Is Bush the worst President in history?

LBJ killed JFK? Someone get a net and put on Monty Python's introductary march music. We got a live one here.

Islstl, how is the view from the asylum today?

 

My whole goal was to join CB's list of contempt and since i have apparently accomplished that I can now die a happy man. some selected quotes about the War:

John Reagan, Postmaster General of the Confederacy.
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, and your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange, which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights."

Albany, NY – “We sympathize with and justify the South because their rights have been invaded to the extreme. If they wish to secede, we would wish them God-Speed.”

New York Tribune – “If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861."

Cincinnati Daily Press – “We believe the right of any member of this Confederacy to dissolve its political relations with the others and assume an independent position is absolute.”

Chicago Daily Times. Quoting from a December 10, 1860 edition:

“In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufacturers would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow.”










and finally in closing i will leave you with Jefferson Davis in his farewell address to the United States Senate.

"Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again when a better comprehension of the theory of our government, and inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent anyone from denying that each State is sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made an agent whomsoever."

 

Gimp, on one hand I have Allan Nevins and James McPherson, two of the finest historians America has ever produced, telling me that the single cause of the Civil War was slavery. Without slavery, there would have been no Civil War.

On the other hand, I have a racist, probable segregationist, and right wing kook named Gimp telling me slavery had nothing to do with the start of the Civil War.

Guess who loses?

 

"... in my opinion the best means of securing the efficiency and fidelity of this auxiliary force [of slaves who would join the Confederate army] would be to accompany the measure with a well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation."
Robert E. Lee

"A last-minute diplomatic initiative to secure British and French recognition in return for emancipation. . . . The impetus for this effort came from Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana, a prominent member of the Confederate Congress and one of the South's largest slaveholders. Convinced since 1862 that slavery was a foreign-policy millstone around the Confederacy's neck, Kenner had long urged an emancipation diplomacy."
James McPherson 'Battle Cry of Freedon'

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, believing that slavery was necessary and that the black man must be subject to the white man, wrote in December of 1859, "I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery"

December 10, 1860 Chicago Daily Times.

"In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwide trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow"

Stephan A. Douglas:
"The fact can no longer be disguised that many of the Republican Senators desire war and disunion, under the pretext of saving the Union. They wish to get rid of the Southern States, in order to have a majority in the Senate to confirm the appointments, and many of them think they can hold a permanent Republican majority in the Northern States, but not in the whole Union; for partisan reasons they are anxious to dissolve the Union, if it can be done without holding them responsible before the people"

January 15, 1861, Philadelphia Press clarified that losing the South as a source of Federal revenue, and not the secession of the Southern States as such, was their real concern. The Southern States could not be forced to collect revenue for Washington without Northern military occupation of the forts located in Southern ports.
"It is the enforcement of the revenue laws, not the coercion of the State that is the question of the hour. If those laws cannot be enforced, the Union is clearly gone; if they can, it is safe"

An editorial in the February 19, 1861, Manchester, New Hampshire Union Democrat voiced the common concerns of Northern shipping interests.

"The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more ships than all other trade. It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No–we MUST NOT let the South go!"

I guess that quoting Northern newspapers from the time of the war isn't evidence enough for you but that's because no matter what i tell you, just like no matter what you say, will i change your mind but that's what's great about this country the freedom of opinions and dissent.

 

I would also like to add that in an attempt to keep Southern States from leaving the Union, a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, very different from the current one, was whittled out of the Crittenden Compromise by both Republicans and Democrats, with Lincoln's approval and even his signature. It was approved by Congress on February 28, 1861, and submitted to the States for ratification on March 2, 1861. It declared:

"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 orservice by the laws of said State."

But of course this has no bearing on whether the war was over slavery because this ammendment happened after the fact that some states had already seceded, isn't that right CB. Why would the other states secede and join the confederacy if this amendment was proposed and already passed by Congress and signed by the President, I know that the Presidents signature is not needed on amendments however it showed his approval of it.

 

I just thought you might like to read the actual Crittendon Compromise for yourself.

Crittendon Compromise

 

Thank you for bringing up the Crittenden Compromise. I didn't figure you would know what it was.

So folks: Another proof that the war was fought over slavery is that the several compromises that were proposed at the last minute after Lincoln's election ALL involved protecting slavery in the South, and in giving the South more concessions on slavery rights if they would not leave the Union.

One of those compromises was the so-called "Crittenden Compromise."

Since that is what the compromises dealt with-slavery, it is proof beyond any shadow of a doubt that the cause of the Civil War was slavery. After all, if they were working out a deal to prevent war at the last minute, it stands to reason that they would negotiate over the crucial issue(s).

And they were negotiating over slavery rights in the South. The Compromises failed, but they clearly show the issue in question was slavery.

As I have already said I am not unsympathetic to the South's plight. But the cause of the war was the slavery issue and the many forms it took in many debates.

The South was insistent that the western states, at least some of them, be slave. The South wanted Mexico and Cuba and some Gulf of Mexico nations to expand slavery.

The North was just as adament that slavery would be contained in the South where it existed at that time.

The position of the South was that slavery could NOT be excluded from the territories by Congress. They opposed homestead laws because they feared it would bring free soil settlers to western states.

Believe it or not, there are some scholars who think the US Supreme Court was moving toward a position that said that NO STATE, north or south, could outlaw slavery. If you look closely at the Dred Scott decision, you could see the logical conclusion of that drift.

 

Gimp, I have been in these discussions before in other places. When someone starts arguing that "slavery had nothing to do with the cause of the War," I know exactly where you are coming from.

It is not a pretty place.

On the other hand:
I think that any person, white or black, who looks at the situation objectively will see that the South was between a rock and a hard place. No one from that era even came close to seriously proposing a solution to the problem. Lincoln realized this.

What I am saying is that outside of a few real villains who demagogued in the South and were irresponsible in their rhetoric and the dire consequences of it, most people on both sides did what they thought they had to do.

But you cannot escape the conclusion that slavery was the one issue that caused the war. If I offended you, I apologize, but you should realize that accepting the truth is not such a hard thing. It does not make the Southerners some evil monsters.

The people of the South suffered horribly during the war and afterwards. They paid the price. As John Brown might have said, "the land was purged with blood." And it was purged for its sins.

 

Slavery was a minor issue. The major issues were rotective tarrifs and the state rights. Why would 90 percent of a population fight to protect an institution that only 7 percent had anything to do with. I will concede that to say the War of Southron Independece had nothing to do with slavey is absurd. To say slavary was te main issue is more ubsurd. The Union did not fight to end slavary and the South did not fight to protect it.

The Southrons fought the war because the army of a foreing nation invaded their homes, pillaged, raped, and burned.