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

The south had the right to secede, not to own slaves. The south wanted to secede in order to preserve slavery which was not viewed as a reasonable justification and it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to get there either.

If the south held the right to own slaves then the north held the right to kill southerners….what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. 😉

I wish they’d never been brought here in the first place and I wish there hadn’t been such a demand for slaves….that’s the reason for the trouble we have today. Slavery was a dying remnant but it was important enough for many to die for.

I don't claim to be a historian, but I was taught the the south mainly seceded for states rights, basically free trade. They wanted to sell tobacco and cotton to Europe at a higher profit and the north demanded the south sell to them at a cheaper rate. Slavery was also an issue.

The irony of defending the "right" of states to own other human beings as if they animals of another species calling "statist" someone who opposes that practice escapes you doesn't it?

You might be interested to know that Harry Jaffa carried on a long debate with Mel Bradford, the leading Southern apologist and proponent of your "States Rights" view. When Bradford ran for the Chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities Jaffa wrote a powerful letter supporting him in opposition to the Left who tried to demonize Bradford. I have copied Jaffa's encomium to Bradford at the time of the latter's passing (1993) below. It's an interesting read. Bradford eventually became a Republican.

Mel Bradford, RIP
IN ABRAHAM'S BOSOM
A lifelong dispute about Abraham Lincoln has been remanded to a higher court.
HARRY V. JAFFA

No one outside the immediate circle of his family and close friends will miss Mel Bradford more than I. His opinions on Lincoln, the Civil War, the Declaration of Independence, equality, and slavery were so diametrically opposite to mine that they were virtually mirror images of each other. We were, more than any of our contemporaries, I think, so convinced that the conflict that centered on the figure of Abraham Lincoln was the central conflict in American, perhaps even in world, history that we came to constitute a fellowship of our own.

In his loyalty to the Old South-to the South of which he knew from what he regarded as the only ultimately reliable authority, namely "our fathers"-Mel was perfectly intransigent. He believed in tradition in the absolute sense in which the fundamental ordering of society, and above all its convictions on the ultimately important things-such as God and the universe-were transmitted by the family. Of course, this meant not any families, but the old families, such as constituted the senatorial class in ancient republican Rome, the ones who ruled by divine right because their family gods were the gods of the city. Once in a long private conversation, I pointed out to him that the only regime that was purely patriarchal more so even than that of the Roman republic was that of ancient Israel. This regime alone, in the form of Orthodox Judaism, had survived into the modern world. "You ought to be a Jew, Mel," I said.

"Maybe you're right, Harry, maybe you're right," he replied, in his long squeaky Texas drawl.

Of course, Mel couldn't become a Jew, because it was not his inherited religion. That, however, illustrated the difficulty with "pure" traditionalism in a Judaeo-Christian framework. When Jesus asked: "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" (Matthew 12:48) he transformed the family of pure tradition into one constituted, not by blood, but by faith. Curiously, this is exactly what Abraham Lincoln did within the American experience.


"We have besides these men descended by blood from our ancestors . . . perhaps half our people who are not descended [from them] ... German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian. If they look back through this
history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none...but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that
they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are."

Just as Jesus bridged the gap between the God of Israel and Mel Bradford's ancestors, who were not descended from the Fathers who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai, so Lincoln bridged the gap between the Revolutionary Fathers and my ancestors. When Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address by invoking "our fathers who brought forth this nation" he confirmed our community as a sacramental union of "one nation, under God."

OUR SEPARATE FATHERS

Mel Bradford could never accept this view of Lincoln, or of the Declaration as the source of our authentic tradition. Yet in a curious way we shared a faith in "our fathers"-both Biblical and American the source of authority and tradition. Because of that shared faith, we agreed very much in our post-bellum convictions. We shared a hatred of Communism abroad and socialism at home. We both loathed "race-based remedies." We felt much the same way about the liberal statism that would replace the family and its extension in neighborhood communities, neighborhood schools, neighborhood churches and synagogues, and voluntary charitable organizations. In fact, we shared a conviction concerning states' rights, even though Mel, following John C. Calhoun, could not see the connection that I (and Abraham Lincoln) saw between states' and natural rights.

Above all, we shared a hatred for that acid of modernity, moral relativism, which lay at the heart of the welfare state, and which was dissolving the very basis of our civilization. In 1977 I presented a paper on Measure for Measure at a Shakespeare conference at the University of Dallas. It was entitled "Chastity as a Political Principle," and in it I set out what I believed to be Shakespeare's finding of moral laxity in private life as the basis for the disintegration of public morality. Shakespeare's play is a drama of the restoration of the family of republican Rome-as is symbolized in part by the silent presence of old Romans at the end. Mel was most enthusiastic at this presentation; both from a literary and a philosophic perspective, he felt it represented complete agreement as to what we understood conservatism to be.

JOINING LINCOLN'S PARTY

It was accordingly not surprising that Mel called on me when he decided in 1981 to become a candidate for the chairmanship for the National Endowment of the Humanities. I wrote in his behalf to the Reagan White House, making plain our differences, but also giving it as my opinion that Mel was as loyal a member of the Reagan coalition as could be found. Certainly it could not have been easy for him to join the party of Lincoln. But he saw that party, under Ronald Reagan, as holding out the only rational hope for the future. And I for one thought he deserved the most cordial welcome.

Since I have myself undergone a good deal of criticism-even from some of my friends for having supported Mel as I did, I would like to say here that in doing so, I believed I was doing no more than I believed Abraham Lincoln would have done. Lincoln was a master of the art of patronage. No one, better than he, would have recognized the importance of moving the old Northeastern liberal wing of the Roosevelt Democratic Party coalition, along with the old Southwestern conservative wing of that same coalition, into the Reagan Republican coalition. In FDR's case, it was patronage pure and simple that glued these opposites together. In Reagan's case, there was a common cause to be made against the welfare state and its intellectuals. I thought Mel's appointment would have served that cause. Unfortunately, the old hatred between Northeast and Southwest was too great, and Mel's candidacy foundered. Among the ironies was the part played in the campaign against him by the circulation of his anti-Lincoln views. It just happens that those who circulated these views were, for the most part, less friendly (if possible) to Lincoln than Mel was. To them, the natural law of the Declaration was anathema. Since I was shut out of the loop for my pro-Lincoln views as effectively as Mel for his anti-Lincoln views, I never had the opportunity to explain why I thought he would have had Lincoln's support!

As I return to my book on Lincoln and the Civil War, I shall always remember that no one encouraged me to write it more than Mel. I will not now have the opportunity to hear his comments when-God willing-it is finished. But our conversation will not have come to an end. I am confident that somehow, somewhere, he and l and Abraham Lincoln will, in the best of tempers, go on arguing into eternity.





https://ia904602.us.archive.org/30/items/bradford-misc-collection/Bradford%20Obituary%20by%20Harry%20Jaffa%20-%20National%20Review%20%281993%29.pdf