Another frivolous thread

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by CarnalCanaan

All the South wanted was to be left alone[...]

... to keep human beings as physical property.

That argument would have a lot more credibilty if Lincoln had not been willing to allow the South to keep slavery if that was what it took to keep the Union together. But Lincoln's purpose in fighting the war was clearly to force the South to remain part of a union that it no longer regarded as serving its interests, not to end slavery. The agenda of using the war as a tool to end slavery came only later, when Lincoln decided that the political and military benefits of the Emancipation Proclamation would be great enough to outweigh the drawbacks.

Lincoln's reasoning when he decided to fight the war was not that ending slavery would produce enough benefits to be worth the suffering, death, and economic devastation a war would bring. Therefore, I regard it as a gross misrepresentation to give Lincoln credit as if that were the basis for his decision.

...
For this Lincoln should be the American leader; He might be the only President who personally underwent this phenomenon we communally experience. The war he prosecuted and won was completely unConstitutional. But it was under his legacy that Americans stopped saying "The United States are..." and started saying "The United States is...". If he is not the founder of our nation - born of tyranny, baptized in blood, condemned to a flawed essence - then no one can be.

Unfortunately, that transformation has led over time to a serious perversion of our Constitution. The Tenth Amendment explicitly defines the relationship between the federal government and the states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The states that make up the United States are not merely political subdivisions, but are sovereign nations in their own right that have each given up a portion of their sovereignty to an overarching federal government - not unlike how the members of the European Union have given up some of their national powers to that body but remained nations.

When Lincoln set the precedent that the federal government can use military force to compel states to remain a part of the Union whether doing so is in their best interest or not, he changed the relationship between the federal government and the states in a way that eventually led to the Tenth Amendment's becoming all but irrelevant. Today Congress intrudes into state spheres of authority using the tiniest fig leaves of justification, or using federal dollars as leverage to force states to do what it wants as a price for receiving a fair share of the benefits their own tax money pays for, and states that object are virtually powerless to stop it. (Remember that the Supreme Court is both a part of the federal government and a body appointed by presidents and confirmed by U.S. Senators, and therefore cannot be regarded as an unbiased arbiter between state and federal authority. That is especially true when federal courts are themselves a source of orders that states deem unconstitutional.)

So while Lincoln did significantly transform the relationship between the federal government and the states, I do not regard the means he used as a mark of greatness, nor do I regard the results as so unambiguously positive as to constitute a mark of greatness.

[Martinus]

I was going to make a prediction that this thread is going to turn into a ****fest for Southern racist *******s, but it would be post-factum now...

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Ninot


I really don't understand why you would paint Lincoln with the brush of a warmonger tho. At the outset, he was simply a proponent of barring slavery from future territories and states. It was the South that was attempting to impose its will, and when it was losing its equal status in the senate, resorted to what it did.

He is doing it, because he is one of the Southern idiots that still go into orgasm at the thought of a bunch of bigoted traitors who died defending the "right" to own other human beings. Unfortunately, Sherman wasn't thorough enough.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

The idea that the South started the war is grossly misleading. Had Lincoln not insisted on maintaining Union military bases within the Confederacy, the South would have had no reason to fire even a single shot.

That is, if he hadn't had the intention of keeping what was Federal property...

Talk about understatement! Property rights were only the tininest sliver of what was at stake. The real issue was the Union government's insistence on maintaining a military fortification within territory that had declared its independence. Lincoln could have have pulled back from the fort and continued pushing for a diplomatic solution to get the states that were trying ot secede to change their minds. Even after the firing on Fort Sumter, he could have kept pursuing a diplomatic course - especially since no Union troops had been killed or seriously injured in the fighting. Instead, he decided on war against the South - and, in the process, sparked the secession of four more states (including Virginia) that had not previously made up their minds to secede.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Martinus

He is doing it, because he is one of the Southern idiots that still go into orgasm at the thought of a bunch of bigoted traitors who died defending the "right" to own other human beings. Unfortunately, Sherman wasn't thorough enough.

You're quick to lump people into stereotypes, aren't you? The reality is that the fact that I don't view Lincoln as a great leader does not mean that I regard his counterparts on the Southern side as great. I most certainly do not. On the contrary, I am disgusted at the South's having had such a strong desire to own human beings as property.

