# Think Tank > History >  Abe Lincoln vs the Founding Fathers

## Galileo Galilei

*Abe Lincoln vs the Founding Fathers*

It is frequently asserted that Abe Lincoln is our most respected and/or revered president by the general public.  But is it really true?  I say no.

Let's say you are an educated layman, and your knowledge of these five famous presidents is limited mostly to a quick scan of their wikipedia page.

Let's compare the major deeds and offices held by these presidents prior to, and after, their presidency:

*George Washington*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington

* Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army; 1775-1783

* Father of his country

* President of the Constitutional Convention

* Signer of the U.S. Consitution

* Delegate to the Continental Congress; 1774-1775

* United States Army Senior Officer; 1798-1799

* Colonel in the French & Indian War; 1752-1758

* Hosted the Mt. Vernon Conference; 1785

*John Adams*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams

* Vice President of the United States; 1789-1797

* United States Ambassador to Great Britain; 1785–1788

* United States Ambassador to the Netherlands; 1782–1788 

* Delegate to the Continental Congress; 1774–1778 

* Leading member of the Continental Congress in drive for Independence

* Signer of the Declaration of Independence

* Co-negotiator of the Treaty of Paris; 1783

* Husband of Abigail Adams

* Major party candidate for president; 1800

* Oldest President still living; 1799-1826

* Father of John Quincy Adams

* Second cousin of Sam Adams

* Author of _Thoughts on Government_; 1776

* Author of _A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States_; 1787

* Co-author of famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence

* Great-grandfather of Henry Adams

*Thomas Jefferson*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson

* Vice President of the United States; 1797–1801

* United States Secretary of State; 1790–1793

* United States Ambassador to France; 1785–1789

* Delegate the Congress of the Confederation; 1783–1784

* Governor of Virginia; 1779–1781

* Delegate to the Continental Congress; 1775–1776 

* Author of the Declaration of Independence

* Signer of the Declaration of Independence

* Author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (written 1779, enacted 1786)

* Co-Founder of the Democratic-Republican Party

* Founder of the University of Virginia

* Major candidate for president; 1796

* United States Minister Plenipotentiary to France; 1785-1789

* Author the Kentucky Resolution of 1798

* Probably the most quoted of the Founding Fathers

* Author of _A Summary View of the Rights of British America_; 1774

* Author of _Notes on the State of Virginia_

* Author of the _Jefferson Bible_

* Co-author of famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence

* Best friend of James Madison

* Distant relative of John Marshall

* Author of _Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States_

*James Madison*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison

* United States Secretary of State; 1801–1809

* Supervised the Lousiana Purchase

* Member of the U.S. House of Representatives; 1789-1797

* Author and sponsor of the Bill-of-Rights

* Father of the Consitution

* Author of the Virginia Plan

* Signer of the U.S. Constitution

* Author of _Madison's Notes on the Federal Constitution_

* Co-author of the _Federalist Papers_

* Author of the Virginia Resolution of 1798

* Oldest President still living; 1826-1836

* Co-Founder of the University of Virginia

* Co-author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; 1786

* Delegate to the Continental Congress; 1780-1783 (youngest member)

* Delegate to the Confederation Congress; 1787-1788

* Husband of Dolley Madison

* Leading member of Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788

* One of the most quoted Founding Fathers

* Member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830

* Author of the _Report of 1800_

* Best friend of Thomas Jefferson

* Second cousin of Zachary Taylor

* Learned to read French, Spanish, Italian, ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew when he was eight years old

* Graduated from college in two years, finished graduate school in one year

* Delegate to the Annapolis Convention; 1786

* On committee and co-author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights; 1776 (youngest member)

* Co-Founder of the Democratic-Republican Party

*Abe Lincoln*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

* Member of the U.S. House of Representatives; 1847-1849

* Soldier in Black Hawk War; 1832

* Participant in the Lincoln–Douglas debates; 1858

* Distant relative of Daniel Boone

DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE A DIFFERENCE HERE?

IS THIS STARK DIFFERENCE NOT NOTICABLE TO THE EDUCATED LAY READER?

Galileo has spoken.

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## heavenlyboy34

I don't think you're going to convince any Linoln-phile with logic, bro. :wink:

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## torchbearer

Lincoln also liked to sleep with men.

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## 1836er

Question:  Which of the above men was the only President to wage war against his fellow countrymen in an effort to deny them the right to live under a government of their consent?

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## Dunedain

A lot of it has to do with Lincoln supposedly freeing the slaves.  As ethnopolitics becomes a bigger and bigger deal over time so do these types of historical figures.

My major problem with Lincoln was his love of central authority and the fact that he butchered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen.

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## jack555

> Lincoln also liked to sleep with men.




Thanks for bringing this highly relevant view to this thread.

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## axiomata

> * Distant relative of Daniel Boone


Me too!

Does that mean I'm a distant^2 relative of Abe Lincoln?

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## torchbearer

> Thanks for bringing this highly relevant view to this thread.


I'm all full of fun facts.

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## JeNNiF00F00

You forgot to mention the total war that he inflicted upon southern civilians.  Also, he didn't free the slaves.  He just turned all of us into slaves under the govt.

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## Kevin_Kennedy

> Question:  Which of the above men was the only President to wage war against his fellow countrymen in an effort to deny them the right to live under a government of their consent?


Well I don't know about waging war, but Washington did crack down pretty hard on the Whiskey Rebellion.

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## specsaregood

> Also, he didn't free the slaves.  He just turned all of us into slaves under the govt.


Well he did "free" all the slaves that were under jurisdictions not under his contol.    Of course those slaves still under union control were just out of luck.

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## Bucjason

So... you so-called libertarians believe that state's rights overrule the right to personal freedom?

A state government can condemn you to a life-time of slavery to a rich plantation owner, as long as the federal government isn't the one doing it ??

I think that's stupid. If a government is violating your rights , who cares if it's local or federal???

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## ClayTrainor

Great post Galileo! 




> So... you so-called libertarians believe that state's rights overrule the right to personal freedom?
> 
> A state government can condemn you to a life-time of slavery to a rich plantation owner, as long as the federal government isn't the one doing it ??
> 
> I think that's stupid. If a government is violating your rights , who cares if it's local or federal???


The only benefit to local government is that it's easier to overthrow and/or move away when it's a smaller group of tyrants, instead of a massive centralized group of tyrants.

I agree with you though.  I personally think politicians need to go the way of the king.  We don't need rulers anymore.

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## YumYum

> Lincoln also liked to sleep with men.


A lot of men like to sleep with men, including Jesus. A great president who tried to prevent the Civil War was James Buchanan, and the evidence is pretty overwhelming he liked to sleep with men too!

Yum (who is pretty particular who he sleeps with)

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## Bucjason

> Great post Galileo! 
> 
> 
> 
> The only benefit to local government is that it's easier to overthrow and/or move away when it's a smaller group of tyrants, instead of a massive centralized group of tyrants.
> 
> I agree with you though.  I personally think politicians need to go the way of the king.  We don't need rulers anymore.


Obviously it's NOT that easy to overthrow. It takes a freakin CIVIL WAR , lol

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## ClayTrainor

> Obviously it's NOT that easy to overthrow. It takes a freakin CIVIL WAR , lol


The Union soldiers were fighting for a "union" were they not?  The south was trying to defend states rights and state independence from the union?  I'm a little rusty on American history, i'll be honest.

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## Bucjason

No , the south were redneck farmers that were fighting to avoid having to actually pay the people working thier farm for thier services, like we do in FREE societies.

$#@! those scumbags, THEY were all the mini-dictators... dictators ofthe worst kind. They deserved to be taken down, regardless of the real motivations of the north. The end justifies the means...

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## Kevin_Kennedy

> So... you so-called libertarians believe that state's rights overrule the right to personal freedom?
> 
> A state government can condemn you to a life-time of slavery to a rich plantation owner, as long as the federal government isn't the one doing it ??
> 
> I think that's stupid. If a government is violating your rights , who cares if it's local or federal???


Except the Civil War was not fought over slavery, but the right to self-government.  Lincoln didn't believe the people had the right to form a government that would protect their interests.  Slavery was simply used later as further justification for his actions, and to keep Great Britain and France, who had abolished slavery peacefully at this point, from helping the Confederacy.

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## YumYum

> No , the south were redneck farmers that were fighting to avoid having to actually pay the people working thier farm for thier services, like we do in FREE societies.
> 
> $#@! those scumbags, THEY were all the mini-dictators... dictarots of the worst kind. They deserved to be taken down, regardless of the real motivations of the north. The end justifies the means...


According to G. Edward Griffin in the "Creature From Jekyll Island", the Civil War was instigated by the Rothschilds. Hamilton and Jefferson started the Civil War. For the sake of the country, they should have settled their dispute before Hamilton was shot.

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## ClayTrainor

> The end justifies the means...


- Karl Marx

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## Galileo Galilei

> Me too!
> 
> Does that mean I'm a distant^2 relative of Abe Lincoln?


It is possible.  Lincoln was related to Daniel Morgan, a revolutionary war general.  Boone was a fairly close relative of Daniel Morgan.

You better get a DNA scan.

:-)

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## Galileo Galilei

> Great post Galileo! 
> 
> 
> 
> The only benefit to local government is that it's easier to overthrow and/or move away when it's a smaller group of tyrants, instead of a massive centralized group of tyrants.
> 
> I agree with you though.  I personally think politicians need to go the way of the king.  We don't need rulers anymore.


Appreciate that, Claytrainor.

Has anyone here ever read a biography of Lincoln?  I have always found them boring, as he did not do much prior to the Civil War.  Even in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln managed to oppose inter-racial marriages, blacks voting, blacks holding public office, and blackse serving on juries.  Mind you, this was in the North in a free State in 1858, not in Virginia in 1776.

Even during the Civil War, what exactly did Lincoln do?

He basically sat around and complained about his generals.

This is why I find the DiLorenzo thesis that Lincoln is our most highly regarded president unconvincing.

It is also why books on the Founding Fathers far outsell books on Lincoln.

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## Bucjason

> Except the Civil War was not fought over slavery, but the right to self-government.  Lincoln didn't believe the people had the right to form a government that would protect their interests.  Slavery was simply used later as further justification for his actions, and to keep Great Britain and France, who had abolished slavery peacefully at this point, from helping the Confederacy.


It doesn't matter. The confederacy were dirt-bags with an illegitimate reason for secession- the right to continue to deny other Americans thier human rights and/or constitutional rights.

Regardless of the original reason for war , the result was the same- the end of slavery. That is just , and is something worth fighting for. 

Placing states' rights over HUMAN rights is about the stupidiest argument I've ever heard a "libertarian" make....

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## JeNNiF00F00

> No , the south were redneck farmers that were fighting to avoid having to actually pay the people working thier farm for thier services, like we do in FREE societies.
> 
> $#@! those scumbags, THEY were all the mini-dictators... dictators ofthe worst kind. They deserved to be taken down, regardless of the real motivations of the north. The end justifies the means...



Those "redneck scumbags" were standing up against high taxes and their rights were being infringed upon.  They rightfully seceded the Union.  You are aware that Marx and Lincoln were in bed with each other under this notion of a "Union"?  Which included FORCE.  The slavery issue from my understanding wasn't an issue until the last year or so of the Civil War.  The North WAS PROVIDING MORE THAN 90% of slaves to around 3% the SOUTH that actually owned slaves!  Meanwhile the Union continues to do what they did to the south, to the rest of the world today.  Its nothing but EMPIRE BUILDING.  You know, thats what a Marxist would say.  "The end justifies the means" I mean if its dealing w/ the collective whole, it really doesn't matter how many people die even if they're civilians now does it.  Are you sure you are in the right forums? 


I mean does this justify anything?

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## Bucjason

> - Karl Marx


Actually Machiavelli said "the end justifys the means" , not Karl Marx.

You are thinking of " From each according to his means..." Two statements that mean totally different things...

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## Ethek

tyrant

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## JeNNiF00F00

> It doesn't matter. The confederacy were dirt-bags with an illegitimate reason for secession- the right to continue to deny other Americans thier human rights and/or constitutional rights.
> 
> Regardless of the original reason for war , the result was the same- the end of slavery. That is just , and is something worth fighting for. 
> 
> Placing states' rights over HUMAN rights is about the stupidiest argument I've ever heard a "libertarian" make....


You haven't a clue in what you are talking about.  They mainly seceded over the morrill tarrif.  Its like us today flipping out over the health care bill thats going to pass.  When we start getting taxed to death, we will have something to say as well and possibly secede if its bad enough.  Then 150 years later people will be saying we placed "states rights over HUMAN RIGHTS".  It was about states rights. Lincoln violated HIS own constitution, murdered thousands of southern civilians, and burnt their cities while soldiers were away fighting and you want to talk about 'human rights'??  The south was in the right for doing what they did.  Blacks AND Native Americans fought for the confederacy.  Your argument is null.

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## Kevin_Kennedy

> It doesn't matter. The confederacy were dirt-bags with an illegitimate reason for secession- the right to continue to deny other Americans thier human rights and/or constitutional rights.
> 
> Regardless of the original reason for war , the result was the same- the end of slavery. That is just , and is something worth fighting for. 
> 
> Placing states' rights over HUMAN rights is about the stupidiest argument I've ever heard a "libertarian" make....


So do you support the whole of the south being subjugated by the federal government because a minority of that population had slaves?  When slaves could have been peacefully emancipated like all the other civilized nations did at the time?  Not to mention the brutality of the Union troops towards the slaves and especially the slave women who were raped, robbed, and murdered quite often.

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## Ethek

Tyrant 

+ background
Draft Riots (aka Civil War 'Battle of New York')  A civil war era precursor to Iraq
YouTube - New York: The 12th Confederate State? (The Real Gangs of New York) pt 1

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## Bucjason

> Those "redneck scumbags" were standing up against high taxes and their rights were being infringed upon.  They rightfully seceded the Union.  You are aware that Marx and Lincoln were in bed with each other under this notion of a "Union"?  Which included FORCE.  The slavery issue from my understanding wasn't an issue until the last year or so of the Civil War.  The North WAS PROVIDING MORE THAN 90% of slaves to around 3% the SOUTH that actually owned slaves!  Meanwhile the Union continues to do what they did to the south, to the rest of the world today.  Its nothing but EMPIRE BUILDING.  You know, thats what a Marxist would say.  "The end justifies the means" I mean if its dealing w/ the collective whole, it really doesn't matter how many people die even if they're civilians now does it.  Are you sure you are in the right forums? 
> 
> 
> I mean does this justify anything?


I'm quite sure I'm in the right place . You are the one supporting slavery, and a "states" rights to deny ALL human rights to certain people , not me. 

Your argument over the time-table that slavery became a major issue for the war is debatable , and regardless ,a weak justification for an illegimate racist government  ( the confederacy )

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## JeNNiF00F00

> I'm quite sure I'm in the right place . You are the one supporting slavery, and a "states" rights to deny ALL human rights to certain people , not me. 
> 
> Your argument over the time-table that slavery became a major issue for the war is debatable , and regardless ,a weak justification for an illegimate racist government  ( the confederacy )


You dont get it.  I do not support slavery.  Most southerners did not have slaves.  Most slaves in the south came out of the north.  However you support the Union of the time.  

Do you support socialized medicine?  You know that can be argued as a Human Rights thing also.

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## torchbearer

The northern textile industry relied on the southern slave trade to provide its industry with cotton. When the south seceded, they removed the source of northern wealth. The South was selling its cotton to france.
So the north had to blockade the south, and france started to financially help the south.
The war was fought over cotton.

Every town lincoln's thugs went through in louisiana- burned the towns to the ground and stole all the cotton to ship to the north.

I never hear anyone talk about this....

The north didn't want to free the slaves, they wanted to free the cotton.

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## JeNNiF00F00

> The northern textile industry relied on the southern slave trade to provide its industry with cotton. When the south seceded, they removed the source of northern wealth. The South was selling its cotton to france.
> So the north had to blockade the south, and france started to financially help the south.
> The war was fought over cotton.
> 
> Every town lincoln's thugs went through in louisiana- burned the towns to the ground and stole all the cotton to ship to the north.
> 
> I never hear anyone talk about this....
> 
> The north didn't want to free the slaves, they wanted to free the cotton.


Exactly!  It was all a corporate takeover.  It was also about who controlled the railroads.  All Lincoln did was release the slaves, then turned every last one of us into one.  We have been going to hell in a handbasket ever since.

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## Bucjason

> You haven't a clue in what you are talking about.  They mainly seceded over the morrill tarrif.  Its like us today flipping out over the health care bill thats going to pass.  When we start getting taxed to death, we will have something to say as well and possibly secede if its bad enough.  Then 150 years later people will be saying we placed "states rights over HUMAN RIGHTS".  It was about states rights. Lincoln violated HIS own constitution, murdered thousands of southern civilians, and burnt their cities while soldiers were away fighting and you want to talk about 'human rights'??  The south was in the right for doing what they did.  Blacks AND Native Americans fought for the confederacy.  Your argument is null.


You are comparing the health care debate to slavery ?? HA! Once again, a pathetic stretch of an argument .

If the state's had the right to violate the VERY reason given for our independence in the 1st place ( " All men are created equal, and endowed by thier creator with certain inalienable rights ..."),  then we technically had no right to start a war against King George either.  It says in our Declaration that ,whenever a government becomes destructive to these ends , it's our right to abolish it ...so the Union was well within it's rights to abolish the confederacy. PERIOD

You support a state's right's to slavery? You are no libertarian, you're just a racist.

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## JeNNiF00F00

> You are comparing the health care debate to slavery ?? HA! Once again, a pathetic stretch of an argument .
> 
> If the state's had the right to violate the VERY reason given for our independence in the 1st place ( " All men are created equal, and endowed by thier creator with certain inalienable rights ..."),  then we technically had no right to start a war against King George either.  It says in our Declaration that ,whenever a government becomes destructive to these ends , it's our right to abolish it ...so the Union was well within it's rights to abolish the confederacy.
> 
> You support a state's right's to slavery? You are no libertarian, you're just a racist.


The taxes stemming from healthcare will BE SLAVERY.  If you cant get that through your ignorant collective skull, then get the $#@! out of here you communist bitch.

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## torchbearer

The emancipation proclamation wasn't until 1863. 3 years into the war-
Why?

Public support for the war in the north was starting to wane. The north was losing its youth to the meat grinder in virginia. Lincoln had to do something to keep his war going- so he changed its focus from preserving the union to freeing the slaves. at least, that was the propoganda. The real reason was always cotton. Cotton is king. People of that day understood the economics.
the federal government left the "freed" black man after the war to face retribution from their former owners. Left those former slaves to the retribution of Jim Crow laws.
The war created a hatred that wasn't there previosly.

Nothing good came from that war. Had lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he could have bought them and freed them.

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## Bucjason

> The taxes stemming from healthcare will BE SLAVERY.  If you cant get that through your ignorant collective skull, then get the $#@! out of here you communist bitch.


I hate taxes as much as the next person , and I would never support government health-care, but if you are ignorant enough to think that high taxation is the same as being a REAL slave, then it stands to reason why you are dumb enough to be a lover of the confederacy....

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## Bucjason

> The emancipation proclamation wasn't until 1863. 3 years into the war-
> Why?
> 
> Public support for the war in the north was starting to wane. The north was losing its youth to the meat grinder in virginia. Lincoln had to do something to keep his war going- so he changed its focus from preserving the union to freeing the slaves. at least, that was the propoganda. The real reason was always cotton. Cotton is king. People of that day understood the economics.
> the federal government left the "freed" black man after the war to face retribution from their former owners. Left those former slaves to the retribution of Jim Crow laws.
> The war created a hatred that wasn't there previosly.
> 
> Nothing good came from that war. Had lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he could have bought them and freed them.


Nonsense , man. Do you really think the southern plantation owners would have EVER given up thier cash-cow of free labor willingly ?? You call yourself a Libertarian, but you are against the Emancipation Proclamation??

Wait , I already know you will argue the date it was issued. So your only defense against the war was the DATE of the Emancipation Proclamation? DO you deny that if the Emancipation Proclamation was given earlier, it would have lead to war even sooner?? If you do deny it , you are a liar.

The war was unavoidable .

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## JeNNiF00F00

> I hate taxes as much as the next person , and I would never support government health-care, but if you are ignorant enough to think that high taxation is the same as being a REAL slave, then it stands to reason why you are dumb enough to be a lover of the confederacy....


Working for free is slavery. How many months are you willing to work for free out of the year in order to pay for healthcare among other things going on with this $#@!ed up country we have now?

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## torchbearer

> Nonsense , man. Do you really think the southern plantation owners would have EVER given up thier cash-cow of free labor willingly ?? You call yourself a Libertarian, but you are against the Emancipation Proclamation??
> 
> Wait , I already know you will argue the date it was issued. So your only defense against the war was the DATE of the Emancipation Proclamation? DO you deny that if the Emancipation Proclamation was given earlier, it would have lead to war even sooner?? If you do deny it , you are a liar.
> 
> The war was unavoidable .


dude, the emotional $#@! don't work with me.
The invention of tractors would have made hand labor obsolete. 
You do realise the slave owners weren't killed in the war. Young men protecting their states died.
If the north didn't want cotton- there would have been no war. fact.

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## Galileo Galilei

A couple points here:

1) The slaves didn't get to vote on secession.

2) Lincoln was indeed a tyrant; but a tyrant that never would have existed had the South gone along with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and put in place an emancipation plan.

3) Central government expands when it has an evil to attack.  Slavery was that evil.  Reduce or eliminate the evil, and you get less central government.  The federal government continued to expand for another 100 yeras, using the Jim Crow laws for a reason.  We all would have more freedom today if the South had taken steps to first, get rid of slavery, and then to get rid of Jim Crow laws.

4) True, that most southerners did not own slaves, only about 4% of the population did.

5) But about 4 out of every 9 people in the South were enslaved.

6) The South had rigged legislatures that concentrated power to the slaveholders.

7) Many southern legislatures counted slaves for apportionment, not just at 3/5th, but as a whole person.

8) Many southern legislatures had laws which did not allow many free whites to vote.  Had these laws been eliminated, slavery might have been ended peacefully.

9) James Madison, in 1829/1830, at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, got a small amount of reform on these issues of apportionment and voting rights.  Just this small success put Virginia on a road where an emancipation plan might have been attempted.  In the Deep South, there was no chance, slavery was getting worse.

10) In the Upper South, slavery was on the way out.

11) Lincoln's biggest F-up, was his failure to negotiate with Virginia.  Virginia was still in the Union in March, 1861, when Lincoln took office.  Had Virginia stayed in the Union, there would not have been much of a Civil War, and Stonewall Jackson & Robert E Lee would have been with the North.  A real plan could have bee worked out instead of war and military occupation.

12) One plan, endorsed by Frederick Douglas, was to send free blacks to Florida.  There could have been a "black" state in the Union.  Another "black" state or two could have been set up in the West as well.  This would have been preferable to war and slavery.  As things turned out, "black" areas were formed in the North inside existing states, and to this day, the North is more segregated than the South.

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## RevolutionSD

Lincoln worship proves that 100 years from now GW Bush will go down as a great president in U.S. History classes.

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## Galileo Galilei

> Lincoln worship proves that 100 years from now GW Bush will go down as a great president in U.S. History classes.


Lincoln is not the most revered president by the average American.  The Founding Fathers are more revered.

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## Bucjason

> A couple points here:
> 
> 1) The slaves didn't get to vote on secession.
> 
> 2) Lincoln was indeed a tyrant; but a tyrant that never would have existed had the South gone along with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and put in place an emancipation plan.
> 
> 3) Central government expands when it has an evil to attack.  Slavery was that evil.  Reduce or eliminate the evil, and you get less central government.  The federal government continued to expand for another 100 yeras, using the Jim Crow laws for a reason.  We all would have more freedom today if the South had taken steps to first, get rid of slavery, and then to get rid of Jim Crow laws.
> 
> 4) True, that most southerners did not own slaves, only about 4% of the population did.
> ...


Awesome post ...a fair summary of the reasons for war, instead of simple glorification of the Confederacy and demonization of Lincoln...

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## Brian in Maryland

Lincoln was a white supremacist and a tyrant.

