Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Battle flag uproar

So, his whole deal about "Saving the Union", about which he was quite open and forthcoming throughout, to the extent of publishing it plainly stated in a major newspaper for the whole World to read, during that war, was all a front?

He didn't care about saving the Union at all, only his personal profits from the railroad?

Well, fortunately for him, there was about a half-million OTHER guys, with no stake in the railroad, who DID want to save the Union, and who were prepared to die for that belief.



You're lucky. When I say that slavery was essential to the Southern economy in 1860 I get labelled a "revisionist", and worse, a "Brit"

Same thing when I point out that the entire Southern leadership derived their own personal fortunes from the labor of other men, women and children confined in chains (literal or figurative as necessary) and condemned to a life of imprisonment and hard labor.

In fact they even wrote a Constitution specifically designed to protect and preserve that practice ergo their own fortunes. I dunno if every Confederate soldier was sworn to uphold it, it being a sort of Confederate Federal document after all, but they were all in service to states that had ratified said constitution and must have been aware of it.

Birdwatcher

That's because you always leave out the fact that the war was about the economy, of which slavery was an element. It's like saying WWII was about killing Jews.

Lincoln did want to preserve the union yes....even if it meant slavery was legal forever under the 13th amendment (corwin), which isnt taught today

So Bleeding Kansas et al. before the war was really about the economy, people caring naught for actual principles at all?

And I've oft pointed out that in Southern perception, slavery WAS the economy, by that point they had hopelessly sold themselves out to "Big Cotton", ergo slavery, a process that had been continuing unabated for the previous fifty years.

So much so they believed going into it that they could actually use a cotton export embargo as a club to extort recognition from the Brits.

Considerable irony in the fact that the interrupted exports of Southern cotton, either purposefully by the Confederacy in the beginning, or involuntarily as a result of the subsequent Northern blockade, prompted rapid increases in production elsewhere in the World.

Heck this would have eventually happened anyway even without a war, and the subsequent collapse in cotton prices could have been equally ruinous to the South.

Birdwatcher

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Useful idiots are always easy enough to find in huge numbers.

John Brown was a dupe, a chump, and a useful idiot just like so many people are today with their pet causes.

Oh, so they DIDN'T preserve the Union? That whole secession thing was just a sham?

As a point of fact, they didn't. The war destroyed the "Union" as it was known before the war and replaced it with a centralized empire.

You might have point, if'n John Brown and his boys were the whole deal.

It was much more personal than that in the south. People, the majority who never saw a slave, much less owned one, were threatened by an invading force. In Washington it was all about business. (As usual.)

Oh, I have a point and I just used John Brown as an example. There were many others.

...which went on to save the World, twice, and provide for its citizens (including you and me) and the Free World a higher degree of freedom and material prosperity than humanity has ever known.

Call me a proud Citizen

I know you would call prob'ly call me a "Dupe", 'mongst other things...

And lincoln is like john kerry
"He actually voted for it before he voted against it (slavery)" LOL

Not as high a degree of freedom as was enjoyed BEFORE the Civil War.

And, no, America did not save the world twice. Our unnecessary entry into WW I took a European conflict that was more or less at a stalemate and tipped the balance away from the Germans. Our entry prompted the Germans to send Lenin to Russia in hopes of ending the war there and freeing those troops to end the war in the West before the Americans arrived in force. Our troops provided the margin for victory in the west and our subsequent withdrawal from the peace process set the stage for the monstrously unfair treaty that directly lead to Hitler and the NAZIs.

Lots to be proud of as an American, but no, we didn't save the world. Our abandonment of our principles of nonintervention in order to go to Europe in 1917 damned near ended it.

The majority of Southerners never saw a Black guy?

None of the 3.5 million slaves scattered throughout the South? Heck, in most of Mississippi and South Carolina you could scarcely throw a rock without hitting a slave. Here in Texas, ONE THIRD of the population was enslaved by the other two thirds, most of 'em in your neck of the woods where their descendants remain today (around here there weren't much cotton and besides, the unfree help had an irritating tendency to hoof it for Mexico, wherein they would be free).

...and likewise secession wasn't front page news in every newspaper in America?

...and there weren't enthusiastic Secession Conventions across the Southern States long before they ever saw a Yankee wherein they were SURE they could whip the Yankees in a month or two?

...and the wording in the Confederate Constitution was irrelevant?

Birdwatcher

What does secession have to do with invasion? The north was free to let the South go without invading them.

Texas. I can't speak for the people plowing a 40 acre farm in the back woods of Tennessee. Slave owners weren't the one's manning the cannons.

I still want someone to answer where Lincoln got his constitutional authority to use force to preserve the Union?

Where does the Constitution say the POTUS may do that?



I was so hoping Birdwatcher would answer this for me

You do a profound disservice to the man.

Lincoln, as he so plainly stated, did whatever he could to preserve the Union. If that meant preserving that noxious and entirely toxic institution where it already existed in order to forestall secession he was for that.

After the bullets were flying anyway, as early as 1862 he was moving towards eradicating that divisive vileness everywhere it existed.

Birdwatcher

Do you wish the United States had divided in 1861?