that is needed to justify trashing the law. Next, it is it means what I say it means or the Supreme Court says it means (the living document things). When that doesn’t work, then something along the line of labeling someone something negative (neo-confederate) or raising the “race” card comes out. All the while, the very precedence they defend will eventually come back to bite them. The history of slavery around the world throughout history has tended to be an equal opportunity oppressor (such as the Roman Empire and the Greeks) but Interloper suffers from the same disease that most liberal Jews suffer from. Liberal Jews and the Interlopers of the world can’t function without seeing either a Klan member or Nazi behind every tree or corner. Mean while the people trying to kill as many “Americans” as possible happen to typically be non-white these days and they really don’t care about one’s ethnic origin, race or even skin color. Ironically, those Southern neo-confederates Interloper is so worried about are the only thing between them and him these days (disproportionately speaking). To be consistent, Interloper would have to find a racist motive for them being in the Armed Forces just to kill people of “color”. The world outside this Nation is quite a bit different and runs on a very different set of rules than what people like Interloper worry about here. He wouldn’t last long in the third world.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 7:49PM

Alan Brooks:

The state gave us the destruction of the black family, not slavery. Your comment is just plain stupid.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 7:57PM

a) my comment was deadly serious
b) it was a joke

you, see, when you write, you do not have to write a university thesis concerning philosophy, you can play around with words, as "journalists" often do in opinion writing.
remember, only a naive lib today would confuse opinion writing with fact-based analysis. when Rush Limbaugh goes in front of the EIB mic he is thankfully not expected to read academic theses over the airwaves! Geesh, you'd think this was a liberal blog.

No wonder Obama won.
that's a joke too, btw, in case you need to be told.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 8:06PM

ACynic:

When Lightworker decries the perfidious influence of lobbyists remember that without government being all over our lives we would not need them.The more regulation the more special interests you create. The Stimulus will stuff the goose to the neck and lobbyists will be more prevalent than ever.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 8:16PM

Alan, I think a "value added" statement might have sounded something like this: “If slavery had not been so widely practiced in Africa by most of the tribes prior to the expansion of slavery in the New World, a ready made market would not have been laying there for the making by simply trading a few beads each for the millions of African slaves the African tribes were willing to trade. Slavery still exists in various parts of Africa today the same way it has always been but generally ignored today by the African-American community because it weakens their stake in the Civil Rights extortion business.” As Teleprompter Messiah said and I will echo, you can find and trace using any Government Statistical Abstract the demise of the “black” family Nationwide, certainly not just in the South by putting the pertinent stats for social chaos and disillusion from the Great Society welfare programs on that time line. The State provided the candy but it takes a willing accomplice to complete the deal. Several generations now just can’t resist the candy and Obama is the ultimate Sucker (as in Candy). Such things take a very long time to fix if the patient keeps trying to commit suicide.

LJenkins| 2.12.09 @ 8:16PM

"Lincoln is about the only repub pres today's lefty kooks like. Even without knowing the Truth of the War of Northern Aggression that would be enough for me to not hold onto him too dearly." There are folk tales that Abe was part black, possibly quadroon, and that he was born in Bostic, NC, or at least his mother conceived him while working at an Inn near there. That being the case, neither Obama nor Clinton would be the first black president (if Obama being 50% is considered black). But this digresses from the thread. Heck of a discussion boys. Now we all can understand why the War of Northern Agression, Southern Seccession, the Rebellion, Lincoln's War, Jeff Davis' War, and/or the Civil War was so fierce. But let's not kid ourselves, there were men of both political persuations above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 8:16PM

i ought to apologize, keep forgetting this is the New Republic PC blog. or is The Nation? things

are changing so fast that sometimes it is hard to tell.

Teleprompter Messiah| 2.12.09 @ 8:28PM

LJenkins:

The Civil War gave us a lot of things to think about. I think that one can admire the military efficiency and fighting ability of the Army of Northern Virginia, the outstanding generalship of Stonewall Jackson, Pat Cleburne, and RE Lee, and the tenacity of how folks in the Confederacy could survive such hardship and sacrifice without secretly wishing in your heart that they prevailed. The cost of the war on both sides meant that both had to reconcile the cost and that still is not clear.

To me, it was a great and preventable tragedy.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 8:30PM

Ljenkins said, "But let's not kid ourselves, there were men of both political persuations above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. " Certainly. One of the North's best Officers was a Virginian. Several Confederate Officers became Republicans after the war and worked for harmony. Nathan B. Forrest was quit different after the war with regard to racial matters and those “blacks” in Tennessee that understand the man’s entire journey don’t disrespect his service in the Confederacy simply because he fought on that side (and made a fortune in the slave trade prior to the war). His brief association with the Klan is all that some can remember while over looking the rest.

A. Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 8:36PM

now now, lets not be pointy headed northern intellekshuells

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 8:50PM

Teleprompter Messiah said, "how folks in the Confederacy could survive such hardship and sacrifice" Given being outnumbered better than 3:1 and having less than that in every other material matter that counts, they could not survive but yet they fought till there was nothing left to fight with. Why they fought, people of wealth and privilege today will simply never understand and that is ok. Howdy Doody could have been put in charge of the Army of the Potomac in the Spring of 1864 and the South would have still collapsed in 1865. If you stick a stick in someone’s eye for decades and call them names when it becomes convenient for a region of the country to find it no longer needs the cheap goods produced by slave labor in the South (and still in the North to some extent), the central argument after a while isn’t really about slavery but about “offense” taken. You see that same arrogant condescending view being presented even today about the “backward” nature of the South. Obama is a shining example of this with his arrogant statements about “people clinging to their guns and religion”. After a while, the “offense” is all they people hear. It is never a simply as we would like it to be. The Civil War is the most studies war in the history of the world for this reason.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 8:57PM

today you have to be so careful, even at a rightwing-- er, that is-- conservative site. even David Duke has to say it is not Obama's being black he objects to, really, it is being a black lib, or being the gateway to black-ZOG domination.. etc...
so let me preface the below remark by writing that it is not a question of black, white, green, purple, chartreuse, maroon;
it is an elementary biological question of why it is a man (of any race or ethnicity) with enough children already cannot keep his trousers on in the company of a woman other than his wife, and then he ends up with more children than he can care for?

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 9:04PM

Well Alan, the short answer is there are no meaningful consequences to do that any more. The most society will do now is try to make such a man pay to support those children and that can be all but avoided by simply not making enough to accomplish that. Look at the women that had 6 kids already out of wed lock and then 8 more. Who pays? Not her, simply not possible to do (pay for all that). No consequences = more of the same because look it how fun it is to produce children you don't have to actually be the "Dad" for.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 9:21PM

Alan, a more base answer is that Humanity will revert to its more animalistic behavior if you don’t train them to do otherwise. We not only don’t train both men and women to be personally responsible about such things we promote them as victims and subsidize what essentially becomes a Human Pet in society. Like stray Cats and Dogs there is no end to the cycle until there is consequence to the population at large. Everywhere you see this kind of behavior on a large scale you see social destruction of some considerable measure.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 9:38PM

Alan, you are a kook man. I think you inhaled too much of that stuff your mom & dad were smoking when you were younger! Haha!

Anyway you are right. I made the observation yesterday on a different thread that if you want to see America in a microcosm, look to any big city who's city government is dominated by the descendants of slaves. Corrupt. Crime-ridden. Bankrupt. A welfare state paradise.

Its like putting your pre-teens in charge of the family finances. You'll come home one day to Wiis, and big screen TVs, ipods and cellphones, but the electric bill will go unpaid. Then when "Big Electric" kills the power, they cry it ain't fair!

I mean I spent a good deal of time bashing Lincoln on this thread but he was right about one thing. There are physical differences between the races. Reason we don't acknowledge that is if you admit to physical differences the next logical conclusion you make it there must be intellectual differences. Its been proven. Asians have a higher average IQ than Caucasians who have a higher average IQ than Blacks. But it probably won't be 10 minutes before Interloper or someone else gets on here and calls me a racist for saying it.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 9:43PM

Ding ding ding, Thom is a winner!

