Very Nice...Did you know that in the 1800-1900s such songs, ballads and even poetry recitals were often sung in public halls in communities and people went there on Saturday nights (because it was the equivalent of Cinema)?
Yup ^_^
Why am I reading the comments? >.<
Ouch. A lot of history twisting going on there, and on both sides. I don't support what the Confederacy stood for in any way, shape, or form, but all the people whitewashing history in it's favor have a point about Lincoln and Sherman.
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Goes to show you the degree of cultural decline.Very Nice...Did you know that in the 1800-1900s such songs, ballads and even poetry recitals were often sung in public halls in communities and people went there on Saturday nights (because it was the equivalent of Cinema)?Yup ^_^
Oh, don't you start with the whole "culture is in decline" nonsense. People have been naysaying and doomsaying since the dawn of civilization, and they've been proven wrong almost universally.
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The Confederacy was fighting against the same centralization of power in the hands of the banking industry that Occupy Wall Street is protesting against today. Discuss!
Just kidding, don't discuss that. Get The Long Riders on DVD and watch David Carradine make the band sing "I'm a good ol' Rebel."
Gods and Generals... not a great movie, but Stephen Lang as Stonewall Jackson was worth it.
The Confederacy stood for a lot of good things - states' rights and the 9th and 10th Amendments being some of them. At some point, people should reach a point where they realize that few things are all black or all white.
It certainly is complicated, but, while state's rights was certainly a Confederate rallying cry, I wouldn't say they held all that true to it. They only applied it to gathering and spending funds, which was precisely where they shouldn't have applied it. It screwed them over in the later years of the war when they couldn't move food and munitions where it needed to go.
I know you haven't brought up slavery, and I'm not saying you did, but I want to throw out there that while I do not claim it was the sole cause of the Civil War, it was definitely one of the primary ones, if not the primary one. To say otherwise is a whitewash. Same with the fact that Lincoln was pretty damned heavy handed, and didn't always follow the constitution.
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Precisely. Mississippi wasn't the only state to explicitly mention slavery in it's declaration of secession, either.
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the Civil War didn't accomplish much good.
Few wars have.
Due to Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3, laws requiring the return of slaves didn't violate states' rights or the 9th or 10th.The Confederacy stood for a lot of good things - states' rights and the 9th and 10th Amendments being some of them. At some point, people should reach a point where they realize that few things are all black or all white.The Confederacy stood for state's rights to have slaves and not much else. For example, the slave states were quite happy to try to use the federal government to return slaves who'd escaped to free states.
I do think that ending slavery was a good thing. There is a difference between being poor and being enslaved. It was a step in the right direction.
I am amused by "few things are all black or all white" in this context.
going to need more information here.
Also, JOHN BROWN 4 LIFE!
That first song almost sounds like a Poe -- it's so explicitly, defiantly hateful toward the Constitution, the american eagle, and the very ideal of freedom that one suspects it was actually written to show off the hypocrisy of Confederate sympathizers who also claim to be patriots. It's not quite as unambiguously anti-Confederate as Tom Lehrer's "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie," but it can certainly be read that way. My own opinion on the Confederacy matches John Scalzi's (see here and here as well) -- to claim that preserving slavery wasn't the single most important cause of secession, or that it would have happened at all without that issue, is to be either ignorant or dishonest. The two most important differences between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution in regard to states' rights were that the Confederate Constitution denied states the right to abolish slavery or to grant citizenship rights to free blacks, and that the Confederate Constitution explicitly denied states the right to secede from the Confederate States of America.
The two most important differences between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution in regard to states' rights were that the Confederate Constitution denied states the right to abolish slavery or to grant citizenship rights to free blacks, and that the Confederate Constitution explicitly denied states the right to secede from the Confederate States of America.
It's always funny how no one on the 'war of northern aggression' side ever want to really remember those points.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
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Down here in Texas, Rick Perry as governor spoke up against a confederate-flag license plate. They just approved this beauty, though.
I didn't mention slavery because I assumed that everyone knows at least a little about slavery and the Civil War.
However, considering that the poor (of whatever color) were left destitute after the War and remained destitute (in many cases even til today), the Civil War didn't accomplish much good.
More than one scholar has pointed out that we are still fighting the Civil War. The battleground has become a cultural and societal one, with occasional ugly skirmishes mostly in the form of terrorist acts. But it's still going on.
