Comments by "Patrick Cleburne" (@patrickcleburneuczjsxpmp9558) on "PragerU"
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@woodrowcall3158 Apparently your point has nothing to do with the Confederate constitution (where your and my discussion began and the where I've repeatedly pressed you), and you have no point to make on the basis of the clauses you originally cited, because in explaining your point you didn't so much as mention the Confederate constitution. Very well.
> Slavery was the chief aggravating factor (not the sole factor) that led to secession.
That's like saying that Islam was the chief aggravating factor (not the sole factor) that led to 9/11, and then going on to say that 9/11 was or wasn't justified on the basis of whether you believe Islam is good or bad. It's not that I disagree so much as that I believe your historical claim is vague nonsense, vague nonsense that is useful only for dishonest propagandists that serves only to distract from the questions that actually matter. And in any case it doesn't follow from the fact that there were more slaves in the Confederacy than in the Union or from the fact that multiple Union states had abolished slavery or from the fact that the South was pro-slavery or that Republicans employed anti-slavery rhetoric that the Union had a right to rule over the southern states without their consent, especially not while the Republican-led North continued to affirm the southern states' right to practice slavery as long as they wanted and while offering to irrevocably amend the US constitution to protect slavery from federal interference.
> The issue of slavery is why people were killing each other in the Kansas territory well before secession.
Whether slavery would be protected or prohibited in Kansas was superficially a big part of why people killed each other, but (1) the question wasn't whether any slaves would be freed or continue to be slaves but rather whether slaves in other states would continue to be slaves in those other states or whether they would continue to be slaves in Kansas -- not a big difference from the perspective of the slave, and in fact being a slave in Kansas might have even been a marginal improvement over being a slave in Mississippi; (2) the main reason people were fighting over whether slavery would be allowed in Kansas was because it seemed likely to influence the balance of power in DC, and that mattered not (as with point 1) because it would make any substantial difference in the lives of slaves but because it would make a difference in whether Republicans would be able to gain enough power to use the federal government to enrich the robber baron class that they chiefly represented at the expense especially of the South's export-based agriculture; and (3) clearly none of the southern states seceded in order to be able to maintain slaveholding rights in Kansas. On the contrary, seceding clearly meant forfeiting claims to all such rights, which is the opposite of fighting for them, so it's nothing but misinformation to suggest that the war was in any war fought over what people fought over in Kansas.
And not only was the issue of whether Kansas would protect or prohibit slavery not an issue that seceding offered any hope of resolving in favor of slaveholders, but neither was any other slavery-related issue. If there had been any such issue, you could clearly articulate what it was, but there wasn't any such issue, certainly not any issue that anyone would honestly claim was central to the war.
> The only issue of “self governance” that was substantive enough to warrant protest by the south was slavery.
No, BS! There was no slavery-related issue of "self governance" that was in dispute. The Republican-led North fully recognized the southern states' right to continue practicing slavery. They were even willing to amend the constitution to make that right irrevocable. That clearly wasn't what the war was fought over.
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@woodrowcall3158 > For you to say that there “was no slavery-related issue” in concern to self governance is kinda baffling.
There were issues/disputes prior to secession over whether slavery would be protected or prohibited in Kansas (even though a large majority of the Supreme Court had already very recently declared that the constitution guaranteed the right of US citizens to take slaves to the territories), over whether the guarantee of the constitution's fugitive slave clause would be honored or nullified... but those weren't issues of the seceded states self-governance, which was your claim. If there was any issue relating to the seceded states' self-governance, just tell me what it was. Of course, I already challenged you to do so and you didn't. Is that because you're determined to believe in the revisionist Righteous Cause Myth even if it's inexplicable nonsense to you, too?
> If the left started a civil war over abortion tomorrow, would you say that abortion was the only issue that they found divisive in their opposition?
If the Jeffersonian principle that the federal government "was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself" and that each state "has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress" had not yet been destroyed by an unjust war to subjugate the states to the absolute rule of DC, and if in that context the representatives of the anti-abortion states were universally affirming their commitment to the constitutional limits of the federal government and affirming the right of pro-abortion states to continue allowing abortion and weren't making any threats of using the federal government to overstep their constitutional powers to interfere with the right of pro-abortion states to allow abortion, even while they spoke out strongly against abortion and disputed whether the constitution gave DC the authority to prohibit abortion on overseas US military bases and violated the constitution's extradition clause to protect anti-abortion terrorists that had murdered random citizens of pro-abortion states or other such issues without any direct application to the pro-abortion states themselves, and if the pro-abortion states decided they wanted to secede under those circumstances and the anti-abortion states denied their right to secede and then went to war to forcefully subjugate the pro-abortion states, I would (1) say the anti-abortion states were in the wrong, even though they were right on the abstract question of whether abortion is murder, and (2) I think it would be dishonest propaganda to claim such a war had been fought over abortion.
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@Dennis-nc3vw There's a big difference between wanting America to win versus wanting America to lose versus wanting America to never enter the fight to begin with or to quit fighting a fight we never should have entered to begin with.
