Comments by "Patrick Cleburne" (@patrickcleburneuczjsxpmp9558) on "Lex Clips"
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@ApostleMarduk I'm sure you have theories about lots of things. What you obviously don't have -- or you would have presented it already -- is a theory of what the people seceding thought would have prevented them from continuing to keep slaves if they hadn't seceded. And since there wasn't anything that would have prevented them from continuing to keep slaves if they hadn't seceded and since they knew that, it couldn't possibly make any sense to say they seceded in order to keep slaves.
Do you even think A, B, or C were things that seceding offered any prospect of preventing? In any case, none of those things were things that would have prevented them from keeping slaves so even if seceding had offered some prospect of preventing or avoiding those things it didn't offer any prospect of preventing or avoiding what you claimed they seceded to avoid, namely something that would have prevented them from keeping slaves.
> If a slaveholder heard people from free states were sympathizing with the guy who wants you dead, would he not be worried?
First of all, none of the people that Brown's gang murdered were even slaveholders, so the threat they represented wasn't a threat particularly against slaveholders. It wasn't even particularly a threat against white Southerners as the first person they murdered was a free black Southerner. But more to the point, it most certainly wasn't a threat of Republicans amending the constitution to abolish slavery or anything else that would have prevented Southerners from continuing to keep slaves. So they obviously didn't secede in order to keep slaves, did they?
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@orbituary > states stating in their secession documents it was so they could keep slaves
That's not true. Your summary there necessarily implies that they thought they couldn't keep slaves if they didn't secede, and the declarations of causes don't support that implication at all.
The fact that they wanted to continue keeping slaves clearly isn't proof they seceded "so they could keep slaves," because Americans in 1776 wanted to continue keeping slaves, and no halfway reasonable person tries to argue that the original 13 states declared independence "so they could keep slaves," so you need to provide evidence for more than just the fact that they wanted to continue keeping slaves if you want to back up your claim. In particular, you need to show that they wouldn't have been able to continue keeping slaves if they hadn't seceded, such that secession was necessary for them to continue to do so. But, of course, that's not true.
> The Confederate government itself was born upon their core belief that slavery should be upheld and in accordance with natural law.
So what? What does that matter with regards to their desire for independence from the North? There wasn't anything they wanted to do because of those beliefs that the Union government wasn't willing to let them do as states in the Union, so what difference does it make?
If Sam works for Bob and then Sam decides he wants to quit do you think Bob would be justified in denying Sam the right to quit and physically beating him back into submission if he tries to quit if it also happens to be true that Sam beets his wyfe? If Sam has been beeting his wyfe all along and Bob has known about it all along but has recognized that under the laws where Sam and Bob live that Sam is entirely within his legal right to beet his wyfe and if Bob also repeatedly declares that he has no intention of interfering with Sam beeting his wyfe, how do any of those facts about Sam and his wife give Bob any right to violently subjugate Sam and to deny him the right to quit working for him?
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@orbituary The secession of SC, MS, FL, AL, GA, LA, and TX triggered the formation of the Confederate government, and their secession was triggered by the election of a Republican to the presidency.
You don't think Republicans represented an abolition amendment or anything else of the sort (which is to say any attempt to use their constitutional power to abolish slavery in the slave states), do you? Not only did they (as a party and Lincoln as their candidate) repeatedly and categorically deny any interest in doing so, but they (1) wouldn't have had the votes to do so even if every state (and multiple more besides) that has been added to the US since Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959 had voted on their side so long as the already existing slave states hadn't supported it, and (2) they (Republicans in DC) actually helped pass a constitutional amendment through Congress in early 1861 (with Lincoln declaring that he had no objections to its ratification) that would have irrevocably removed even that possibility.
Republicans did not represent any attempt to abolish slavery in the southern states through the federal government or by the northern states. That's just a completely historically baseless lie if that's what you believe.
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> in the sense that every thing that caused it was ultimately rooted in slavery
Whatever truth there is to that statement, you're still left with an argument as faulty as trying to justify the entire "War on Terror," the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc. on the basis that "everything that caused it was ultimately rooted in" Islam, arguing that Islam is bad, and therefore the US was fully justified in every aspect of the War on Terror. It doesn't matter how bad Islam is or is not, whatever your opinion on that question the answer is irrelevant to whether the War on Terror was justified.
Even if the Republican-led North had been trying to abolish slavery in the South -- which Lincoln and the rest of the Republican party most definitely were not -- the South would still have had a right to independence self-government, contingent at best on meeting the North's demands on behalf of the South's slaves, but the historical reality is that the North didn't go to war making a single slavery-related demand of the southern states but went to war offering additional concessions to slaveholders on the condition that the southern states forfeit their right to independence and self-government.
The North thus didn't have even a shred more justification in denying independence and self-government to the southern states than England had justification in denying independence and self-government to the 13 colonies, and the South had every bit as much right (and more) to defend their right to independence and self-government as the 13 colonies (which, of course, also practiced slavery) had in 1776.
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@IronWarhorses Alexander Stephens, March 1861: "As to whether we shall have war with our late confederates, or whether all matters of differences between us shall be amicably settled, I can only say that the prospect for a peaceful adjustment is better, so far as I am informed, than it has been. The prospect of war is, at least, not so threatening as it has been. The idea of coercion, shadowed forth in President Lincoln's inaugural, seems not to be followed up thus far so vigorously as was expected. Fort Sumter, it is believed, will soon be evacuated. What course will be pursued toward Fort Pickens, and the other forts on the gulf, is not so well understood. It is to be greatly desired that all of them should be surrendered. Our object is peace, not only with the North, but with the world. All matters relating to the public property, public liabilities of the Union when we were members of it, we are ready and willing to adjust and settle upon the principles of right, equity, and good faith. War can be of no more benefit to the North than to us. Whether the intention of evacuating Fort Sumter is to be received as an evidence of a desire for a peaceful solution of our difficulties with the United States, or the result of necessity, I will not undertake to say. I would feign hope the former. Rumors are afloat, however, that it is the result of necessity. All I can say to you, therefore, on that point is, keep your armor bright and your powder dry."
