Do you think all Mexicans have the right to come live
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[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Genesis of the Civil War[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The historical event that looms largest in American public consciousness is the Civil War. One-hundred thirty-nine years after the first shot was fired, its genesis is still fiercely debated and its symbols heralded and protested. And no wonder: the event transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order. The cataclysmic event massacred a generation of young men, burned and looted the Southern states, set a precedent for executive dictatorship, and transformed the American military from a citizen-based defense corps into a global military power that can?t resist intervention.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And yet, if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery. If you favor Confederate symbols, it means you are a white person unsympathetic to the plight of blacks in America. If you favor abolishing Confederate History Month and taking down the flag, you are an enlightened thinker willing to bury the past so we can look forward to a bright future under progressive leadership. The debate rarely goes beyond these simplistic slogans.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with slavery. Even the name "Civil War" is misleading, since the war wasn?t about two sides fighting to run the central government as in the English or Roman civil wars. The South attempted a peaceful secession from federal control, an ambition no different from the original American plea for independence from Britain.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through public works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central government. It also injured the South?s trading relations with other parts of the world.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North?s early version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with the "tariff of abomination." Thirty year later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to "collect the duties and imposts": he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians said at the time.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution, with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the executive. No, it didn?t abolish slavery but neither did the original Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in slaves).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Now, you won?t read this version of events in any conventional history text, particularly not those approved for use in public high schools. You are not likely to hear about it in the college classroom either, where the single issue of slavery overwhelms any critical thinking. Again and again we are told what Polybius called "an idle, unprofitable tale" instead of the truth, and we are expected to swallow it uncritically. So where can you go to discover that the conventional story is sheer nonsense?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The last ten years have brought us a flurry of great books that look beneath the surface. There is John Denson?s The Costs of War (1998), Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel?s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996), David Gordon?s Secession, State, and Liberty (1998), Marshall de Rosa?s The Confederate Constitution (1991), or, from a more popular standpoint, James and Walter Kennedy?s Was Jefferson Davis Right? (1998).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But if we were to recommend one work-based on originality, brevity, depth, and sheer rhetorical power-it would be Charles Adams?s time bomb of a book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is wrong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption . Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence-including remarkable editorial cartoons and political speeches-to support his thesis that the war was really about government revenue.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Consider this little tidbit from the pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post, March 2, 1861 edition:[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]"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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]"What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it, when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities have been expelled?"[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This is not an isolated case. British newspapers, whether favoring the North or South, said the same thing: the feds invaded the South to collect revenue. Indeed, when Karl Marx said the following, he was merely stating what everyone who followed events closely knew: "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."[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Marx was only wrong on one point: the war was about principle at one level. It was about the principle of self-determination and the right not to be taxed to support an alien regime. Another way of putting this is that the war was about freedom, and the South was on the same side as the original American revolutionaries.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Interesting, isn?t it, that today, those who favor banning Confederate symbols and continue to demonize an entire people?s history also tend to be partisans of the federal government in all its present political struggles? Not much has changed in 139 years. Adams?s book goes a long way toward telling the truth about this event, for anyone who cares to look at the facts.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And yet, if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery. If you favor Confederate symbols, it means you are a white person unsympathetic to the plight of blacks in America. If you favor abolishing Confederate History Month and taking down the flag, you are an enlightened thinker willing to bury the past so we can look forward to a bright future under progressive leadership. The debate rarely goes beyond these simplistic slogans.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with slavery. Even the name "Civil War" is misleading, since the war wasn?t about two sides fighting to run the central government as in the English or Roman civil wars. The South attempted a peaceful secession from federal control, an ambition no different from the original American plea for independence from Britain.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through public works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central government. It also injured the South?s trading relations with other parts of the world.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North?s early version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with the "tariff of abomination." Thirty year later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to "collect the duties and imposts": he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians said at the time.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution, with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the executive. No, it didn?t abolish slavery but neither did the original Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in slaves).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Now, you won?t read this version of events in any conventional history text, particularly not those approved for use in public high schools. You are not likely to hear about it in the college classroom either, where the single issue of slavery overwhelms any critical thinking. Again and again we are told what Polybius called "an idle, unprofitable tale" instead of the truth, and we are expected to swallow it uncritically. So where can you go to discover that the conventional story is sheer nonsense?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The last ten years have brought us a flurry of great books that look beneath the surface. There is John Denson?s The Costs of War (1998), Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel?s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996), David Gordon?s Secession, State, and Liberty (1998), Marshall de Rosa?s The Confederate Constitution (1991), or, from a more popular standpoint, James and Walter Kennedy?s Was Jefferson Davis Right? (1998).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But if we were to recommend one work-based on originality, brevity, depth, and sheer rhetorical power-it would be Charles Adams?s time bomb of a book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is wrong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption . Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence-including remarkable editorial cartoons and political speeches-to support his thesis that the war was really about government revenue.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Consider this little tidbit from the pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post, March 2, 1861 edition:[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]"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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]"What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it, when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities have been expelled?"[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This is not an isolated case. British newspapers, whether favoring the North or South, said the same thing: the feds invaded the South to collect revenue. Indeed, when Karl Marx said the following, he was merely stating what everyone who followed events closely knew: "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."[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Marx was only wrong on one point: the war was about principle at one level. It was about the principle of self-determination and the right not to be taxed to support an alien regime. Another way of putting this is that the war was about freedom, and the South was on the same side as the original American revolutionaries.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Interesting, isn?t it, that today, those who favor banning Confederate symbols and continue to demonize an entire people?s history also tend to be partisans of the federal government in all its present political struggles? Not much has changed in 139 years. Adams?s book goes a long way toward telling the truth about this event, for anyone who cares to look at the facts.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][/FONT]
My mother is.