As to what good the Civil War did, if you believe the comment about it still going on, then that remains to be seen. I think it did plenty good in ending slavery. Problem is, every solution presents more problems, and that can be said for anything in the world, whether wars, transportation, fast food, whatever. Some are still worth doing. As I believe that war was, and will prove more and more to be (ugly and horrible as it was).
I agree with those here who think that the South's scope of "states rights" was severely and wrongly limited, and frankly I think it's quite dubious to claim to be for rights at all when the main thrust of your secession is to be able to keep your slaves.
As to Lincoln and the other figures of the time, well who on earth is not a complicated man? (Other than Forrest Gump?) We are all complicated and nobody is perfect, and we shouldn't expect Lincoln to have been. But was he the best man for the job? Undoubtedly. He proved it by rising to the occasion when the catastrophe presented itself. He did what he could, when he could. Hindsight makes it easy to point out his missteps. Who cares?
All that matters to me is that, as a thinking, reasoning and compassionate human being, I could not imagine this country standing by, trying to trade on the world stage, trying to take ourselves seriously and call ourselves "good," while our brothers and cousins and countrymen ran a slave state immediately next door and were actively trying to claim more territory around us to spread that doctrine within. Whatever else you think about the Civil War and the people involved, however true it may be that some people on both sides had good and bad intentions, nothing can whitewash the awful thing they wanted. A war was inevitable, at some point. That lifestyle could not be allowed to stand.
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Oh, don't you start with the whole "culture is in decline" nonsense. People have been naysaying and doomsaying since the dawn of civilization, and they've been proven wrong almost universally.Goes to show you the degree of cultural decline.Very Nice...Did you know that in the 1800-1900s such songs, ballads and even poetry recitals were often sung in public halls in communities and people went there on Saturday nights (because it was the equivalent of Cinema)?Yup ^_^
Used to be you could go to those Recitals for free...now its 15 dollars to watch a low quality film while the people who sold it to you use your money to buy thousand dollar tickets to poetry recitals.
in what way isn't that a decline in society?
The state's rights issue was a canard. They wanted to keep the slaves upon which their wealth was built and the states rights argument gave them the answer they wanted. When states wanted to outlaw bringing slaves into their states, the south objected.
Like most folks, they grabbed whatever argument agreed with what they wanted to do.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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There's a difference between a "right" and a "liberty". A right creates a restriction on some third party. For example, you have the liberty to smoke in your own home. If you had a right to smoke in a hospital, that right would restrict how hospital staff can treat you (for example, they couldn't kick you out because you were smoking). A right derives from a contract. For example, I agree to restrict what I do during work hours and, in return, myemployer agrees to restrict how he spends some of his money (he gives it to me). The Constitution is a contract between the Federal government and the States. The States are obligated to restrict what they do if they are going to remain states (and vice versa in the other direction). The Federal government had no restrictions on what it could do if States sheltered runaway slaves. In other words, there were no states rights regarding the handling of runaway slaves. If the portion of the Constitution I referenced earlier did not exist, then States would have that right.
(arrgh, why am I posting?)
Um, I'm going to disagree.
The Constitution is a limiting document. Article 1 section 10 specifically lists things states can't do.
Fugitive Slave laws were enforced by article IV, section 2.*
The 9th and 10th ammendments specify that rights exist that are not enumerated in the Constitution. And that those rights are reserved to the states, and the people.**
As for smoking, the hospitals/workplaces/etc can ban smoking since they can restrict behaviour on their property, it's not a federal issue.*** Just like my workplace (stupidly) restricts weapons brought into the building.****
We don't get 'rights' from the government. We agree to a system of government, limiting the exercise of some of our rights in exchange for the benefits of society.*****
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Again, see stupid laws. Ohio's smoking ban is one of these. A bar/restaurant should be allowed to set their own smoking policy IMHO, you don't like it, don't go there. That I find the law stupid doesn't make it unconstitutional.
The problem there is that you're creating an unsafe environment for your employees. While they COULD technically leave, many people aren't in a position to quit their jobs.
I don't know how constitutional federal "we're not going to let you give your employees cancer, or work with something that will rip their limbs off without safety, or make them use flame throwers in coal mines" but i know that they've done a lot to make things suck less, so I'm for them. Sure, Osha's insane sometimes, but its less crazy than weavers being locked in a burning building
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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BNW,
The problem I have is that there's no provision for OSHA in the Constitution as I read it. An Ohio OSHA is fine, a Texas OSHA is fine. But to have a blanket OSHA... not so much.
