Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Slavery Was Not the Cause of War Between States; Gene Kizer Jr

Then why are you defending secession, when the reason the South seceded is because the North elected a president whose only offense was to commit the nation to the principle of not allowing slavery to expand into the territories? The entire political debate in the run-up to Lincoln's election was about expanding (or not expanding, or not allowing to expand) slavery into the territories. 6 southern states seceded before Lincoln even took office simply because he had been elected. They simply refused to be bound by the result of an election held according to the rules of the Constitution. Lincoln repeatedly said he had no power whatsoever to end slavery where it existed (show me where he ever said otherwise). The platform of the Republican Party (and Lincoln's platform) was simply to prevent its spread. The South, which was fanatical about slavery, seceded because they saw that if slavery could not grow, it would ultimately contract and they could not tolerate that result. The intellectual fathers of Southern secession were very explicit that in transmuting slavery into positive moral good, that they were breaking with the philosophy of Jefferson and the Founders and were equally explicit in denouncing Jefferson (and the Founders) for holding to the idea that white men and black men were equally men and that under the laws of nature no man had the right to govern another man without his consent. The entire Southern position was ultimately grounded in the argument that some men (white ones) did have the right to govern other men (black ones) without their consent. They even concocted a "scientific" justification for their position. In this they simply anticipated Nazism with its own "scientific" justification for the extermination of Jews. That's right: the Southern argument for slavery as a positive moral good, was the philosophic forerunner of Nazi genocide as a positive moral good. this is irrefutable. Which, again, makes reason stare when folks who supposedly stand for liberty and limited government are constantly trying to justify the greatest expansion of unlimited government power in the service of despotism in human history. It is mind boggling.

Jordan

Yep, we should let some cat from Colorado dictate how we celebrate our heritage and history. Not likely.

Bowsinger, thank you for posting that. Not only Alexander's Cornerstone speech, but the speeches of Jefferson Davis and the speeches of John Calhoun (the intellectual father of Southern secession) make clear that not only did the South believe in the inferiority of blacks, their belief in that inferiority ultimately and actually comes to sight as the proposition that blacks are actually not even human beings. This is the "self-evident truth" (the equal humanity of blacks and whites) which Southern intellectuals called a self-evident lie, (that black men and white men were equally men, viz., equally human beings). The philosophy which gave rise to and tried to justify southern secession is simply naked nihilism; it stands on identical ground with not merely Nazi genocide but Leftism today, which equally denies any objective basis for knowledge about right and wrong. The homosexual rights movement and John Calhoun, for example, are identical in their denial of the moral authority of nature and the law that is in nature.

The positive good school of pro-slavery thought in ante-bellum America denied that a black man was a human being and the homosexual rights movement in modern America denies that a man is not a woman. Or more precisely, it denies that nature or God intended for the complementarity of male and female to have any moral significance. Although 4ager will never acknowledge it, this is why I have been so incessant in opposing here the political agenda of the homosexual rights movement. In its premises, that movement is identical with the greatest despotisms in human history. Those despotisms may disagree in their conclusions, but in their premises, they are identical as they are identical in their opposition to the novus ordo seclorum that formed the foundation of the glorious revolution upon which this once great nation was founded.

Here is Harry Jaffa on the law of nature and its bearing upon slavery (briefly) and the justification of homosexuality. Philosophically, the argument for each is identical in its rejection of "the laws of nature and of nature's God".

"Man is a social animal, and no one can secure what is desirable for himself except in partnership with others. According to Aristotle, if a man had all the health, wealth, freedom and power that he desired, but lacked friends, he would not even wish to live. But the root of all friendships, as it is the ground of the existence of the species, is that of a man and a woman. As nature is the ground of morality, the distinction of the sexes is the ground of nature. Nature---which forbids us to eat or enslave out own kind---is that which has within it the principle of coming-into-being. Mankind as a whole is recognized by its generations, like a river which is one and the same while the ever-renewed cycles of birth and death flow on. But the generations are constituted---and can only be constituted---by the acts of generation arising from the conjunction of male and female. The root of all human relationships, the root of all morality, is nature, which itself is grounded in the generative distinction of male and female.....Abraham Lincoln once said that if slavery is not unjust, then nothing is unjust. With equal reason it can be said that if homosexuality is not unnatural, nothing is unnatural. And if nothing is unnatural then nothing---including slavery and genocide---is unjust"

Harry V. Jaffa, Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question.


Jordan

4ager, you have completely ignored the libertarian law review article I cited over a week ago. Why am I not surprised. It gives the lie to every point you made.

Popularity does not legality or Constitutionality make. Not even 2:1, even with fuzzy math.

Andrew Jackson was YOUR citation about "saving the Union" and secession, not mine. The "doing nothing" involved Federal troops in an unconstitutional unconstitutional action under a despotic president.

A claim of righteousness outside of the Constitution and law does not absolve one of crimes. Thanks for bringing that up and making that point.

Well said, though he has never gotten that point. The retrospective moral justification is the only option available to someone who refuses to concede that Southern secession was Constitutional and that the invasion by the North was unconstitutional.

