Civil War

[dairygirl4u2c]

people say 'constitutioal abuses, and slavery' were the causes for war back then.
but nowadays, its' even worse. if you believe there's abuses constitutioanlly...they're much ,much worse now. and, in stead of slavery being encroached upon per th states, the issue is abortion. much much bigger than slavery.

so on every front... people are just cowards and/or inconsistuten, when they say they'd fight in the civl war, but not now, when they at least are not pushing for a just war, even if it's not practical, ie, try to make it practical, exercise your first amendment rightts.
people should be more self and outterly consistent, but mostly honest. it damages the credibility etc etc

[elizabeth09]

i do not think one is needed at this time, because we need our men to fight and the ladies will repair them in any way.

[CatherineM]

The Tea Party guys in Oklahoma are putting through a measure to state a recognized state militia separate from the National Guard to protect the state from federal overreaching.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='12 April 2010 - 06:44 PM' timestamp='1271115849' post='2092022']
The Tea Party guys in Oklahoma are putting through a measure to state a recognized state militia separate from the National Guard to protect the state from federal overreaching.
[/quote]
Is it going to go through?

[CatherineM]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='12 April 2010 - 09:38 PM' timestamp='1271126304' post='2092187']
Is it going to go through?
[/quote]
I never discount the ability of Okies to pull things off. This is after all where the parking meter was invented, and where men still fish for 200 lb. catfish with their bare hands.

[havok579257]

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' date='02 April 2010 - 03:10 PM' timestamp='1270235451' post='2085618']
people say 'constitutioal abuses, and slavery' were the causes for war back then.
but nowadays, its' even worse. if you believe there's abuses constitutioanlly...they're much ,much worse now. and, in stead of slavery being encroached upon per th states, the issue is abortion. much much bigger than slavery.

so on every front... people are just cowards and/or inconsistuten, when they say they'd fight in the civl war, but not now, when they at least are not pushing for a just war, even if it's not practical, ie, try to make it practical, exercise your first amendment rightts.
people should be more self and outterly consistent, but mostly honest. it damages the credibility etc etc
[/quote]


slavery was not a cause of the civil war. that's revisionist history to paint lincoln as the altrouistic hero who was only out to free the slaves. that couldn't be farther from the truth.


also a civil war now would be no more just than the civil war between the north and south. suffice to say, niether would meet catholic just war ideology.

[dairygirl4u2c]

"I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought." - Confederate Col. John S. Mosby

i do remember a quote though from lincoln that i think effectively said he wanted to preserve the Union at all costs, not so much concerned about slavery. he'd even allow slavery to preserve the union.
so if you were a confederate sympatheizer, id see why you'd be antilincoln. he didnt have the cahones to fight slavery, and he was anti local government. (arguably

i know there's one similar to mosby's from davis or douglass.

that said, here's one by davis about the principle of the matter, not slavery.
" I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination President Jefferson Davis, Confederate States of America"

-----------

other interesting quotes:
lilcoln must've not on principle thought revolution unjustified, ever. he prob jsut thought it in this case.
"If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861"
that means, perhaps slavery wasn't an issue he thought willing to let the union fall to, even if they were being infringed constuttioally etc. ?

Edited April 17, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in his "Cornerstone Speech". Stephens said:

“ (Thomas Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. 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. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free. [/quote]
lincoln

Edited April 17, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. [/quote]

and more interesting
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/miller1.html

the fugitive slave laws before the civil war said "if a slave is in the north, the northerners must help them go back to the south". the emancipation proclamation, said the slaves are free only if the rebel states didn't return to the union. on the one side, it was good political expedeiency, "do what we say, or you lose your slaves", and it helped further lincoln's "union preserved, even if it means slaves exist". on the opposite end of expediency though, was the rebel's interesting point "As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.""

one of lincoln's constitutional amendments, on how to deal with freed slaves, was "the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals." As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000), "It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and that you couldn’t have one without the other." "

[quote]Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive. The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way:

"The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North… the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue."

In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point:

That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.[/quote]
so they weren't too concerned with slavery, but to preseve the union. and the economic bottoline mustve been nice too. i wonder how much that mightve been a primary reason, taking away pretense excuses, and upon reading that, i read "Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:

Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.

Karl Marx seconded this view:

The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.
"
note karl marx, the founder of much of socialism.


[quote]Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet, he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called for Lincoln to suppress it.

Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century’s political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. [/quote]

"Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these states, without first calling Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four states seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions, the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible."

Edited April 17, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[Nihil Obstat]

edit

Edited April 18, 2010 by Nihil Obstat