Lincoln, March 1861: "there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices.
"The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper, and in every case and exigency my best discretion will be exercised, according to circumstances actually existing and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections."
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@chrisjones7347 It's very simple:
Lincoln, 1848: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world."
That's the sacred right that Americans fought for in 1776 and that the southern Americans fought for in 1861, and it's the right the so-called Union fought to destroy. And everything else is just red herrings and ad hominems.
The abolitionist George Bassett wrote in early 1861: "It is constantly said... that if our government cannot prevent a State from seceding at will, it is no government at all. But it is forgotten, that the true glory of our government—the queen beauty of our system is, that it ceases with the will of the people. Its true strength lies not in navies and battalions, but in the affections of the people. Numbers in our midst... are vainly boasting that we propose to show the world that we have a government that is strong enough to meet the exigency and to suppress rebellion. But they fail entirely to apprehend and appreciate the true theory of the American system. Their is the old European, and not the American, idea of government...
"The true strength of a free government—and they are the strongest of all, is in the devoted attachment of its citizen sovereigns. Let this be forfeited, and the government falls.
"A government which is strong by the exercise of military power over its own citizens, is not a free government, but a despotism."
Abolitionist Lysander Spooner: "The whole affair... has been, and now is, a deliberate scheme of robbery and murder; not merely to monopolize the markets of the South, but also to monopolize the currency, and thus control the industry and trade, and thus plunder and enslave the laborers, of both North and South. ... And to hide at once, if possible, both their servility and crimes, they attempt to divert public attention, by crying out that they have “Abolished Slavery!” That they have “Saved the Country!” ...
"The pretense that the “abolition of slavery” was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud... And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general – not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only “as a war measure,” ...in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white. And yet these imposters now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man – although that was not the motive of the war – as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. ...
"This, too, they call “Preserving our Glorious Union”; as if there could be said to be any Union, glorious or inglorious, that was not voluntary. Or as if there could be said to be any union between masters and slaves; between those who conquer, and those who are subjugated. All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” ... are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one – when uttered as justifications for the war, or for the government that has succeeded the war..."
> the Fugitive Slave Law at least serves in part to contradict the nonsensical State vs Federal rights argument.
Only if you have no idea what anyone meant by "states rights" in the 19th century and have assumed some novel definition for yourself.
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@derps8690 Your personal behavior is as vile as what you're defending -- if you can even call a defense with no substance a defense -- what the abolitionist Joshua Blanchard described in the March 1861 issue of The Liberator, the abolitionist paper: "The doctrine that the prerogatives of government are more sacred and inviolable than the rights, liberties, and welfare and even lives of individual men, is now openly maintained by the advocates of an enforced union, in direction opposition to the principle of popular sovereignty.... The success of this compulsory measure, establishing the character of our national government as one maintained by coercion, and not by consent, would be an awful apostacy, a retrogression into the barbarous maxims of European domination, cemented in blood; an utter failure of the first magnificent experiment of popular government, the the exultation of tyrants, the disgrace of our land, the despair of all the friends of freedom in the world."
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@ApostleMarduk > It's not noble, when the only reason states secede is so they can continuously enslave other people.
First of all, whether a slave has a noble reason for wanting to be free and independent of his master ought to be irrelevant to the question of whether he has a right to freedom and independence. And if he, as the southern states did, is forced to fight for his right to freedom and independence, that's a noble fight regardless of what he wants to do with his freedom. What he wants to do with his freedom may or may not be noble, but his fight for freedom and independence can indeed be noble regardless.
And in any case, fighting to deny other people their right to freedom and independence -- what the North did -- is unquestionably ignoble, and it couldn't be more disgustingly absurd to try to justify denying other people their freedom and independence on the grounds that slavery is bad.
But secondly, the seceding states most definitely did not "secede... so they can continuously enslave other people," not if you mean they seceded in order to be able to continue to enslave people -- and if that's not what you mean, then you're just using misleading language to promote a lie. They knew they would be able to continue to enslave people regardless of whether or not they seceded, so the myth of some threat of abolition of perceived threat of abolition is entirely a lie with no basis in historical fact.
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@Mountaineer3615 "But the southern states' motivation was the expansion of slavery. They said so in their articles of secession..."
No, they didn't! Seceding meant forfeiting their right to take slaves to Kansas, Nebraska, etc., not securing that right.
"The experiment instituted by our revolutionary fathers, of a voluntary Union of sovereign States for purposes specified in a solemn compact, had been perverted by those who, feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law but their own will...
"...never was there a people whose interests and principles committed them so fully to a peaceful policy as those of the Confederate States. By the character of their productions they are too deeply interested in foreign commerce wantonly to disturb it. War of conquest they cannot wage, because the Constitution of their Confederacy admits of no coerced association. Civil war there cannot be between States held together by their volition only. The rule of voluntary association, which cannot fail to be conservative, by securing just and impartial government at home, does not diminish the security of the obligations by which the Confederate States may be bound to foreign nations. In proof of this, it is to be remembered that, at the first moment of asserting their right to secession, these States proposed a settlement on the basis of the common liability for the obligations of the General Government."
-Jefferson Davis, February 22, 1862
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