We don't punish bad decisions in this country anymore! By punish I do not mean throwing people in jail for having kids out of wedlock, but when you reward bad behavior you get more of the same. I think some dude named Jesus talked about building a house on sand versus building on bedrock. When a storm comes the house on sand gets washed away. After that the US Gubmint comes in and builds you a new one, right back on the sand. (Provided you are the right color and live in the right place. If you live in KY or OK and are white you are screwed).

Personally I am tired of paying for other people's bad decisions.

Crusader| 2.12.09 @ 9:50PM

Thom, doncha know if we try to "train" folks to resist their inner Id we will damage their precious self-esteem?

Seriously though, some cultures are more advanced than others. When we equate cultures for no other reason than we want to be "PC," we do the superior AND inferior culture a disservice. Why do you think you see so many White kids walking around with their jeans down around their a$$, caps on crooked, and gangsta rap in their ipods? They've grown up literally being told how bad and oppressive their White culture is, and they've been led to believe that the inferior culture is equal (if not better than) to theirs. For the same reason intellectual Blacks are shunned as "Uncle Toms" or "trying to act White" if they, gasp, do well in school.

Yes, when the superior culture embraces the inferior, society at large doesn't have much time before it all comes crashing down. Like I asked someone yesterday who talked about how white folk are going to be eradicated, who'll pay for welfare when there are no more whiteys?????

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 9:52PM

the sexual urge is so powerful that the pill is invented around '62; then Hugh Hefner commissions the Playboy Philosopher to offer some FRIENDLY advice. So maybe the Great Society was just icing on the cake? even without AFDC many would have reproduced like rabbits anyway.
the woman (and her ex-paramour) with the octuplets doesn't care that AFDC is gone, she can do her own thing without it.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 10:00PM

...the Octuplet mom will refuse private help, she can manage on her "own".

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 10:02PM

Crusader, about the only part of the Theory of Evolution I give any credence to is the thought that environment changes the genetic makeup of the species to suit. If Africa is the cradle of civilization it is also the most unchanged place on the planet. Unlike the Northern hemisphere (and extreme Southern) climate is relatively constant and unchanging compared to the Northern reaches. Living and adapting to multiple seasons and the challenges that brings with it would tend to make those people that lived there have to perform more tasks, overcome more problems and be more forward thinking than someone living in a place where day to day life didn’t change that much. Like reading a lot, exercising the brain tends to expand and grow the potential. The most advanced cultures are all in the Northern Hemisphere where climate demands adaptation to survive. The Asian cultures for some reason seem to have been doing this for a longer period of time than the Western cultures or simply the Western cultures are more watered down by now and the Asian cultures are closer to being racially pure from isolation in that portion of the world. Africans dominate athletics because they are genetically closer to the time where that skill was needed for day to day existence. Asians have had to exist on a far poorer diet and are only recently able to grow in statue as a people. You are right, just mentioning that there are differences is typically equated as racist kind of superiority or inferiority arguments. I can’t change that simple minded view or the fact that racial differences do exist and for a reason that can be traced to environment (for better or worse).

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 10:14PM

but the game is over when even David Duke can't talk straight about race anymore. we were better off in the '90s when Andrew Dice Clay was making jokes, and Sista Souljah was screaming 'kill whitey!'

now people dislike each other as much as they did before, the govt spends even more,
but we all smarm more, and feel so good when the white fireman reunites with the black baby he applied mouth to mouth resuscitation to in 1968.

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 10:21PM

...the Octuplet mom will refuse private help, she can manage on her "own".

Let's see, at about $8000 a year per pupil in public school she and who ever would claim to be the father of those children would have to come up with $112,000 a year to just educate them if they had to actually pay for that. Even home schooled we are talking tens of thousands of dollars a year just for basic education needs. Food, clothing, shelter and basic medical care is off the chart. My parents each had 6 brothers and sisters. Most of them had 2 or fewer children. Those that didn’t raised their children in poverty conditions and the cycle would repeat. If the person doing this can actually afford what she is doing and the children can benefit from a father figure in their lives then I have less reservations about this but the odds are overwhelmingly against that. Where some of my relatives live in Appalachia a women living in a trailer may have 3-5 kids each with a different last name. Nothing good comes of this the overwhelming majority of the time. The checks just keep coming in……

Thom| 2.12.09 @ 10:32PM

Alan, I turned off Network TV news in 1990 and have never had cable TV. I turned off Network TV about 1999. Some people in this world, driven by 24/7 doom and gloom lead such shallow lives that they have to have their own "personal" savior to see, feel and touch. They are "driven" by something they don't even understand that is driving them. The sickness lives in the Intenet world too but symbolism over substance is all many people have today. It is a sickness and it is going to eventually kill a number of people. It is going to come crashing down eventually. How long and how bad is the only uncertainity. Too many of my friends have seen the "elphant" (the 1000 yard stare). The real world is coming to a block near you (and me) real soon......Good night guys. I do have to work for a living for as long as I can manage to do so.

Vern Crisler | 2.12.09 @ 10:48PM

Teleprompter Messiah, I think you've done an admirable job of exposing the imbicility of neo-confederate claims. What I don't understand is why the American Spectator continues to publish their drivel.

I suppose it's because too many conservatives in the past (such as Russell Kirk or the Ideas have Consequences guy, can't remember his name) looked with wistfulness on the relatively conservative South vis-a-vis the post-Roosevelt liberal North. They saw it as an ally in their battle with the modernist North.

Others have adopted a purist libertarian philosophy and see the Southern secessionists as "on their side" so to speak. Very few of them actually understand the Founding, or the Constitution, or Lincoln's defense of the natural rights philosophy of Washington, Madison, and Hamilton.

And so the American Spectator appears to be headed up now by those who've cut their teeth in either the Kirkian tradition or the Rothbardian tradition. And so they too do not really understand the American founding, and thus will continue to publish neo-confederate propaganda, wrongly thinking it represents a true conservative or libertarian perspective.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 10:51PM

i made the mistake of watching (Chance Gardener: "i like to watch") the tube all through the '90s, but even then it was tame compared to today.
the Commies that pulled the strings for ANSWER, Workers World Party, ran an editorial saying Beavis and Butthead was evidence of capitalist decadence.
it was a CARTOON! after all the people WWP helped kill, they fretted about a cartoon.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 10:55PM

Vern,
Amspec is not a monolith like the Politburo 1938, or Angka, 1975.
There are all kinds. you can't get away from diversity in 2009 if you moved to the Caymans.

Alan Brooks| 2.12.09 @ 11:04PM

... you will find neo-confederates to be the least of your troubles during the next decade. in fact blacks are so In now, Reagan appears in an old photograph, smiling with a black woman, here at AS. David Duke will soon be posing with blacks in front of cameras.
Even National Alliance members will be photographed with blacks. Obama's daughters have lunchboxes being manufactured with their faces on them. the dolls are sold out.

A revanchist South is definitely not in the horizon, Vern.

Vern Crisler| 2.12.09 @ 11:08PM

Alan, I was not arguing that Amspec is monolithic. But should they be publishing neo-confederate stuff? How about pro-abortion articles? What are their standards?

(s/b imbecility)

Vern| 2.12.09 @ 11:17PM

I'm not concerned about blacks basking in the glow of attention, but they will eventually learn disappointment. I have a black Republican friend who voted for Obama, basically gave up his principles to do so. However, I write off his behavior as a "black thing" -- a form of temporary insanity he will later regret.

Eventually he, and many other blacks will become disenchanted with their black president, just as whites have with white presidents. Do not put your trust in princes, saith the Bible. (With the exception of Ronaldus, perhaps.)

Whether black or white, most politicians will disappointment in the long run. I think blacks have yet to learn that.