I didn't ignore it. I called it bullschit and determined you unworthy of continued response for reasons stated. I'm sure you'll get back to us "later", but you still don't and won't merit further discourse. You have been given personal and professional courtesy time and again to take leave and return to a discussion, leave that you requested and wanted, and have abused and disregarded that courtesy each time. You don't merit further discussion or response.

Oh, I see.

A part of the populace felt that they didn't have say in who was elected?

Kind of like why would anyone support secession when the minorities and city folk elected a president that supported illegal immigration, excessive taxes, bloated bureaucracy, protected classes, privileged classes, discretionary enforcement of the law..

oh wait...

Secession doesn't have to pass muster with the nation from whom another is seceding; it must only be the will of those who wish to secede. The Colonists (and Tejas, secessionist slavers themselves) established that on this continent and spread the concept globally.

To now state that secession must pass a retrospective moral justification based upon the history written by a nation that refused to allow a lawful secession is quite something else. I believe Mr. Putin is rather supportive of this concept, as he is applying it rather well to the Ukraine and seeking to do so with the Baltic states.

I see the resident feelings driven HS teacher and the rest of the Liberal Lemmings are still adhering to the Party Narrative and the intellectual dishonesty and inconsistency that is the hallmark of the Hard Left despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.


Granddaddy Lenin, Poppa Mao, Uncle Joe, Uncle Ho, and Cousin Barack must be so proud of them.

You have zero reading comprehension skills. Now you move on to exterminating Jews??

Blah Blah Blah
Once again blow out your pious ass.

Here's the irony; given that forcible expulsion of a small (relative to the surrounding populations) remaining Indian minority...

(about half the members of all the tribes in question had already removed, by their own accounts the Cherokees for one were already across the Mississippi and clear to the highlands of Northern Mexico by the 1790's, forty years before Removal)

...was already inevitable at the hands of local militia and State Guard groups, Jackson probably saved many lives on both sides by sending in troops.

If the Indians were poorly fed and handled while under Federal supervision, recall how poorly BOTH sides handled prisoners during the War Between the States. Efficiently caring for masses of imprisoned people weren't a skill yet acquired at the time.

And I'm going to take a breathtaking leap into political incorrectness here by suggesting that, completely unjust and tragic as the whole Removal process was, the death toll along the Trail of Tears was not all that much greater than would have been expected for any travelers of that period....

(the average life expectancy of even sedentary populations of Americans at the time was only about 40 years).

...Furthermore their Federal escorts likely saved many Indians from being killed or otherwise waylaid en route.

But the greater point is of course that the collective people of the South (and many in the North for that matter) didn't give a rip about constitutionality or justice in this case when it benefited THEM.



Can you even begin to imagine the penalties that slave owners would have to face for crimes against humanity if standards of twentieth century justice had been applied?

"It was legal under our laws" was not regarded as a viable defense for the Nazis at Nuremberg, nor would it have sufficed for Americans.

Birdwatcher

There's your fatal flaw; applying 20th or 21st Century morality to issues that were done in centuries past.

Glad to see you showing your true colors, though, with the Nazi insinuation. Go figure which flag flew over a slave nation for nigh a century, and which flags flew over ships out of what ports that brought slaves in. Hint: it won't the CBF. What people sold Africans into slavery? Hint: it won't Southerners, and how would history judge them under your retrospective lens?

You can't justify the Northern invasion under the Constitution. You can't justify it legally then. You can't even justify the "save the Union" BS, and you certainly can't absolve the Federal government in the genocide against the Natives in the 1830s, '40s, or beyond (btw - I'm part Cherokee from some of the very few that escaped those pogroms). All you have is retrospective justification based upon modern/latter day morality. That is the hallmark of intellectual dishonesty when it comes to history, and you're the f'king poster child for that.

You've tried the "it was for the children" socialist mantra, and now you're pulling the "same as the Nazis" BS. You have neither law nor history on your side, but you certainly know the leftist responses when faced with those certainties.

EXACTLY! This is the bane of the study of History and the bell cow for the vast majority of the "professional" educators in our schools.

Disregard him; those aren't even his thoughts. His zealotry is astounding, but unworthy of discourse due to his inability to keep his word. Though, I'll not be surprised if he now returns to issues he left (against his word) long ago in a sad attempt to save face.

It appears he's found his new Crusade; to castigate Southerners as "Nazis" based upon the academic diatribes of retrospective "moral historians". It'll be the windmill to replace his wild-eyed charges, where "Nazi" will replace his old war cry of "sodomite", and all the while he'll continue hold down a .gov position in the PRK funded by extorted tax dollars where he is supposed to represent all equally before the law, and personally hate any that he finds "Biblically/morally offensive" wishing them less freedom (or none) and holding them in contempt of his high-brow world view.

Helluva "libertarian", that...

And these were built prior to the Colonial Era I'm sure...

this cracks me up.

I see your point, and concede it. It is as I stated, and I need to follow through on that.

Damn....... a man enters the fray in support of a right to fly a battle flag and discovers that he is now on the side of homosexuals and Nazis.

At least Rob and Mike haven't equated us to Democrats..... yet.