Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire General Milley calls the Confederacy treasonous and traitors

home being Northern Virginia, when I was young, the number of remenents of the Civil War were left all over the place.. in almost every grove of trees, were what was left of artillery positions from 1861 to 1865....finding musket balls was like finding pennies in a parking lot... even then, you could tell if they were built by Confederate Troops or Northern Troops, based on what direction was where the most damage was... if it was facing north bound, it was a Confederate Emplacement.. if it was facing South it was a Northern Emplacement...

Growing up around that you understood what the south fought for... defense of homeland...invaded because Washington was right across the Potomac River.. people fought to defend their home land, out numbered heavily.. yet it held the Union back for 4 years of heavy fighting... the remains, you could tell it wasn't about Slavery... because of the number of men that left their homes, families, farms and loved ones to fight for their state....and none of these people owned slaves.. it wasn't slave owners out there putting their asses on the line...for the rich folks and their money....helll there never was many plantations in Northern VA ever...

these men were not traitors to their nation.. they were loyal to their home state...and the Union invaded it...and started destroying everything in Arlington and Fairfax Counties.. until they were stopped in Prince William at a little place called Manassas...

when I was a kid growing up and living in Manassas, at the Centennial in 1961 and 1962, its population was about 2500 people... exactly what it had been 100 yrs earlier in1861 and 1862.. that is why so much damage and remains of the Civil War was quite obvious 100 years after the fact....

it was the Union who were traitors to the Southern States....

That`s why we refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression not the Civil War.

Yes. The treasonous south.


Im all for the few southern states to be kicked out of the US.. enough taxpayer money gets funneled into those backwards states.

I would be damned glad for us to go!

Where do I sign up? This Govt hasn't been of, by and for the people for way too long. The oppression we face is 10x anything the colonist ever dealt with. We're nothing but slaves now, and the more technology advances the less chance we'll ever have of being free again. How did we allow ourselves to be surveilled and tracked 24/7?
For our power to issue currency and our entire economy to become under the control of privately owned banks/families/corporations?

It was no more treasonous than telling Great Britain to KMA in 1776 was. If Lee and Davis were traitors then so were Washington and Jefferson.

These mother-fu-kers need to do their GD job and STFU about politics, everyone wants to be an attention whore slut for the news! and never missing the opportunity to let everyone else know they're a fu-king liberal!

Preface: yes, I realize the response this will generate and no, I'm not from California.

1. The Articles of Confederstion created an intentionally weak central government that had very little coercive power over member states (no taxes, etc.). This was by design after waging an improbably successful revolt against a tyrannical government.

2. The original Constitution of 1789 -- which had no 10th amendment -- specifically states that it continued the AOC with noted changes/upgrades. The continuation language is critically important because the full title of the AOC was actually "The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union."

3. You know what perpetual means, and so did the Founders. Patrick Henry specifically argues against ratification -- as did other prominent anti-Federalists (Warren, etc.) *because* once in, a state could not legally leave the Union. The Bill of Rights was added later to get ratification over the hump, but the 9th and 10th amendments did not supersede the original frame of the Union itself or its central government. Again: anti-Federalists knew this and didn't like it.

4. The American Revolution constituted high treason and its leaders knew that. What do you think "give me liberty or give me death" means? Win = freedom. Lose = gallows. All rebellions from a mother country are treasonous until they're successful, then to the rebels, their history is written as a revolution. The Brits teach the Am Rev as a *civil war* to this day.

5. If you go back and actually read secessionist sources and responses to it from the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, you'll see that the vast majority of southerners reject secession specifically because it meant violating the Constitution, which they viewed as a sacred legacy passes down from other *southerners* like GW, Madison, etc. And then when the war begins, Confederate authors put out tons of material justifying the rebellion as the Am Rev 2.0 and cloaking themselves in Revolutionary era rhetoric, but in that writing, they recognize that the Declaration amounted to high treason -- and simply believed that some treason was justified.

6. If you genuinely think Lincoln wanted the war, you've never actually read a word he wrote and there's nothing I can do for you. After federal property was occupied, he sat still to let things fizzle out as they always had since 1832 (Nullification issues).

7. You can make the case that rank and file men enlisted in the CSA army to protect home and hearth but it's much harder to extend that to CSA brass when virtually all of them had previously taken a federal oath and then went back on it. Lee *agonized* over what to do when offered command from Scott because he understood this in real-time. Many of the other West Pointers wrote about similar dilemmas.