Frank B| 2.12.09 @ 11:46PM

Every federal who fought to subjugate us to a central government, believed that freed slaves would be repatriated to Africa. If they had known their decendants would have to live among them, there would have been no Civil War.

Basil Plumley| 2.12.09 @ 11:50PM

Folks, this was quite entertaining. There were some darn fine reads and some thoughtful even misguided posts.

All did well, except for Interloper, who has proved again to be beyond his pay grade. If you are truly a "historian", why can't you argue facts and logic instead of hyperbole and venom.

I disagree with John on certain issues but he is posts in good faith and marshals his facts and logic in a way that makes me/others to rise to the occasion. I suggest you do the same.

Logically, there is no one cause to the War. There were several reasons for the war to occur; most of the economic. If you believe that we enter wars solely for a moral reason, then one would believe we fought WWII to save the Jews from extermination. I am sure Interloper the historian can wax poetic about the survivors of the SS St. Louis.

The History Channel had an excellent discussion about the human toll of the war. The loss of the flower of the youth from both sides was devastating.

There are so many issues to discuss about American politics from 1775-1875 that I find quite fascinating. Issues like the rise of the special interests groups (like abolitionists) and the role Darwinianism played in the fighting during the Civil War. For instance, one should look at John Bell Hood's reason for his charge at the Battle of Franklin or taking the War to the civilians by Sherman and Sheridan.

I suggest some of you read Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, a pamphlet written in the 16th century about the rights of man when the king abdicates his duty to rule judiciously. That thinking was apparent in the American Revolution and pre-War South.

History is a wonderful thing to learn/study. Those who refuse to learn from History are damned to repeat it. It is advice the present administration should heed and the previous one didn't.

Cheers y'all (born in the North-live in the South)

Basil Plumley| 2.13.09 @ 12:00AM

@Vern Crisler

Careful there. I suggest you back away from the ledge.
Comparing the Confederacy to Abortion? That is a leap of logic. You may hurt yourself.

I suggest you take a long look at the GOP since 1996. Their retreat from various sections of this country is more intention than bunker mentality. It was just 12 years previous that Reagan swept the same area. Pleae do not make the mistake of many; equating GOP and conservatism.

Rich Rostrom| 2.13.09 @ 12:36AM

I just knew this would bring the neo-Confederates and crank libertarians out from under the rocks. As usual, most of their claims are garbage.

Crocker's the first: he fraudulently conflates South Carolina's claim of a LEGAL right of secession with the MORAL right of revolution claimed in the Declaration of Independence. A legal right is based on what the relevant document says - fairly easily determined. A moral right is based on a host of real-world concerns and philosophical questions, and cannot merely be asserted. One may be obliged to concede a legal right by the wording of a document one has agreed to, regardless of feelings. But no one is required to accept anyone else's moral claims.

LarryK: Lee freed no slaves in 1862. When his father-in-law, G. W. P. Custis, died in 1857, he freed all his slaves in his will, naming Lee as executor (much to his annoyance). Lee held all the slaves for five years, exploiting their labor to clear up the debts left by the improvident Custis (as permitted in the will); also to generate the cash for Custis' lavish bequests to Lee's daughters. All Lee did in 1862 was issue the required manumission papers. None of the former Custis slaves ever fought for the CSA. No ex-slaves EVER served in the Confederate Army, except a few hundred mustered in 1865, who never saw action. Neo-Confederate claims of this have all been refuted by actual records.

ACynic, Crusader: Article VI of the Constitution says:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States
which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all
Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the
Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme
Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall
be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or
Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

In other words, no state has the power to interfere in any way with Federal authority under the Constitution, and certainly not to abolish that authority. The Constitution, and the laws made under it, are the law of the land regardless of any state's action.

Also, ACynic: Lincoln offered compensated emancipation to the slaveholders of the Border States in 1862, and they turned him down. The whites of the Deep South (many of whom lived in majority slave states and counties) opposed any form of emancipation because they were terrified of what those "black savages" would do if set free. The purity of white women would be at risk!! (A concern frequently raised by "secession commissioners" and similar spokesmen.)

Crusader: The Maryland legislature rejected secession by a 53-13 vote on April 29, 1861; no Union soldiers were present or even within 30 miles of Frederick, where the special session was held (the capital, Annapolis, was being used by Union troops en route to Washington).

Citations for all of this if requested.

Oh, and for anyone who wants to write me off as a "liberal": I went up to Wisconsin at my own expense to make phone calls and ring doorbells for McCain; I think the Obama victory may be the beginning of the end for real democracy and maybe even for civilization.

Interloper| 2.13.09 @ 1:09AM

I understand coming back to see several blatantly white supremacist comments by Crusader in which he declares people of African descent genetically inferior. Most neo-Confederates are white supremacists, though some of them hide behind claims of being concerned about 'states' rights.' They've made the phrase infamous.

I was a little surprised to see those of us who argue against neo-Confederate propaganda branded Jewish. Weird that anyone could actually think that.

Vern, there is a general increase in this sort of silliness at far Right sites. The neo-Confederates think this is a good time to recruit new members. It doesn't help that some neo-Confederate leaders, such as Robert Stacy McCain are regulars here. Then there are the secession lovers from the Lew Rockwell bloc, who've also thrown in with the neo-Confederates.

What is mind-boggling is that anyone could perceive a society in which an elite population of white, landed, slave holding white men took advantage of everyone else as a goal to return to. But, many of these people do, considering the slave South idyllic. The Myth of the Gallant South still lurks.

TM, congratulations on presenting a non-racial explanation for your disdain for President Obama.

Basil Plumley| 2.13.09 @ 1:39AM

@Rich Rostrom

Assuming arguendo that your premise that the Supremacy Clause is indeed supreme. If Obama should enter into a Treaty which ends our (let's say) right to bear arms, does that Treaty supersede/trump the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution?

If true, what recourse do the people have?

Nick| 2.13.09 @ 3:52AM

Mr. Rostrom,

Have you read Mr. Crocker's book already?

I would refute your argument against secession. There was no statute prohibiting secession, as far as I know. The strongest case against seceding from the U.S. of A. were the "Articles of Confederation & PERPETUAL Union between the states of..." (1781). I think this proves what the Founders' thoughts were on the nature of the Union they had created.

Don't you think 1862 was a little late to be offering compensation, after more than a year of fighting? I think Lincoln was one of our worst presidents. A great man, a statesman, would have avoided war, not stoked the flames.

In a history book from the 1950's I have, is the best explanation I've read, of the causes of the War Between the States, as it's called in the book. Referring to "[a] more recent interpretation", that places the blame on "popular hysteria whipped up by 'irresponsible leadership.' After 1850 no statesman of the stature of Clay or Webster appeared, goes this argument, to keep the nation on the path of compromise."

Just read some of the comments here, and you can get an idea of the hysteria. Rabble-rousers on both sides got people so keyed up, that when Ft. Sumter was fired on, there was no shortage of volunteers to join the fight.

Nick| 2.13.09 @ 5:58AM

Also, Karl Marx protested Great Britain's aid to the Confederacy and was against her entering the war.

Crusader| 2.13.09 @ 7:50AM

Rich, how was seceeding from the Union and forming their own sovereign nation interfering with the Federal gubmint of the US of A? Neo-Yankees like to confuse seceeding with rebelling. The CSA did not make any attempt to overthrow the government of the US of A--i.e. rebellion. Your point is not valid.

Also, like someone else mentions, does that mean when Obama the World Pres enters an agreement brokered by the UN to confiscate all small arms from the civilian population that we just go along?

The BOR are not privileges bestowed upon us by the nanny state. They are God given rights. I will ask you what I asked T-Mess which no Neo-Yankee has dared to answer:

If a Republican president started a Civil War to end abortion, would you support him?

Further, where in your copy of the Constitution does it say the job of da prez is to preserve the union by any means necessary? Again, the Constitution was very specific as to the limited powers of the fed, and very vague as to the broad powers of the states.