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## zade

I don't understand the original post. It appears the poster's proof that Lincoln was "worse" than the foudning fathers is simply that he chose to write less things about Lincoln in a list.

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## Galileo Galilei

> I don't understand the original post. It appears the poster's proof that Lincoln was "worse" than the foudning fathers is simply that he chose to write less things about Lincoln in a list.


My point is that Lincoln is not the most respected/revered/glorified/etc. president.

Many people look to great people of the past as guides or as an authority on relevant topics.

My argument is that more people look to the leading Founding Fathers as authorities, rather than to Lincoln.

To educated laypeople, Lincoln's accomplishments are much fewer than for Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison.

Because so many have been duped by DiLorenzo and the lewrockwell crowd about Lincoln, people spend way too much time attacking Lincoln.  Spending all day attacking Lincoln is a good way to lose votes in the Ron Paul revolution.  Most people can name few if any actual accomplishmnets of Lincoln.

A better use of time is to promote the Founding Fathers.

I had a thread similar to this thread a month ago or so.  In it, I mentioned the lack of famous Lincoln quotes.  Lincoln has few quotes on the wisdom of good government, compared to the hundreds of dozens by the Founding Fathers.

Lincoln got a boost this year because it was the 200th anniversary of his birth.  But what did it produce?

One Lincoln besteller; _Team of Rivals_; and _Team of Rivals_ is LONG and BORING.

Records sales for DiLorenzo.

_American Lion_ on Andrew Jackson has outsold the Lincoln book.

And the _John Adams_ book by David McCulloch is the best selling non-fiction book of the century.

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## Galileo Galilei

> Awesome post ...a fair summary of the reasons for war, instead of simple glorification of the Confederacy and demonization of Lincoln...


I'm glad to hear that someone else here GETS IT.

The North vs South debate should not be like Democrat vs Republican debate.

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## YumYum

Man! I was really getting into this fight. Why in the Hell did you all stop? C'mon, c'mon!! Keep it going! Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and Lincoln wanted the South's cotton and the South fought the war to protect the Everglades and the movie set in Atlanta for "Gone With The Wind". Damit dudes, you're just getting warmed up!

----------


## torchbearer

> Man! I was really getting into this fight. Why in the Hell did you all stop? C'mon, c'mon!! Keep it going! Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and Lincoln wanted the South's cotton and the South fought the war to protect the Everglades and the movie set in Atlanta for "Gone With The Wind". Damit dudes, you're just getting warmed up!


well, the guy i was debating admitted he didn't even know when the emancipation was created. i believe he has more reading to do before we continue.

----------


## specsaregood

> well, the guy i was debating admitted he didn't even know when the emancipation was created. i believe he has more reading to do before we continue.


Torch, I thought you would have rementioned how the emancipation proclamation didn't actually free any slaves in union states/territories only confederate territory.  People are often surprised to learn about that....That little fact alone blows holes in the official narrative...

----------


## torchbearer

> Torch, I thought you would have rementioned how the emancipation proclamation didn't actually free any slaves in union states/territories only confederate territory.  People are often surprised to learn about that....That little fact alone blows holes in the official narrative...


i took that as known. what gets me is when it was done and why.

----------


## torchbearer

had the north won the war in the first couple of years, there would have been no emancipation.
The south holding its ground for three years caused it to happen.

----------


## specsaregood

> i took that as known. what gets me is when it was done and why.


Ok, fair enough.  But I've found the opposite to be true.  I've mentioned that to about 6 other non-RP people over the past year and none of them knew that.  In fact I got called a crackpot when I claimed that.....

----------


## torchbearer

> Ok, fair enough.  But I've found the opposite to be true.  I've mentioned that to about 6 other non-RP people over the past year and none of them knew that.  In fact I got called a crackpot when I claimed that.....


all the civil rights laws that came out after the civil war only pertain to the southern states. by that definition, we are still under occupation/reconstruction.

----------


## torchbearer

i'm a civil war buff... i've forgotten a lot of what i've learned, but still know a lot.
I even know about the small battles faught in central louisiana.
I remember how i felt when I heard that all the union soldiers did was burn people's homes and lliterlly steal their cotton. they shipped them via bayous.
They razed our state. We were the last to fall.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

Hey guys, the Civil War ended 144 years ago.  It was a blood sacrifice, for our sins, to God.

----------


## torchbearer

> Hey guys, the Civil War ended 144 years ago.  It was a blood sacrifice, for our sins, to God.


there was no civil war. It was a war between the central government and the people who rejected it.
It was not a war of the states.
This was a continuation of the federalist and anti-federalist.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> The northern textile industry relied on the southern slave trade to provide its industry with cotton. When the south seceded, they removed the source of northern wealth. The South was selling its cotton to france.
> So the north had to blockade the south, and france started to financially help the south.
> The war was fought over cotton.
> 
> Every town lincoln's thugs went through in louisiana- burned the towns to the ground and stole all the cotton to ship to the north.
> 
> I never hear anyone talk about this....
> 
> The north didn't want to free the slaves, they wanted to free the cotton.


+a zillion

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> i'm a civil war buff... i've forgotten a lot of what i've learned, but still know a lot.
> I even know about the small battles faught in central louisiana.
> I remember how i felt when I heard that all the union soldiers did was burn people's homes and lliterlly steal their cotton. they shipped them via bayous.
> They razed our state. We were the last to fall.

----------


## YumYum

I don't know why, but I have always been facinated with The Civil War. When I was younger I read the Time/Life book series "Brother Against Brother". There were a couple of interesting facts from the books:

Before Congress was to meet in early 1865 and vote to borrow another $50 million for the war, Lincoln sent on a secret mission two ambassadors to the South to negotiate a deal with Jefferson Davis. He offered the South $2,500 per slave, and the Southerners could keep their slaves until 1870, provided the South return to the Union. Jefferson Davis agreed to the slave part of the deal, but would not agree to rejoin the Union. Thus, mission failed and the war continued.

Torch mentioned cotton, well in the book series it told how the Jews followed the Union troops into the South, and when the North would take and occupy new Southern territory the Jews would buy the confiscated cotton bales a penny on the dollar, then turn them around and sell the cotton for an enormous profit. Well, this made General Grant madder than Hell because these Jews were not fighting in the war, the North was going broke, and the Jews were getting rich. So he signed an order forbidding the Jews from buying the cotton. The Jews then went to the White House and met with Abraham Lincoln (according to the book Lincoln loved the Jews) and they cried to him and Lincoln told Grant to let the Jews have the cotton, which they did under Grant's nose, in spite of Grant's insane hatered for them.

The kicker in all this is while I'm part Jewish, I am related to U.S. Grant, who in turn is related to my Jewish ancestors from Ireland. Crazy world we live in.

----------


## Danke

> I don't know why, but I have always been facinated with The Civil War. When I was younger I read the Time/Life book series "Brother Against Brother". There were a couple of interesting facts from the books:
> 
> Before Congress was to meet in early 1865 and vote to borrow another $50 million for the war, Lincoln sent on a secret mission two ambassadors to the South to negotiate a deal with Jefferson Davis. He offered the South $2,500 per slave, and the Southerners could keep their slaves until 1870, provided the South return to the Union. Jefferson Davis agreed to the slave part of the deal, but would not agree to rejoin the Union. Thus, mission failed and the war continued.
> 
> Torch mentioned cotton, well in the book series it told how the Jews followed the Union troops into the South, and when the North would take and occupy new Southern territory the Jews would buy the confiscated cotton bales a penny on the dollar, then turn them around and sell the cotton for an enormous profit. Well, this made General Grant madder than Hell because these Jews were not fighting in the war, the North was going broke, and the Jews were getting rich. So he signed an order forbidding the Jews from buying the cotton. The Jews then went to the White House and met with Abraham Lincoln (according to the book Lincoln loved the Jews) and they cried to him and Lincoln told Grant to let the Jews have the cotton, which they did under Grant's nose, in spite of Grant's insane hatered for them.
> 
> The kicker in all this is while I'm part Jewish, I am related to U.S. Grant, who in turn is related to my Jewish ancestors from Ireland. Crazy world we live in.


Interesting, there were a lot of Carpetbaggers I guess.

----------


## torchbearer

never once heard anything about jews in connection with the civil war.
i guess to a southern- a yankee is a yankee.

----------


## PreDeadMan

I have a request, can somebody give me a book name and author of the REAL story of the civil war instead of the government school myths and disinformation they tell us.... I'm also going to pick up Thomas Dilorenzo's books on the real Abe Lincoln and lincoln unmasked I believe is the other one. Thanks all.

----------


## Bucjason

Torch ...read the 2nd qoute in your OWN sig : "When you abridge other people's inalienable rights.. your rights too become alienable. "
 Then tell me again why you defend the confederacy's right to secede with out allowing the people they were ENSLAVING to vote in that secession request .

You make a poor and hypocritical libertarian...

----------


## NoHero

> Torch ...read the 2nd qoute in your OWN sig : "When you abridge other people's inalienable rights.. your rights too become alienable. "
>  Then tell me again why you defend the confederacy's right to secede with out allowing the people they were ENSLAVING to vote in that secession request .
> 
> You make a poor and hypocritical libertarian...


I think that while you make a point about the evil of slavery trumping the rights of states to decide things for themselves, it wasn't the same issue then to most Southerners then, or the same one people here arguing you. In the 1860s, most people, north and south, thought blacks weren't even fully human. That's a really horrible thing, but they didn't have the luxury of studying human genetics. I think the reason there are still racists today, is because many still lack growing up in an atmosphere were people discuss anything scientific. It was a time of myths then, so I think during the actual fight the southern soldiers believed they were fighting for their states' rights to secede and to self-decide, while northern soldiers believed they were stopping a bunch of whackos from leaving their country and ruining the economy.

The average southerner fighting in the Civil War was poor, didn't own slaves, and probably didn't know anyone who did. They weren't in the wrong any more than the boys fighting for the Union were. It was something government forced them into. Southerners were fighting for their lives as the Union came in and burned their cities to the ground and terrorized families. They were fighting for their liberties. I'm sure neither side had much thought about the slaves while during the war.

Slavery never should have happened in our existence. The only good thing to come from the war was an end to slavery... BUT could things have worked out better without the war? There's no doubt, IMO. Slavery, would have been abolished, most likely before 1900 with industrialization, and race relations would have improved much quicker. There would've be no KKK reactionaries to reconstruction. There wouldn't have been a precedent set that allowed for more and more increments of big government.

----------


## torchbearer

> Torch ...read the 2nd qoute in your OWN sig : "When you abridge other people's inalienable rights.. your rights too become alienable. "
>  Then tell me again why you defend the confederacy's right to secede with out allowing the people they were ENSLAVING to vote in that secession request .
> 
> You make a poor and hypocritical libertarian...


It seems like you have this idea that states rights equals slavery.
are you sure you aren't a liberal? you argue like one.

----------


## torchbearer

> I have a request, can somebody give me a book name and author of the REAL story of the civil war instead of the government school myths and disinformation they tell us.... I'm also going to pick up Thomas Dilorenzo's books on the real Abe Lincoln and lincoln unmasked I believe is the other one. Thanks all.


The South was Right
http://www.amazon.com/South-Right-Ja.../dp/1565540247

----------


## jmdrake

*sigh* The never ending civil war argument.  Slavery was indeed a significant contributor to the civil war.  The states that seceded mentioned that in their declarations of secession.  Ron Paul mentioned slavery as a "mistake" that "plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War".

(See: http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co...3/cr012903.htm)

So it floors me that people keep trying to pretend slavery wasn't a factor.  It was.  Was it the *only* factor?  No.  Clearly it wasn't.  Could slavery have been ended without the civil war?  Possibly.  Ron Paul gave his on "compensated emancipation" idea on Meet the Press.  Only Lincoln tried that and it didn't work for him.  The border states wanted more money the Lincoln was offering.  The congress thought Lincoln was offering too much.  Too little too late?  Maybe.  Were the tariffs an issue?  Of course.  But as someone pointed out such issues over federal taxation go all the way back to George Washington and the Whiskey rebellion.  Had those rebels been more successful in gaining support for their cause perhaps Washington would be the one villified.  Or perhaps Andrew Jackson when South Carolina threaded to secede over tariffs and he threatened to hang everyone involved including his former vice president John Calhoun.  

But alas the SHTF under Lincoln and there we have it.  Slavery wasn't an issue for Washington or Jackson.  They both owned slaves and stopping the "expansion of slavery" wasn't on the table for them *like it clearly was for Lincoln*.  There were also no disputes over enforcement of the fugitive slave laws with those to presidents.

What's missing from everyone's analysis is the fact that Britain wanted to perpetually relegate America to "colony" status.  Growing industry in America was a threat to GB.  They much preferred buying cotton cheap from their colonies and then selling their colonies expensive manufactured goods.  Yes that's free market.  But it also exposes the big picture of why England initially backed the south and why Russia sent ships to aid the north.  It also shows a way the problem could have been solved that even Ron Paul didn't think of or if he did he didn't elaborate on.  The republicans should have proposed using *all* of the money taken from the tariffs to pay for compensated emancipation.  Northern industry would still get its chance to be established.  Southern states would get money for their "property".  And northern taxpayers wouldn't have to feel like they were getting shafted to pay for southerners simply giving slaves their freedom.  Win-win for everybody.  But alas that didn't happen.

One final note.  Most people also seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that the end of slavery *helped* the south industrialize.  I urge everyone to take the tour of the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham Alabama.  The first leg of the tour seems irrelevant but it's really not.  It talks about how Birmingham quickly industrialized after the end of the civil war to become a steel making center.  What is not openly stated, but obvious to any astute observer, is that ending slavery was a necessary prerequisite.  Making steel back then was both a very labor intensive *and a very dangerous* undertaking.  Imagine a slave uprising around open pits of molten lava.    Also the risk of slave sabotage in an industrial setting is *much* worse than in an agricultural one.  Imagine the relative risk of loosening bolts on a wagon wheel to loosening bolts on a drop forge mechanism.  The nazi's attempted to use slave labor in their V2 rocket production.  Many V2's went off course because Jewish concentration camp victims would piss on the circuit boards.  When slavery ended in the south that opened up a large labor pool that could work in settings not amicable to forced labor.

Anyway, that's all I have to say.  I've said most of it before in countless other threads.  I leave you to your dixieland Lincoln hatefest.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## torchbearer

> *sigh* The never ending civil war argument.  Slavery was indeed a significant contributor to the civil war.  The states that seceded mentioned that in their declarations of secession.  Ron Paul mentioned slavery as a "mistake" that "plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War".
> 
> (See: http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co...3/cr012903.htm)
> 
> So it floors me that people keep trying to pretend slavery wasn't a factor.  It was.  Was it the *only* factor?  No.  Clearly it wasn't.  Could slavery have been ended without the civil war?  Possibly.  Ron Paul gave his on "compensated emancipation" idea on Meet the Press.  Only Lincoln tried that and it didn't work for him.  The border states wanted more money the Lincoln was offering.  The congress thought Lincoln was offering too much.  Too little too late?  Maybe.  Were the tariffs an issue?  Of course.  But as someone pointed out such issues over federal taxation go all the way back to George Washington and the Whiskey rebellion.  Had those rebels been more successful in gaining support for their cause perhaps Washington would be the one villified.  Or perhaps Andrew Jackson when South Carolina threaded to secede over tariffs and he threatened to hang everyone involved including his former vice president John Calhoun.  
> 
> But alas the SHTF under Lincoln and there we have it.  Slavery wasn't an issue for Washington or Jackson.  They both owned slaves and stopping the "expansion of slavery" wasn't on the table for them *like it clearly was for Lincoln*.  There were also no disputes over enforcement of the fugitive slave laws with those to presidents.
> 
> What's missing from everyone's analysis is the fact that Britain wanted to perpetually relegate America to "colony" status.  Growing industry in America was a threat to GB.  They much preferred buying cotton cheap from their colonies and then selling their colonies expensive manufactured goods.  Yes that's free market.  But it also exposes the big picture of why England initially backed the south and why Russia sent ships to aid the north.  It also shows a way the problem could have been solved that even Ron Paul didn't think of or if he did he didn't elaborate on.  The republicans should have proposed using *all* of the money taken from the tariffs to pay for compensated emancipation.  Northern industry would still get its chance to be established.  Southern states would get money for their "property".  And northern taxpayers wouldn't have to feel like they were getting shafted to pay for southerners simply giving slaves their freedom.  Win-win for everybody.  But alas that didn't happen.
> ...




And now we are all slaves to the federal plantation. How's that working out for you?

----------


## torchbearer

the best outcome would have been abolition of slavery with states rights intact.
i believe slavery would have been ended- regardless.

----------


## torchbearer

People watch too many movies. They start to believe everyone in the south lived in a big white house surrounded by 100 year old live oaks, and owns a huge stock of mules and slaves.
That is fantasy. Only the uber rich had plantation. The rest of the people here were share croppers and skill hands/merchants.

----------


## Justinjj1

The Civil War was about state's rights.  Especially the right of a state to completely deny the rights of blacks for completely arbitrary and cruel reasons.  The issue of slavery was primarily the reason why arguments over "state's rights" existed in the first place.  

The South seceded because Abraham Lincoln was the most anti-slavery president that had been elected.  True he never said that he wanted to abolish slavery, but he was adamantly opposed to slavery expanding westward.  The South knew that the rest of the country was growing and developing all aound them and that it was only a matter of time before they were completely outnumbered in Congress and slavery would eventually be phased out.  

I believe that Lincoln argued correctly that the Civil War was not an official war but a rebellion that was created by a small faction of the Southern public.  The secession conventions were dominated by the elite slavocracy and not the people.  Even if you believe that a state has the right to remove itself from the Union, you would have to concede that it would take a majority of people from the state to agree to it.  Some states like Mississippi and S.C had a majority of black people and they were not represented at all.  

Many poor and middle class whites that owned no slaves were dupped into supporting the cause because they believed they were defending their homeland from an invasion.  But it was an invasion that would have never happened if the planter class elites would have never got them into the mess in the first place.

----------


## Dieseler

> People watch too many movies. They start to believe everyone in the south lived in a big white house surrounded by 100 year old live oaks, and owns a huge stock of mules and slaves.
> That is fantasy. Only the uber rich had plantation. The rest of the people here were share croppers and skill hands/merchants.


Yep, I'm quite sure my ancestors drug a sack on hands an knees down them rows right along with a slave. I know for a fact my own Grand parents picked cotton and I'm as white as the driven snow.

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## torchbearer

> The Civil War was about state's rights.  Especially the right of a state to completely deny the rights of blacks for completely arbitrary and cruel reasons.  The issue of slavery was primarily the reason why arguments over "state's rights" existed in the first place.  
> 
> The South seceded because Abraham Lincoln was the most anti-slavery president that had been elected.  True he never said that he wanted to abolish slavery, but he was adamantly opposed to slavery expanding westward.  The South knew that the rest of the country was growing and developing all aound them and that it was only a matter of time before they were completely outnumbered in Congress and slavery would eventually be phased out.  
> 
> I believe that Lincoln argued correctly that the Civil War was not an official war but a rebellion that was created by a small faction of the Southern public.  The secession conventions were dominated by the elite slavocracy and not the people.  Even if you believe that a state has the right to remove itself from the Union, you would have to concede that it would take a majority of people from the state to agree to it.  Some states like Mississippi and S.C had a majority of black people and they were not represented at all.  
> 
> Many poor and middle class whites that owned no slaves were dupped into supporting the cause because they believed they were defending their homeland from an invasion.  But it was an invasion that would have never happened if the planter class elites would have never got them into the mess in the first place.


Maybe you should take a second to look at what they did to alexandria louisiana. (this was after lee's surrender)
they burned it to the ground. every last building.
that was after the union soldiers looted what they wanted, and killed anyone who resisted.
The federal government robbed and killed americans.

----------


## jmdrake

> And now we are all slaves to the federal plantation. How's that working out for you?


Better than being slave.  I can *leave* this federal plantation any time I like.  Nobody's stopping me (or *YOU* for that matter) from going to Mexico or Canada or any other country.  There is no "fugitive federal citizen" law.  You asked me a while back why blacks for the most part stick with the democratic party despite "sheet wearers" as you called them?  Well for one thing I've never seen what you described in Louisiana happening where I've lived in Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia.  But for another you don't typically see democrats trying to convince blacks that they would be better off under a system where they could be killed without trial and raped without recourse.  I'm for state sovereignty but I'm not an idiot.  Slavery sucked and there's no excuse defending it.  I understand better why influential black TV talk show host Tony Brown first joined the Republican party then left it in disgust.  And yes, I know you're not a Republican.  But I doubt he'd hang around the libertarian party long either if supporting southern slavery became some sort of litmus test for being "pro liberty".

I also notice that you haven't bothered addressing a single point I raised.  Interesting.

Regards,

John M. Drake

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## jmdrake

> People watch too many movies. They start to believe everyone in the south lived in a big white house surrounded by 100 year old live oaks, and owns a huge stock of mules and slaves.
> That is fantasy. Only the uber rich had plantation. The rest of the people here were share croppers and skill hands/merchants.


Most Americans don't own oil wells either.  That doesn't mean oil hasn't been a motivating factor for war.

----------


## jmdrake

> had the north won the war in the first couple of years, there would have been no emancipation.
> The south holding its ground for three years caused it to happen.


Not true.  During the first two years of the civil war Lincoln offered compensated emancipation to the border states.  They didn't take it.  But it was offered.  Ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.  There were not enough "free" states prior to the civil war to force the issue.  That's why there were so many arguments about the *expansion* of slavery into the free territories.  A combination of offering compensated emancipation and pushing for new free states could have brought slavery to an end.

----------


## Dieseler

> Not true.  During the first two years of the civil war Lincoln offered compensated emancipation to the border states.  They didn't take it.  But it was offered.  Ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.  There were not enough "free" states prior to the civil war to force the issue.  That's why there were so many arguments about the *expansion* of slavery into the free territories.  A combination of offering compensated emancipation and pushing for new free states could have brought slavery to an end.


Go into a little more detail here Jm.

----------


## jmdrake

> The invention of tractors would have made hand labor obsolete.


The possibility of future technical advances does not excuse current tyranny.  That's like saying "Don't worry about the illegal organ trade.  Sometime in the future we'll be able to clone organs and it will be obsolete".  Besides technical advances do not always end the need for hand labor.  The invention of the cotton gin had the effect of *extending* slavery.  And the migrant farm worker issue *today* shows that in many cases agriculture is still manually intensive.




> You do realise the slave owners weren't killed in the war. Young men protecting their states died.


  Fail on two fronts.  One it diminishes the sacrifice of slave owners like Stonewell Jackson.  While I don't agree with the cause he fought for, I'm not going to pretend he didn't die for it.  Clearly he was a slave owner and clearly he was killed in the civil war.  And the fact that most soldiers weren't slave owners has zero relevance.  Most soldiers today have no real interest in the causes they are sent to die for.  The rich always manipulate the poor into fighting for them.




> If the north didn't want cotton- there would have been no war. fact.


 Every time I turn around I hear some new motivation ascribed to the "evil north".  Once it was "The North wanted to steal southern black labor".  (As if one man can truly own the labor of another).  Now it's "they wanted the cotton".  What's next?  The North was simply after the chitterlings and cornbread?  In non of the southern declarations was the word "cotton" ever mentioned.  But hey, you know better than those southern legislators did as to why the voted to secede.

----------


## Todd

> and to this day, the North is more segregated than the South.


Something conveniently denied by people in the North who still think we are backwards rednecks.

----------


## RonPaulFanInGA

I was born in the deep south and have lived here my whole life.  I had an ancestor who fight for the Confederacy with the Army of Tennessee.  So generally I'm a lot more biased towards supporting the confederacy, but will admit that slavery was its fatal flaw.

That said, Lincoln's pretense for war was flimsy.  Him blockading the south and calling for an army of 75,000 men to invade and kill people in response to a bombing (Fort Sumter) that resulted in exactly one casualty, that being a horse, was very extreme.

The war was directly cause by Lincoln.  South Carolina became the first state to leave in December 1860 only because of Lincoln's win November 1860.  That led to the war.  There would have been no civil war that resulted in 620,000 deaths had Breckinridge won.