And yeah, it's a libertarian argument that someone can just choose not to work there.* Life is all about Risk vs. Reward.
There was a time where if the Federal Government wanted to ban something, the constitution had to be amended.**
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I AM a Confederacy supporter. While the Confederacy had its issues, Arcturus Mengsk and his rebels the Sons of Korhal, were much worse.
The state's rights issue was a canard. They wanted to keep the slaves upon which their wealth was built and the states rights argument gave them the answer they wanted. When states wanted to outlaw bringing slaves into their states, the south objected.
Like most folks, they grabbed whatever argument agreed with what they wanted to do.
Pretty much this. Aside from explicitly outlawing all internal improvements except those related to shipping and making it difficult to raise federal taxes (two decisions which helped them lose the war), the Confederate constitution wasn't really any more focused on state's rights than it's American counterpart. Unlike the American constitution, it explicitly stated that state's rights trumped federal rights, but that was lip service, and the document did not hold to it. The Confederate federal government:
Gave the president a line item veto (which is actually a good idea)
Allowed 7 members of the president's cabinet to simultaneously serve on the cabinet and in congress
Could mint coins, sign treaties, regulate systems of measurement, naturalize citizens, set and collect levies, and many other things.
Oh, and the Confederate sates could not choose to ban slavery. The Confederate constitution explicitly forbid it.
By the way, shortly after the Confederacy was formed, the Confederate states got to squabbling with the government over state's rights, just like they had in the Union, do to the fact that the Confederacy did not provide states greater rights than the Union. Ironic, that.
Oh, and Lincoln gets a lot of flack for suspending the writ of habeus corpus, but that is constitutional in time of war or rebellion, and Jefferson Davis did it, too. In fact, most of the controversial policies Lincoln came up with were also implemented by Davis. Confederate supporters never seem to remember that when throwing fire at Lincoln for violating the constitution.
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That first song almost sounds like a Poe -- it's so explicitly, defiantly hateful toward the Constitution, the american eagle, and the very ideal of freedom that one suspects it was actually written to show off the hypocrisy of Confederate sympathizers who also claim to be patriots. It's not quite as unambiguously anti-Confederate as Tom Lehrer's "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie," but it can certainly be read that way. My own opinion on the Confederacy matches John Scalzi's (see here and here as well) -- to claim that preserving slavery wasn't the single most important cause of secession, or that it would have happened at all without that issue, is to be either ignorant or dishonest. The two most important differences between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution in regard to states' rights were that the Confederate Constitution denied states the right to abolish slavery or to grant citizenship rights to free blacks, and that the Confederate Constitution explicitly denied states the right to secede from the Confederate States of America.
Yeah, slavery was central to the public discourse, rhetoric, and politicking of the time, but to say the Civil War was just about slavery is kind of a Pollyanna approach. That is, we like to assume that the result of the Civil War was positive progress, and we point toward the end of slavery to prove that fact.
(Note: I don't mean to downplay at all the horror show that was slavery. Any country that engages in such practices deserves to be destroyed.)
But to say that it all comes down to slavery is like saying that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about terrorism. Yeah, 9/11, Osama bin Laden, yadda, yadda, but a lot more is going on than just a supposed fight against terrorism. As an American citizen, I am about to lose the last of my guarantees to civil liberties with the passage of the current NDAA, but is that because of terrorism or are there other more complex economic and political issues in play?
Comparing slavery to terrorism might not be the best argument, because slavery actually existed and wasn't a nebulous concept, but my point is that history might end up recording this time period as an Age of Terrorism, when it was an age being dragged along by economic forces just like any other.
And that's the biggest flaw in most libertarian arguments. Few people are willing to step over the guy in the street who's suffering from his bad choices/luck. While private institutions/citizens can step up (G_d knows I have), it is hard to see suffering and not do something.
The flaw is more general than that; Libertarianism, like Communism, might be a good way of organizing a society for a sentient species with certain characteristics that could plausibly evolve somewhere in the universe, but Homo sapiens is not that species. I don't want to get into a lot of detail on this here, but I highly recommend philosophy professor Ernest Partridge's essay series A Dim View of Libertarianism.
Yeah, slavery was central to the public discourse, rhetoric, and politicking of the time, but to say the Civil War was just about slavery is kind of a Pollyanna approach.
And I don't say that. I do say that slavery was a necessary condition for secession and the civil war to occur; without that factor, all of the other conflicts between the northern and southern states together would not have resulted in the kind of violent schism that occurred in the 1860s.