Crusader| 2.13.09 @ 7:55AM

Further, like I mentioned earlier and no Neo-Yankee touched, why don't our history books mention the NORTHERN New England states threatening to seceed in 1814 for basically the same reasons the Southern states did in 1860/1?

And, if ol' Abe was such a great pres, why is a guy like Obama embracing him? You have to get past the R/D debate and look at what he actually did. Looking back, it is almost as if the Rs of the 1860s were today's Ds and vice versa.

Jeremiah| 2.13.09 @ 8:09AM

Can't anyone muzzle the Interschlepper's natural orifices? He's farting liberal nonsense and stinking up this joint. No wonder he's a teacher. Teachers have been poisoning our children for decades.

S.L. Toddard| 2.13.09 @ 8:13AM

*And, if ol' Abe was such a great pres, why is a guy like Obama embracing him? *

... and he was such a racist bigot, why is a guy like Obama embracing him, too?
Something is wrong there, gentlemen.

david murphy| 2.13.09 @ 8:46AM

The neo-Confederate arguments for secession, and the attempts to divorce them from the cause of defending slavery, is today every bit the sanctimonious fraud and hypocrisy that it was in the mid-nineteenth century when first articulated. You people were fine with the supremacy of the Union as long as you could bully and wheedle it into doing your bidding. When it became clear in the 1850s that you could no longer stifle the expression of the majority's wish to restrict the spread of slavery, then you became big on the right of individual states to leave the compact into which they had entered. It's all as clear now as it was then: Race slavery was the issue, and Southerners adapted their political ideology to sustain it. I don't like the expansion of the Federal government any more than most people on this site, but the fraudulence of the secessionist argument is also repellent.

Basil Plumley| 2.13.09 @ 9:56AM

@david murphy

Very eloquent but you fail to logically see that there could be/was more than one reason to go to war. Slavery was probably 5% of the reason to go to War. Yet, that is all you see.

Your argument comes very close to Interloper's "neo-confederacy=white supremacism=return to slavery" argument.
Don't fall into Interloper's dilemma of 1=all argument. That would be akin to saying the folks that were the bad actors at Abu Graib were representative of the all the folks in the armed forces.

Interloper is stuck on stupid; don't be like him.

Al Adab| 2.13.09 @ 11:22AM

Too bad the debate descends to such depths. The entire question is one of the nature of the federal union. Try reading the federalist and the records of the various state confirmation conventiopns. Many of the problems of overlarge government we face today were first postulated by the anti-federalists during the debate on the Constitution. Lincoln took one stand, others another. The debate continues. Vitriol in the comments here however does little to further the discussion. Lets have a little civility.

Crusader| 2.13.09 @ 11:33AM

Bottom line is when you look at Lincoln objectively, and not as the first "Republican" president, determine if he acted

1 - Within the bounds and limits of the executive branch of government as outlined by the US Constitution, or
2 - Outside the bounds and limits of the executive branch of government as outlined by the US Constitution?

Turning the issue to an argument that basically says, "slavery was immoral so he had to do what he had to do" is a scary precedent to set. Again, I am not arguing whether or not slavery was immoral (it was), I am arguing that an objective analysis of Lincoln's presidency could come to no conclusion other than he acted outside the specific powers delegated to the Executive branch, and therefore his actions were decidely UNconstitutional. I don't care if he was an R or D, his ACTIONS were unconstitutional. Turning it into a pure slavery issue is like Interloper turning T-Mess' dislike of obamamama's policies into a race issue.

When you allow a person in your party to trample the Constitution, you give implied permission to the opposition party to do the same thing. Kinda like we are seeing with the whole "stimulus" fiasco. When you hold the federal government to the powers specifically delegated to it by the US Constitution, guess what? Doesn't matter if a D or R is in power, the same standard applies.

Lincoln apologists really have no standing to complain about obama's expansion of government as Lincoln laid the foundation for it. Prolly why the obamanator is so enamored with him in the first place.

JimP| 2.13.09 @ 2:43PM

FYI: Here is what Charles Dickens, from Massachusetts for those who don't know, had to say about secession and the cause of the 'Civil War' -
"Any reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale...As to Secession being Rebellion, it is distinctly possible by state papers that Washington considered it no such thing - that Massachusetts, now loudest against it, has itself asserted its right to secede, again and again."

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

Interloper| 2.13.09 @ 3:04PM

There are enough thoughtful, factual comments about the causes and legality of the Civil War on this thread that this last ditch effort by the neo-Confederates to have the last word is easily seen for the childish thing it is.

(Note to JimP: Charles Dickens' merits as a novelist notwithstanding, he was a white supremacist. So, ironically, you are proving what I've said about the core reason for pro-slavery apologia.)

I think the best summary statement is to again remind people that:

• Slavery as the main cause of the Civil War is not controversial among historians or thoughtful people. All of the primary documents of the period, including those written by the leading Confederates, prove that slavery was the major reason they rebelled.

• White supremacy is the belief that resulted in the implementation of slavery and other forms of dominance by race. It continues to influence race relations in various ways today.

• There is a small, but determined, neo-Confederate movement that is particularly active online. It posits the slave South as an ideal society, denies slavery was the main reason the Southern states seceded, vilifies President Abraham Lincoln, rejects research and scholarship in favor of often laughable myths, and encourages contemporary belief in white supremacy.

I believe the GOP will come to regret its alliance with the neo-Confederates.

JimP| 2.13.09 @ 3:27PM

Interloper: You are paranoid. Good luck with that. Also, Dickens 'proves' that the idea that the North fought the war to free the slaves is NOT true. Which is what I have been pointing out since my first comment. Unfortunately, you and some other hysterical commenters, interpret any explanation of the causes (plural) of the war as evidence of neo-Confederate pro-slavery bigotry and denial of slavery being a reason at all etc. A objective person would not react this way. To paraphrase what they teach us in law school: When you've got the law, argue the law; When you've got the facts, argue the facts; When you have neither, yell neo-Confederate apologist bigot at the top of your lungs.

Best wishes.

Interloper| 2.13.09 @ 3:51PM

Nope! Not paranoid, educated. Your knowledge of Dickens is a quotation you pulled from some neo-Confederate source. I happen to know both his biography and his works. Dickens fashioned himself a populist, but his interest was limited to the white working class. He ignored the humanity of non-whites.

BTW, I teach law. I doubt you would make it past freshlaw at a good law school. Anyone who thinks the fact a novelist who was a white supremacist supported slavery proves slavery was not the major reason for the Civil War is immune to reason. Even a freshlaw should know the most relevant documentation is the articles of secession of the Southern states, which do indeed prove the main reason for secession was slavery.

Interloper| 2.13.09 @ 9:37PM

Damn! I said it! I'm a f.ucking liberal who teaches law! I'm your worst nightmare and I hate your guts almost as much as I hate my country! Most of the mayhem in this country was created by liberal lawyers who became POTUS. I hate you! redrum redrum redrum redrum redrum redrum r

Rich Rostrom| 2.13.09 @ 11:46PM

Basil Plumley: "f Obama should enter into a Treaty which ends our (let's say) right to bear arms, does that Treaty supersede/trump the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution?"

Of course not. The Federal government does not have power to make treaties that violate the Constitution. However, you have anticipated one of my nightmares. A UN panel (funded by one of Soros' rich tranzi cronies) has declared gun prohibition to be a "human right". I predict that at some point (once a friendly SCotUS majority is in place) the U.S. will sign and the Senate will ratify a slab of UN boilerplate which includes that principle in an obscure paragraph, after which it will be said that Congress now must enact gun prohibition, and SCotUS will find some way to agree.

Rich Rostrom| 2.13.09 @ 11:56PM

Interloper: "White supremacy is the belief that resulted in the implementation of slavery and other forms of dominance by race."