----------


## randolphfuller

"Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: by Jeffrey Hummel is a good history of the Civil War.Should be available in most good libraries or can easily be purchased on Amazon.

----------


## jmdrake

> Go into a little more detail here Jm.


Sure.  The constitution protected the institution of slavery.  Lincoln knew that, the southern states knew that, everybody knew that.  It also required slaves who escaped to be returned.  (The "fugitive slave" laws).  But there were two questions regarding slavery that were open for debate.  1) Did the constitution guarantee the right of new states being admitted to the union to have slaves?  2) Was the federal government required to enforce fugitive slave laws?  Some states passed laws forbidding local law enforcement to assist in returning slaves.  So if the federal government refused to enforce such laws they were basically null and void.  Lincoln said in his first inaugural address that he realized slavery was protected by the constitution and that he would not try to end it.  But he also made it clear that he thought the question of the expansion of slavery and the enforcement of fugitive slave laws were up for debate.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
_Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say._

In the all of declarations of secession I've read states either harped on lack of enforcement of fugitive slave laws, restrictions of the expansion of slavery or both.  Mississippi put the issue bluntly.

http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html 
_It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion._ 

Now why did Mississippi and other states think that the policy of restricting the expansion of slavery would lead to _extinguishing_ it?  They don't say.  But considering both sides concede that slavery was protected by the constitution, it seems they were worried about anti slavery forces reaching a 2/3rds majority of the states.  Considering how much territory was unallocated at the time that was clearly possible.

See: http://thomaslegion.net/secessionofsouthernstates.html

Now here's were some southern apologists will point out Lincoln's support for the "permanent slavery amendment".  What they don't mention is that with a solid 2/3rds majority such an amendment would have been meaningless.  The anti slavery forces would have the votes to call a constitutional convention, scrap the whole bloody thing and re-write it to their liking.

Regardless those who passed the secession declarations were worried enough about this issue to included it.  And yes these men represented a minority of the total southern population, but that's not knew.  In every country the poor are manipulated to fight the wars of the rich.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> the best outcome would have been abolition of slavery with states rights intact.
> i believe slavery would have been ended- regardless.


Even though the South still had poll taxes in the 1960s.

----------


## jmdrake

> I was born in the deep south and have lived here my whole life.  I had an ancestor who fight for the Confederacy with the Army of Tennessee.  So generally I'm a lot more biased towards supporting the confederacy, but will admit that slavery was its fatal flaw.
> 
> That said, Lincoln's pretense for war was flimsy.  Him blockading the south and calling for an army of 75,000 men to invade and kill people in response to a bombing (Fort Sumter) that resulted in exactly one casualty, that being a horse, was very extreme.
> 
> The war was directly cause by Lincoln.  South Carolina became the first state to leave in December 1860 only because of Lincoln's win November 1860.  That led to the war.  There would have been no civil war that resulted in 620,000 deaths had Breckinridge won.


Alternatively Jefferson Davis could have taken the advice of his secretary of state Robert Toombs.

_Mr. president at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose every friend at the North.  You will wantonly strike a hornets nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm our and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it put us in the wrong it is fatal."_

----------


## YumYum

One thing to consider is that the North's racism was based on their belief that blacks were inferior and that they were a threat to the job market, since blacks would work for less money. Another thing to consider is that the North was very segregated in communities of Italian verses Irish, Polacks/Slovaks verses Germans, and the Jews were hated by all. There was a segregation mentality in the North.

In the South, blacks were looked upon as inferior, but they were more integrated into the white society than they were in the North; just as long as they knew their place. Southern people took pride in the fact that they "knew their n*****s", and would brag about how they knew how to handle blacks when they got "uppity". Slaves had value, just a prized race horse, and they were treated as such. That is why the belief that slaves were beat all the time is a myth. Would you beat your prized race horse? Slaves in the South were raised to be obedient to "Master", and their whole existence was only to please "Master", and since this is all they knew from birth their benevolence was sincere.

I live in the South and I sometimes wonder if the South would have ever given up slavery, because the majority of white Southern people today still hate blacks. But as I noted earlier, in early 1865 Jefferson Davis was willing to end the Civil War and give up slaves; he just wasn't willing to rejoin the Union. Given that, maybe slavery was not such a big issue after all. It possibly could have died out.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> That said, Lincoln's pretense for war was flimsy.  Him blockading the south and calling for an army of 75,000 men to invade and kill people in response to a bombing (Fort Sumter) that resulted in exactly one casualty, that being a horse, was very extreme.


FYI

The Civil War began with an orchestrated "event".  Fort Sumpter was just another 9/11, Pearl Harbor and/or Gulf of Tonkin.

*Lincoln and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception*
_by John V Denson_
(Chapter 8, page 231)
http://books.google.com/books?id=hJG...20shot&f=false

----------


## jmdrake

> One thing to consider is that the *North's racism was based on their belief that blacks were inferior* and that they were a threat to the job market, since blacks would work for less money. Another thing to consider is that the North was very segregated in communities of Italian verses Irish, Polacks/Slovaks verses Germans, and the Jews were hated by all. There was a segregation mentality in the North.



Yes there was competition in the northern job market because there were decent paying jobs to be had.  And large numbers of blacks migrated north as soon as they were able to "vote with their feet".




> In the South, blacks were looked upon as inferior, but they were more integrated into the white society than they were in the North; just as long as they knew their place. Southern people took pride in the fact that they "knew their n*****s", and would brag about how they knew how to handle blacks when they got "uppity". Slaves had value, just a prized race horse, and they were treated as such. That is why the belief that slaves were beat all the time is a myth. Would you beat your prized race horse? Slaves in the South were raised to be obedient to "Master", and their whole existence was only to please "Master", and since this is all they knew from birth their benevolence was sincere.


  Have you ever heard of a prize racehorse rebelling and killing everyone in sight? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner

And many slaves escaped, sabotaged workflows, went back to help free other slaves etc.  The systematic beating of slaves was in no way a "myth".  It was a necessity.  How do you think "uppity" slaves were handled?  Simply keeping a population enslaved from birth is not enough to fool them all into believing the slaver was "benevolence".  The first time a mothers child is sold away or a husband has to sit idly by while his wife is raped all feelings of "benevolence" disappear.




> I live in the South and I sometimes wonder if the South would have ever given up slavery, because the majority of white Southern people today still hate blacks. But as I noted earlier, in early 1865 Jefferson Davis was willing to end the Civil War and give up slaves; he just wasn't willing to rejoin the Union. Given that, maybe slavery was not such a big issue after all. It possibly could have died out.


Well I've lived in the south my entire life and I've never gotten the impression that most southern whites hate me.  That said I think slavery was motivated more by greed than by hate.  Look at  your point about Jefferson Davis.  What motivated him to consider giving up slavery during the middle of the civil war?  Was it a newfound respect for blacks?  Or the realization that with the northern blockade fully in place slaves were nothing but an economic liability?

----------


## Uncle Emanuel Watkins

> I don't think you're going to convince any Linoln-phile with logic, bro. :wink:


Most people are far too busy to be moved by logic.  Instead, we have to be envisioned.  Aside from this, any hater of Lincoln show they are naive because they fail to realize how no theory was ever developed in how our government should function.  Instead, our government was created to function as a necessary evil over the people while its establishers, our Christian Founding-Fathers sat in representing not the Lords over this new society, but playing the parts as the uncomely commoners being ruled over by it.   Also consider how "theoretical" science did not exist during the time of our Christian Founding-Fathers, being that they lived during the time of "natural law" science?  
Why confuse things?  According to our Christian Founding-Fathers, we don't need lawyers, historians, political scientists or any other expert explaining to us that which is self-evident and unalienable. 
According to their meaning, we aren't a nation of laws, with this designation going to the world outside our borders; but, we are a nation established on a Civil Purpose.  This Civil Purpose was established by natural law meaning that it overrides every long standing tradition and legal-precedent.

----------


## YumYum

> Yes there was competition in the northern job market because there were decent paying jobs to be had.  And large numbers of blacks migrated north as soon as they were able to "vote with their feet".
> 
> 
> 
>   Have you ever heard of a prize racehorse rebelling and killing everyone in sight? 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner
> 
> And many slaves escaped, sabotaged workflows, went back to help free other slaves etc.  The systematic beating of slaves was in no way a "myth".  It was a necessity.  How do you think "uppity" slaves were handled?  Simply keeping a population enslaved from birth is not enough to fool them all into believing the slaver was "benevolence".  The first time a mothers child is sold away or a husband has to sit idly by while his wife is raped all feelings of "benevolence" disappear.
> ...


While I love studying about the Civil War, I will never have the complete picture of what is real. Also, I give my opinions on this subject, which could very well be wrong. You make very good assessments of what happened, and I enjoy your posts. Please continue to share.

----------


## Bucjason

JMDrake has thourougly OWNED Torch in this thread with facts.

Nicely done.


Seeing these so-called "libertarians" put states rights above HUMAN rights is quite baffling also....These few seem to not mind tyranny , as long as thier tyranny is doled out at the local level...

----------


## JeNNiF00F00

> JMDrake has thourougly OWNED Torch in this thread with facts.
> 
> Nicely done.
> 
> 
> Seeing these so-called "libertarians" put states rights above HUMAN rights is quite baffling also....These few seem to not mind tyranny , as long as thier tyranny is doled out at the local level...


Says the Marxist Neocon.  You know nothing of Libertarianism.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> Seeing these so-called "libertarians" put states rights above HUMAN rights is quite baffling also....These few seem to not mind tyranny , as long as thier tyranny is doled out at the local level...


What in hell are you talking about?  Our Constitution is clear on what the federal government is allowed to be involved in.  Are you saying that you agree with our federal government overstepping their constitutional bounds?  Interesting.

----------


## tremendoustie

I support the use of force to end slavery, but not the use of force to compel states to remain part of the union. Military efforts should have been directed at freeing slaves, that's it.

Of course, it should have also been funded voluntarily, but that discussion's for another day ...

----------


## JeNNiF00F00

> I support the use of force to end slavery, but not the use of force to compel states to remain part of the union. Military efforts should have been directed at freeing slaves, that's it.


I believe Torchbearer said it well enough.  If Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he would have bought them, and simply freed them. Why use force?

----------


## specsaregood

> I support the use of force to end slavery, but not the use of force to compel states to remain part of the union. Military efforts should have been directed at freeing slaves, that's it.


But if the other states were not part of the union, then what you are supporting is foreign interventionism.  So do you support the US now going into other countries and freeing slaves in this day and age?

----------


## LibertyEagle

> I support the use of force to end slavery, but not the use of force to compel states to remain part of the union. Military efforts should have been directed at freeing slaves, that's it.


The thing is, before the North used military force to free the slaves in the South, maybe they should have FREED THE SLAVES IN THE NORTH FIRST, eh????

----------


## tremendoustie

> But if the other states were not part of the union, then what you are supporting is foreign interventionism.  So do you support the US now going into other countries and freeing slaves in this day and age?


That's why I added the bit about voluntary funding.

I support interventionism for purposes of human rights, but only if it is funded and staffed voluntarily.

----------


## tremendoustie

> The thing is, before the North used military force to free the slaves in the South, maybe they should have FREED THE SLAVES IN THE NORTH FIRST, eh????


Yes, they should have done that too.

Lincoln's motivation was "maintaining the union" above freeing the slaves. The civil war was immoral from the north's perspective because

1. It was staffed and funded involuntarily

2. It had purposes other than protecting innocents.

No one, no matter what country or state they claim to be part of, has a right to enslave another, however, and force is justified in defending the victims of slavery.

----------


## jmdrake

> JMDrake has thourougly OWNED Torch in this thread with facts.
> 
> Nicely done.
> 
> 
> Seeing these so-called "libertarians" put states rights above HUMAN rights is quite baffling also....These few seem to not mind tyranny , as long as thier tyranny is doled out at the local level...


We're arguing on the same side?    Oh well.  I've got to remember the 80 / 20 rule.  

Seriously though.  While these historical debate can be interesting (and I *do* learn something everytime even from the other side) it's not like any of us can go back in time and change what happened.  I hope we can all agree that slavery was wrong but that doesn't excuse everything Lincoln did either.  I'm glad my forebears got their freedom no matter how it happened, but it does bother me to hear Lincoln being invoked to justify suspending habeus corpus and trying civilians before military tribunals.  Then again I think Washington was wrong to put down the Whiskey rebellion and to agree to creating the first bank of the U.S.  We don't have to go along with bad precedent no matter who it came from.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> JMDrake has thourougly OWNED Torch in this thread with facts.
> 
> Nicely done.
> 
> 
> Seeing these so-called "libertarians" put states rights above HUMAN rights is quite baffling also....These few seem to not mind tyranny , as long as thier tyranny is doled out at the local level...


Sorry, Torch won hands down, IMO.

----------


## specsaregood

> No one, no matter what country or state they claim to be part of, has a right to enslave another, however, and force is justified in defending the victims of slavery.


Random thought.  I wonder what a study that analyzed the success of a people/culture that has BEEN freed vs. one that fought and won its own freedom would show.

----------


## Dieseler

> Random thought.  I wonder what a study that analyzed the success of a people/culture that has BEEN freed vs. one that fought and won its own freedom would show.


OoO

----------


## jmdrake

> I believe Torchbearer said it well enough.  If Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he would have bought them, and simply freed them. Why use force?


Ummmm....he tried to do that with the border states.  They wanted more money than he was offering and congress didn't want to pay that much.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...443ffcb5a5cce1

Had you been a northerner back in the early 1860s would you have been willing to pay more taxes in order to pay off southern states to do what they morally should have been willing to do for free?  That's why I suggested using the money from the tariffs to pay for the compensated emancipation.  Everybody wins that way.  (Well everybody except the slaves who aren't getting any back wages out of the deal but nothing is perfect).  Anyway.  None of us have a time machine so it's moot.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> Yes, they should have done that too.
> 
> Lincoln's motivation was "maintaining the union" above freeing the slaves. The civil war was immoral from the north's perspective because
> 
> 1. It was staffed and funded involuntarily
> 
> 2. It had purposes other than protecting innocents.
> 
> No one, no matter what country or state they claim to be part of, has a right to enslave another, however, and force is justified in defending the victims of slavery.


Horse patootie.  If Lincoln would have respected the South's RIGHT to secede from the Union, then hell no, they wouldn't have had any right to interfere in another sovereign nation's affairs.  That is, unless you agree with what our government is doing NOW by sticking their nose in other countries' affairs.  All for their own good, don't ya know. :/

----------


## jmdrake

> Sorry, Torch won hands down, IMO.


  I don't care if I "win" in your opinion or anyone else's, but torch didn't even attempt to answer any points.  His only comeback was asking me if I'd rather be a plantation slave or a "federal slave".  The answer is easy.  As a "federal slave" I can vote with my feet.  I sincerely doubt you, torch or anyone else would leave this country, as bad as it is, in exchange for yourself, your spouse and your children to be someone else's chattel.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## LibertyEagle

> Ummmm....he tried to do that with the border states.  They wanted more money than he was offering and congress didn't want to pay that much.
> 
> http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...443ffcb5a5cce1
> 
> Had you been a northerner back in the early 1860s would you have been willing to pay more taxes in order to pay off southern states to do what they morally should have been willing to do for free?  That's why I suggested using the money from the tariffs to pay for the compensated emancipation.  Everybody wins that way.  (Well everybody except the slaves who aren't getting any back wages out of the deal but nothing is perfect).  Anyway.  None of us have a time machine so it's moot.


You're acting like the Northern war of aggression was fought over slavery and it WAS NOT.

----------


## jmdrake

> Horse patootie.  If Lincoln would have respected the South's RIGHT to secede from the Union, then hell no, they wouldn't have had any right to interfere in another sovereign nation's affairs.  That is, unless you agree with what our government is doing NOW by sticking their nose in other countries' affairs.  All for their own good, don't ya know. :/


I'm curious.  In your opinion did France have a right to aid our nation in the revolutionary war against the British?  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_...olutionary_War

----------


## tremendoustie

> Horse patootie.  If Lincoln would have respected the South's RIGHT to secede from the Union, then hell no, they wouldn't have had any right to interfere in another sovereign nation's affairs.  That is, unless you agree with what our government is doing NOW by sticking their nose in other countries' affairs.  All for their own good, don't ya know. :/


I don't agree with the interventionism because it is funded by force. It has also been extremely harmful towards innocents, and has done far more to destroy lives than protect them. Even the original intent was not humanitarian, but rather the enforcement of hegemony.

A government has no more right to abuse people than an individual or other organization, however, and if I see a government committing oppression or genocide, I absolutely would voluntarily support a well conceived and planned effort to liberate those people.

----------


## tremendoustie

> Random thought.  I wonder what a study that analyzed the success of a people/culture that has BEEN freed vs. one that fought and won its own freedom would show.


No doubt it would show that peoples who win their own freedom are more likely to maintain it, because they have demonstrated the capability and will to win it. That does not mean that innocents should not be defended.

If a local shopkeeper is under the thumb of the mob, and he is able to successfully wrest control of his business away from them, surely he will be able to maintain that freedom. That does not mean that a good person, with the capability to help, will sit quietly by as he is abused, in hopes that he will someday become capable of obtaining his own liberty.

I'd let the south leave the union, but I would be working to organize crack militias dedicated to raiding plantations and freeing slaves, to be sent to Canada or wherever they would be safe.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> I'm curious.  In your opinion did France have a right to aid our nation in the revolutionary war against the British?  
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_...olutionary_War


Red herring.  Not biting, but thanks.

----------


## Dieseler

I'm pretty sure Brent will be back John.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> I don't agree with the interventionism because it is funded by force. It has also been extremely harmful towards innocents, and has done far more to destroy lives than protect them. Even the original intent was not humanitarian, but rather the enforcement of hegemony.
> 
> A government has no more right to abuse people than an individual or other organization, however, and if I see a government committing oppression or genocide, I absolutely would voluntarily support a well conceived and planned effort to liberate those people.


As long as you do not use the force of government to carry out your personal beliefs, I have no problem with your stance.  So, if you are saying that you would go into another country with other like-minded individuals to right some perceived wrong, then power to you.  But, a government's might should be left out of it; whether they are voluntarily staffed or not.

----------


## jmdrake

> You're acting like the Northern war of aggression was fought over slavery and it WAS NOT.


 So you say.  But just because you claim something to be true doesn't make it so.  Ron Paul was correct when he said that slavery was not only a mistake, but that it also led, along with other factors, to the civil war.

Anyway I was responding to a specific question someone raised about Lincoln not buying the slaves to set them free.  History shows that he tried.  History also shows that the southern states in the declarations of secession listed northern antagonism towards slavery, Lincoln's antagonism against slavery, the north's attempts to restrict slavery from expanding to the other territories and northern states refusals to cooperate with the fugitive slave laws as *major reasons* in there decision to secede.  I've posted all of that information *along with all relevant links* earlier in this discussion so I'm at a loss as to why you just want to jump in at this juncture when I'm not even making that point.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## jmdrake

> Red herring.  Not biting, but thanks.


In other words you don't have a good answer.  I understand.  And you're welcome.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> You're acting like the Northern war of aggression was fought over slavery and it WAS NOT.


+a zillion

----------


## specsaregood

> No doubt it would show that peoples who win their own freedom are more likely to maintain it, *because they have demonstrated the capability and will to win it*.


I think it might be a tad bit more to it as well.  It would represent a change in mindset from that of a slave to that of a freeman.  Some people are happy or content being controlled, others are not.  ANYBODY or group can be free, if they are willing to die for it.  When comparing death to slavery it seems most decide that slavery aint that bad.    Not promoting slavery or arguing based on morality, just stating the facts.

----------


## tremendoustie

> As long as you do not use the force of government to carry out your personal beliefs, I have no problem with your stance.  So, if you are saying that you would go into another country with other like-minded individuals to right some perceived wrong, then power to you.  But, a government's might should be left out of it; whether they are voluntarily staffed or not.


Yep, that's what I'm saying .

In order for it to be moral, by my standard, they would need to not only be voluntarily staffed, but voluntarily funded as well -- and I'm not sure that a voluntarily funded organization would be considered a government anyway -- more like a charity or business.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> So you say.  But just because you claim something to be true doesn't make it so.  Ron Paul was correct when he said that slavery was not only a mistake, but that it also led, along with other factors, to the civil war.
> 
> Anyway I was responding to a specific question someone raised about Lincoln not buying the slaves to set them free.  History shows that he tried.  History also shows that the southern states in the declarations of secession listed northern antagonism towards slavery, Lincoln's antagonism against slavery, the north's attempts to restrict slavery from expanding to the other territories and northern states refusals to cooperate with the fugitive slave laws as *major reasons* in there decision to secede.  I've posted all of that information *along with all relevant links* earlier in this discussion so I'm at a loss as to why you just want to jump in at this juncture when I'm not even making that point.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake


RP disagrees with you, FWIW

YouTube - Ron Paul on the American Civil War

----------


## LibertyEagle

> Yep, that's what I'm saying .
> 
> In order for it to be moral, by my standard, they would need to not only be voluntarily staffed, but voluntarily funded as well -- and I'm not sure that a voluntarily funded organization would be considered a government anyway -- more like a charity or business.


Well, here's the thing, beyond the voluntary nature of it, I wouldn't want our country to be ill-perceived, thus inviting blowback, because of some action by this "voluntary group".  Therefore, it must not have anything to do with the government.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> In other words you don't have a good answer.  I understand.  And you're welcome.


No, that's not it at all.  You have a habit of derailing from the subject at hand, when you do not want to address it.  I refuse to play that game with you.

----------


## tremendoustie

> Well, here's the thing, beyond the voluntary nature of it, I wouldn't want our country to be ill-perceived, thus inviting blowback, because of some action by this "voluntary group". Therefore, it must not have anything to do with the government.


That's a fair point. Really, people shouldn't associate the actions of the government with the people either, but they often do.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> RP disagrees with you, FWIW

----------


## JeNNiF00F00

> Ummmm....he tried to do that with the border states.  They wanted more money than he was offering and congress didn't want to pay that much.
> 
> http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...443ffcb5a5cce1
> 
> Had you been a northerner back in the early 1860s would you have been willing to pay more taxes in order to pay off southern states to do what they morally should have been willing to do for free?  That's why I suggested using the money from the tariffs to pay for the compensated emancipation.  Everybody wins that way.  (Well everybody except the slaves who aren't getting any back wages out of the deal but nothing is perfect).  Anyway.  None of us have a time machine so it's moot.


The North simply should have stopped selling those slaves to the south.  Wouldn't you think?  I think both sides were at fault for slavery.  It was WRONG.  No one is advocating slavery here.  I think we can all agree that we are against slavery.  Most of us feel like modern day slaves to our government at the moment.  

Most of the people living in the south, AND some people living up in the North as well, who side with the confederacy are not racist rednecks, but we are concerned with the tyranny that the Federal government forced upon us then, and continues to force upon us today.  Just look at what the Union has done and is doing to this day.  How many countries does the US have occupy before we wake up?  How many innocent civilians have been killed by the US?  They are doing to these countries what they did to the south. They are lying to our people, and they are lying to the military.  This is the problem that I personally have against the Union, and is why I stand by the confederacy.  

You are correct.  We have no time machine to go back and change things.  However we can join together as northerners and southerners, and fight this.  How many more people have to die?  How much of OUR money are they going to continue to spend to do it in our name?  Its not us as a people that want any of this.  Its the same Marxist views given to Lincoln that we are expressing today on other countries.  We are all being turned into slaves, if people cannot see this then we have already lost.

----------


## Old Ducker

Without the War of Northern Aggression, how much longer would slavery have existed in the US (or the Confederacy).  Five years?  Ten? 

Well that's certainly worth the destruction of the Constitution and half a million deaths.  Yeah.  Imagine, had the Confederacy survived, North America might be home to four or five republics, each more concerned with keeping watch on each other than killing brown people in far away places.  Wouldn't that be nice.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> 


I'm not sure why you quoted that.   The link seems to still work in my previous post.  I actually agree with you in this thread, so I hope you don't think I was disagreeing with you.  I was referring to jmdrake.