As John Randolph of Roanoke said, "this Government was not instituted for the purpose of offensive war. No – it was framed (to use its own language) for the common defence and the general welfare, which are inconsistent with offensive war. I call that offensive war which goes out of our jurisdiction and limits for the attainment or protection of objects not within those limits and that jurisdiction. As in 1798 I was opposed to this species of warfare [the Quasi-War with France], because I believed it would raze the Constitution to its very foundation, so in 1806 am I opposed to it, and on the same grounds. No sooner do you put the Constitution to this use, to a test which it is by no means calculated to endure, than its incompetency to such purposes becomes manifest and apparent to all. I fear if you go into a foreign war for a circuitous, unfair trade, you will come out without your Constitution. Have you not contractors enough in this House? Or do you want to be overrun and devoured by commissaries and all the vermin of contract? I fear, Sir, that what are called the energy men will rise up again – men who will burn the parchment. We shall be told that our Government is too free, or, as they would say, weak and inefficient. Much virtue, Sir, in these terms. That we must give the President power to call forth the resources of the nation – that is, to filch the last shilling from our pockets, or to drain the last drop of blood from our veins. I am against giving this power to any man, be him who he may."
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Was Lysander Spooner a proponent of the "Lost Cause Myth"?
"Their pretenses that they have “Saved the Country,” and “Preserved our Glorious Union,” are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people. This they call “Saving the Country”; as if an enslaved and subjugated people – or as if any people kept in subjection by the sword (as it is intended that all of us shall be hereafter) – could be said to have any country. 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,” of establishing “a government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor,” 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..."
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@manilajohn0182 > The next paragraph is only your opinion and is not supported by the historical record.
I didn't really say anything about any history. I spoke about what unions are and what violence against other members of a union constitutes. It doesn't constitute "preserving."
> Fort Sumter, which was United States territory and land which the Confederate States of America had no legal claim to.
The people of the southern states had as much right to their share of the previously jointly held assets as the people of the northern states did. And the people of the northern states had absolutely no valid reason for wanting to continue to control the border defenses of the southern states.
As the abolitionist George Bassett said early in 1861, "The whole object of those forts is... protection. While the peoples of those States or territories are protected by the United States, the United States authorities occupy and garrison those forts at an expense which is defrayed by a revenue voluntarily paid by the people. Here is a fair, legitimate transaction, a quid pro quo. A sovereign people paying the United States, by a revenue, for protecting and guarding her national interests. But when any State ceases to require the protection of the general government and proposes to protect herself, and the United States authority ceases, for the want of the requisite consent of the people interested, there is no reason why the general government should retain possession of those forts, but every reason why they should go into the hand of the people of that territory... Keep ever in view the only legitimate object of government—the protection of the people—and you cannot but recognize the absurdity of forcing protection upon an unwilling people at the point of the bayonet."
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@TheStapleGunKid "Yes they did, because fighting to defeat a rebellion to preserve slavery gave them the moral upper hand over those who carried out a rebellion to preserve slavery."
Even if it were true that the South was fighting to preserve slavery (which isn't true to the extent the claim is even intelligibly substantive, as opposed to inexplicable propaganda nonsense, which is mainly what it is), if, for the sake of argument, we accept the disputable understanding of the Iraq War as a war in which the US attacked Iraq for the sake of US business interests (oil, military contractors, etc.) on the pretenses of lies about WMD's, would you say that the US had the moral upper hand over the evils of Saddam Hussein? Or if a plain old robber robs a man that happens to have committed the most heinous crimes imaginable, would you say the robber has the moral upper hand in the robbery over those who carried out those more heinous crimes? You might say that if you were trying to justify evil.
"'Slavery would have waned and ended sooner or later'"
"Not in a nation founded specifically for preserving it."
Your argument really is that absurd, isn't it? You believe slavery would have lasted literally forever if not for the success of the principle applauded by the Unitarian minister Henry Bellows in 1866 that "The state is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation’s rights, privileges, honor, and life."
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@juliank6793 > the war was independence as far as it was the method they were using to defend slavery
What threat are you imagining independence would have defended slavery from? Or even offered a hope of defending slavery from?
> it's to keep slavery
As if they wouldn't have been able to keep slavery if they remained in the union? What would have stopped them?
Sure, they wanted to keep slavery, just like they did in 1776 when they fought their first independence war, but in neither case was there anything that they had to fight to protect slavery from. That's an entirely historically baseless propaganda myth.
> Unless some document you can find says "we are seceding because the federal government says we can't."
That's pretty clearly why Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded, right? They voted not to secede until Lincoln called to forcibly deny the states that had voted to secede the right to secede, and then they overwhelmingly changed their positions.
Along that's also what one northern abolitionist, George Bassett, said in early 1861 (before VA, NC, TN, and AR had seceded) about the other states that had followed South Carolina:
"What if it is South Carolina that is conquered now? It may be Massachusetts next. I know that slavery complains the most to-day, but liberty may be the next victim, if, indeed, it is not even now to be the real victim.
"It is the destruction of the government, because it is a political revolution. It is a change of the whole spirit of the government, from a confederacy of sovereign States, held together by mutual interest and common attachment, to a consolidated empire, bound together by military force.
"It is also, to some extent, an efficient cause of the present dissolution of the Union. It is the belligerent doctrines and attitude of the dominant politicians of the North, which have precipitated this movement of secession. If the right of secession had been conceded at the first, the movement would have been deprived of its essential vigor and intenseness. The people, feeling that they had a conceded right to secede at will, would naturally have delayed an act so fearfully pregnant with possible evils. They would have given themselves time to fully consider the subject in all its bearings and possible consequences. Nor could so many States have been induced to follow the momentous experiment in such hasty succession. It is very doubtful if the movement could have been effected at all, if the right to make it had not been denied. But the right was denied with threats of coercion, and the people of the slave States saw impending over them a political domination which, if its doctrines were carried out, would destroy their legitimate sovereignty, and reduce them to the condition of conquered provinces of political slaves. They were, therefore, driven to the fearful experiment of secession by the necessities of their contested and endangered rights."
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