You've got it backward. Slavery pre-existed ideological racism. The Romans never needed a justification for owning people beyond "Vae victis!" Arabs and Spaniards never thought much about racial supremacy in their slave-dealings. Neither did Englishmen, until in the 17th and 18th centuries philosophers started asking hard moral questions. Then racial ideology was invented to salve the consciences and protect the assets of the slaveholder class.

Rich Rostrom| 2.14.09 @ 12:13AM

Crusader: "Rich, how was seceeding from the Union and forming their own sovereign nation interfering with the Federal gubmint of the US of A?"

In every one of the "Confederate" states, there were people who were loyal citizens of the United States. The declarations of secession, if allowed to stand, would have deprived these people of their citizenship in the United States without their consent, and left them exposed to whatever abuses the "independent" state governments chose to visit on them, with no redress.

And if you don't think this was a real concern, you might consider the Union-loyal German immigrants of south Texas, many of whom were dragged from their homes and lynched by "Confederate" vigilantes (what the Germans called the "hangverband").

Rich Rostrom| 2.14.09 @ 12:47AM

Crusader| 2.13.09 @ 7:55AM
"why don't our history books mention the NORTHERN New England states threatening to seceed in 1814 for basically the same reasons the Southern states did in 1860/1? "

Because it didn't happen? The Hartford Convention was a private meeting of Federalists. Only three states sent official delegations. While it is clear that some of the extreme New England Federalists favored secession, there was no open discussion of secession. The Convention's proceedings were secret, anyway. The Convention issued a report calling for several Constitutional amendments: a 1-term limit on the President, a ban on successive Presidents from the same state, removing the 3/5 representation of slaves, and requiring a 2/3 majority for declarations of war and admission of new states. Secession was never mentioned and no state threatened it.

Nonetheless, the rumor of secessionist talk at the Convention was devastating to the Federalists. The Republicans made the most of it, repeating the charge endlessly. The Federalist Party was ruined: losing control of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the next few years.

Basil Plumley| 2.14.09 @ 12:59AM

@JimP

It guess it is true that there are 3 types of law; The law one learns in law school (Ivory Tower idealism), the day to day practice of law (reality), and Lunar Law (the stuff practiced by Interloper ...... it is out of this world)
Interloper has gone from being a history teacher to a law school teacher in one thread. Quite amazing when you think about it. But then again, that explains the current state of education in the US of A.

@Rich Rostrom

Not bad. You understand quite well the premise for the question. However, you did not answer the question "what is the recourse of the American people?".

Of course, it is within the realm of possibility for the Federal government to make such a Treaty. It was just 5 or 6 years ago that the Congress passed a law affecting our right to political speech via the 1st Amendment. (McCain-Feingold)

I think that hoping that the SCOTUS will do the right thing may be wishful thinking.

Rich Rostrom| 2.14.09 @ 1:17AM

Basil Plumley: "Slavery was probably 5% of the reason to go to War."

Mississippi Declaration of Causes: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery..."

Georgia Declaration of Causes: "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

Texas Declaration of Causes: "In all the non-slave-holding States... the people have formed ... a great sectional party, now strong enough ... to control the affairs of ... those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery..."

Florida Declaration of Causes: "The nullification of [fugitive slave] laws by... two thirds of the non slaveholding States... [is] evidence of an open disregard of constitutional obligation, and of the rights and interests of the slaveholding States and of a deep and inveterate hostility to the people of these States."

South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States: "Experience has proved that slave-holding States can not be safe in subjection to non-slaveholding States."

Etc. (Full texts of these and related documents may be seen at http://civilwarcauses.org/plat.htm.)
The Southern secessionists themselves openly, repeatedly, and at great length stated that secession was necessary to preserve slavery and for no other reason. Why deny it now?

Nick| 2.14.09 @ 1:58AM

All wars are economic at their core, to paraphrase Tom Clancy.

Southeners, whipped up by firebrands, concluded Northerners were trying to extinguish their livelihood. Yankee demagogues demonized Southeners in the North. There was a war in Kansas leading up to Lincoln's election. It all depends on your point of view really.

No response to my earlier questions Mr. Rostrom?

mch| 2.14.09 @ 7:54AM

great disscusions, but y'all are missing the root cause. slavery was not illegal,was not morally incorrect. abuse of a slave was illegal, and inslaving some one is wrong. the institution in the USA came from Queen of England and King of Spain, it was imposed on all colonys, with great profits. read RL Dabney,"In Defense of Virginia"
a history lesson from the losing side and nearer the truth.
Lincoln was our worst president, our first and best
dictator so far. He was big gov.big tax & spending,central banking, liberal etc. wait a min.
he was a Rep.
The Dem. South was the conservative, religious &fisical;,limited gov.state rights, free traders etc.
the names have changed the problems of 1861
are still with us.

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 8:45AM

MCH: Excellent point. It is interesting how so many people apply 20th & 21st C. morality to the slavery issue, rather than looking at the war with the kind of detachment that they use on, say, abortion. Slave owners as you point out were law abiding and exercising their right to private property as it was defined in those times. Of course no one today approves of the practice, but one wouldn't necessarily know this from some of the comments here. Also, they are so emotionally involved in being on the 'side of the angels'. What other subject of history gets their attention like this issue? None in my experience.

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 8:56AM

Basil P: LOL. Interloper is the new Renaissance man, I guess. It's humbling to know that my bona fides are illigitimate, my sources not 'reputable', and that my heart is poisoned with bigotry. I'm glad he doesn't know my mama wears combat boots or he would have dinged me for that too.

Basil Plumley| 2.14.09 @ 9:29AM

@Rich Rostrom

I have no doubt that language is there but please notice that those States used the plural--causes--in their declarations.

Ergo, more than one.

It is similar to the Left clamoring that we went to War in Iraq for WMDs (or oil--I wish the Left would get their reasons straight)
However, the Declaration passed by Congress had 23 reasons to take out Saddam. The Left conveniently forgets the other 22.

Cpm| 2.14.09 @ 10:40AM

Seeing as how the southern states subjugated blacks with Jim Crow laws and defacto apartheid until finally ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , the assertion that slavery would have ended on it's own is strange, as is the assertion that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Of course the men who fought it each had their own reasons but to cite those as "the reason" is to ignore the 800lb gorilla in the room.

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 11:02AM

CPM: be sure to investigate the Jim Crow laws that existed in the North as well and the de facto apartheid that existed in the North until '1964'. I saw it first hand when my family moved from the Jim Crow South to the 'integrated North'. Black people in the 1960's North didn't riot because they they were treated well by Northerners. I understand your argument, but unfortunately it is unprovable and it ignores the fact that many Southerners were looking to end slavery. Industrial advancements would have made slavery economically unsustainable at some point. People often think since slaves were not paid (which was not always the case BTW-again proven by research) it was cheaper to use them. This was not the case. There were very large upfront purchase costs and then ongoing costs of food, clothing, housing, medical care. It was cheaper to hire labor than own slaves. I am not per se trying to refute your point, as much as I am pointing out-again- that things were not as simple as people have been taught and that what they have been taught is incomplete and therefore inaccurate and misleading.

Pingback| 2.14.09 @ 12:44PM

ShallowTime links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…neo-confederates or Lincoln-haters deny it, or belittle it as a cause, there is no real doubt among serious historians that slavery was the issue that brought about the Civil War. See: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/12/shades-of-gray __________________________________________________________________________ Mississippi Declaration of Causes: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of…

Basil Plumley| 2.14.09 @ 12:56PM

@Cpm

It is a leap of logic to equate slavery and Jim Crow laws. Both are separate and unrelated entities.

@JimP

Thanks for reminding me about the "busing riots" that took place in Boston MA in the mid 1970's. Whole neighborhoods were segregated at that time and presumably are still segregated. The Charlestown, North End, South End sections were White, while Roxbury and Dorchester sections were Black.
The folks in Boston have had a history of hostility towards Blacks. But wait, only the South has sinned.