----------


## NoHero

> We're arguing on the same side?    Oh well.  I've got to remember the 80 / 20 rule.  
> 
> Seriously though.  While these historical debate can be interesting (and I *do* learn something everytime even from the other side) it's not like any of us can go back in time and change what happened.  I hope we can all agree that slavery was wrong but that doesn't excuse everything Lincoln did either.  I'm glad my forebears got their freedom no matter how it happened, but it does bother me to hear Lincoln being invoked to justify suspending habeus corpus and trying civilians before military tribunals.  Then again I think Washington was wrong to put down the Whiskey rebellion and to agree to creating the first bank of the U.S.  We don't have to go along with bad precedent no matter who it came from.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake


I agree. It's all happened and done with; the only thing we can do now as liberty activists is to change the way the brainwashed in this country views states' rights and not have them equate it to slavery in the civil war. It's a totally different issue.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> Without the War of Northern Aggression, how much longer would slavery have existed in the US (or the Confederacy).  Five years?  Ten?


In the Upper South, slavery was on the way out.

Not so in the Deep South.  Given that the South kept poll taxes until the 1960s, and only got rid of them because of a Constitutional amendment, it is hard to imagine being gone in the Deep South for at least 50 years.

The total number of slaves in the South was increasing in 1860, not decreasing.

----------


## TruckinMike

> ...Lincoln's motivation was "maintaining the union" above freeing the slaves.



Lincoln's response to Horace Greeley's  August 22, 1862 open letter  "The Prayer of Twenty Millions"...




> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union;


Emancipation proclamation effects:
from wiki --- _The Proclamation was issued in two parts. The first part, issued on September 22, 1862, was a preliminary announcement outlining the intent of the second part, which officially went into effect 100 days later on January 1, 1863, during the second year of the Civil War. It was Abraham Lincoln's declaration that all slaves would be permanently freed in all areas of the Confederacy that had not already returned to federal control by January 1863. The ten affected states were individually named in the second part (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina). Not included were the Union slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Also not named was the state of Tennessee, which was at the time more or less evenly split between Union and Confederacy. Specific exemptions were stated for areas also under Union control on January 1, 1863, namely 48 counties that would soon become West Virginia, seven other named counties of Virginia including Berkeley and Hampshire counties which were soon added to West Virginia, New Orleans and 13 named parishes nearby._


TMike

----------


## QueenB4Liberty

> You forgot to mention the total war that he inflicted upon southern civilians.  Also, he didn't free the slaves.  He just turned all of us into slaves under the govt.


Didn't he also throw dissidents in jail?

But yeah, he was horrible.

----------


## YumYum

I have a question for states rights advocates. Do you think it was appropriate that both Eisenhower and Kennedy used the National Guard to end segregation when the Southern governors refused to cooperate?

----------


## LibertyEagle

> I'm not sure why you quoted that.   The link seems to still work in my previous post.  I actually agree with you in this thread, so I hope you don't think I was disagreeing with you.  I was referring to jmdrake.


lol.

No.  I'm not sure why the image isn't displaying.  It is an animated gif of a basketball player doing a slam dunk.

----------


## jmdrake

> The North simply should have stopped selling those slaves to the south.  Wouldn't you think?  I think both sides were at fault for slavery.  It was WRONG.  No one is advocating slavery here.  I think we can all agree that we are against slavery.  Most of us feel like modern day slaves to our government at the moment.


Ummmm....you know that the slave trade ended long before the civil war right?    That's the problem with these discussions and why I avoided this one in particular for a long time and probably should have continued to do so.  Some people are *SOOOO* anxious to justify the south that they feel the need to make up history.  I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The south was *not* 100% wrong in the civil war.  But that doesn't mean people have to try to obfuscate its role in perpetuating slavery.




> Most of the people living in the south, AND some people living up in the North as well, who side with the confederacy are not racist rednecks, but we are concerned with the tyranny that the Federal government forced upon us then, and continues to force upon us today.


I have not called anyone "racist" or "redneck".  And there were racists in the north.  Lincoln was racist.  And I said in my first post that the tariff was wrong.  But so was the excise tax that led to the Whiskey rebellion that George Washington put down.  But southerners give him a pass.  Why is that?  Washington also created the first bank of the U.S.  But we just all collectively ignore that.  Why?  Tariffs were also an issue when Andrew Jackson was president.  South Carolina threatened to secede then and "Old Hickory" threatened to hang all involved including his former VP John Calhoun.  But you don't see people starting "Andrew Jackson was a tyrant" thread.  It's also interesting to note that South Carolina wasn't able to get other states to go along with secession until they felt slavery was threatened.  

Also you need to remember that the reasons why rank and file soldiers fight are often divorced for the reasons that their leaders *really* send them to war.  For example 70% of Americans at one time thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.  The leaders clearly knew that wasn't true.  The leaders manipulate the dumb masses for their own agenda.




> Just look at what the Union has done and is doing to this day.  How many countries does the US have occupy before we wake up?  How many innocent civilians have been killed by the US?  They are doing to these countries what they did to the south. They are lying to our people, and they are lying to the military.


And that really just proves my point.  The southern leaders wrote down *on paper* their reasons for going to war.  But did they communicate that to every illiterate "Johnny Reb" they had up on the front lines?  Did they tell them "By the way.  Even if we win this thing your life is still gonna suck.  We're still going to look down on you as nothing but a whigger.  We're still going to cheat you when you bring your cotton to gin.  And we're still going to suppress your wages by having a free labor force."  Really, it's funny how some people think that only northern politicians were capable of lying to their own people.




> This is the problem that I personally have against the Union, and is why I stand by the confederacy.


You should stand with neither.  Both were controlled by corrupt politicians who lied to their own people.





> You are correct.  We have no time machine to go back and change things.  However we can join together as northerners and southerners, and fight this.  How many more people have to die?  How much of OUR money are they going to continue to spend to do it in our name?  Its not us as a people that want any of this.  Its the same Marxist views given to Lincoln that we are expressing today on other countries.  We are all being turned into slaves, if people cannot see this then we have already lost.


And the south was controlled by fascists.  People who believed they had the right to have total dominion over the life of another for the sake of their own greedy gain.  That doesn't mean all southerners were fascists.  But the ruling elite were.  The ruling elite always suck.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## Bucjason

> You're acting like the Northern war of aggression was fought over slavery and it WAS NOT.


...and you are acting like it wasn't even a factor , and it WAS . It was absolutely a factor in the road to war, and the South even gave it as one of thier reasons for secession. 

Even if ending slavery was only %1 of the motivation to abolish the confederacy ( and it was more) , it makes it justified according to our own Declaration of Independence , because slavery is the worse offense to liberty you can possibly have !

----------


## Bucjason

> We're arguing on the same side?    Oh well.  I've got to remember the 80 / 20 rule.  
> 
> Seriously though.  While these historical debate can be interesting (and I *do* learn something everytime even from the other side) it's not like any of us can go back in time and change what happened.  I hope we can all agree that slavery was wrong but that doesn't excuse everything Lincoln did either.  I'm glad my forebears got their freedom no matter how it happened, but it does bother me to hear Lincoln being invoked to justify suspending habeus corpus and trying civilians before military tribunals.  Then again I think Washington was wrong to put down the Whiskey rebellion and to agree to creating the first bank of the U.S.  We don't have to go along with bad precedent no matter who it came from.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake


80/20 rule for sure , lol 

It cracks me up that these people are still repeating the same talking points-- " the war wasn't even about slavery" , " We are ALL slaves now" , "Lincoln was the devil" -- but not one of them has taken on the task of arguing against the historical FACTS you laid out against Torch...

----------


## Bucjason

> Horse patootie.  If Lincoln would have respected the South's RIGHT to secede from the Union, then hell no, they wouldn't have had any right to interfere in another sovereign nation's affairs.  That is, unless you agree with what our government is doing NOW by sticking their nose in other countries' affairs.  All for their own good, don't ya know. :/


We are not talking about a different sovereign nation , we are talking about states in this union , who's people were supposedly protected by the rights granted them in the COnstitution . 

Wanting the right to deny those American citizens THIER god-given rights , is not a legitimate reason for secession . It makes the secession request invalid from the get-go....DOn't believe me ?? Read the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,  That 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, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."


Once again ...some rights are more important than others. Our inalienable rights as human beings are more important than "states" rights. The fact that you would argue in favor of a government that promoted enslaving it's citizens is troubling ...

----------


## CharlesTX

Great discussion.  I really wish we had the internet when I was in high school.  My history papers would be complete and I would probably be labelled as a nut for writing it.

----------


## TruckinMike

> ...that all men are created equal,


And that is where your argument falls to pieces. In general, slaves were considered to be less than man. Not equal, a lesser race. *Thats the way it was*. It was wrong. They were racists, but there is nothing I or you can do about it. The fact is that you have to take that position when arguing the founders points, otherwise your arguments are based on fluff. A wannabe truth, but not truth.

So when you say



> ...some rights are more important than others. Our inalienable rights as human beings are more important than "states" rights. The fact that you would argue in favor of a government that promoted enslaving it's citizens is troubling ...


You are misconstruing the intent of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was written for Non-slaves. Does 3/5 of a person ring a bell?




> In 1787 - The three-fifths compromise is found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:
> 
> “ 	Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.


Sometimes the truth hurts. I don't like it, I'm sure that you don't like it. But when forming an argument one must look at facts and not fluff.

Sorry, I'm not trying to irritate you, I just think people need to get beyond that misconception and false argument.

TMike

----------


## Kevin_Kennedy

> Didn't he also throw dissidents in jail?
> 
> But yeah, he was horrible.


Yes.  He also shut down opposition newspapers in the north and deported an Ohio Congressman, Clement L. Vallandigham, to the Confederacy for speaking out against him.  Vallandigham then made his way to Canada and ran a campaign for Ohio Governor from Canada, but was unsuccessful.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> You are misconstruing the intent of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was written for Non-slaves. Does 3/5 of a person ring a bell?


The 3/5th rule provided an incentive for the South to free slaves.  If they did, they got extra seats in the House and more votes in the Electoral College.  The North took advantage of this provision.

----------


## YumYum

> I have a question for states rights advocates. Do you think it was appropriate that both Eisenhower and Kennedy used the National Guard to end segregation when the Southern governors refused to cooperate?


Please answer my question. If you do not understand the point of my question I will explain it to you. They states refused to end segregation in public education. They refused to stop mistreating blacks, violating their human rights (are you paying attention anti-abortionists?) It took the Federal government to stand up to the states to put an end to their violation of human rights. This is proof that we need a central government that is more powerful than the state governments. The Federal government protects human rights more than the states.

----------


## Dieseler

> Please answer my question. If you do not understand the point of my question I will explain it to you. They states refused to end segregation in public education. They refused to stop mistreating blacks, violating their human rights (are you paying attention anti-abortionists?) It took the Federal government to stand up to the states to put an end to their violation of human rights. This is proof that we need a central government that is more powerful than the state governments. The Federal government protects human rights more than the states.


Yay Federal Goober-$MINT.
Yay Plantation.
Yay for the Pet Class.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Please answer my question. If you do not understand the point of my question I will explain it to you. They states refused to end segregation in public education. They refused to stop mistreating blacks, violating their human rights (are you paying attention anti-abortionists?) It took the Federal government to stand up to the states to put an end to their violation of human rights. This is proof that we need a central government that is more powerful than the state governments. The Federal government protects human rights more than the states.



Yeah, let's expand the plantation and make EVERYONE a slave of the Feds.  That'll help.

----------


## Dieseler

> Yeah, let's expand the plantation and make EVERYONE a slave of the Feds.  That'll help.


Damn HB, I just had a dejavu there...
What am I thinking of?
Like I had just run up this row (maybe chased somebody) before but I can not remember where.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Damn HB, I just had a dejavu there...
> What am I thinking of?
> Like I had just run up this row (maybe chased somebody) before but I can not remember where.



Sorry, didn't mean to copy you...I didn't get to your post before I responded.

----------


## Dieseler

> Sorry, didn't mean to copy you...I didn't get to your post before I responded.


I didn't mean it that way. 

It was another thread form yesterday.
I remembered.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> I didn't mean it that way. 
> 
> It was another thread form yesterday.
> I remembered.


oic.  I hope it was a pleasant experience for you.   I was doing a lot of things yesterday, and I don't remember the exact incident you're thinking of.

----------


## Bucjason

> And that is where your argument falls to pieces. In general, slaves were considered to be less than man. Not equal, a lesser race. *Thats the way it was*. It was wrong. They were racists, but there is nothing I or you can do about it. The fact is that you have to take that position when arguing the founders points, otherwise your arguments are based on fluff. A wannabe truth, but not truth.
> 
> So when you say
> 
> 
> You are misconstruing the intent of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was written for Non-slaves. Does 3/5 of a person ring a bell?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It doesn't matter if it's true. What matters is it was wrong , and a violation of human rights by government - tyranny. Therefore we had the RIGHT , even a "DUTY" according to our founders , to change it.


Bottom Line: All this demonization of Lincoln is really tiresome on this board. Was he perfect ? No. But, geeeeez ,he wasn't the spawn of satan like some on this board make out either....and, in the end, he will always be revered in american history because slavery DID end on his watch .(PERIOD, regardless of the "real" reasons you THINK we went to war) That is one of the biggest wins for liberty in our nation's history.Whether you like the fact it was forced on the states or not , thousands upon thousands were liberated as an end result, so get over it already people....

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> It doesn't matter if it's true. What matters is it was wrong , and a violation of human rights by government - tyranny. Therefore we had the RIGHT , even a "DUTY" according to our founders , to change it.
> 
> 
> Bottom Line: All this demonization of Lincoln is really tiresome on this board. Was he perfect ? No. But, geeeeez ,he wasn't the spawn of satan like some on this board make out either....and, in the end, he will always be revered in american history because slavery DID end on his watch .(PERIOD, regardless of the "real" reasons you THINK we went to war) That is one of the biggest wins for liberty in our nation's history.Whether you like the fact it was forced on the states or not , thousands upon thousands were liberated as an end result, so get over it already people....


And feel-goodism triumphs over facts and principles once again.  (as I said before, thousands were freed, but millions were enslaved)

----------


## Dieseler

Buc?
Is you so excited to be a massa or is you so excited to be a slave?

----------


## YumYum

> Yay Federal Goober-$MINT.
> Yay Plantation.
> Yay for the Pet Class.


If the question I presented was posted in an academic environment and you gave the response that you just gave me, people would think that you are not educated. I know you are educated. You are brilliant. But could you please answer my question on a level that is a notch above grunts and groans?

----------


## Dieseler

> If the question I presented was posted in an academic environment and you gave the response that you just gave me, people would think that you are not educated. I know you are educated. You are brilliant. But could you please answer my question on a level that is a notch above grunts and groans?


Why thank you my little Geisha girl.

----------


## YumYum

> Yeah, let's expand the plantation and make EVERYONE a slave of the Feds.  That'll help.


That doesn't answer my question. If you believe that the states should not be in submission to the Federal government, do you then think it was inappropriate for Eisenhower and Kennedy to call in the National Guard to end segregation? Jesus, do you know how to answer with a simple Yes or No answer?

----------


## YumYum

> Why thank you my little Geisha girl.


You answered my question.

----------


## Dieseler

> You answered my question.


Educated?
Yes.
10th grade.
Thanks.
That's like a college degree by today's standard.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> That doesn't answer my question. If you believe that the states should not be in submission to the Federal government, do you then think it was inappropriate for Eisenhower and Kennedy to call in the National Guard to end segregation? Jesus, do you know how to answer with a simple “Yes” or “No” answer?


No, I don't believe using force ended segregation.  It created a litany of laws, but it didn't fundamentally change people's hearts and minds.  Ending hatred requires enlightenment and time, not laws and coercion.  There was still formal segregation in the forms of separate fountains, bathrooms, etc (later changed to "seperate but equal" by the supreme court).  In Lincoln's day, blacks were lucky to get "separate but unequal".  But none of this legal nonsense ended segregation-people chose to.  Laws are arbitrary-people are real.

----------


## YumYum

> No, I don't believe using force ended segregation.  It created a litany of laws, but it didn't fundamentally change people's hearts and minds.  Ending hatred requires enlightenment and time, not laws and coercion.  There was still formal segregation in the forms of separate fountains, bathrooms, etc (later changed to "seperate but equal" by the supreme court).  In Lincoln's day, blacks were lucky to get "separate but unequal".  But none of this legal nonsense ended segregation-people chose to.  Laws are arbitrary-people are real.


Thank you for responding to my question. When the National Guard showed up to protect the black kids to go to class unmolested, this was done by use of force. The white kids hurled insults to the black kids but did not hit them; otherwise the white kids would have been shot on the spot by the Guard. This was coercion by force. Both Eisenhower and especially Kennedy tried to reason with the Southern governors, but to no avail. All the sweet talk in the world wouldn’t change the governor’s minds. What then ended segregation was a superior force by the Federal government, which protected the human rights of African Americans. This example and others show that you need a strong central government to keep in line a state government when the state government resorts to tyranny.

----------


## Dieseler

> Thank you for responding to my question. When the National Guard showed up to protect the black kids to go to class unmolested, this was done by use of force. The white kids hurled insults to the black kids but did not hit them; otherwise the white kids would have been shot on the spot by the Guard. This was coercion by force. Both Eisenhower and especially Kennedy tried to reason with the Southern governors, but to no avail. All the sweet talk in the world wouldn’t change the governor’s minds. What then ended segregation was a superior force by the Federal government, which protected the human rights of African Americans. This example and others show that you need a strong central government to keep in line a state government when the state government resorts to tyranny.


You are presenting the antithesis of and to everything I have ever learned at Ronpaulforums.
Thank you.

----------


## tremendoustie

> Thank you for responding to my question. When the National Guard showed up to protect the black kids to go to class unmolested, this was done by use of force. The white kids hurled insults to the black kids but did not hit them; otherwise the white kids would have been shot on the spot by the Guard. This was coercion by force.


They were defending the black kids from attack. That is not aggressive, it is defensive.

Of course, if we're going to really get into the issue, it becomes a bit more muddied, since the school itself was funded by aggressive force, as was the national guard.




> Both Eisenhower and especially Kennedy tried to reason with the Southern governors, but to no avail. All the sweet talk in the world wouldnt change the governors minds. What then ended segregation was a superior force by the Federal government, which protected the human rights of African Americans.


It was the force of one government against another. Really there was no moral actor in the situation. Both were funded by force.

Private individuals, however, do have a right to discriminate. They have a right to do business with whomever they choose. Of course, I find racial discrimination despicable, and would boycott and/or picket any business which used it. I would try to organize ostracism of them and their business until they were forced to change or leave the marketplace.

But, for me to stick a gun to their head, and force them to hire someone, or to use the government to that end, would be immoral.





> This example and others show that you need a strong central government to keep in line a state government when the state government resorts to tyranny.


What happens when the federal government becomes tyrannical, and there is then no escape? At least local government is usually more responsive -- and moving one city over or one state over is less arduous than changing countries.

Ultimately, though, we need to eliminate aggressive violence at all levels, whether by government, corporations, or individuals.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Thank you for responding to my question. When the National Guard showed up to protect the black kids to go to class unmolested, this was done by use of force. The white kids hurled insults to the black kids but did not hit them; otherwise the white kids would have been shot on the spot by the Guard. This was coercion by force. Both Eisenhower and especially Kennedy tried to reason with the Southern governors, but to no avail. All the sweet talk in the world wouldnt change the governors minds. What then ended segregation was a superior force by the Federal government, which protected the human rights of African Americans. *This example and others show that you need a strong central government to keep in line a state government when the state government resorts to tyranny.*


False.  It shows that social issues cannot be resolved by the government.  As I and others have illustrated, the Feds' intervention did not help the plight of blacks-it expanded the plantation.  

You again underestimate the power of ostracism.  If those who disagreed with the segregation policies simply refused to deal with them unless the policies changed, the massive loss of funds and trade would have naturally forced change.  The feds' use of force made the situation worse.  (this is plain to see if you observe the race-baiting and racism-based politics that goes on to this day)

----------


## YumYum

> False.  It shows that social issues cannot be resolved by the government.  As I and others have illustrated, the Feds' intervention did not help the plight of blacks-it expanded the plantation.  
> 
> You again underestimate the power of ostracism.  If those who disagreed with the segregation policies simply refused to deal with them unless the policies changed, the massive loss of funds and trade would have naturally forced change.  The feds' use of force made the situation worse.  (this is plain to see if you observe the race-baiting and racism-based politics that goes on to this day)


Correct me if I am wrong, but blacks today enjoy a significant amount of more freedom and liberty than before there was the Civil Rights Act or Affirmative Action. If we were to do it your way, it might have taken a couple of hundred years for the boycotts and protests to sink in with the bigots before they would change their course of action. The Federal government's way only took 45 years to have achieved what we have today.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Correct me if I am wrong, but blacks today enjoy a significant amount of more freedom and liberty than before there was the Civil Rights Act or Affirmative Action. If we were to do it your way, it might have taken a couple of hundred years for the boycotts and protests to sink in with the bigots before they would change their course of action. The Federal government's way only took 45 years to have achieved what we have today.


Ah, this is the fallacy of central planning.  It gives the impression that because anyone who breaks the law is greeted by force, the problem is "solved".  You're right that it may have taken longer, but we would still have the resources that Lincoln destroyed (people and property and wealth) and we would have GENUINE tolerance and enlightenment gained by experience and hard work-not "enlightenment by fiat". 

I'm a musician, and I can tell you that back in the Jazz age when racism was the norm, jazz and blues musicians and audiences of all races got along just fine.

It's much like just giving a person welfare when he could earn it-it devalues both the work and the money.

----------


## jmdrake

> Ah, this is the fallacy of central planning.  It gives the impression that because anyone who breaks the law is greeted by force, the problem is "solved".  You're right that it may have taken longer, but we would still have the resources that Lincoln destroyed (people and property and wealth) and we would have GENUINE tolerance and enlightenment gained by experience and hard work-not "enlightenment by fiat". 
> 
> I'm a musician, and I can tell you that back in the Jazz age when racism was the norm, jazz and blues musicians and audiences of all races got along just fine.
> 
> It's much like just giving a person welfare when he could earn it-it devalues both the work and the money.


Or maybe the south would have remained the same dirt poor boss-hog non industrial backwater that it was before the civil war.  After the war there was a big industrial boom in the south.  After desegregation  there was a technology, financial services and health services boom in the south.  Maybe all of this would have happened eventually anyway, maybe not.  It's funny how so many people in this thread are quick to point out how oppressed poor whites were before the civil war, but nobody seems to draw the connection as to who was causing the pre civil war oppression.  Hint, it wasn't Lincoln.  You don't like illegal immigrants taking jobs now for lower wages?  Say if today's unscrupulous businessmen were instead able to use slave labor?    Also consider this.  Today's biggest enemies of freedom are the international bankers.  *They backed the south during the civil war*!  That should tell you something.  Yes Lincoln violated the constitution and set up bad precedent just like Washington, Jackson, FDR and others.  But that doesn't mean the south was some antebellum utopia.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## YumYum

> Ah, this is the fallacy of central planning.  It gives the impression that because anyone who breaks the law is greeted by force, the problem is "solved".  You're right that it may have taken longer, but we would still have the resources that Lincoln destroyed (people and property and wealth) and we would have GENUINE tolerance and enlightenment gained by experience and hard work-not "enlightenment by fiat". 
> 
> I'm a musician, and I can tell you that back in the Jazz age when racism was the norm, jazz and blues musicians and audiences of all races got along just fine.
> 
> It's much like just giving a person welfare when he could earn it-it devalues both the work and the money.


My father and brother are both excellent musicians who can funk and play jazz. Blacks and Whites can now enjoy playing together in a club because of the Federal laws against segregation. Do you like free jazz? Tonal chaos? Absence of key?

----------


## Dieseler

Yeah, that's a stretch John.




> Today's biggest enemies of freedom are the international bankers.  *They backed the south during the civil war*!  That should tell you something.  Yes Lincoln violated the constitution and set up bad precedent just like Washington, Jackson, FDR and others.  But that doesn't mean the south was some antebellum utopia.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake


Link?

This is the best I can find..



