Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Can't stand the Neo-Con Swamp Bitch, but,

There were very, very few Confederate soldiers who were fighting to "live lavishly." Most of those Confederate boys were so poor a dime looked like a wagon wheel, to them. No doubt the various plantation owners enjoyed living well, but most "Johnny Rebs" were fighting for States Rights and independence from "Yankee elites." Slavery was the trigger used to compel the "Suthrens" to go to war. But economics and trade -- as usual throughout History -- caused the war.

L.W.

So, the Republican platform of 1860 said that it was in favor of all that was right and good. Called anyone who opposed their platform bad people interested in disunion of the country. Accused others of doing EXACTLY what they were doing themselves (flooding Kansas with armed paramilitaries). Claimed reverence for the Constitution while specifically repudiating the actual powers granted in that constitution and promising to ignore any state legislatures, Congress, or the courts who said differently. Advocated for increased taxation and centralization of government power for the common good. Promised freebies and affirmed and encouraged unlimited immigration.

I mean, who wouldn’t be in favor of that, right? lol

Your assertion is completely false revisionism. The political debate in the lead-up to the civil war was entirely about whether or not the nation would permit the extension of slavery into the territories. It was the dominant theme in the debate between the two candidates, in the newspapers and even in the Supreme Court. The formation of the Republican Party to oppose the attempt to extend slavery is a historical fact you cannot just brush aside because it doesn't suit your ahistorical political biases. We derive the intent of the electorate from the issues they were debating in the public square and the question of whether slavery was to be extended into the territories was, far and away, the dominant issue. Five states seceded before Lincoln ever took office. Why? Because he had dared to declare slavery immoral and a violation of the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution and promised to oppose its adoption in the new territories, while also vowing to prevent it's forceful elimination in the states, which many abolitionist radicals wanted. Good to know you are in sympatico with the Democrat Party of then and today. In fact, if you want more evidence as to why the south seceded, read the pronouncements of Alexander Stevens and Jefferson Davis. It was all about slavery.

Oppressive tariff's on Southern goods was an ongoing complaint against Northern indifference to the Constitution:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-tariff-as-a-motive-for-secession/

Secession had a “basic cause” that was evidenced by multiple “infractions.” Southerner William Yancey was certainly correct in analyzing the cause of secession to be more fundamental than just “slavery” or “tariffs;” both of which were in his word’s mere “symbols” of a more foundational cause, namely, Northern infidelity to the Constitution:

“My friends, there is one issue before you, and to all sensible men but one issue, and but two sides to that issue. The slavery question is but one of the symbols of that issue; the commercial question is but one of the symbols of that issue; the Union question is but one of those symbols; the only issue before this country in the canvass is the integrity and safety of the Constitution.”

Protectionist tariffs motivated secession as one of many “symbols” of Northern infidelity to the spirit and letter of the Constitution; just as slavery issues were yet more among many continual “occasions” of that same malady. It was this continuing infidelity that justified the unilateral secession of a Southern State just as James Madison had affirmed:

“And in the event of a failure of every Constitutional resort, and an accumulation of usurpations and abuses, rendering passive obedience and non-resistance a greater evil, than resistance and revolution, there can remain but one resort, the last of all: an appeal from the cancelled obligations of the Constitutional compact, to original rights and the law of self-preservation…. and it cannot be doubted that a single member of the Union, in the extremity supposed, but in that only, would have a right, as an extra and ultra-constitutional right, to make the appeal.” (James Madison to Edward Everett, 28 August 1830)

Southern secession was indeed a just cause when protectionist tariffs evidenced Northern contempt for the Constitution – the document Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, called “the rotten bottom rail of a Virginia abstraction.” (Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union, Col. Don Piatt, 1887)

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact“

Alexander Stephens
Vice President of the Confederacy
March 21, 1861

Let's take your nonsense one issue at a time: What Constitutional provisions did the Republican Platform repudiate? Let's start with that.

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact“

Alexander Stephens
Vice President of the Confederacy
March 21, 1861

There you have it, from no less an authority than the new Vice President of the Confederacy. Not tariffs, not taxes, not trade, but slavery---more precisely, the question of extending slavery into the territories.