Oh god, cannon fodder. WTF
Tell you what, I'll just play it your way.
Most of the Anglos came illegally.
Mexico never gave up Texas, but under threat of violence--i.e. the Anglos stole it.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
in these times of short attention spans... it's just easier to change history and say all Southerners owned black slaves. Whitey is evil.
ElDominicano
Legendary Poster
Rosa their is one irrefutable fact that disproves all of your theories, Lincoln did what he did for the reasons that are accepted by every serious historian in this country.
Civil War was about slavery, and if your trying to say it was not, then my pretty friend, you are wrong.
Civil War was about slavery, and if your trying to say it was not, then my pretty friend, you are wrong.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
seriously, read what she posted. put aside the public school version of the events and have an open mind.
Rose, you can post a wall of propaganda if you like. But I'm not gong to read through it all. If you have a point you want to make, make it. Use a quote from it to support an argument, but posting up someone's else's work is not making your point.
Again, the central issue of the Civil War was slavery.
Again, the central issue of the Civil War was slavery.
It's easy to see your desire to be a part of intelligent discussion, it's too bad for you that you haven't the ability.
So keep yapping like a puppy with your idiotic quips.
"Whitey" did steal Mexico and your sarcasm can't argue against that.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
take the time and read the 75 seconds worth of text. Lincoln didn't want to lose "half" of the country along with the other reasons Rose stated.
Sorry but your 11th grade history teacher failed you.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
I have to dumb everything down, because you guys can't read 70 seconds worth of material. If it's not a 60 second youtube video with a catchy song most of you won't be able to comprehend.
You really think thousands and thousands and thousands of men fought and killed each other for a few slaves? lol.
Mexico or Spain never "morally" owned it either. The Apaches, Comanches and others were the ones here. They tried to take it from them but couldn't. They said "I own this land" but they couldn't even colonize most of it. It just sat there. If you really want to do what is morally right (which no one is history has ever done anywhere) and are in the US, get off the property you're on and find out what US tribe lived there (Cherokee, Apache, Navajo, etc) and give it to their decendents. No f'n body is going to do that. My mother is 100% Cherokee and would laugh if someone suggested it. The people here have made it what it is- good and bad. Their descendents need to try and hang on to the good of it and improve the bad.
Lincoln didn't want to lose half of the country, huh?
LOL Brilliant. No shit, but I don't need to read for seventy-five seconds to figure that Lincoln didn't want to lose land.
What a fucking genius.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
so you think brothers were killing brothers and fathers killing sons over some black Africans? You sir are the one that is FUCKING "stoopid"
Did I ever say or even imply otherwise?
But at least you admit that Anglos have no moral right to this land.
But I'm not so stoopid that I need to read articles on the 'net to figure out Lincoln was fighting for control of territory. You sir, cannot say the same.
If I apoligized for highlighting your "stoopidity," will you apologize for "name-calling" and showing your "true colors"?
Very few have any moral rights to land. Most came from somewhere else. There is even mounting evidence that others were here for long periods before the AmerIndians came to North America. Whoever lives on the land, holds onto it and makes it what it is has the rights. Morality is also in the eyes of the beholder and has never been what the world was run by. It is a higher human trait that is easy to talk about and try to implement in good times. What's normal is base human nature.
truthBtold
Legendary Poster
so where are you getting your information from... you pulling it out of your a$$?
Again, you have to go a little further than what your 11th grade public school history teacher told you.
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