> Lincoln allowed the bankers to push through the National Banking Act of 1863 in exchange for their support for the urgently needed additional Greenbacks. This act created "National Banks" (hence the N.A. still in use after National banks' names) and gave them a virtual tax-free status. The new banks also got the exclusive power to create the new form of money - National Bank Notes. Though Greenbacks continued to circulate, their quantity was limited and no more were authorized after the war.


...Everything else I run across had Illuminati in the article...

Just think, that's only 50 years before 1913.
So who did what?

----------


## YumYum

> Yeah, that's a stretch John.
> 
> 
> 
> Link?
> 
> This is the best I can find..
> 
> ...Everything else I run across had Illuminati in the article...
> ...



There were a lot of issues that caused the Civil War, and slavery was at the base of things. According to the book "The Creature from Jekyll Island", on page 374, author G. Edward Griffin quotes Otto von Bismark's observation:

"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over Europe and the world. Of course, in the "inner circle" of Finance, *the voice of the Rothschilds prevailed*. They saw an opportunity for prodigious booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, burdened with debt to the financiers,...in place of a vigorous Republic sufficient unto herself. *Therefore, they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to drive a wedge between the two parts of the Union....The rupture between the North and the South became inevitable;* the masters of European finance employed all their forces to bring it about and turn it to their advantage."

----------


## Dieseler

> There were a lot of issues that caused the Civil War, and slavery was at the base of things. According to the book "The Creature from Jekyll Island", on page 374, author G. Edward Griffin quotes Otto von Bismark's observation:
> 
> "The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over Europe and the world. Of course, in the "inner circle" of Finance, *the voice of the Rothschilds prevailed*. They saw an opportunity for prodigious booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, burdened with debt to the financiers,...in place of a vigorous Republic sufficient unto herself. *Therefore, they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to drive a wedge between the two parts of the Union....The rupture between the North and the South became inevitable;* the masters of European finance employed all their forces to bring it about and turn it to their advantage."


One could certainly argue that the Civil War was caused by International Bankers.
Who gave them their bank when the war was done?
Abraham Lincoln.
Bankers don't give a $#@! about slaves by the way.
Who is the Master on this Federal plantation?

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> My father and brother are both excellent musicians who can funk and play jazz. Blacks and Whites can now enjoy playing together in a club because of the Federal laws against segregation. Do you like free jazz? Tonal chaos? Absence of key?


Actually, blacks and whites played together long before these laws existed.  Check out Ken Burns' History of Jazz video series sometime.  

 I do somewhat like free jazz and "atonal" music, actually.  I played bass in my college jazz band.

----------


## YumYum

> Actually, blacks and whites played together long before these laws existed.  Check out Ken Burns' History of Jazz video series sometime.  
> 
>  I do somewhat like free jazz and "atonal" music, actually.  I played bass in my college jazz band.


Music is the universal language. My brother just played me "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman. Incredible. If the world could come together by music, there would be no wars nor hatered. There would would be no need for government, but the framers of the Constitution thought different. It is going to take more than music to bring us together.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

FWIW-

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo16.html

He (Lincoln) denounced “equality between the white and                black races” in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas;                stated in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay that *as monstrous as slavery                was, eliminating it would supposedly produce “a greater evil, even                to the cause of human liberty itself;”* and in his February 27, 1860                Cooper Union speech *advocated deporting black people so that “their                places be . . . filled up by free white laborers.”  In fact, Lincoln                clung to the colonization/deportation idea for the rest of his life. *                There are many other similar statements.   Thus, it is not at all                a stretch to conclude that Basler’s comment that Lincoln’s words                “lacked effectiveness” could be interpreted as that he was insincere.                 It also seems to me that Johannsen is right when he further states                that “Nearly all of [Lincoln’s] public statements on the slavery                question prior to his election as president were delivered with                political intent and for political effect.”  As David Donald wrote                of Lincoln in _Lincoln                Reconsidered,_ “politics was his life.”  In my book I do                not rely on Basler alone, but any means, to make my point that Lincoln’s                devotion to racial equality was dubious, at best.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo180.html

_I am humble                Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become                a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet,                like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . .                . in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective                tariff._
				~                Abraham Lincoln, 1832
 _Lincoln                and the Republicans “intended to enact a                high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead                law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize                a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities                for jobbery._
				~                David Donald, _Lincoln                Reconsidered_
 _[T]he                Thirty-seventh Congress [1861-63] ushered in four decades of neo-Hamiltonianism:                government for the benefit of the privileged few._
~ Leondard                Curry, _Blueprint                for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War                Congress_
	The very                first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated                as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I                have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution                of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful                right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”                He then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially                the same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause                of the Constitution “with no mental reservations”;                and supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the “Corwin                Amendment”) that would have prohibited the                federal government from _ever_ interfering with slavery. In                fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see that the                Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and                the House of Representatives as well).

In the same                speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and “bloodshed”                in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports,                which had just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration.                “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence,                and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority,”                he continued. Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect                the constitutional liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln                threatened to orchestrate the murder of many of those same citizens.                
	What on                earth was he talking about? What would cause a president to wage                war on his own citizens whose liberties he had just pledged to protect?                Lincoln explained in the very next sentence: “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_; but beyond what may be necessary for                these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against                or among the people anywhere” (emphasis added).                He promised to murder American citizens over tax collection.

This was necessary,                in the mind of Lincoln, if he was to deliver on what his party elected                him to do, as stated in the quotations at the beginning of this                article: to enact a high protective tariff, give away public lands                mostly to mining, railroad, and timber corporations, and lavish                the railroad corporations, among others, with corporate welfare.                This was the old “American System”                of Alexander Hamilton, which was endorsed for decades by Lincoln’s                Whig Party, and finally the Republicans. The overwhelming majority                of Southern congressmen had for decades been ardently opposed to                all of these things. But now, they must be forced into it, or so                Lincoln thought, for the sake of revenue collection. (At the time,                the tariff on imports accounted for more than 90 percent of all                federal tax revenues.)
Southerners                (as well as Northerners) needed to be forced to pay for the empire                of corporate welfare that the Republican Party hoped would keep                it in power for decades. (It did: the Republican Party essentially                monopolized national politics for the next half century.) That is                why there had to be a war, in the minds of Lincoln and the Republican                Party. They were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery explicitly                in the Constitution, but there would be no compromise over collecting                the newly doubled tariff.
	This is                also why opposition to war in the North had to be brutally repressed,                as it was, and a myth of “national unity”                invented. Much of the story of how the Republican Party engaged                in a Stalinist spasm of political repression is told by historian                William Marvel in his book, _Lincoln’s                Darkest Year: The War in 1862,_ which I highly recommend.                (Marvel is a renowned Lincoln scholar, winner of the Lincoln Prize                and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award.)
	The Republican                Party’s first act of political chicanery                was to begin kicking out of the U.S. Senate men like Democratic                Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who “lacked                enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln’s war against                the South,” writes Marvel. Using the excuse                that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright “had                known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi,                the Republican Party accused Senator Bright, one of the most senior                members of the Senate, of “retroactive treason”                and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote. 
	The _Congressional                Globe_ propagandized that “only a traitor                would advocate peace,” and newspapers all                over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party                (as was common during that period of time) quoted this statement.                As for Northern newspapers that did not support the waging of war                on their fellow Americans, the government had already begun to “squelch                the most effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing                equipment, and arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated                in that suppression of free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying                the offices of antiwar journals and attacking the editors.”

Even “Francis                Scott Key’s own grandson understood how dangerous                it had become to utter an unpopular opinion in the Land of the Free,” Marvel sarcastically writes. The grandson of the author of “The                Star Spangled Banner” was a Baltimore newspaper                editor who had been thrown into “the bowels                of a coastal fort” without any due process                for editorializing against the Lincoln administration’s                suppression of free speech.
	“The                party that dominated the United States Senate intended to formalize                the concept that meaningful dissent [to the political agenda of                the Republican Party] amounted to treason.”                After kicking Senator Bright out of office the leaders of the “Grand                Ole Party” then “wished                to end their day early in order to prepare for a grand party that                had occupied Mary Lincoln’s attention for                some weeks.” Marvel writes that White House                employees quickly began calling Mrs. Lincoln “the                American Queen” who, according to one senator,                appeared at the party “looking like she was                wearing a flower pot on her head.” Many of                the generals, admirals, Supreme Court justices, and foreign counsels                who attended the party, writes Marvel, considered Lincoln to be                “a vulgar provincial lacking in either sincerity                or statesmanlike qualities.” 
	Without                bothering to amend the Constitution, the Republican Party in 1861                invented a brand new definition of “treason.”                Treason, to Lincoln and the Republican Party, meant opposition _to                them._ This was very different from the actual definition of                treason in Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “Treason                against the United States shall consist only in levying War against                *them*, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and                Comfort” (emphasis added). As with all of                the founding documents, “United States”                is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states                (as they are called in the Declaration of Independence) are united                in forming a compact of states for their own mutual benefit. The                central government was to be _their agent_. 
Treason under                the Constitution consists of levying war against “*them*,”                the states. This of course is exactly what Lincoln and the Republican                Party did. Their war on the South was the very definition of treason                under the U.S. Constitution. Long before George Orwell’s                time, they distorted the meaning of the word to mean exactly the                opposite of what the founding fathers intended it to mean. As the                perpetrators of treason as defined by the Constitution, they accused                _their political opponents_ – those who opposed the levying                of war” on the states – of treason. 
	Marvel                writes that on his very first day in office as Lincoln’s                Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “would exercise                a cool, dictatorial demeanor” as he commenced                to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was                failing to recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact                that it was offering enlistment “bounties”                of as much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern                antiwar newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition                to the war in Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton “unilaterally                abolished” that freedom of speech on August                8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy of military conscription,                Stanton “appointed a special judge advocate                to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local and federal                law officers to imprison anyone who ‘may                be engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer                enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy .                . .’” The vagueness of this order allowed                the government to imprison anyone who said anything negative about                Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on fellow citizens.                
	“With                renewed vigor,” writes Marvel, “U.S.                marshals of predominantly Republican pedigree started rounding up                malcontents almost all of them Democrats on the excuse that their                vocal disagreement with presidential policies discouraged men from                volunteering.” Any Northern newspaper writers                who dared to criticize the “Grand Ole Party”                were treated very roughly. “In August of                1861 . . . a mob of Granite State soldiers attacked the editors                of a Democratic Concord [New Hampshire] newspaper and destroyed                their office.” “On                August 14 Dennis Mahony, the Irish editor of the _Dubuque Herald_,                was arrested by Iowa’s U.S. marshal, H.M.                Hoxie a crony of Republican governor Samuel Kirkwood . . . . Mahony                had been preaching peace for months . . .” “In                jail Mahony met David Sheward, his counterpart at the _Constitution                and Union_, of Fairfield, Iowa.” These                men joined in prison “the editors of Illinois                newspapers, some Illinois judges, and a few other celebrity dissidents                for the long journey to Washington,” where                they were thrown into “the Old Capitol Prison.”                Apparently, administration critics from “The                Land of Lincoln” had to be imprisoned in                Washington, D.C. where they could be especially carefully watched.                
	Newspapers                affiliated with the Republican Party “crowed                over the administration’s latest assault                on free speech,” which speaks volumes about                the rotten, totalitarian mindset of the scoundrels who ran the Republican                Party of the 1860s. Marvel writes of how “prominent                Democrats” all throughout the North were                jailed for such things as advising voters to vote for peace candidates;                laughing at a local “Home Guard”                company; or making “saucy”                comments about Lincoln. 
Even Democrats                running for Congress were imprisoned before election day, as was                the case of William J. Allen, a “peace Democrat                from southern Illinois” who “went                to jail in that mid-August orgy of repression because of opinions                expressed during a political campaign.” Allen                was running for reelection. Many of his fellow Democrats “were                not released [from one of Lincoln’s gulags]                until after the fall elections.” Some of                them languished in prison “until they relinquished                . . . the right to sue their arresting officers for false imprisonment.”                Thousands of Northern citizens “felt the                hand of some sheriff or provost marshal clutching their shoulders”                [figuratively speaking], writes Marvel. 
Republican                Party thugs were not above beatings _and murder_ of Northern                civilians who dissented from the “Grand Ole                Party” line. A group of Republican “volunteers                in the town of Troy [Kansas] severely beat a citizen whose political                observations they resented,” says Marvel.                “Political animosity led to the murder of                another man in southeastern Missouri.” The                local Republican Party-affiliated newspaper editorialized in favor                of the murder, writing that the man “had                no right to be disloyal to the government”                by advocating peace, equating the Republican Party with “government.”                The paper also named other local citizens who would make for “acceptable                targets.” Such were the origins of the “Grand                Ole Party.”

----------


## Bucjason

> And feel-goodism triumphs over facts and principles once again.  (as I said before, thousands were freed, but millions were enslaved)


Your argument that we are all slaves now is weak and pathetic . What our current government is doing now sucks, no doubt. But comparing it to REAL slavery?? Get serious . We are free to leave this country at any moment , and we can seek education and jobs that will actually pay us any amount we strive for.  We are also free to vote in NEW "masters" that will free us ... something real slaves could only dream of.

If you think this compares to REAL slavery , I have some chains to sell you...

----------


## tremendoustie

I'm no fan of the federal government, and I think the civil war caused far more pain and suffering than was necessary. That said, the "slavery" that we live in today is nothing near as bad as the true chattel slavery of that time. 

Yes, they steal the product of my labor, but I am not on a plantation in chains being whipped, etc, which anyone with any knowledge of slavery at that time can tell you would be far, far, far worse.

Yes, the federal government acted very wrongly -- perhaps even did more harm than good. But, I'm not going to pretend that what we have now is anything close to chattel slavery.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Your argument that we are all slaves now is weak and pathetic . What our current government is doing now sucks, no doubt. But comparing it to REAL slavery?? Get serious . We are free to leave this country at any moment , and we can seek education and jobs that will actually pay us any amount we strive for.  We are also free to vote in NEW "masters" that will free us ... something real slaves could only dream of.
> 
> If you think this compares to REAL slavery , I have some chains to sell you...



My argument is far from "weak and pathetic".  No, what we have now is not the same as literal slavery 19th century style, but it is closer to slavery than freedom.  Does a free person owe a portion of his wages to someone else? No.   You're conveniently redefined "freedom" to fit your view of this issue.

If we actually could vote in new "masters", there would be no point to the RP movement, so you fail there.  Did you get to vote on the members of the cabinet, the FED, and the litany of other appointed positions that hold power over your life?  NO.  You're fooling yourself and justifying the State's misdoings if you think that you're "free" in the most literal sense.  (P.S. you're also fooling yourself if you think Lincoln wanted to free the slaves more than take over the South, but that's another issue.  In his own writings, he said that he would have allowed slavery if it would end the war.  I'm sure some of our resident scholars have the full quote memorized.  EDIT: see the DiLorenzo piece earlier in the thread.)

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## heavenlyboy34

The judge does a good job of ripping Lincoln (as well as various other tyrants like FDR) and the civil war in this vid:

YouTube - The Constitution for Dummies Part 2/4!

Enjoy!

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## Dieseler

I forgot about that video HB and I even saved it to my hard drive.
Good post.

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## jmdrake

> My argument is far from "weak and pathetic".  No, what we have now is not the same as literal slavery 19th century style, but it is closer to slavery than freedom.  Does a free person owe a portion of his wages to someone else? No.   You're conveniently redefined "freedom" to fit your view of this issue.
> 
> If we actually could vote in new "masters", there would be no point to the RP movement, so you fail there.  Did you get to vote on the members of the cabinet, the FED, and the litany of other appointed positions that hold power over your life?  NO.  You're fooling yourself and justifying the State's misdoings if you think that you're "free" in the most literal sense.  (P.S. you're also fooling yourself if you think Lincoln wanted to free the slaves more than take over the South, but that's another issue.  In his own writings, he said that he would have allowed slavery if it would end the war.  I'm sure some of our resident scholars have the full quote memorized.  EDIT: see the DiLorenzo piece earlier in the thread.)


Wow.  I can't believe people are still arguing this crap.

Alright.  I'll make it simple for you.  Dredd Scott.  He owned *NONE* of his wages.  But worse he had no way to change his situation.  He couldn't travel nor could he choose to earn income from something other than wages.  *You can do BOTH*!  If you think you are such a slave in America you have the right to leave.  There is no "fugitive American wage slave" law.  Second you can change where you get your income from.  It's not easy, but also not impossible to change your cash flow quadrant to something other than wages.  You can angle for capital gains which are taxed at a much lower rate.  Or you can get involved in business and learn how to zero out most of your income.  Despite repeated efforts to get rid of "tax shelters" they still very much exist.  So no.  You're not a slave.  As for Lincoln's "writings" you blissfully ignore both the fact that he said he would end slavery or not end slavery *TO PRESERVE THE UNION* and then simultaneously ignore the fact that *HE SOUGHT TO DO COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION OF THE BORDER STATES EVEN THOUGH THAT WASN'T REQUIRED OF HIM!*  As much as Ron Paul dislikes abortion, if he was president I doubt he would try to unilaterally ban it because he knows that wouldn't work.  So he would try different strategies.  While Lincoln was no Ron Paul by any stretch, it's ridiculous to look at *ONE WRITING AND IGNORE WHAT LINCOLN ACTUALLY TRIED TO DO* just because you *THINK* it proves your point.  Regardless of what you think of Lincoln, he tried to end slavery in the border states even before the emancipation proclamation. 

Regards,

John M. Drake

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## Dieseler

500,000 dead.
I would love to revisit this thread in ten years and see if it is even legal to read about it, much less to discuss it.
I guess some of us will live to see while others of us are certain to die of lead poisoning.

----------


## Stop Making Cents

In today's world, the measure of a man's worth is completely predicated on the amount of which he loves blacks.

And therefore, Lincoln will always be revered as our top President (perhaps he will be revered as #2 behind Barry Sotoero).

And our founding fathers owned slaves, so they will be forever tarnished and belittled by those that control our media and institutes of higher learning. The fact that Lincoln murdered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen and shredded the Constitution  is of little consequence.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

JMdrake:
Since you ignored what I posted and made up a rant all your own, I'll post it again so you can see why you're wrong.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo16.html

He (Lincoln) denounced “equality between the white and black races” in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas; stated in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay that *as monstrous as slavery was, eliminating it would supposedly produce “a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself;”* and in his February 27, 1860                Cooper Union speech *advocated deporting black people so that “their places be . . . filled up by free white laborers.” In fact, Lincoln clung to the colonization/deportation idea for the rest of his life.*  There are many other similar statements. Thus, it is not at all a stretch to conclude that Basler’s comment that Lincoln’s words “lacked effectiveness” could be interpreted as that he was insincere. It also seems to me that Johannsen is right when he further states that “Nearly all of [Lincoln’s] public statements on the slavery question prior to his election as president were delivered with political intent and for political effect.” As David Donald wrote of Lincoln in _Lincoln                Reconsidered,_ “politics was his life.” In my book I do not rely on Basler alone, but any means, to make my point that Lincoln’s devotion to racial equality was dubious, at best.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo180.html

_I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff._
                ~                Abraham Lincoln, 1832
 _Lincoln and the Republicans “intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery._
                ~                David Donald, _Lincoln                Reconsidered_
 _[T]he Thirty-seventh Congress [1861-63] ushered in four decades of neo-Hamiltonianism: government for the benefit of the privileged few._
~ Leondard                Curry, _Blueprint                for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War                Congress_
 The very first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially the same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution “with no mental reservations”; and supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the “Corwin Amendment”) that would have prohibited the federal government from _ever_ interfering with slavery. In fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see that the Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and the House of Representatives as well).

In the same speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority,” he continued. Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect the constitutional liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln threatened to orchestrate the murder of many of those same citizens. 
 What on earth was he talking about? What would cause a president to wage war on his own citizens whose liberties he had just pledged to protect? Lincoln explained in the very next sentence: “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_; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere” (emphasis added). He promised to murder American citizens over tax collection.

This was necessary, in the mind of Lincoln, if he was to deliver on what his party elected him to do, as stated in the quotations at the beginning of this article: to enact a high protective tariff, give away public lands mostly to mining, railroad, and timber corporations, and lavish the railroad corporations, among others, with corporate welfare. This was the old “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, which was endorsed for decades by Lincoln’s Whig Party, and finally the Republicans. The overwhelming majority of Southern congressmen had for decades been ardently opposed to all of these things. But now, they must be forced into it, or so Lincoln thought, for the sake of revenue collection. (At the time, the tariff on imports accounted for more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenues.)
Southerners (as well as Northerners) needed to be forced to pay for the empire of corporate welfare that the Republican Party hoped would keep it in power for decades. (It did: the Republican Party essentially monopolized national politics for the next half century.) That is why there had to be a war, in the minds of Lincoln and the Republican Party. They were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery explicitly in the Constitution, but there would be no compromise over collecting the newly doubled tariff.
 This is also why opposition to war in the North had to be brutally repressed, as it was, and a myth of “national unity” invented. Much of the story of how the Republican Party engaged in a Stalinist spasm of political repression is told by historian William Marvel in his book, _Lincoln’s                Darkest Year: The War in 1862,_ which I highly recommend. (Marvel is a renowned Lincoln scholar, winner of the Lincoln Prize and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award.)
 The Republican Party’s first act of political chicanery was to begin kicking out of the U.S. Senate men like Democratic Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who “lacked enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln’s war against the South,” writes Marvel. Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright “had known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the Republican Party accused Senator Bright, one of the most senior members of the Senate, of “retroactive treason” and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote. 
    The _Congressional                Globe_ propagandized that “only a traitor would advocate peace,” and newspapers all over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party (as was common during that period of time) quoted this statement. As for Northern newspapers that did not support the waging of war on their fellow Americans, the government had already begun to “squelch the most effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing equipment, and arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated in that suppression of free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying the offices of antiwar journals and attacking the editors.”

Even “Francis Scott Key’s own grandson understood how dangerous it had become to utter an unpopular opinion in the Land of the Free,” Marvel sarcastically writes. The grandson of the author of “The Star Spangled Banner” was a Baltimore newspaper editor who had been thrown into “the bowels of a coastal fort” without any due process for editorializing against the Lincoln administration’s suppression of free speech.
 “The party that dominated the United States Senate intended to formalize the concept that meaningful dissent [to the political agenda of the Republican Party] amounted to treason.” After kicking Senator Bright out of office the leaders of the “Grand Ole Party” then “wished to end their day early in order to prepare for a grand party that had occupied Mary Lincoln’s attention for some weeks.” Marvel writes that White House employees quickly began calling Mrs. Lincoln “the American Queen” who, according to one senator, appeared at the party “looking like she was wearing a flower pot on her head.” Many of the generals, admirals, Supreme Court justices, and foreign counsels who attended the party, writes Marvel, considered Lincoln to be “a vulgar provincial lacking in either sincerity or statesmanlike qualities.” 
 Without bothering to amend the Constitution, the Republican Party in 1861 invented a brand new definition of “treason.” Treason, to Lincoln and the Republican Party, meant opposition _to                them._ This was very different from the actual definition of treason in Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against *them*, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (emphasis added). As with all of the founding documents, “United States” is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states (as they are called in the Declaration of Independence) are united in forming a compact of states for their own mutual benefit. The central government was to be _their agent_. 
Treason under                the Constitution consists of levying war against “*them*,” the states. This of course is exactly what Lincoln and the Republican Party did. Their war on the South was the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution. Long before George Orwell’s time, they distorted the meaning of the word to mean exactly the opposite of what the founding fathers intended it to mean. As the perpetrators of treason as defined by the Constitution, they accused _their political opponents_ – those who opposed the levying                of war” on the states – of treason. 
 Marvel writes that on his very first day in office as Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “would exercise a cool, dictatorial demeanor” as he commenced to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was failing to recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact that it was offering enlistment “bounties” of as much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern antiwar newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition to the war in Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton “unilaterally abolished” that freedom of speech on August 8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy of military conscription, Stanton “appointed a special judge advocate to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local and federal law officers to imprison anyone who ‘may be engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . .’” The vagueness of this order allowed the government to imprison anyone who said anything negative about Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on fellow citizens. 
 “With renewed vigor,” writes Marvel, “U.S. marshals of predominantly Republican pedigree started rounding up malcontents almost all of them Democrats on the excuse that their vocal disagreement with presidential policies discouraged men from volunteering.” Any Northern newspaper writers who dared to criticize the “Grand Ole Party” were treated very roughly. “In August of 1861 . . . a mob of Granite State soldiers attacked the editors of a Democratic Concord [New Hampshire] newspaper and destroyed their office.” “On                August 14 Dennis Mahony, the Irish editor of the _Dubuque Herald_, was arrested by Iowa’s U.S. marshal, H.M. Hoxie a crony of Republican governor Samuel Kirkwood . . . . Mahony had been preaching peace for months . . .” “In                jail Mahony met David Sheward, his counterpart at the _Constitution                and Union_, of Fairfield, Iowa.” These men joined in prison “the editors of Illinois newspapers, some Illinois judges, and a few other celebrity dissidents for the long journey to Washington,” where they were thrown into “the Old Capitol Prison.” Apparently, administration critics from “The Land of Lincoln” had to be imprisoned in Washington, D.C. where they could be especially carefully watched. 
 Newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party “crowed over the administration’s latest assault on free speech,” which speaks volumes about the rotten, totalitarian mindset of the scoundrels who ran the Republican Party of the 1860s. Marvel writes of how “prominent Democrats” all throughout the North were jailed for such things as advising voters to vote for peace candidates; laughing at a local “Home Guard” company; or making “saucy” comments about Lincoln. 
Even Democrats running for Congress were imprisoned before election day, as was the case of William J. Allen, a “peace Democrat from southern Illinois” who “went to jail in that mid-August orgy of repression because of opinions expressed during a political campaign.” Allen was running for reelection. Many of his fellow Democrats “were not released [from one of Lincoln’s gulags] until after the fall elections.” Some of them languished in prison “until they relinquished . . . the right to sue their arresting officers for false imprisonment.” Thousands of Northern citizens “felt the hand of some sheriff or provost marshal clutching their shoulders” [figuratively speaking], writes Marvel. 
Republican                Party thugs were not above beatings _and murder_ of Northern civilians who dissented from the “Grand Ole Party” line. A group of Republican “volunteers in the town of Troy [Kansas] severely beat a citizen whose political observations they resented,” says Marvel. “Political animosity led to the murder of another man in southeastern Missouri.” The local Republican Party-affiliated newspaper editorialized in favor of the murder, writing that the man “had no right to be disloyal to the government” by advocating peace, equating the Republican Party with “government.” The paper also named other local citizens who would make for “acceptable targets.” Such were the origins of the “Grand Ole Party.”