8.Long story short: *after* the war a lot of work was done to remove treaaon from the act secession, but at the time, men undersrood what they were doing and did it anyway because they believed that such a course was justified. So, it's pretty ironic how many of you are lauding the creation of the Confederacy as a justified rebellion but don't believe it justified enough to be worth risking treason.

I've got my fire-proof suit on now...

That's exactly right. The Union forces holding the fort were told to leave, they did not, and they were then forced to. Most of you people north of the Mason-Dixon line grew up believing all the lies you were told about the War Between the States..............about how the greatest president ever, the Bolshevik Lincoln, only wanted to "save the union," and how the war was over slavery, and how every Southerner owned slaves and beat them every day. The facts are out there concerning the real reason the North wanted to fight the South, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure them out.

Addendum question: how can you say you'd gladly go now, but viewed CHOP as illegal? The cause/motivation to secede would certainly be very different, but the legality wouldn't. Worth keeping in mind that all 11 CSA states had significant pockets of Unionism (as did MO and KY) and all of those people had private property ans families to protect... sort of like the law-abiding property owners trapped in the CHOP that many here wanted rights/protection for and that many hoped would sue the city?

(FWIW: I would've had CHAZ/CHOP cleared on day 1 and never abandoned the precinct. There's no such thing as an autonomous zone in the United States per the Constitution...)

Someone forgot to flush again.

It's simple - if you win a civil war, you're a patriot. If you lose a civil war,, you're a traitor.

Winners write history.

(Then Communists rewrite it.)

Do you really think 900,000 men fought a war to help the 1% that owned slaves. Just like when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor everyone enlisted to fight the Japs.When the North attacked everyone joined to fight the Yankees.Men who believed in slavery fighting side by side with men who did not believe in slavery.The reason is they were fighting to protect their home from invaders. 900,000 will join to protect their home.

Quite a bit more than 1% of the adult population owned slaves. (Though far fewer would be considered "large planters.") Slavery ensured that even the poorest whites would never be the lowest rung on the socio-economic ladder. So yes, lots of non-slaveholders fight to preserve it. That said, have you actually read the secession ordinances? They were basically each state's declaration if independence from the Union before joining the CSA... they are explicit -- as in, they literally come right out and say it -- about the main motivation for secession: to protect interest/property in slavery.

Either way, that really has nothing to do with whether or not secession was legally treasonous based on the shift from the AOC to the Constitution and how legal scholars in the 1780s and 1860s understood the bond of Union to work.

Again, I realize this isn't a popular take... so if you don't want my word for it go read the *actual historical documents* and you can find it for yourself.

That's about the size of it.

They did not discriminate about who could own slaves.Are you going to pretend that black people did not own slaves?

Nope. A very small demographic of black slaveholsers existed. More importantly, they *did* discriminate concerning who *could* be enslaved.

Actually, Irishmen were the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Irishmen could be replaced for nothing, but a slave was an expensive asset.

Secession was certainly legal though perhaps not desirable.

The Constitution was originally said to be in effect after a certain number of the original states ratified it. At least two of those states--New York and New Jersey ratified it conditionally, the condition being they would be allowed to secede at any time.

After the war, Jefferson Davis was held without being charged with anything for four years. Or tried for anything. He wanted to be tried for treason. The federal government didn't want to try him. Both he and they felt he would be acquitted based on the (fairly obvious) provision in the Constitution that a state could do anything not prohibited to it. And secession was not prohibited or even mentioned.

That said, a lot had changed between 1789 and 1861. Lincoln realized--correctly--that letting the South secede would lead to the destruction of the United States. What if New England wanted to secede sometime? What if Texas seceded from the Confederacy? In 1860 California came close to seceding (not to join the Confederacy but to be independent from both North and South).

Lincoln realized that letting the South go would lead to the piecemeal conquest of the various states by foreign powers. He was willing to break the law to save the union, as he himself said.

You can accuse the South of many things but treason is not among them.

"The Constitution was originally said to be in effect after a certain number of the original states ratified it. At least two of those states--New York and New Jersey ratified it conditionally, the condition being they would be allowed to secede at any time."

This is entirely false. No such thing as conditional ratification. The document is ratified as passed or not. No middle.

Also, the Irish could not be sold as property. If there's a lower form of life than being property, that's news to me.