Aretha Franklin said it best ...... R-E-S-P-E-C-T

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 1:12PM

Basil P: LOL. Yes, what was I thinking? There I went again spouting neo-Confederate propaganda. Now say it (to myself) repeatedly: ingore the slavery that still existed in the North; ignore the slave trade that still existed in the North; ignore the North's Jim Crow laws that existed in 1861- and later; ignore that Lincoln said he was figthing to preserve the Union (slavery as a cause came later- much later);.... well gosh darn it, just ignore all the evidence that the Yanks were NOT fighting to free the slaves. What do primary source documents prove anyway?

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 2:20PM

Here's another interesting FYI: Lincoln cited the Declaration of Independence (DOI) for justification of separating what is now West Virginia from Virginia, yet at the same time argued that the Southern states were not allowed to separate from the Union and by extension, the DOI was a one time, and one time only deal. 'That's a true fact', as we Rebs say. Ain't history fun?

Michele San Pietro| 2.14.09 @ 2:27PM

Mr. JimP, first of all I am male (Michele is exclusively a male name in Italy), second of all my opinions on the American civil war are not phantasies but the historical truth. No, the American secession war wasn't a conflict with all the goods guys on one side and all the bad guys on the other side, no war is like that: but, to my mind, it was definitely a conflict between a side that fought for a right cause and a side who fought for a wrong one. Thank God, the side fighting for a right cause finally won.

JimP| 2.14.09 @ 3:20PM

Sorry, 'Mike', about the gender confusion. Unfortunately you do not have all the facts. You are free to think as you please of course, but that does not mean you are correct. Ad hominem assertions about Taliban propaganda etc are not factual arguments. This is the approach taken by those who do not have facts and are expressing their opinions. What is your reason for being so emotionally invested in this debate anyway? You aren't an American. You obviously are not well read on the subject matter. If you were, you would not be arguing that the North fought the war to free slaves. That little bit of propaganda became the casus belli after the war had been underway for well over a year-if not longer- and is contradicted by so many primary source documents of the soldiers and Northern civilians of the time that it is unquestioned among 'reputable historians' as Interloper puts it; not to mention, as I have stated several times previously, that slavery still existed in the North, and the slave trade was still contributing huge sums of income to the Northern economy, and there were many Jim Crow laws on the books in Northern states intended to keep free black people out etc. Sorry to bust your bubble but there was equal guilt to go around for slavery in America. Like Interloper says, it was a Vast White Wing Conspiracy to get all the people of color. The Yanks went to Africa and bought the slaves and they brought them here where they sold them to Yanks and Rebs and then cotton became king and the Rebs got hooked on slave labor because there was a labor shortage. Don't get confused now. I'm not justifying or defending slavery. Only showing that there was equal guilt. The Yanks brought 'em and the Rebs bought 'em, so to speak. Equal guilt. You have heard of the 'Middle Passage', have you not? Those were Northerners who owned and operated those ships. I digress. Think what you like, but I suggest you start doing historical research if you are going to make comments on this subject.

Interloper| 2.14.09 @ 3:42PM

Rich, pleased to have you on the thread. Trying to reason with Confederate moonbats is wearying. Good luck with your efforts!

One of many troubling aspects of neo-Confederates is they are often too uneducated to understand what well-educated people are like. For example, is not unusual for a law professor who attended good schools to be well-versed in history and even literature. In the circles I frequent, knowing things is normal.

I can't help but wonder what, if any, law school accepted JimP. as a student. A person with such a lack of analytical skills surely fared poorly academically and on achievement tests. What JimP. is posting to this thread is largely crabbed verbatim from neo-Confederate sources, particularly a book of laughable propaganda published by a nurse, "The South Was Right." That is where ludicrous claims such as the slave trade was still going on, slaves were paid, there were more slaves in the North, slaves were happy, etc., come from. Garbage in, garbage out.

Michele, I am rather embarrassed by my neo-Confederate countrymen. Please realize that they are small, though vocal, segment of the population. Most white Southerners, despite still having racial hang-ups, do not subscribe to the extremist views you're seeing posted here. Furthermore, age is a determining factor in racism in the South. Though as little as 10 percent of white Southerners voted for President Obama in some Southern states, younger, better educated white people voted disproportionately Democratic.

Cpm| 2.14.09 @ 4:39PM

Southerners still obsess about the Civil War because they lost, and because their underlying motive for secession, the preservation of the morally indefensible practice of slavery, is embarrassing and shameful.
You don't find this sort of navel gazing and rationalizing up North because, to paraphrase the guy in the White House, "We won".

Interloper| 2.14.09 @ 5:43PM

Cpm, all white Southerners don't do this extremist crap. Most accept that the South lost the Civil War and that it (the ante-Bellum South) is not going to rise again. They realize that the biggest reason for the Civil War was also its biggest consequence - the official end of slavery. I think there has to be a mental health aspect to the neo-Confederates, obsessive-compulsiveness, at least. Ignorance alone does not explain them.

Also, many of these men (the movement is overwhelmingly male) are fixated on the notion that they would be leaders if a traditional Southern society still existed. They believe that the changes of modern America - civil rights for minorities, women and non-whites voting and running for office, at least a basic education available to anyone - have 'cheated' them of what they perceive to be their birthright, lording it over everyone else. But, if people are 'natural' leaders, why would they need to be propped up by a system in which only a small slice of the population (white, male, property-owning, Christian) is allowed to compete?

Nick| 2.14.09 @ 6:10PM

Cpm,

Wrong, I was born a Yankee (well half Yankee, half Canadian), and I continually question the "winners" version of events. I went back and forth for years on the right to secede. Lincoln made a good, lawyerly case against it in his 1st inaugural. I've concluded there is no right to secede, and make my case at 2.13.09 @ 3:52AM, if you care to look. But I also think Lincoln was a terrible president and could have avoided the war.

I can't wait to read Mr. Crocker's book. I'll bet I'm not the only one up North who doesn't swallow everything he was spoon fed about the War Between the States. And no, I'm not in the militia movement either.

Nick| 2.14.09 @ 6:23PM

Interloper,

Not only are you a professor of law and history, but of psychology as well? Is there no subject that you are not an expert?

How is it you know so much about this "movement" and the personalities that drive it? Are you also an investigative reporter?

Interloper| 2.14.09 @ 6:32PM

Nick, have you ever heard of 'research'?

Nick| 2.14.09 @ 6:38PM

Interloper,

Is "research" the latest euphemism for having a subscription to Mother Jones and listening to NPR?

Basil Plumley| 2.14.09 @ 8:28PM

@Nick
re: Interloper--"Is there no subject that you are not an expert?"

Interloper is a legend in his own mind. He does a poor job of making stuff up as he gets challenged.
Unfortunately, he gives the impression that folks that are on the opposite side to him are 'Neo-CONfederateS; in love with the institution of slavery and white supremacism. It is a disgusting tactic but that is how the Interloper rolls.

Reasonable folks can argue points of history. It does not mean they wish to live in said times. It is beyond logic to assume that folks would. Sometimes, we in the present have to look to history to see what the future portends.

If Interloper is truly a teacher of law, he would realize the concept of precedents. Learning from past arguments and refining them into winning arguments in the present.
However, if Interloper had his way, "Separate but equal" would still be the law of the land. You see, nothing in history should be questioned or challenged. Draw your own conclusions.