> Wow.  I can't believe people are still arguing this crap.
> 
> Alright.  I'll make it simple for you.  Dredd Scott.  He owned *NONE* of his wages.  But worse he had no way to change his situation.  He couldn't travel nor could he choose to earn income from something other than wages.  *You can do BOTH*!  If you think you are such a slave in America you have the right to leave.  There is no "fugitive American wage slave" law.  Second you can change where you get your income from.  It's not easy, but also not impossible to change your cash flow quadrant to something other than wages.  You can angle for capital gains which are taxed at a much lower rate.  Or you can get involved in business and learn how to zero out most of your income.  Despite repeated efforts to get rid of "tax shelters" they still very much exist.  So no.  You're not a slave.  As for Lincoln's "writings" you blissfully ignore both the fact that he said he would end slavery or not end slavery *TO PRESERVE THE UNION* and then simultaneously ignore the fact that *HE SOUGHT TO DO COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION OF THE BORDER STATES EVEN THOUGH THAT WASN'T REQUIRED OF HIM!*  As much as Ron Paul dislikes abortion, if he was president I doubt he would try to unilaterally ban it because he knows that wouldn't work.  So he would try different strategies.  While Lincoln was no Ron Paul by any stretch, it's ridiculous to look at *ONE WRITING AND IGNORE WHAT LINCOLN ACTUALLY TRIED TO DO* just because you *THINK* it proves your point.  Regardless of what you think of Lincoln, he tried to end slavery in the border states even before the emancipation proclamation. 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake

----------


## sofia

just to be devils advocate....

how was Washington's response to the Whiskey Rebellion any different than Lincoln's response to succession? If Whiskey Farmers didn't back down, we can assume Fed troops would have gunned them down.

----------


## catdd

Lincoln figured it would be a 90 day war and all he had to do was to come down here and slap a few people around and wipe out a few "terror cells".

----------


## Bucjason



----------


## catdd

You're right, a lot of Blacks DID fight and die under that banner. Lots of Blacks volunteered.
And you can stop acting like the Abe Lincoln - the ignorant murdering BASTARD from hell - was some kind of liberating Angel.

----------


## Bucjason

> You're right, a lot of Blacks DID fight and die under that banner. Lots of Blacks volunteered.
> And you can stop acting like the Abe Lincoln - the ignorant murderer from hell - was some kind of liberating Angel.


and you can stop acting like the Condefedacy;  an ignorant, selfish, racist, Declaration of Independence ignoring, tyrannical excuse for a government was some sort of liberating Angel.

Deal ??

----------


## catdd

> and you can stop acting like the Condefedacy;  an ignorant, selfish, racist, Declaration of Independence ignoring, tyranical excuse for a government was some sort of liberating Angel.
> 
> Deal ??


OK, you shut the $#@! up with your insults and I will.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> and you can stop acting like the Condefedacy;  an ignorant, selfish, racist, Declaration of Independence ignoring, tyrannical excuse for a government was some sort of liberating Angel.
> 
> Deal ??


You say this like the North wasn't ignorant, selfish, racist, DOI-ignoring, and tyrannical as well.

----------


## jmdrake

> just to be devils advocate....
> 
> how was Washington's response to the Whiskey Rebellion any different than Lincoln's response to succession? If Whiskey Farmers didn't back down, we can assume Fed troops would have gunned them down.


Exactly!  And Andrew Jackson's response South Carolina's nullification initiative was "hang em all".  Nobody went along with S.C. so they blinked.  When slavery was also on the table S.C. was able to get other states to go along.  It's a question of mixed motives.  Some people can't deal with that and want to pretend the south was as pure as the driven snow and that Lincoln was some aberrant vampire.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Exactly!  And Andrew Jackson's response South Carolina's nullification initiative was "hang em all".  Nobody went along with S.C. so they blinked.  When slavery was also on the table S.C. was able to get other states to go along.  It's a question of mixed motives.  Some people can't deal with that and want to pretend the south was as pure as the driven snow and that Lincoln was some aberrant vampire.


And some want to pretend that Lincoln just wanted to end slavery.

----------


## jmdrake

> JMdrake:
> Since you ignored what I posted and made up a rant all your own, I'll post it again so you can see why you're wrong.


You think I'm impressed by your stupid little cut and paste job?  I'm not "wrong".  You can leave this country anytime you like.  In fact I'll by you a ticket if you want one.  Blog posts at Lewrockwell.com don't impress me the least.  But since they impress you why don't you read this one *FROM RON PAUL*!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul76.html

_A constitution in and by itself does not guarantee liberty in a republican form of government. Even a perfect constitution with this goal in mind is no better than the moral standards and desires of the people. Although the United States Constitution was by far the best ever written for the protection of liberty, with safeguards against the dangers of a democracy, it too was flawed from the beginning. Instead of guaranteeing liberty equally for all people, the authors themselves yielded to the democratic majoritys demands that they compromise on the issue of slavery. This mistake, plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War that surely could have been prevented with clearer understanding and a more principled approach to the establishment of a constitutional republic._

Instead of wasting everyone's time cutting and pasting blog posts that back up your myopic world view WHY DON'T YOU GO BACK AND READ THE ORIGINAL HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS?  I HAVE ALREADY DONE SO!  THE HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS SHOW THAT LINCOLN ATTEMPTED TO FREE THE SLAVES IN THE BORDER STATES THROUGH COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION!  THE HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS ALSO SHOW THAT THE SOUTHERN STATES LISTED RESTRICTIONS ON THE EXPANSION OF SLAVERY AND LACK OF ENFORCEMENT OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAWS AS PRIMARY REASONS FOR SECESSION!

FINALLY I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FART ABOUT LINCOLN SEEKING TO RESETTLE FREED SLAVES IN AFRICA!  THAT IS A STUPID RED HERRING!  WHEN THE AMISTAD SLAVES WERE FREED THEY WERE ALLOWED TO RETURN TO AFRICA ALSO!  THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM SOME KLANSMAN TELLING BLACKS WHO HAVE BEEN IN THIS COUNTRY LONG AFTER THE END OF SLAVERY TO "GO BACK".  PLUS I'VE NEVER SAID I THOUGHT LINCOLN WAS A SAINT!  I SAID THE RECORD SHOWS THAT HE WAS ATTEMPTING TO FREE SLAVES IN THE BORDER STATES!  THE RECORD STILL SHOWS THAT AND YOU WOULD KNOW THAT IF YOU WOULD TAKE THE TIME TO ACTUALLY FREAKING READ IT!!!!!

----------


## Dieseler

> Exactly!  And Andrew Jackson's response South Carolina's nullification initiative was "hang em all".  Nobody went along with S.C. so they blinked.  When slavery was also on the table S.C. was able to get other states to go along.  It's a question of mixed motives.  Some people can't deal with that and want to pretend the south was as pure as the driven snow and that Lincoln was some aberrant vampire.


Lincoln was about as aberrant as one could get.
Far worse than the most famous of vampires.
The number of Vlad Dracul's victims ranges from 40,000 to 100,000.

Lincoln is responsible for the deaths of over half a million.
That's pretty $#@!ing abhorrent Bro.

He even looks like a $#@!ing Vampire Illuminati Banker's bought out Bitch.

----------


## Bucjason

> You say this like the North wasn't ignorant, selfish, racist, DOI-ignoring, and tyrannical as well.


...and you continue to pretend that slavery played no role. 

This is directly from the Georgia Secession papers:

"The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. 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. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic"

Wow , the state's right to ENSLAVE....what a noble cause for a liberty lover to defend....

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> ...and you continue to pretend that slavery played no role. 
> 
> This is directly from the Georgia Secession papers:
> 
> "The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. 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. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic"
> 
> Wow , the state's right to ENSLAVE....what a noble cause for a liberty lover to defend....


Quit trying to make it out like I'm defending slavery.  This is beneath you.  I don't know how much clearer I have to be before you'll get it.  Go back and watch the Tom Woods video and read the literature I posted.  You're becoming as anti-intellectual as the Obamabots, and I'm bored with you.

"Every other country in the world ended slavery without a civil war!" -Ron Paul

----------


## jmdrake

> Quit trying to make it out like I'm defending slavery.  This is beneath you.  I don't know how much clearer I have to be before you'll get it.  Go back and watch the Tom Woods video and read the literature I posted.  You're becoming as anti-intellectual as the Obamabots, and I'm bored with you.
> 
> "Every other country in the world ended slavery without a civil war!" -Ron Paul


I'm editing my post because I notice that you were responding to BucJason here and not me.  That said I'm not defending Lincoln any more than you are defending slavery.  I'm pointing out the historical fact that Lincoln did indeed attempt to end slavery and the southern states did indeed list defending slavery as a motivating factor for seceding.  No it wasn't the only motivating factor, but it clearly was a factor.

"Instead of guaranteeing liberty equally for all people, the authors themselves yielded to the democratic majority’s demands that they compromise on the issue of slavery. This mistake, plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War that surely could have been prevented with clearer understanding and a more principled approach to the establishment of a constitutional republic." -Ron Paul.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## jmdrake

> Lincoln was about as aberrant as one could get.
> Far worse than the most famous of vampires.
> The number of Vlad Dracul's victims ranges from 40,000 to 100,000.
> 
> Lincoln is responsible for the deaths of over half a million.
> That's pretty $#@!ing abhorrent Bro.
> 
> He even looks like a $#@!ing Vampire Illuminati Banker's bought out Bitch.


And you honestly believe that Andrew Jackson would have backed down if South Carolina hadn't blinked?  I don't.  there's a reason he was called "Old Hickory".  People need to study more history to understand that these issues go back way before Lincoln.  They go all the way back to the first chief justice of the U.S. John Marshall.

----------


## Dieseler

> And you honestly believe that Andrew Jackson would have backed down if South Carolina hadn't blinked?  I don't.  there's a reason he was called "Old Hickory".  People need to study more history to understand that these issues go back way before Lincoln.  They go all the way back to the first chief justice of the U.S. John Marshall.


Andrew Jackson?
I think he was dead at the time.
Do you mean Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson?
You may ought to go read some yourself.

That was rude of me jm, my apology.
I see where you were going with this.

----------


## catdd

Andrew Jackson did have a run-in with SC and the North was accustomed to the South threatening secession, they just didn't think they would ever do it.
It's the same situation we have today where we say "I dare you to cross this line" and the Feds cross it; so we say "OK, now cross THIS line".
Lincoln honestly thought he could unfairly tax the South to finance Northern industrialization and nothing would really become of it.

----------


## jmdrake

> Andrew Jackson?
> I think he was dead at the time.
> Do you mean Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson?
> You may ought to go read some yourself.
> 
> That was rude of me jm, my apology.
> I see where you were going with this.


Good.    It's interesting that to note that usually I've seen the pro south side bring up S.C. earlier attempt to secede in these debates.  But nobody ever raises the question "Why did southerner Jackson apparently care so little for his own region"?  I think Catdd hit the nail on the head.  Jackson considered it just a bluff. I doubt Jackson supported the tariff, but he clearly didn't support a right to secede.

----------


## Dieseler

I think some of the people calling for secession here on this board would do well to read over this bit of history.
I'm not sure I agree with it but it certainly did set a precedent for War over secession.
The other thing I find interesting is that you would bring up this fact while arguing that slavery was the greatest cause of the Civil War when this small piece of history shows that tariffs were indeed the greatest contributor to disagreements between the south and the north even back then.

I don't see how this is helping you make your point and I will always believe Lincoln used slavery as an excuse for the war after the fact.
It suited his purpose to do so at the time.
My family would be a sight bit larger if it weren't for him.

----------


## jmdrake

> I think some of the people calling for secession here on this board would do well to read over this bit of history.
> I'm not sure I agree with it but it certainly did set a precedent for War over secession.
> The other thing I find interesting is that you would bring up this fact while arguing that slavery was the greatest cause of the Civil War when this small piece of history shows that tariffs were indeed the greatest contributor to disagreements between the south and the north even back then.
> 
> I don't see how this is helping you make your point and I will always believe Lincoln used slavery as an excuse for the war after the fact.
> It suited his purpose to do so at the time.
> My family would be a sight bit larger if it weren't for him.


_scratching my head_ I'm not sure where I said slavery was the _greatest_ cause for the civil war.  It was certainly highlighted the most in the declarations of secession.  It was certainly *a* cause.  I don't think South Carolina would have gotten other states to join into their cause but for slavery.  Clearly they couldn't get any other state on board when tariffs were the only cause.  

Let's look at it another way.  There area people talking about secession right now over the health care bill and cap and trade.  Let's say these things pass and nobody actually secedes.  Let's say 20 years down the road a president signs an executive order banning NASCAR because it "needlessly contributing to climate change".  So a bunch of southerners say "Screw that!", pull out their shotguns and commence to rebelling.  All of the southern states pull out and include NASCAR in their reasons for secession.  Years later more "enlightened" people say "NASCAR wasn't a good reason to secede".  Others counter "Yeah, but we had issues before NASCAR was on the table".  The others counter back "Yeah, but you didn't actually act on those issues.  You only acted when prompted by NASCAR".  See what I mean?  

Probably not.  I will concede this is a retarded example.  I can't think of a good one.  I'll simply say I agree with Ron Paul's point that slavery was a mistake and that the mistake of slavery *combined with other mistakes* led to the civil war.  I'm not sure what else to say.  Some people will always feel the need to "defend southern honor" when simply telling the truth about what southern legislators felt were their reasons for pushing for secession in no way besmirches southern honor in my book.  Afterall, many African kings owned slaves too.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## Bucjason

> I think some of the people calling for secession here on this board would do well to read over this bit of history.
> I'm not sure I agree with it but it certainly did set a precedent for War over secession.
> The other thing I find interesting is that you would bring up this fact while arguing that slavery was the greatest cause of the Civil War when this small piece of history shows that tariffs were indeed the greatest contributor to disagreements between the south and the north even back then.
> 
> I don't see how this is helping you make your point and I will always believe Lincoln used slavery as an excuse for the war after the fact.
> It suited his purpose to do so at the time.
> My family would be a sight bit larger if it weren't for him.


Regardless, even if we assume your opinion of Lincoln is absolutely true, your tyrannical racist ancestors GAVE him that perfect excuse. Without slavery , the moral grounds and will to fight secession would not have been there.

 Your family would STILL be a bit larger if they had honored the spirit this country was originally founded on, and had some respect for liberty and equal rights for all.

Sob stories from morally-bankrupt slave-drivers  don't go over well with me...

----------


## tremendoustie

It's simple. Everyone has a right to secede. No one has a right to own slaves.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Regardless, even if we assume your opinion of Lincoln is absolutely true, your tyrannical racist ancestors GAVE him that perfect excuse. Without slavery , the moral grounds and will to fight secession would not have been there.
> 
>  Your family would STILL be a bit larger if they had honored the spirit this country was originally founded on, and had some respect for liberty and equal rights for all.
> 
> Sob stories from morally-bankrupt slave-drivers  don't go over well with me...



You mean "morally-bankrupt slave-drivers" like Lincoln?  


http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo16.html

He (Lincoln) denounced equality between the white and black races in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas; stated in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay that *as monstrous as slavery was, eliminating it would supposedly produce a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself;* and in his February 27, 1860                Cooper Union speech *advocated deporting black people so that their places be . . . filled up by free white laborers. In fact, Lincoln clung to the colonization/deportation idea for the rest of his life.*  There are many other similar statements. Thus, it is not at all a stretch to conclude that Baslers comment that Lincolns words lacked effectiveness could be interpreted as that he was insincere. It also seems to me that Johannsen is right when he further states that Nearly all of [Lincolns] public statements on the slavery question prior to his election as president were delivered with political intent and for political effect. As David Donald wrote of Lincoln in _Lincoln                Reconsidered,_ politics was his life. In my book I do not rely on Basler alone, but any means, to make my point that Lincolns devotion to racial equality was dubious, at best.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo180.html

_I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old womans dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff._
				~                Abraham Lincoln, 1832
 _Lincoln and the Republicans intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery._
				~                David Donald, _Lincoln                Reconsidered_
 _[T]he Thirty-seventh Congress [1861-63] ushered in four decades of neo-Hamiltonianism: government for the benefit of the privileged few._
~ Leondard                Curry, _Blueprint                for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War                Congress_
 The very first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. He then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially the same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution with no mental reservations; and supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the Corwin Amendment) that would have prohibited the federal government from _ever_ interfering with slavery. In fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see that the Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and the House of Representatives as well).

In the same speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and bloodshed in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration. [T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority, he continued. Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect the constitutional liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln threatened to orchestrate the murder of many of those same citizens. 
 What on earth was he talking about? What would cause a president to wage war on his own citizens whose liberties he had just pledged to protect? Lincoln explained in the very next sentence: 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_; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere (emphasis added). He promised to murder American citizens over tax collection.

This was necessary, in the mind of Lincoln, if he was to deliver on what his party elected him to do, as stated in the quotations at the beginning of this article: to enact a high protective tariff, give away public lands mostly to mining, railroad, and timber corporations, and lavish the railroad corporations, among others, with corporate welfare. This was the old American System of Alexander Hamilton, which was endorsed for decades by Lincolns Whig Party, and finally the Republicans. The overwhelming majority of Southern congressmen had for decades been ardently opposed to all of these things. But now, they must be forced into it, or so Lincoln thought, for the sake of revenue collection. (At the time, the tariff on imports accounted for more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenues.)
Southerners (as well as Northerners) needed to be forced to pay for the empire of corporate welfare that the Republican Party hoped would keep it in power for decades. (It did: the Republican Party essentially monopolized national politics for the next half century.) That is why there had to be a war, in the minds of Lincoln and the Republican Party. They were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery explicitly in the Constitution, but there would be no compromise over collecting the newly doubled tariff.
 This is also why opposition to war in the North had to be brutally repressed, as it was, and a myth of national unity invented. Much of the story of how the Republican Party engaged in a Stalinist spasm of political repression is told by historian William Marvel in his book, _Lincolns                Darkest Year: The War in 1862,_ which I highly recommend. (Marvel is a renowned Lincoln scholar, winner of the Lincoln Prize and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award.)
 The Republican Partys first act of political chicanery was to begin kicking out of the U.S. Senate men like Democratic Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who lacked enthusiasm for Abraham Lincolns war against the South, writes Marvel. Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright had known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the Republican Party accused Senator Bright, one of the most senior members of the Senate, of retroactive treason and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote. 
	The _Congressional                Globe_ propagandized that only a traitor would advocate peace, and newspapers all over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party (as was common during that period of time) quoted this statement. As for Northern newspapers that did not support the waging of war on their fellow Americans, the government had already begun to squelch the most effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing equipment, and arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated in that suppression of free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying the offices of antiwar journals and attacking the editors.

Even Francis Scott Keys own grandson understood how dangerous it had become to utter an unpopular opinion in the Land of the Free, Marvel sarcastically writes. The grandson of the author of The Star Spangled Banner was a Baltimore newspaper editor who had been thrown into the bowels of a coastal fort without any due process for editorializing against the Lincoln administrations suppression of free speech.
 The party that dominated the United States Senate intended to formalize the concept that meaningful dissent [to the political agenda of the Republican Party] amounted to treason. After kicking Senator Bright out of office the leaders of the Grand Ole Party then wished to end their day early in order to prepare for a grand party that had occupied Mary Lincolns attention for some weeks. Marvel writes that White House employees quickly began calling Mrs. Lincoln the American Queen who, according to one senator, appeared at the party looking like she was wearing a flower pot on her head. Many of the generals, admirals, Supreme Court justices, and foreign counsels who attended the party, writes Marvel, considered Lincoln to be a vulgar provincial lacking in either sincerity or statesmanlike qualities. 
 Without bothering to amend the Constitution, the Republican Party in 1861 invented a brand new definition of treason. Treason, to Lincoln and the Republican Party, meant opposition _to                them._ This was very different from the actual definition of treason in Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against *them*, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort (emphasis added). As with all of the founding documents, United States is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states (as they are called in the Declaration of Independence) are united in forming a compact of states for their own mutual benefit. The central government was to be _their agent_. 
Treason under                the Constitution consists of levying war against *them*, the states. This of course is exactly what Lincoln and the Republican Party did. Their war on the South was the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution. Long before George Orwells time, they distorted the meaning of the word to mean exactly the opposite of what the founding fathers intended it to mean. As the perpetrators of treason as defined by the Constitution, they accused _their political opponents_  those who opposed the levying                of war on the states  of treason. 
 Marvel writes that on his very first day in office as Lincolns Secretary of War Edwin Stanton would exercise a cool, dictatorial demeanor as he commenced to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was failing to recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact that it was offering enlistment bounties of as much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern antiwar newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition to the war in Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton unilaterally abolished that freedom of speech on August 8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy of military conscription, Stanton appointed a special judge advocate to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local and federal law officers to imprison anyone who may be engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . . The vagueness of this order allowed the government to imprison anyone who said anything negative about Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on fellow citizens. 
 With renewed vigor, writes Marvel, U.S. marshals of predominantly Republican pedigree started rounding up malcontents almost all of them Democrats on the excuse that their vocal disagreement with presidential policies discouraged men from volunteering. Any Northern newspaper writers who dared to criticize the Grand Ole Party were treated very roughly. In August of 1861 . . . a mob of Granite State soldiers attacked the editors of a Democratic Concord [New Hampshire] newspaper and destroyed their office. On                August 14 Dennis Mahony, the Irish editor of the _Dubuque Herald_, was arrested by Iowas U.S. marshal, H.M. Hoxie a crony of Republican governor Samuel Kirkwood . . . . Mahony had been preaching peace for months . . . In                jail Mahony met David Sheward, his counterpart at the _Constitution                and Union_, of Fairfield, Iowa. These men joined in prison the editors of Illinois newspapers, some Illinois judges, and a few other celebrity dissidents for the long journey to Washington, where they were thrown into the Old Capitol Prison. Apparently, administration critics from The Land of Lincoln had to be imprisoned in Washington, D.C. where they could be especially carefully watched. 
 Newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party crowed over the administrations latest assault on free speech, which speaks volumes about the rotten, totalitarian mindset of the scoundrels who ran the Republican Party of the 1860s. Marvel writes of how prominent Democrats all throughout the North were jailed for such things as advising voters to vote for peace candidates; laughing at a local Home Guard company; or making saucy comments about Lincoln. 
Even Democrats running for Congress were imprisoned before election day, as was the case of William J. Allen, a peace Democrat from southern Illinois who went to jail in that mid-August orgy of repression because of opinions expressed during a political campaign. Allen was running for reelection. Many of his fellow Democrats were not released [from one of Lincolns gulags] until after the fall elections. Some of them languished in prison until they relinquished . . . the right to sue their arresting officers for false imprisonment. Thousands of Northern citizens felt the hand of some sheriff or provost marshal clutching their shoulders [figuratively speaking], writes Marvel. 
Republican                Party thugs were not above beatings _and murder_ of Northern civilians who dissented from the Grand Ole Party line. A group of Republican volunteers in the town of Troy [Kansas] severely beat a citizen whose political observations they resented, says Marvel. Political animosity led to the murder of another man in southeastern Missouri. The local Republican Party-affiliated newspaper editorialized in favor of the murder, writing that the man had no right to be disloyal to the government by advocating peace, equating the Republican Party with government. The paper also named other local citizens who would make for acceptable targets. Such were the origins of the Grand Ole Party.