That is, we like to assume that the result of the Civil War was positive progress, and we point toward the end of slavery to prove that fact.
Which it does; it's such a huge improvement in the aggregate conditions of human life in this country as to vastly outweigh all arguably negative social effects of the war. (I say arguably because most of the arguments I've heard for negative effects are conservative or libertarian arguments against changes in society that progressives regard as positive.)
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Yeah, slavery was central to the public discourse, rhetoric, and politicking of the time, but to say the Civil War was just about slavery is kind of a Pollyanna approach.And I don't say that. I do say that slavery was a necessary condition for secession and the civil war to occur; without that factor, all of the other conflicts between the northern and southern states together would not have resulted in the kind of violent schism that occurred in the 1860s.
That is, we like to assume that the result of the Civil War was positive progress, and we point toward the end of slavery to prove that fact.Which it does; it's such a huge improvement in the aggregate conditions of human life in this country as to vastly outweigh all arguably negative social effects of the war. (I say arguably because most of the arguments I've heard for negative effects are conservative or libertarian arguments against changes in society that progressives regard as positive.)
I don't really disagree with any of that. One of my favorite things to do is to make fun of "libertarians," but lately a strong federal government seems to me to be a double-edged sword. And it interests me to think about what other economic and political turns America might have taken if slavery had not existed.
The problem I have is that there's no provision for OSHA in the Constitution as I read it. An Ohio OSHA is fine, a Texas OSHA is fine. But to have a blanket OSHA... not so much.
The problem there is if you have say, Delaware regulate OSHA the way it regulates corporations, every business in the US moves to Delaware because they allow you to give your employees cancer and hack off their limbs with impunity. Now every state in the nation has a "race to the bottom" trying to keep their workers.
I don't know if that makes a good argument for affecting interstate commerce and thus coming under purview of the federal government, but its been a good idea and thats enough for me. The state is just a different unit of government. People have rights, not governments.
Doing this from memory, so please forgive/correct any errors:
There were many reasons that the South lost the Civil War, but one of them was state's rights. As soon as the Confederacy was founded, the leaders of the individual states started falling out over all sorts of things. IIRC, the two main thorns in Jefferson Davis's side(s?) were Vice-President Alexander Stephens and the Governor of North Carolina whose name, I think, was Zebulon Vance. Cool name, btw. They (along with other zealous state's rights advocates) made it nigh on impossible for the Confederacy to achieve the same sort of unity and organization that the Union brought to bear.
I'm not saying that it's an argument against state's rights, but I am saying that it was kind of funny.
Doing this from memory, so please forgive/correct any errors:
There were many reasons that the South lost the Civil War, but one of them was state's rights. As soon as the Confederacy was founded, the leaders of the individual states started falling out over all sorts of things. IIRC, the two main thorns in Jefferson Davis's side(s?) were Vice-President Alexander Stephens and the Governor of North Carolina whose name, I think, was Zebulon Vance. Cool name, btw. They (along with other zealous state's rights advocates) made it nigh on impossible for the Confederacy to achieve the same sort of unity and organization that the Union brought to bear.
I'm not saying that it's an argument against state's rights, but I am saying that it was kind of funny.
I think it proves a point about the Confederacy. All their talk of state's rights was hot air, and the common assertion that the south stood for state's rights is only a half truth. The Confederate government was just as federalist as the Union, and the states railed against it just as much as they railed against such behavior in the Union.
Well, the internal dissension in the Confederacy, while crippling the war effort, kind of proved that it wasn't all hot air.
But this is a weird position for me to be arguing in because I'm a big Union fan. Where the Republicans lost me was when they stabbed Reconstruction in the back and handed the South over to the Klan.
Except the reason for the internal dissension was the fact that the federal government only paid it lip service. That shows that it was a bunch of hot air so far as the federal government was concerned.
As for the second, it's because Andrew Johnston was a pretty big racist.
Johnson was a bigot, but Reconstruction carried on through two terms of Grant's presidency and was only ended in...'78? Something like that. It can't all be laid at Johnson's feet.
Interesting historical fact: The French government that earlier in the decade has slaughtered the Communards gave the US government that had just betrayed Reconstruction and the promise of black freedom...the Statue of Liberty!
Life: Either you laugh or you cry.
EDIT: Commune '71, End of Reconstruction '77, State of Liberty '86. Too many Budweisers makes Comrade Anklebiter forget timelines.