Pingback| 2.15.09 @ 2:36AM

Biography Of Signers Of The Declaration Of Independence Printable Declaration Of Inde links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…s,June_12 news DECLARATIONS OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND STATESMEN OF AMERICA … Weekend in Philly The Original Right Wing Whackos_Stock_fftyc.cn A Slice of Rainbow: Happy Single Awareness Day! The Foundation of Church Planting The American Spectator : Shades of Gray Arthur Middleton / Middleton Place - Charleston, SC - South … USA & religion By Helen Bascom Mr. Robert Haar Minnesota School is Teaching Islam «…

Rich Rostrom| 2.15.09 @ 3:46AM

JimP:

"the slavery that still existed in the North"

False. The secessionists consistently referred to the slave states and "the South" interchangeably. That is, they defined "the South" as the slave states, and they expected ALL the slave states to declare secession. They were rather shocked that Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky , and Missouri refused to "join their sister Southern states". (Unionists in Missouri seized control of the state government by force - to thwart a conspiracy by Governor Jackson to impose secession by force.)

"the slave trade that still existed in the North"

False. The slave trade was outlawed. Some illegal slaving trips were sponsored by Southerners (see the history of the yacht/slaver WANDERER in 1857-1860). The only market for slaves was in the South.

"ignore the North's Jim Crow laws that existed in 1861- and later"

What does this have to do with slavery? There is a vast gulf between discrimination against people and treating people as property. Northerners were no enthusiasts for racial equality in 1860. But it might be noted that all New York omnibuses and streetcars were desegregated by 1860, the courts there ruling that a negro had the same right as a white person to use them. It took Alabama over hundred years and Federal coercion to accept that.

"Lincoln said he was fighting to preserve the Union (slavery as a cause came later- much later)... the Yanks were NOT fighting to free the slaves". Well, yes, of course. Absolutely. No question about it. Nor has there ever been a question about it. No one has asserted they did, here or anywhere else. You are attacking a straw man of your own making. The obvious reason for this vehement straw-man attack is to evade the irrefutable evidence that the South went to war to protect slavery.

"Lincoln cited the Declaration of Independence (DOI) for justification of separating what is now West Virginia from Virginia..."

False. West Virginia was created by Constitutional procedures. The Unionist members of the Virginia legislature, meeting at Wheeling, approved the separation, and the new state was admitted by Congress. Whether that rump assembly could lawfully so act was dubious, but the separation was eventually accepted by Virginia after the war.

"What do primary source documents prove anyway? " I would like to see some citations of primary source documents that support these bizarre claims. I've linked to a site with the text of secessionist documents.

Rich Rostrom| 2.15.09 @ 4:00AM

Basil Plumley: "please notice that those States used the plural - causes - in their declarations..."

The plural refers to the multiple ways the evil North was oppressing the noble slaveholding South: by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, by portraying slavery as evil, by sending "abolition agents" into the South to incite slave revolts, by barring slavery from the Territories...

Other injuries were claimed, but these were ascribed to the malice of the anti-slavery faction in the North: Texas complained that the U.S. was refusing to defend her settlers from the Indians because Texas was a slave state.

Read the documents at the link I provided. Slavery is not just the central concern, it is practically the only concern.

Rich Rostrom| 2.15.09 @ 4:26AM

Nick:

"Have you read Mr. Crocker's book already?"

Mr. Kenefick quotes Crocker in his review; the quote clearly states the false thesis I condemned Crocker for.

"Don't you think 1862 was a little late to be offering compensation, after more than a year of fighting? "

At the start, Lincoln tried very hard to reassure the South that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in a state - that the Constitution gave the Federal government no power to do so. Proposing that the Federal government buy and free slaves en masse was exactly the sort of "radicalism" that the secessionists accused him of. Anything that challenged the permanent legitimacy of slavery was wrong, wrong, WRONG!

"But I also think Lincoln was a terrible president and could have avoided the war."

Southerners declared secession, mustered tens of thousands of troops (outnumbering the U.S. Army), seized numerous Federal posts, and laid siege to others - all before Lincoln even took office. How was Lincoln supposed to avoid a war that had already started?

"Marx protested Great Britain's aid to the Confederacy and was against her entering the war."

So? The Gestapo executed Bruno Ludke - who was a psychopathic sex killer. Even people who are wrong about almost everything can be right about something.

Basil Plumley| 2.15.09 @ 11:52AM

@Rich Rostrom

Thank you for the response. I was hoping you would respond to my question of what recourse do the American people have when they lose rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Nonetheless, let me posit that the South in 1860 was mainly an agrarian society dependent on slave labor to be competitive. That is the economic reason for slavery; not, as some inane folks would say, white supremicism. It is the distinction in this debate.
Combine that with an invasion of Southern States, and one has a causi belli.

Oddly, slavery was the original welfare state. The slaveowner had to take care of the slave even after they could not work the fields. It is quite delicious that those who support the current welfare system miss the irony.

The North was heavily manufacturing. Of course, very little is said about the working conditions in these factories, the use of child labor, and the exploitation of the immigrant.

Assume for a moment that the South had the political clout to outlaw child labor, immigration, and/or poor working conditions, what would have the North done in response?

Yes, the abolitionist was a very interesting creature. He found great fault in slavery yet somehow it was okay to live off the sweat and exploitation of immigrants and children.

Of course, the same abolitionists set in motion the original American terrorist; John Brown. I am somewhat surprised that very few folks want to discuss that cretin who killed many innocent people.

That being said, the South had very little chance of winning the War. Except for Lee's foray into MD (Antietam) and PA (Gettysburg), the South basically fought a defensive war in hopes of suing for peace.
Unfortunately, the South had no sustainability as the North had the greater resources, manpower, and manufacturing. As a wise man once remarked to me, "5 beats 3 everytime".

D.| 2.15.09 @ 12:45PM

Wow! Alot of comments. The best books I have read on the War of Northern Agression were written by Katherine M. Jones. I love them because they were written by the women of the South and clearly show what the truest thinking of that time was. These women tried to care for their families, and if they had slaves, their slaves no less than their own families, in a situation where Lincoln's only strategy was to starve the women, children and old people of the South. In large number these women worried what would become of Black people once the North tookover. Their largest concern, that Northerners would not include Black people in their church services and these people might lose their faith in God. Sorry to you who were public school educated, but this doesn't sound like a bunch of heartless, cruel people, but rather women who knew what was truly important and that goes much deeper than earthly freedom.

Interloper| 2.15.09 @ 3:05PM

Like I said before, the psychological hooks of white supremacist beliefs go very deep.

• mch gives us this wad of inanities: "but y'all are missing the root cause. slavery was not illegal,was not morally incorrect. abuse of a slave was illegal, and inslaving some one is [not] wrong. the institution in the USA came from Queen of England and King of Spain, it was imposed on all colonys, with great profits. read RL Dabney,"In Defense of Virginia." This is demonstrative of how these people will claim to believe just about anything but the truth about slavery and the Civil War. (Also, that they often are rather dim.)

• 'Basil Plumley,' a regular at neo-Confederate sites, simply cannot wrap his head around the idea that stealing other people's lives from them because a white male elite needed "slave labor to be competitive," is not a defense that any rational and ethical person would accept. The millions of people of African descent who had their lives stolen by slave owners were completely deprived of their human rights. There is nothing comparable in American history, other than the white man's genocide against American Indians. 'Plumley' can't grasp this because he is incapable of seeing black folks as fully human, equal to white people. What was done to them doesn't 'count' to a white supremacist.

D., in a perversely childish comments, extols the 'virtues' of women who considered other human beings their property. Says the slave owners were admirable because they claimed to be concerned about the celestial freedom of the people whose lives they stole. Reminds me of that James Weldon Johnson poem in which a Southern white woman believes she will have slaves in Heaven. That's the traditional Confederate perspective - not a thought for the people they're harming, just for themselves. The attitude carried on among the 'Lost Causers' after Reconstruction and still is being taught in their home schools and segregation academies today.

Having researched neo-Confederates thoroughly enough to write on a book on the subject, I am not shocked by these remarks. They are typical. I realize that newcomers to the topic may wonder if they have stepped into some kind of eerie alternative reality. The answer is 'no.' These people are out there.

Basil Plumley| 2.15.09 @ 4:15PM

@ Interloper

"'Basil Plumley,' a regular at neo-Confederate sites ......"