Any hope of resolving the slavery issue and averting the Civil War ended with John Brown’s raid. It was at that point that since Brown’s purpose had been to cause a slave rebellion that would have seen countless innocent killed, Southerners realized it was no longer a somewhat abstract political question, but one where the other side wanted them dead. And it may have been different if Brown had been some lone nut, but he wasn’t. His harebrained scheme was funded by some of the wealthiest men in the country. They were so complicit that four of them fled the country to avoid a prosecution that never came. Northern newspapers called him a hero and lamented the failure of his scheme. Southerners saw this hateful rhetoric. They saw the act. They saw the government’s refusal to take any action against those who had funded and encouraged Brown. And they rightly concluded that you couldn’t share a country with people who wanted you dead and refused to enforce any laws on the books they felt like ignoring.

As such, attitudes hardened. Positions radicalized. And people began to prepare for the inevitable.

Seems that way today. Sanctuary cities ignore federal law. BLM rioters get no punishment or very lenient sentences while January 6th protesters rot in federal prison over misdemeanors. Joe Biden is openly bribed while crimes are invented against Trump. Billionaires openly fund the destruction of our country and white people are hunted with impunity in some of our cities while the rhetoric from every approved source blames them for everything wrong in the world today. All the while one side chants “democracy” like some sort of deranged mantra while doing everything it can to subvert wnd destroy it.

They repudiated he power of the courts and Congress. Of course, they also championed states rights and decried the armed invasion of states for any reasons. So, obviously, rhey were full of schit snd their morals were highly changeable just like commies today.

Joe Bob...right on brother

False.

https://www.raabcollection.com/jefferson-davis-autograph/defends-states-rights-as-the-constitutional-position#:~:text=My%20faith%20in%20that%20right,which%20it%20has%20been%20subjected.”

Excerpt:

After the Civil War, Davis remained a wholehearted supporter of those symbols of the Southern cause that Union military might had discredited – states’ rights and secession. He maintained, “Every evil which has befallen our institutions is directly traceable to the perversion of the compact of union and the usurpation by the Federal Government of undelegated powers…My faith in that right as an inherent attribute of State sovereignty, was adopted early in life, was confirmed by study and observation of later years, and has passed, unchanged and unshaken, through the severe ordeal to which it has been subjected.”

As for himself, he asserted, “I shall die, as I have lived, firm in the State rights faith.” He told an appreciative audience of Southerners in 1882: “Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known all that was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.”

The bold statement is still true.

Why are you refusing to "put-up"? You said the Republican party "repudiated the actual powers granted in the Constitution". I asked for evidence and you demurred. I'm asking again: what Federal Constitutional power did the Republicans or their platform repudiate? Also, you claimed they favored flooding Kansas with armed paramilitaries, when in fact the 1860 Platform (quote above) specifically denounces and opposes that activity.

Lincoln decreed that a State which voluntarily joined the Union couldn't voluntarily *leave* the Union.

Russia had Stalin. America had Lincoln.

The South didn’t give a fly [bleep] about states rights when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dread Scott case. Basically forcing Northern States to recognize the rights of slave owners to their slaves even when they were in a state where slavery was supposed to be illegal.

How Tyranny Came to America: Good read.

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

Excerpt:

The Civil War, or the War Between the States if you like, resulted from the suspicion that the North meant to use the power of the Union to destroy the sovereignty of the Southern states. Whether or not that suspicion was justified, the war itself produced that very result. The South was subjugated and occupied like a conquered country. Its institutions were profoundly remade by the federal government; the United States of America was taking on the character of an extensive, and highly centralized, empire. Similar processes were under way in Europe, as small states were consolidated into large ones, setting the stage for the tyrannies and gigantic wars of the twentieth century.

They repudiated the powers of Congress, state legislatures, and the courts. The power of Congress and the courts are granted in the Constitution.

I guess you’ve never heard of Beecher’s Bibles. Henry Ward Beecher sent Sharps Rifles to abolitionists in Kansas disguised as crates of Bibles. Beecher was a prominent Republican was even sent to Europe by Lincoln during the war to champion the Union cause.

I had a college professor, a southerner ironically, who stated the following;

"We the People"

NOT "We the States"

He also made the claim that no prominent Southerner prior to the war gave a speech that cited states rights or tariffs as a reason for secession, the only reason given was slavery.

You're fullashit. As usual.

He was fullashit.