----------


## jmdrake

Heavenlyboy, how often are you going to spam the same blog post without ever going back and reading the original historical documents?  Here is the eulogy that was edited by Dilorenzo *to the point where he changed the meaning*

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creat...eches/clay.htm
_Mr. Clay's efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion -- a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes. 

Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay's views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States; tear to tatters its now venerated constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more halting sympathisers, have received, and are receiving their just execration; and the name, and opinions, and influence of Mr. Clay, are fully, and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly, arrayed against them. But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme -- against a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man's charter of freedom -- the declaration that "all men are created free and equal." So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. But, only last year, I saw with astonishment, what purported to be a letter of a very distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following, to me, very extraordinary language--_

The three words at ONCE eradicated is what you are missing.  Ron Paul's plan of "compensated emancipation" *would NOT have immediately ended slavery*!  It would have required a process of negotiation, legislation, compromise and fund allocation.  This is the fatal flaw of all those who would criticize Lincoln for recognizing the fact that immediate emancipation was impossible.  Quit letting DiLorenzo think for you.  Go back, read the original documents and think for yourself.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## LibertyEagle

> Regardless, even if we assume your opinion of Lincoln is absolutely true, your tyrannical racist ancestors GAVE him that perfect excuse. Without slavery , the moral grounds and will to fight secession would not have been there.
> 
>  Your family would STILL be a bit larger if they had honored the spirit this country was originally founded on, and had some respect for liberty and equal rights for all.
> 
> Sob stories from morally-bankrupt slave-drivers  don't go over well with me...


That argument might work a little better had it not been for the fact that the North had slaves too.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> Nonsense , man. Do you really think the southern plantation owners would have EVER given up thier cash-cow of free labor willingly ??


Offer them an alternative. Something that costs less than slavery. 

Allow them to bring in desperate workers from other countries, with no limits. Import them from places where they are already terribly oppressed. Everything is relative. They will be grateful for almost nothing here in the US. They can be paid for less than it costs to keep a slave. No need to worry about their housing, food or medical care. If they act up, they can be deported. It's a system that can one day replace slavery.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

I would post it as many times as it takes for you to actually pay attention to it.   Why is "immediately ending slavery" better than letting it end naturally as it did elsewhere?  Does an unconstitutional and unjust war justify the ends of the Emancipation Proclomation (which wasn't the original intent of the war)?  You still have no answer, which is the fatal flaw in YOUR argument.  You justify Lincoln's tyrannical end-run around the Constitution (and common humanity) in your argument.  This is why you fail to convince me and many others.




> Heavenlyboy, how often are you going to spam the same blog post without ever going back and reading the original historical documents?  Here is the eulogy that was edited by Dilorenzo *to the point where he changed the meaning*
> 
> http://showcase.netins.net/web/creat...eches/clay.htm
> _Mr. Clay's efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion -- a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes. 
> 
> Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay's views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States; tear to tatters its now venerated constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more halting sympathisers, have received, and are receiving their just execration; and the name, and opinions, and influence of Mr. Clay, are fully, and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly, arrayed against them. But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme -- against a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man's charter of freedom -- the declaration that "all men are created free and equal." So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. But, only last year, I saw with astonishment, what purported to be a letter of a very distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following, to me, very extraordinary language--_
> 
> The three words at ONCE eradicated is what you are ignorant about.  Ron Paul's plan of "compensated emancipation" *would NOT have immediately ended slavery*!  It would have required a process of negotiation, legislation, compromise and fund allocation.  This is the fatal flaw of all those who would criticize Lincoln for recognizing the fact that immediate emancipation was impossible.  Quit letting DiLorenzo think for you.  Go back, read the original documents and think for yourself.
> 
> ...

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> That argument might work a little better had it not been for the fact that the North had slaves too.


+a zillion!

----------


## jmdrake

> That argument might work a little better had it not been for the fact that the North had slaves too.


That was generally not true by the time the civil war occurred.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> That was generally not true by the time the civil war occurred.


_Myth number                one_: Slavery was a distinctively Southern institution. From                Ira Berlins _Generations                of Captivity_ (Harvard University Press, 2003), we read:
 On the eve                  of American independence, nearly three-fourths of Bostons wealthiest                  quartile of property-holders held slaves. A like proportion could                  be found in New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Newport. From                  a position at the top of colonial society, one visitor noted that                  there was "not a house in Boston" that "has not                  one or two" slaves  an observation that might be applied                  to every northern city with but slight exaggeration.
The expansion                  of slavery followed a similar trajectory in the countryside. Indeed,                  the rapid growth of rural slavery eclipsed its development in                  the cities of the North. Throughout the grain-producing areas                  of Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, and Long                  Island  the Norths bread basket  bondage spread swiftly during                  the eighteenth century, as farmers turned from white indentured                  servants to black slaves. By mid-century slaverys tentacles reached                  into parts of southern New England, especially the area around                  Narragansett Bay, where large slaveholders  many of whom had                  originated in Barbados  took on the airs of a planter class.                  In these places, slaves constituted as much as one-third of the                  labor force, and sometimes more than half.
In the northern                  colonies, Africans had difficulty finding mates, establishing                  families, conceiving, and producing healthy infants. The problem                  was not new. From the beginning of settlement, northern slaveholders,                  unlike their counterparts farther south, showed little interest                  in creating an indigenous slave population. From their perspective,                  the discomfort and expense of sharing their cramped quarters with                  slaves outweighed the profits offered by a self-reproducing labor                  force. Northern slaveholders discouraged their slaves from marrying                  and did not provide accommodations for slave families to reside                  in the same abode. They routinely separated husbands from wives                  and parents from children and only reluctantly extended visitation                  rights. Seeing but small advantage in the creation of an indigenous,                  self-reproducing slave population, northern slaveholders sold                  slave women at the first sign of pregnancy. Such practices constrained                  the development of residential family units and diminished the                  chances that black men would assume the roles of husbands and                  fathers and black women the roles of wives and mothers. Grandparenthood                  became unknown to most northerners of African descent.
In the middle                  years of the eighteenth century, northern lawmakers  taking a                  page from southern statute books  updated, refined, or consolidated                  the miscellaneous regulations that had been enacted during the                  seventeenth century and issued more comprehensive slave codes.                  In every case, legislators strengthened the hand of the slaveowner                  at the expense of the slave and free black.
Black life                  in the North increasingly resembled that of the plantation South.

----------


## jmdrake

> I would post it as many times as it takes for you to actually pay attention to it.


Why should I pay attention to dishonest inaccurate tripe?  Really the blog is no better than someone who cuts and pastes Ron Paul's speeches to make him look racist.




> Why is "immediately ending slavery" better than letting it end naturally as it did elsewhere?


  Why are you trying to change the argument to something nobody said? Lincoln was for compensated emancipation.  Ron Paul suggested compensated emancipation was also the best way to go.  




> Does an unconstitutional and unjust war justify the ends of the Emancipation Proclomation (which wasn't the original intent of the war)?  You still have no answer, which is the fatal flaw in YOUR argument.


How long have you been beating your wife?  Seriously.  You are making up arguments that I have never said.  Lincoln went to war for the same reason Andrew Jackson *threatened* to go to war and the same reason Washington put down the whiskey rebellion.  Quit hating on Lincoln and start hating the founding fathers that set the precedent if you wish to be consistent.  But clearly you care nothing about consistency.

Since you are so logically challenged that you can't understand my argument I'll lay it out for you yet again.

1) I never said Lincoln was a saint.  Quite the contrary.

2) Slavery was a primary motivation for the southern states seceding.  They said so.  Ron Paul said so.  History said so.

3) Lincoln *did* actually want to free the slaves.  But immediately freeing the slaves was neither constitutionally possible nor politically practical.  Your repeated posting of a dihonest blog post that edited Lincoln's speech for the purpose of changing its meaning does not alter this historical fact.




> You justify Lincoln's tyrannical end-run around the Constitution (and common humanity) in your argument.


I haven't justified anything.  You're just so bent on "defending the south" that you can't see that.




> This is why you fail to convince me and many others.


I can't convince you because you are willing to believe dishonest blog posts that fit your world view.  

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## Todd

Hmm...

How many societies had to use war to end slavery?

----------


## heavenlyboy34

Thomas                DiLorenzo has also recently pointed out that Ira Berlin played                a role in assembling an exhibit in October at the New York Historical                Society entitled "Slavery in New York." When interviewed                about the exhibit, Professor Berlin pointed out that "New York                City in the 17th and 18th centuries was the largest slave-holding                city on the North American continent. There were more slaves in                New York than in Charleston or New Orleans. Slaves made up a quarter                of New Yorks population at various times. . . . New York had slave                auctions and slave whipping posts and slave rebellions. . . . there                were over 10,000 slaves in New York in the third decade of the 19th                century."
_Myth number                two_: The White man captured slaves in the African jungles. From                Alan Taylors _American                Colonies_ (Viking, 2001), we read:
 Popular myth                  has it that the Europeans obtained their slaves by attacking and                  seizing Africans. In fact, the shippers almost always bought their                  slaves from African middlemen, generally the leading merchants                  and chiefs of the coastal kingdoms. Determined to profit from                  the trade, the African traders and chiefs did not tolerate Europeans                  who foolishly bypassed them to seize slaves on their own initiative.                  And during the eighteenth century the Africans had the power to                  defeat Europeans who failed to cooperate. Contrary to the stereotype                  of shrewd Europeans cheating weak and gullible natives, the European                  traders had to pay premium, and rising, prices to African chiefs                  and traders, who drove a hard bargain.
The Europeans                  exploited and expanded the slavery long practiced by Africans.                  Some slaves were starving children sold by their impoverished                  parents. Others were debtors or criminals sentenced to slavery.                  But most were taken in wars between kingdoms or simply kidnapped                  by armed gangs.
The African                  raiders marched their captives to the coast in long lines know                  as coffles: dozens of people yoked together by the neck with leather                  thongs to prevent escape. Some marches to the coast exceeded five                  hundred miles and six months. About a quarter of the captives                  died along the way from some combination of disease, hunger, exhaustion,                  beatings, and suicide.
Upon reaching                  the coast, the captors herded their captives into walled pens                  called barracoons. Stripped naked, the slaves were closely examined                  by European traders, who wanted only reasonably healthy and young                  people, preferably male. _Myth number                three_: Blacks never owned slaves. From Anne Sarah Rubins _A                Shattered Nation: The Rise & Fall of the Confederacy_(The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), we read:
 The free                  blacks who had prospered in the prewar South had done so by seeking                  favor with local whites and assuring them of their loyalty. Some                  of them had owned slaves themselves.And again,                from Berlins _Generations of Captivity_:
 As societies                  engaged in the trade in slaves, the coastal enclaves became societies                  with slaves. African slavery in its various forms  from pawnage                  to chattel bondage  was practiced in these towns. Both Europeans                  and Africans held slaves, imported and exported them, hired them,                  used them as collateral, and traded them. At Elmina, the Dutch                  West India Company owned some 300 slaves in the late seventeenth                  century, and individual Europeans and Africans held others._Myth number                four_: Slave masters were brutal taskmasters. From Berlins _Generations                of Captivity_, we read:
 Other aspects                  of the new work regimen operated to the slaves advantage. Slave                  lumbermen, many of them hired out for short periods of time, carried                  axes and, like slave drovers and herdsmen, were generally armed                  with knives and guns  necessities for men who worked in the wild                  and hunted animals for food and furs. Woodsmen had access to horses,                  as did slaves who tended cattle and swine. Periodic demands that                  slaveowners disarm their slaves and restrict their access to horses                  and mules confirmed that many believed these to be dangerous practices,                  but they did nothing to halt them. In short, slave lumbermen and                  drovers were not to be trifled with. Their work allowed considerable                  mobility and latitude in choosing their associates and bred a                  sense of independence, not something planters wanted to encourage.                  Slaves found it a welcome relief from the old plantation order.
As the slaveholders                  economy faded, the slaves economy flourished. Black men and women                  became full participants in the system of exchange that developed                  within the lower Mississippi Valley, trading the produce of their                  gardens and provision grounds, the fruits of their hunting and                  trapping expeditions, and a variety of handicrafts with European                  settlers and Indian tribesmen. Many hard-pressed planters turned                  to the production of foodstuffs for internal consumption and sometimes                  for export to Saint Domingue and Martinique. To cut costs, they                  encouraged and sometimes required slaves to feed themselves and                  their families by gardening, hunting, and trapping on their own                  time. Indeed, some slaveholders demanded that their slaves not                  only feed themselves but also provide their own clothes and purchase                  other necessities. Such requirements forced slaveowners to cede                  their slaves a portion of their time to work independently. "It                  is because the slaves are not clothed that they are left free                  of all work on Sunday," argued one advocate in an affirmation                  of the slaves right to maintain gardens, market produce, and                  work independently on Sunday. "On such days some of them                  go to the neighbors plantations who hire them to cut moss and                  to gather provisions. This is done with the tacit consent of their                  masters who do not know the where-abouts of their slaves on the                  said day, nor do they question them, nor do they worry themselves                  about them and are always satisfied that the Negroes will appear                  again on the following Monday for work."_Myth number                five_: The Civil War was fought entirely over slavery. From Mark                Thornton and Robert Ekelunds _Tariffs,                Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War_                (Scholarly Resources, 2004), we read:
 Slavery and                  its opposition were interwoven into the economic, political, social,                  and religious fabric of America. However, it was not the only                  factor in the Souths decision to secede and the Norths decision                  to take up arms to prevent secession. Active abolitionists in                  the North and slaveholders in the South were relatively small                  minorities of their populations. Therefore, to get below the surface                  of these issues we focus on economic interests in the various                  causes that have been attributed to the Civil War. The evolving                  relations between the powers of the federal government and the                  states were certainly an issue. In general, the Souths well-known                  position was one of states rights, while the North increasingly                  preferred a stronger central government. This question was the                  underpinning of another incendiary matter  the issue of import                  duties. Both as a revenue device for the federal government and                  as a means of industry protection, the tariff was a flashpoint                  for particular interests, North and South.
We maintain                  that a multiplicity of issues brought about the conflict and that                  those economic interests and the interest groups surrounding them                  were the key factor in explaining these events. While we acknowledge                  that other dimensions affected the coming of the war, such as                  the moral and philosophical horrors of slavery, this chapter argues                  that economic interests, many of them at least somewhat related                  to slavery, were a major factor in the emergence of the conflict.                  Political parties, moreover, evolved and coalesced around this                  embroidery of interests. Many social and economic factors are                  involved in this connection, including the statues of money and                  banking in the North and South, canal and railway building, and                  other public works.
Slaveholders                  can therefore be viewed as an economic interest group that established                  secession and thus helped precipitate the war. The very election                  of Abraham Lincoln was seen by them as an economic loss to slaveholders                  and as an impetus for secession and war. In other words, the containment                  policies of the Republican Party were a long-run threat to the                  wealth of slaveholders, but the partys protectionist policies                  were an immediate threat to the profitability of their plantations,                  having the same effect as one-third of the slave population running                  away outside the South.
The twin                  issues of tariffs and slavery were thus at the fore of aligning                  economic interest groups, North and South._Myth number                six_: Slaves never defended the Confederacy. From William W.                Freehlings _The                South vs. the South_ (Oxford University Press, 2001), we                read:
 During the                  Civil Wars relatively quiet first year, slavery tolerably passed                  its paternalistic test. Thousands of slaves labored inside army                  camps and fortifications. More thousand manned new munitions factories.                  Blacks comprised over half the toilers at Richmonds Tredegar                  Iron Works and over three in four at Selma, Alabamas, naval ordnance                  plant. In the fields, slave millions produced a record cotton                  crop, even with many masters away. A few blacks donated cash to                  the Confederate cause. Two Mobile slaves bought $400 in Confederate                  bonds. One New Orleans slave subscribed for $200.
When mutilated                  masters returned from the bloodbath, some slaves raged as well                  as wept. "Dey brung" Massa Billy home, one South Carolina                  slave grieved to a contemporary, "with he jaw split open                  . . . He teeth all shine through he cheek. . . . I be happy iffen                  I could kill me jes one Yankee. I hated dem cause dey hurt                  my white people."And, from a                review for the History Book Club by William C. Davis of what promises                to be an interesting work, Bruce Levines _Confederate                Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil                War_ (Oxford University Press, 2005), we read that "there                were clear signs that some of the slave population saw themselves                as Southerners first and blacks second, and expressed a willingness                to take the field."
_Myth number                seven_: Abraham Lincoln was the Negroes friend. In his debate                with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said:
 I will say,                  then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing                  about in anyway 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 which I believe will forever forbid                  the two races 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.In his First                Inaugural Address, Lincoln said:
 Apprehension                  seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by                  the accession of a Republican Administration their property and                  their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There                  has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed,                  the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed                  and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the                  published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote                  from one of those speeches when I declare that  
 I have                    no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution                    of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no                    lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.Those who                  nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had                  made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted                  them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance,                  and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution                  which I now read:
 Resolved,                    That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States,                    and especially the right of each State to order and control                    its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment                    exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which                    the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend;                    and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil                    of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among                    the gravest of crimes.In his letter                to Horace Greeley, the editor of the _New York Tribune_,                dated August 22, 1862, Lincoln said:
 My paramount                  object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either                  to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without                  freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing                  all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing                  some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do                  about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it                  helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because                  I do not believe it would help to save the Union.Just before                Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, Congress proposed an amendment                to the Constitution that would have protected slavery:
 No amendment                  shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give                  to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State,                  with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons                  held to labor or service by the laws of said state.In his First                Inaugural Address, Lincoln specifically mentioned this amendment,                and voiced no objection to it:
 I understand                  a proposed amendment to the Constitution  which amendment, however,                  I have not seen  has passed Congress, to the effect that the                  Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions                  of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid                  misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose                  not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding                  such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have                  no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.And who can                forget that Lincolns Emancipation                Proclamation only freed those slaves that were under the control                of the Confederate government, which means that it basically freed                no one. Lincoln declared that only "persons held as slaves                within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward                shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States,                including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize                and maintain the freedom of said persons." Here are the states                and parts of states that Lincoln listed:
 Arkansas,                  Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines,                  Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption,                  Terrebonne, 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                  Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess                  Ann, 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.Lincolns Secretary                of State, William Seward, remarked about the Emancipation Proclamation                only applying to slaves in areas that were in a state of rebellion                against the United States: "We show our sympathy with slavery                by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them                in bondage where we can set them free."

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> I can't convince you because you are willing to believe dishonest blog posts that fit your world view.  
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake



I do not rely solely on "dishonest blog posts".  I've cited books and speakers like RP in my rebuttals, which you apparently overlooked. 




> I haven't justified anything.  You're just so bent on "defending the south" that you can't see that.


Wrong again.  I think the South did things wrong too, as all governments do.  I'm interested in the objective truth (or as close as humanly possible).

----------


## jmdrake

I said "civil war".  By the eve of the *civil war* there were generally no slaves in the North.

http://www.slavenorth.com/

_frican slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1] 

When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2] 

African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England. Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (cf. “African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery,” The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993). 

I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line: 
"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3] 
Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period. 

Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel. 

Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4] 

The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy. 


The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century, and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence, all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with hackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5] Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find wives who had been sold to distant purchasers. 

Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to slavery there and sometimes eased its severity. On the other hand, the paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part, and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more brutal the punishments for transgressions. 


Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding, in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain. 

That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution. Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British. 

When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the slave population. An exception was New Jersey, where the slave population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and 18 as late as 1860. 

The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be marginalized economically and politically in their home communities, and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive slaves from elsewhere to settle there. 

But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem._





> _Myth number                one_: Slavery was a distinctively Southern institution. From                Ira Berlin’s _Generations                of Captivity_ (Harvard University Press, 2003), we read:
>              [INDENT]                [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=3]*On the eve                  of American independence,* nearly three-fourths of Boston’s wealthiest                  quartile of property-holders held slaves.

----------


## jmdrake

> I do not rely solely on "dishonest blog posts".  I've cited books and speakers like RP in my rebuttals, which you apparently overlooked.


Ron Paul agrees with me that slavery was a major cause in the civil war.  Try again.

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Ron Paul agrees with me that slavery was a major cause in the civil war.  Try again.


False.  Listen to him here: YouTube - Ron Paul on the American Civil War

I'll let others deal with you, because you're more interested in your agenda than the truth, IMO.  TTYL.

----------


## jmdrake

> Hmm...
> 
> How many societies had to use war to end slavery?


In most societies slavery was equally distributed regionally.  Due to differences in climate and economics slavery was pretty much confined to the south by the middle of the 19th century.  That caused a wrinkle for compensated emancipation that Lincoln (and Ron Paul) advocated.  How do you convince one region of the country to pay off another part of the country for what the slave owning region should be willing to do themselves for moral reasons?  When Lincoln tried compensated emancipation with the border states wanted more money than he offered and the congress thought Lincoln's proposal was too expensive.  I already suggested a way Lincoln could have gotten around this impass, but some are to caught up in their "Lincoln bashing" to pay attention.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## jmdrake

> False.  Listen to him here: YouTube - Ron Paul on the American Civil War
> 
> I'll let others deal with you, because you're more interested in your agenda than the truth, IMO.  TTYL.


Oh you are such a LIAR!

Read this moron!  It's a speech that Ron Paul gave on the house floor!
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co...3/cr012903.htm
_
A constitution in and by itself does not guarantee liberty in a republican form of government. Even a perfect constitution with this goal in mind is no better than the moral standards and desires of the people. Although the United States Constitution was by far the best ever written for the protection of liberty, with safeguards against the dangers of a democracy, it too was flawed from the beginning. Instead of guaranteeing liberty equally for all people, the authors themselves yielded to the democratic majority’s demands that they compromise on the issue of slavery. This mistake, plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War that surely could have been prevented with clearer understanding and a more principled approach to the establishment of a constitutional republic.
_

Yes I'm aware that Ron Paul felt slavery could have been ended without war through compensated emancipation But that doesn't change the fact that the question of slavery HELPED LEAD TO THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Get off your Lincoln hating horse for a second and *THINK*!  Anyone with half a brain knows that part of the reason we are fighting in the middle east is over oil.  There are ways to supply our energy needs without depending on the middle east.  But the fact that alternatives exist does *NOT* mean that oil has not been a motivating factor in going to war.  Similarly there were options for freeing slaves without going to war.  I've talked about those options *throughout this thread!*  And unlike you I've explained why compensated emancipation *DID NOT WORK FOR LINCOLN*, but how Paul (or someone else) *COULD HAVE MADE IT WORK!*  I don't mind these discussions but this is getting downright stupid!  Quit ignoring what Ron Paul says when he doesn't back up your narrow minded worldview.