I tried to make it clear in an earlier post that wars don't always divide into "good guys" and "bad guys," but are sometimes tragedies that come about because of unreasonable positions on both sides. I view the American Civil War as an example of that. The South wanted to own slaves, and the North wanted to force the South to remain part of a union that deliberately exploited the South economically for the North's benefit, and neither side cared overly much about true freedom and equality.

Nathan

[Dis]

that was just a troll. Apparantly people seem to think stereotyping white southerners is okay, but you can't stereotype black people.

[Orcrist]

Originally posted by Dis
that was just a troll. Apparantly people seem to think stereotyping white southerners is okay, but you can't stereotype black people.

He's not stereotyping white southerners, he's stereotyping the kind of white southerners who try to justify the confederacy's actions. I'm pretty sure, that if the original poster had stated "I am a white southerner with no opinion on the civil war", he wouldn't have drawn any conclusions.
I mean those are all stereotypical arguments: The secession of the Southern states is comparable to the war for independence? Give me a break, there is that little detail of "Taxation without Representation" which was one of the key rationales for the revolutionary war. Just read the Declaration of Independence sometime, and you'll note that it even starts off saying that such a step (war) should not be entered into lightly, and then goes on to list all the grievances which justified that step. "Our guy lost the presidential election" does not measure up to those arguments. By that logic the entire Northwest would have been justified in seceding because Bush won, and probably every one of these "The South was just fighting for independence" people would have been cheering for George to go get those traitors back. Hell, for that matter , those of us who were opposed to the Iraq war have been branded as traitors by more than a few Southerners just for speaking out against that war.

Okay, I'll shut up now

[nbarclay]

Orcrist, from what I understand, England would have been willing to give the colonies representation in Parliament. The problem is, representation would not have solved the colonies' problem because England could have outvoted the colonies easily, forcing its will onto the colonies in spite of the colonies' being represented. Even if the colonies were represented, England could have gone right on manipulating laws to its own advantage at the expense of the colonies.

Because of that, the colonial leaders were not willing to accept representation as a solution if the other problems would remain unresolved. After all, if they accepted offers of representation, one of their best rallying cries woud disappear.

To understand the South's problem leading up to the Civil War, and at the situation the colonies would have faced if England had given them representation, take a look at how the U.N. works in Civ IV when the player has over half of the world's population. The player can ram whatever he wants to through the U.N. short of diplomatic victory, and the votes of the other civs don't matter one iota. The other civs technically have representation in the U.N., but they have no more real power than if they were not represented at all.

Similarly, colonial representation in the British Parliament and Southern representation in Congress could only have worked properly if the representatives of the larger, more politically powerful regions were willing to respect the legitimate interests of the less populous and politically powerful regions. Without that respect, the value of representation was extremely limited.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the North outnumbered the South in both the House and the Senate and had demonstrated a willingness to use its advantage to promote Northern economic interests at the direct and deliberate expense of Southern economic interests. That left the White House as the only place where Southern states could turn in an effort to protect their interests.

Now take a look at the nature of the new (at the time) Republican Party. Unlike the previous major parties, the Republican Party was not a national party, but rather was a party that relied essentially exclusively on the North for its support. In combination with the Northern domination that already existed in the House and Senate, the election of a President from such a party was an extremely ominous sign for what the South could expect in the future if it remained a part of the Union. Worse, because the nation was still expanding, and because of the federal government's power over what new states admitted to the Union would be like, the North had the power to shift the balance of power in the federal government even farther against Southern interests in the future.

The original concept of the United States under the Constitution was that the new, stronger federal government would make all of the states better off. But that concept had largely collapsed, so that instead of working for the common good of all of the states, the federal government had become a tool for promoting Northern interests at the direct and deliberate expense of Southern states. The South considered that situation unacceptable.

The current-day conflict between "red states" and "blue states" does not even begin to rise to the same level of danger. It might if liberals would ever gain a strong enough upper hand to start using federal power to force their values onto "red states," but the fact that "red states" outnumber "blue states" makes that relatively unlikely given how the Senate is designed - unless perhaps the Supreme Court could be stacked in a liberal direction to a point where it would make the Senate irrelevant. And "red states" aren't generally all that interested in using federal power to force their values onto "blue states" to begin with.

Nathan

[Shogun Gunner]

the title of this thread is very apt

[Dis]

Yes it is