Good Lord man, are you either obtuse or intellectually bankrupt? I presume from your response that you still desire "separate but equal" to be law of the land?
Your silence on that subject speaks volumes. You use Blacks to make you feel better about your wretched life yet, outside of lip service, you do nothing to advance Blacks. Yeah, I get it now.

I have stated nothing for you to conclude that I am a white supremicist. In fact, in my culture, I created quite a stir by marrying a "White girl". What does that lead you to believe?

I am not allowed to question History? Says who?
You, the teacher of history-law-psychology whiz who is patently dishonest?
Gee, I wonder what you will call me this time, Uncle what?

But I also see your dishonesty goes to women who disagree with you. Misogyny is such a delightful trait. I bet you are a hit with all the ladies ...... who enjoy that sort of behaviour.

I shall give the last word. Dig yourself out of the hole you have dug for yourself. You truly are a contemptible little fascist zib.

Nick| 2.15.09 @ 5:06PM

Mr. Rostrom,

Thank you for responding.
I wasn't questioning your rebuttal of the passage cited, I was just curious if you read the book.

How hard "Lincoln tried" is subjective, and depends on what side of the debate you're on. What you call "radicallism" I would call compromising. And as an old saying goes: "Money talks..."

Was it worth the lives of 600,000 Americans to assert Federal rights to forts and other installations, rather than do everything possible to find a peaceful solution? And you're right, the war had started, but not with the incidents you list. The fighting in Kansas & Missouri had been going on for years. Secession didn't pop up in a vacuum. Lincoln could have calmed things down after the election, instead of arguing with the South over preserving the Union, in my opinion.

I only threw out the Karl Marx thing as a fun fact of history, not to try to prove my points. Although, was he right about anything?

Baz| 2.15.09 @ 6:21PM

We are not allowed to disclose the Interloper's actual identity on this blog, but it might be interesting to learn he did time in Fort Leavenworth for ID theft, forgery, impersonating a law enforcement officer, rape and child molesting. He's not a teacher and doesn't hold a degree as he dropped out of high school in 2001.
Nice fellow.

Jeremiah| 2.15.09 @ 6:59PM

Why am I not surprised at all? Where are the decent liberals these days?

Basil Plumley| 2.15.09 @ 7:41PM

Well Baz, the guy probably also thought is was kinky to stampede cattle through the Vatican.

ROTFLMAO-thanks Baz, it all makes sense now.

Interloper| 2.15.09 @ 8:42PM

This is calumny and character assassination. I dare you disclosing my name. I would slap you with court papers ASAP. I have the right to privacy and I do not owe any right wing wacko on this site any explanation.

The Editor| 2.15.09 @ 8:49PM

Interloper, sue us if it makes you feel more comfortable. You were stupid enough to use your actual E mail address, anybody with up to date IPID search engines and the help of Intelius know who you are. Again, blame you own stupidity.

Interloper| 2.15.09 @ 9:24PM

ROFL! It is enough that one or more neo-Confederates have resorted to posting lies under hijacked screen names. That is preferable to more apologetics for slavery, methinks.

Rich Rostrom| 2.16.09 @ 2:40AM

Basil Plumley: "The North was heavily manufacturing." In 1860, over 19M people lived in the free states; less than 1M were employed in manufacturing. Of 12M people in the slave states, over 400K were employed in manufacturing. Both areas were overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.

Rich Rostrom| 2.16.09 @ 2:56AM

Nick P:

It is very difficult to "calm things down" when the other side expects to get everything they want without question and is prepared to use force if thwarted. The only way Lincoln could have avoided conflict was by letting the secessionists have their way - which his oath as President forbade.

"What you call "radicalism" I would call compromising."

You misunderstand. What I said was that compensated emancipation (your suggestion) would have been viewed _at_ _the_ _time_, _by_ _the_ _South_, as dangerous radicalism. As in: "ZOMG! LINCOLN THE ABOLITION TYRANT WANTS TO STEAL PUBLIC MONEY TO FREE THE NIGGERS TO RAPE WHITE WOMEN!"

Nick| 2.16.09 @ 5:24AM

Mr. Rostrom,

My point was Lincoln was no man of peace, nor was he a statesman. He wasn't going to back down, no matter what happened. Northerners were sick of compromising and thought the South was bluffing regarding secession. Remember both sides foolishly thought the war would consist of a couple of battles and be over in 2 weeks. A pox on both sides. Reminds me of August, 1914.

I wrote "...could have calmed down..." in a attempt to play the great "what if" game of history, "ya know, if things were different, they wouldn't be the same." In the end it is a fruitless endeavor, I admit.

Is it your supposition the South wouldn't accept being bought off, or do you have examples in the historical record of your assertion? I would be most interested to read them, please. The only example I know of is Great Britain's success in paying off slaveholders.
And should I assume you do think it was worth the 600,000 dead?

Basil Plumley| 2.16.09 @ 10:00AM

@Rich Rostrom

You posted:
In 1860, over 19M people lived in the free states; less than 1M were employed in manufacturing. Of 12M people in the slave states, over 400K were employed in manufacturing. Both areas were overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.

I would have to recheck those figures. I seem to recall the numbers being more disparate on the order of 4-1. Then again, that could be manufacturing output. Either way, the North certainly had a greater capacity to manufacture than the South.
Militarily, the South did not have the capability to sustain a long fight.

However, the question still remains for you: At what point and what recourse do the people have when they perceive the Government has taken away its rights and liberties?

This has been my point all along. You have brought much to this debate.
I think the question I pose goes to the crux of the argument. It is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
It is unfortunate that some fools with a one-trick pony usurp the debate for their own petty agenda. They bring nothing to this forum.

Rich Rostrom| 2.16.09 @ 9:39PM

Basil Plumley: "I would have to recheck those figures." The data from the 1860 Census may be viewed with the Historical Census Browser at the U of Virginia Library site: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/

There is no question that the free states in 1860 had much greater industrial capacity than the slave states. What I object to is the false characterization of the free states as primarily urban and industrial.

"At what point and what recourse do the people have when they perceive the Government has taken away its rights and liberties?"

"When in the course of human events..." Of course the devil is in the details. When a government becomes arbitrary and oppressive, the people have the moral right to resist it by force and overthrow it. But what if the arbitrary and oppressive act is trivial in its practical effect? Is the dreadful step of revolution justified? Probably not. But a clever dictator could abolish liberty by a series of small steps... When is it right to fight?

Rich Rostrom| 2.16.09 @ 9:49PM

Nick: "Is it your supposition the South wouldn't accept being bought off, or do you have examples in the historical record of your assertion?"

The secessionists of 1860-61 stated loudly and fervently that they were opposed to any change in the slavery system; that they regarded any argument that slavery was a bad thing that should be diminished or limited as a personal insult; and that it was utterly impossible for white men to co-exist with free blacks. This is all a matter of historical record. There is further evidence: the rejection in 1862, by border-state leaders, of Lincoln's proposal for compensated emancipation there. If even the moderate and unionist slaveholders of the border states would not accept CE, there's no reason to think that the fire-eaters of the Deep South would.

As to compensated emancipation in the British Empire, the West Indian planters who accepted it had no choice. They certainly had no possibility of resistance.

Nick| 2.17.09 @ 10:48AM

Mr. Rostrom,

Thanks for answering. You make a good argument. I will have to do some more reading on the subject.

JimP| 2.18.09 @ 9:14AM

Here is a web site that has info on slavery in the North (SLAVENORTH.COM). It corroborates info I stumbled across years before the internet (and have referenced in my comments) and has even more info than I found. It has citations and all the sources are Northerners.

Rich Rostrom| 2.19.09 @ 8:58PM

JimP: You referred to "the slavery that still existed in the North".

That Website chronicles the existence of slavery in Northern states LONG BEFORE 1860. Unless you want to make a big issue about the 18 elderly "apprentices for life" in New Jersey.

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