----------


## LibertyEagle

> That was generally not true by the time the civil war occurred.


When did Grant get rid of his?

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> And you honestly believe that Andrew Jackson would have backed down if South Carolina hadn't blinked?  I don't.  there's a reason he was called "Old Hickory".  People need to study more history to understand that these issues go back way before Lincoln.  They go all the way back to the first chief justice of the U.S. John Marshall.


There probably would have been a civil war around 1828 to 1834, had James Madison not mediated an end to the crisis.  Madison was at the center of a giant controversy involving Daniel Webster, Robert Hayne, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Trist, John Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, John Rowan, William Smith, John M. Clayton, Edward Livinston, and others.

James Madison has letters extant to and from each of these people.  Clay and Jackson actually came down to Montpelier to visit Madison in person in 1832.  Trist was Jaclson's private secretary form 1828 to 1834.

That is the difference bewteen honorable people like Madison, and tyrants like Lincoln; Madison believed in negotiation, while Lincoln did not.  I just watched the entire 9 volume PBS set on the Civil War by Ken Burns, and there is not even a hint of attepted negotiation by Lincoln at any time before or during the war.

The mediation of the crisis of 1828-1834 was essentially the last public act of Madison's life.  He wasn't around to help in 1860, and the lessons of his words were not heeded.

----------


## jmdrake

> When did Grant get rid of his?


Grant wasn't living in the north when he owned one slave.

http://stason.org/TULARC/history/civ...-free-the.html
_2. In 1858, while attempting to make a go in civilian life as a farmer
near St. Louis, MO, U.S. Grant acquired a slave named William Jones,
probably from his father-in-law, although the record is not entirely
clear. In March, 1859, Grant gave Jones his freedom despite the fact that
Grant desperately needed the money he might have recovered by selling him.
Grant's wife, Julia, had the use of four slaves as personal servants; the
record is unclear as to who held legal title to them (it could well have
been Julia's father). In her own memoirs, Julia states that these were
freed at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation._

Also I have to ask if you know what the word "generally" means?    Really, you can do better than coming up with a dubious example of Grant's one slave while in a slave state.  I'll help you out.  There were a total of 18 slaves in New Jersey at the time of the civil war.  But generally slavery was a southern thing by 1860.  The disparity in slavery in the north and the south was due primarily to climate and economics.  There were more religious abolitionists in the north, but that's probably due to the fact that they were more accepted in the north since slavery was already on the way out due to the climate and economic reasons I already mentioned.

Regards,

John M. Drake

----------


## LibertyEagle

JmDrake,  I asked you an honest and legitimate question.  It did not deserve a snarky answer.

Of course the South had more slaves than the North.  They were growing the vast majority of the crops.  But, if your argument that the Civil War was started largely because of slaves is to have much weight, then don't you think the North should first have freed THEIR OWN SLAVES, before they started their war of aggression against the South?

----------


## jmdrake

> There probably would have been a civil war around 1828 to 1834, had James Madison not mediated an end to the crisis.  Madison was at the center of a giant controversy involving Daniel Webster, Robert Hayne, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Trist, John Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, John Rowan, William Smith, John M. Clayton, Edward Livinston, and others.
> 
> James Madison has letters extant to and from each of these people.  Clay and Jackson actually came down to Montpelier to visit Madison in person in 1832.  Trist was Jaclson's private secretary form 1828 to 1834.
> 
> That is the difference bewteen honorable people like Madison, and tyrants like Lincoln; Madison believed in negotiation, while Lincoln did not.  I just watched the entire 9 volume PBS set on the Civil War by Ken Burns, and there is not even a hint of attepted negotiation by Lincoln at any time before or during the war.
> 
> The mediation of the crisis of 1828-1834 was essentially the last public act of Madison's life.  He wasn't around to help in 1860, and the lessons of his words were not heeded.


I wasn't comparing Lincoln to Madison.  I was comparing Lincoln to Washington (whiskey rebellion) and Jackson (nullification crisis).  As for negotiation before the war, secession happened before Lincoln's inauguration.  WWJD (What would JACKSON do)?

----------


## Bucjason

> A constitution in and by itself does not guarantee liberty in a republican form of government. Even a perfect constitution with this goal in mind is no better than the moral standards and desires of the people. Although the United States Constitution was by far the best ever written for the protection of liberty, with safeguards against the dangers of a democracy, it too was flawed from the beginning. Instead of guaranteeing liberty equally for all people, the authors themselves yielded to the democratic majority’s demands that they compromise on the issue of slavery. This mistake, plus others along the way, culminated in a Civil War that surely could have been prevented with clearer understanding and a more principled approach to the establishment of a constitutional republic.
> [/i]
> 
> Yes I'm aware that Ron Paul felt slavery could have been ended without war through compensated emancipation But that doesn't change the fact that the question of slavery HELPED LEAD TO THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE!
> 
> Get off your Lincoln hating horse for a second and *THINK*!


Excellent post .

I love how jmdrake keeps writing in larger and larger fonts , and these dixieland douche-bags STILL refuse to comprehend it and STILL refuse to read it. Instead,  they will just repeat the same talking point he JUST FINISHED effectively countering...

My god ... this thread is going around in circles now, and some of you refuse to admit the crimes of the Confederacy against liberty were MUCH greater than the crimes of Lincoln ( unless you believe state's rights trump human rights) - which I think is the only point.

----------


## jmdrake

> JmDrake,  I asked you an honest and legitimate question.  It did not deserve a snarky answer.


And you didn't already know the answer to that question?  Really I thought it was a snarky question.  Who cares how many slaves Grant had when he lived in Missouri?  If you didn't know Grant lived in a state that would later secede my bad for not realizing it.




> Of course the South had more slaves than the North.  They were growing the vast majority of the crops.  But, if your argument that the Civil War was started largely because of slaves is to have much weight, then don't you think the North should first have freed THEIR OWN SLAVES, before they started their war of aggression against the South?


 

1) The majority of the northern states *had already freed their slaves!  There were only 18 slaves in 1 northern state!*

2) Protecting slavery was *a major cause for secession!  The southern states declared as much!*

Your side keeps going back to the same strawman "the north didn't invade the south to end slavery".  I never said it did.  The north invaded for *the same reason Andrew Jackson would have invaded!  To preserve the union.*  The reason the union was in jeopardy was Jackson was president was *solely* over tariffs.  When Lincoln became president slavery was a much more salient issue.  *The legislators who voted to secede said as much!*  Why you and others feel the need to pretend slavery wasn't an issue is beyond my ability to comprehend.  That the south wanted to hang onto its slaves doesn't make it any less moral than the north.  Southerners simply had warm enough weather to make slavery a viable economic enterprise.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> I wasn't comparing Lincoln to Madison.  I was comparing Lincoln to Washington (whiskey rebellion) and Jackson (nullification crisis).  As for negotiation before the war, secession happened before Lincoln's inauguration.  WWJD (What would JACKSON do)?


Lincoln could have engaged in negotiation before he was inagurated, but didn't.  When the South seceded, at first, most people expected them to return.  Key Upper South states, like Virginia, only seceded after Lincoln was inagurated.

Jackson handled the nullification crisis of 1828-1824 pretty well.  His main weakness was his lack of education and the fact that he was not a Constitutional Scholar (the first president who was not).

That is why Madiosn was so important.  Jackson's personal secretary from 1828 to 1834 was Nicholas Trist.  Trist lived his entire adult life living, reading about, and breathing James Madison, and was Madison's friend.

Hence, Trist, as Jackson's secretary knew everthing that Jackson was doing, and was the go-between between Jackson and Madison.

Jackson was constantly advised of Madison's opinion of Constitutional issues regarding nullification and secession, and of practical political questions.

Jackson MADE THE DECISION to end the crisis without war, and heeded Madison's advice.

Lincoln, on the other hand, was not a Constitutional Scholar, nor was interested in the Constitution, nor had a personal secretary who was either.

Lincoln was bent on war.  Since he made the decision to free the slaves halfway into the war, he salvaged half of his reputuation.  His great decision DID NOT HAVE TO BE MADE.  Lincoln could have promised the South they could keep slavery.

What Lincoln should have done was to use his postition of military strength to force an emanciaption plan to be put in place, and a chip to end the war sooner, along with well thought out Constitutional amendments to protect liberty and preserve the Union, while retaining state powers to be balanced with federal powers.

Since Lincoln was not a Constitutional Scholar, this did not happen.  Instead, Lincoln viloated the Constitution, despite James Madison's precedent during the War on 1812, that the Constitution need not be violated to win a major war.

----------


## Bucjason

> Lincoln could have engaged in negotiation before he was inagurated, but didn't.  When the South seceded, at first, most people expected them to return.  Key Upper South states, like Virginia, only seceded after Lincoln was inagurated.
> 
> Jackson handled the nullification crisis of 1828-1824 pretty well.  His main weakness was his lack of education and the fact that he was not a Constitutional Scholar (the first president who was not).
> 
> That is why Madiosn was so important.  Jackson's personal secretary from 1828 to 1834 was Nicholas Trist.  Trist lived his entire adult life living, reading about, and breathing James Madison, and was Madison's friend.
> 
> Hence, Trist, as Jackson's secretary knew everthing that Jackson was doing, and was the go-between between Jackson and Madison.
> 
> Jackson was constantly advised of Madison's opinion of Constitutional issues regarding nullification and secession, and of practical political questions.
> ...


Many of the decisons made from the *founding* on are what eventually made war unavoidable. 

To put all the blame on Lincoln is just idiotic. He simply tried to fix what had already become a collassal cluster-$#@!. Now if you want to disagree with how he went about it , that is fine , but don't try and tell us is this was all ONE man's fault, and don't try and tell us a state has a right to secede for the purposes of enslaving americans ( one of the reasons THEY gave , not me)....

----------


## heavenlyboy34

> Lincoln could have engaged in negotiation before he was inagurated, but didn't.  When the South seceded, at first, most people expected them to return.  Key Upper South states, like Virginia, only seceded after Lincoln was inagurated.
> 
> Jackson handled the nullification crisis of 1828-1824 pretty well.  His main weakness was his lack of education and the fact that he was not a Constitutional Scholar (the first president who was not).
> 
> That is why Madiosn was so important.  Jackson's personal secretary from 1828 to 1834 was Nicholas Trist.  Trist lived his entire adult life living, reading about, and breathing James Madison, and was Madison's friend.
> 
> Hence, Trist, as Jackson's secretary knew everthing that Jackson was doing, and was the go-between between Jackson and Madison.
> 
> Jackson was constantly advised of Madison's opinion of Constitutional issues regarding nullification and secession, and of practical political questions.
> ...


Nicely said, sir.

----------


## Kevin_Kennedy

If you denounce the Confederacy's right to their own self-government because they were slaveowners, then you must also denounce the right of the colonies to their own self-government because they were slaveowners.  How many here would rather we lost the Revolutionary War?

----------


## Dieseler

> Excellent post .
> 
> I love how jmdrake keeps writing in larger and larger fonts , and these *dixieland douche-bags* STILL refuse to comprehend it and STILL refuse to read it. Instead,  they will just repeat the same talking point he JUST FINISHED effectively countering...
> 
> My god ... this thread is going around in circles now, and some of you refuse to admit the crimes of the Confederacy against liberty were MUCH greater than the crimes of Lincoln ( unless you believe state's rights trump human rights) - which I think is the only point.


Do you have an argument of your own or are you only content to swing on jm's sack and call the rest of us names between his posts?

----------


## LibertyEagle

> 1) The majority of the northern states *had already freed their slaves!  There were only 18 slaves in 1 northern state!*
> 
> 2) Protecting slavery was *a major cause for secession!  The southern states declared as much!*
> 
> Your side keeps going back to the same strawman "the north didn't invade the south to end slavery".  I never said it did.  The north invaded for *the same reason Andrew Jackson would have invaded!  To preserve the union.*  The reason the union was in jeopardy was Jackson was president was *solely* over tariffs.  When Lincoln became president slavery was a much more salient issue.  *The legislators who voted to secede said as much!*  Why you and others feel the need to pretend slavery wasn't an issue is beyond my ability to comprehend.  That the south wanted to hang onto its slaves doesn't make it any less moral than the north.  Southerners simply had warm enough weather to make slavery a viable economic enterprise.


I realize that slavery was an issue, but as you yourself admitted, it was not the primary reason that the North invaded the South.  As you said, they did it to stop the South from seceding.  That is my only beef.  The South had every right to secede from the Union for *whatever* reason they chose to do it.  The president who was at the helm at the time, deserves the fault for infringing on the South's right to secede from the Union.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

> Many of the decisons made from the *founding* on are what eventually made war unavoidable. 
> 
> To put all the blame on Lincoln is just idiotic. He simply tried to fix what had already become a collassal cluster-$#@!. Now if you want to disagree with how he went about it , that is fine , but don't try and tell us is this was all ONE man's fault, and don't try and tell us a state has a right to secede for the purposes of enslaving americans ( one of the reasons THEY gave , not me)....


Sorry, the Civil War was never unavoidable.  Lincoln, instead of engaging in negotiation, orchestrated the Fort Sumpter event to start the war.  Fort Sumter was just another Pearl Harbor.

I am not putting all the blame on Lincoln, just most of the blame.

Lincoln should have engaged in negotiation rather than engage in war.  War should have been a last resort, not a first resort.  He should worked for an emancipation plan, as the South should have done also.  Once the war started, Lincoln should have followed the Constitituiton, and the war precedents set by James Madison.

I just posted information on how people like Andrew Jackson and James Madison handled a crisis.

You might not be aware, but while Lincoln was orchestrating Fort Sumter, a peace conference was ongoing.  Lincoln had no ionterest in the peace conference.

Because of the way the slaves were released, suddenly without Constitutional protections in a time of war, the blacks continued to be subdued for 100 years after the war.  100 more years!  Do your really think that would have happened had an emancipation plan been organized?

And in the 1860s, our nation had 100 times more wealth than we had in 1787, making a plan that cost money possible.  We also had huge tracts of unsettled land.  We had Frederick Douglas, a brilliant man and Constitutional scholar who should have been appointed to a position of real power to seek answers to problems.

The Founders gave us the Constitution, which otherwise we would have been in continual war just as the European States had been for hundreds of years.

And the Founders gave us Article V, a way to amend the Constituton without violence.

----------


## Galileo Galilei

Here is what Lincoln should have taken a leadership role in:

* Call for a national convention like the Federal Convention of 1787.

* Each State would have delegates to the convention.

* The federal government should have reprentatives at the convention, possibly a double share.

* Blacks, Indians and Women should have been representated at the Convention.

* Frederic Douglas should have been appointed to be there by the Federal government, if no state was willing.

* The Convention would suggest amendments to the Constitution.

* A plan to gradually emancipate the slaves should be prsented, funded partially by the sale of Western lands.

* A plan of partial compenastion to slave owners.

* "Black" states could have been set up as homelands for blacks who chose to move there.  Frederic Douglas supported a plan to make Florida a black homeland.  At least two western states, one in the north and one in the south, should have been created for blacks, and at last two states for Indians.

* Blacks, Indians, and woman should have been given a chance to learn ohow to read and write.

* Tariff issues should be resolved.

* In return for freeing slaves, a plan to help the South industrialize should have been put forward.

* _Dred Scott_ overturned.

* A fixed date, after which all blacks born, and becoming a certain age, be freed.

This could have been done.  It wouldn't be easy, but it could be done.

----------


## Dieseler

*The number of Vlad Dracul's victims ranges from 40,000 to 100,000.

Abraham Lincoln is responsible for the deaths of between 500,000 and 600,000.*


*Bram Stoker wrote his novel about the wrong Vampire.*

----------


## Galileo Galilei

An emancipation plan of this type would have been feasible any time after the Conclusion of the War of 1812 (1815):

1) all slaves born after the initiation of plan are freed at age 35.

2) all slaves born 10 years hence are freed at age 30.

3) all slaves born 20 years hence are freed at age 25.

4) all slaves born 30 years hence are freed at age 20.

5) all slaves born 40 years hence are freed at age 15.

6) all slaves born 50 years hence are freed at age 10.

7) all slaves born 60 years hence are freed at age 5.

8) all slaves born 70 years hence are freed at birth, slavery 100% abolished.

9) all slaves age 10 or younger at initiation of plan be freed at age 40.

10) all slaves age 10 to 20 at initiation of plan be freed at age 45.

11) all slaves age 20 to 30 at initiation of plan be freed at age 50.

12) all slaves age 30 to 40 at initiation of plan be freed at age 55.

13) all slaves age 40 to 50 at initiation of plan be freed at age 60.

14) all slaves age 50 to 60 at initiation of plan be freed at age 65.

15) all slaves age 60 to 70 at initiation of plan be freed at age 70.

16) all slaves over 70 at initiation of plan be freed at once.

17) 10 years after initiation of plan, the 3/5th rule becomes the 2/5th rule.

18) 20 years after initiation of plan, the 2/5th rule becomes the 1/5th rule.

19) 30 years after initiation of plan, the 1/5th rule becomes the 0/5th rule (meaning the rule is eliminated, slaves no longer count for House representation).

If this plan is deemd too slow, other incentives could be provided to the South to speed it up.  Or if the plan was too fast, it could be slowed down by 5 years.

If this plan were implemented at the time of the Missouri Compromise (1820), most slaves would have been free by 1860.

Comments anyone?

----------


## Bucjason

> Sorry, the Civil War was never unavoidable.  Lincoln, instead of engaging in negotiation, orchestrated the Fort Sumpter event to start the war.  Fort Sumter was just another Pearl Harbor.
> 
> I am not putting all the blame on Lincoln, just most of the blame.
> 
> Lincoln should have engaged in negotiation rather than engage in war.  War should have been a last resort, not a first resort.  He should worked for an emancipation plan, as the South should have done also.  Once the war started, Lincoln should have followed the Constitituiton, and the war precedents set by James Madison.
> 
> I just posted information on how people like Andrew Jackson and James Madison handled a crisis.
> 
> You might not be aware, but while Lincoln was orchestrating Fort Sumter, a peace conference was ongoing.  Lincoln had no ionterest in the peace conference.
> ...


Nonsense. Many of the southern states planned to secede right away if Lincoln was elected , becuase they knew he was pro-emancipation.  They had no intention of ever giving up thier cash-cow of free labor, and they said so in thier letters of secession - some of which I've already posted excerps from in this thread. You don't think these southern good-ole boys were itching to tell Lincoln where he could stick his yankee "nigga-loving" laws ?? I suggest you get a reality check.

Blame falls on both sides for the road that lead to war. The fact you sit here and try and pin it all on one man, who took over after the problem had already been escalated , is laughable and dishonest on your part.

The bottom line, however, is the Confederacy was a tyrannical illegitimate government - formed without the consent of ALL it governed (slaves) . According to the Declararion , we had a right and a "DUTY" to abolish it . For that reason alone , I'm glad Lincoln won.

----------


## Bucjason

I think what I have a problem with here is not the Lincoln bashing , but the fact that some of you who claim to be "pro-liberty", openly support and defend the honor of a tyrannical regime like the Confederacy.  

It's quite disgusting actually....

So let's get this straight : It's ok for my local government to enslave me, just not the federal?? It's ok for some OTHER american to have every human right stripped from them, as long as it's not my own??" Live and Let be Enslaved".  Is this the new Libertarian Platform ?

----------


## jmdrake

> I realize that slavery was an issue, but as you yourself admitted, it was not the primary reason that the North invaded the South.  As you said, they did it to stop the South from seceding.  That is my only beef.  The South had every right to secede from the Union for *whatever* reason they chose to do it.  The president who was at the helm at the time, deserves the fault for infringing on the South's right to secede from the Union.


Wrong.  I never admitted it was not the primary reason.  Far from it.  *I admitted it was not the ONLY reason!*  South Carolina *COULD NOT GET ANYONE ELSE TO GO ALONG WHEN TARIFFS WERE THE ONLY THING ON THE TABLE*!  

Now, looking at the evidence, I think it was the primary reason.  Looking at the same evidence you may come to a different conclusion.  My problem is with people who wish to *skew the evidence* just because it leads to a conclusion they don't like.  The evidence is clear that every state that left the union mentioned slavery prominently.  South Carolina is the only state that I've seen that mentioned anything about commerce in its declaration of secession and it only did that as a footnote.  Further all of the southern states sought to abrogate the right of other states *NOT* to support slavery but pushing for the enforcement of fugitive slave laws!  The evidence is also clear that Lincoln sought a rational approach to freeing the slaves (compensated emancipation).

As for a "right to secede", how about the right of slaves to rebel?  Do you think Nat Turner was right?  Did Robert E. Lee violate the natural right of a people to be free by thwarting John Brown's effort to arm the slaves?  Ironically some more radical abolitionists were in favor of secession because it would have meant the end of the fugitive slave laws.  And morally they would have been in their "rights" to encourage insurrection just like France was in its right to help arm the revolution against great Britain.

Anyway, here's the bottom line.  You can advance the idea that Lincoln grossly violated the constitution without warping history and ignoring the fact that he actually attempted to free slaves in the border states prior to the emancipation proclamation.  You can also advance the idea that the south had *some* legitimate grievances and was not "morally degenerate" compared to the north without trying to hide *what the south itself declared* as a primary reason for the civil war and without exaggerating slavery in the north.  The simple fact is that climate and economics are the *main* reasons for the north deciding on a labor force based on wages rather than slavery.  If slavery had been a viable economic model for the north she would have kept her slaves.  But that's not the way it worked out and since it didn't it led to different interests based on "slave states" versus "free states".  I'm not mad at the south for what happened.  That's just history.

Regards,

John M. Drake

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## jmdrake

> I just posted information on how people like Andrew Jackson and James Madison handled a crisis.


Ummm....nothing that you posted said anything about Jackson attempting to negotiate.  James Madison did all of the negotiating.  Jackson made threats.  Maybe if Madison had been around to negotiate when Lincoln was president things would have turned out differently.  But that doesn't change the fact that Jackson totally dismissed the right of secession and threatened to hang secessionists.  And yet most southerners sing the praises of "Old Hickory".  If you drove through Nashville and didn't know better you'd have thought he founded it.

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## Bucjason

> Wrong.  I never admitted it was not the primary reason.  Far from it.  *I admitted it was not the ONLY reason!*  South Carolina *COULD NOT GET ANYONE ELSE TO GO ALONG WHEN TARIFFS WERE THE ONLY THING ON THE TABLE*!  
> 
> Now, looking at the evidence, I think it was the primary reason.  Looking at the same evidence you may come to a different conclusion.  My problem is with people who wish to *skew the evidence* just because it leads to a conclusion they don't like.  The evidence is clear that every state that left the union mentioned slavery prominently.  South Carolina is the only state that I've seen that mentioned anything about commerce in its declaration of secession and it only did that as a footnote.  Further all of the southern states sought to abrogate the right of other states *NOT* to support slavery but pushing for the enforcement of fugitive slave laws!
> 
> As for a "right to secede", how about the right of slaves to rebel?  Do you think Nat Turner was right?  Did Robert E. Lee violate the natural right of a people to be free by thwarting John Brown's effort to arm the slaves?  Ironically some more radical abolitionists were in favor of secession because it would have meant the end of the fugitive slave laws.  And morally they would have been in their "rights" to encourage insurrection just like France was in its right to help arm the revolution against great Britain.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John M. Drake


It doesn't matter , even if freeing the slaves was only 1% the reason for opposing secession , it justifies it , because that one percent is RIGHT !!

If you are willing to concede that slavery was even PART of the reason for war, and you call yourself a liberty lover , you've already lost the debate.

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## Bucjason

> I realize that slavery was an issue, but as you yourself admitted, it was not the primary reason that the North invaded the South.  As you said, they did it to stop the South from seceding.  That is my only beef.  The South had every right to secede from the Union for *whatever* reason they chose to do it.  The president who was at the helm at the time, deserves the fault for infringing on the South's right to secede from the Union.


We all enter into a contract , as americans , not to infringe on "life , liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" . 

You DO NOT have the right to secede for the purposes of violating that contract !! And CERTAINTLY not without the consent of all you plan to govern (slaves who didn't get a vote ) !!

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