If the US civil war was fought today...

[TCO]

Hey...you are making me selfconscious. don't talk so much.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
It is easy to judge southerners criminals for the institution of slavery using the enlightented vision of hindsight. It would be another thing to experience the issue from the inside out. I grew up in the South. I grew up in this culture. You don't have to lecture me about the evils of racism. I have lived amid the hail and brimstone whose smoke you only sniff at a distance.

I grew up in Virginia, which last time I checked was part of the South. My family was originally from Tennessee. We moved to New York when I was 2 while my dad got his master's degree. I was 7 when we moved back south, but I had never been exposed to racial prejudice. When I started regurgitating all that Yankee liberal "equality" crap I had learned up North I got a quick education into popular southern culture. I never backed down. I got a face full of fine Louisville ash, but I didn't back down. Teachers told me that little boys who couldn't learn to "get along" and "keep their peace" deserved the sort of treatment I had gotten.
When I was 10 I built a crystal radio from a kit, and I would listen to the filth spilling from the lips of local preachers about what they thought the Civil Rights movement was about. One of those preachers is still nationally prominent.
When I entered high school I watched as our school board fabricated a clever way to bypass court ordered integration. The black kids were bused in and led to a room for roll call, then 5 minutes after school began were hustled out on a bus to a vocational school.
When I was a child we take an annual vacation to visit my grandparents in Memphis. They had a black housekeeper. One year her son was arrested merely for being the blackest person found in the vicinity of a murder. I was with my Dad when he went over to her house to comfort her. He was roughed up a bit while in jail, but was released a week after a witness led the police to the real culprit, who promptly confessed. The police kept the innocent boy in jail for a while for what ever reason that white police in the South used to do that sort of thing.
Yeah, I'm sure you can educate me about life in the South.

[MrFun]

Dr Strangelove don't you get it??

MTG, SlowwHand and other neo-Confederates want to cling to their "Lost Cause" popular culture for their own comfort -- they don't care about the historical realities of the South.

[Patroklos]

Dr Strangelove don''t you get it??

MrFun, Che, and TCO and the very few other "Lost Cause" proponents cling to it so they don't have to understand the historical realities of the South or the Civil War.

[TCO]

bull****.

[TCO]

SLavery was in full force in the South (okay maybe not Deleware!) in 1860 and was outlawed in 1865. Spare me from the specultive crap about the lack of cotton in New Mexico or the growth of industry in the South over the next 150 years. That bull**** is weak kaka.

[Patroklos]

You would know kaka, considering what is contained in your posts on this thread.

[TCO]

Whatever, person-who-wants-to fight-to-preserve-slavery.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Dr Strangelove don''t you get it??

MrFun, Che, and TCO and the very few other "Lost Cause" proponents cling to it so they don't have to understand the historical realities of the South or the Civil War.

I am not the one adhering to the "Lost Cause" ideology. I am the one that has read scholarly work on how the "Lost Cause" originated among white Southerners that included Confederate veterans who wanted to remake history for purposes of white supremacy.

[Ned]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

The Federal judiciary is dependent on the Federal executive for enforcement of it's decisions, so even if SCOTUS had the authority, and the United States waived the issue of personal jurisdiction over the State of South Carolina, (an executive decision, as the Solicitor General is subordinate to the Attorney General), it would still be a matter of executive action to comply with any such decision - and ol' Abe made his position clear.

There was no valid legal process available - only a political process, which each seceding state defined.

Well, Michael The Great, if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the South and Abraham Lincoln refused to allow the South to succeed anyway, I would agree that it would have been a war of Northern Aggression.

But otherwise, your post does not provide an adequate explanation as to why the Southern states did not attempt to settle the dispute with Lincoln through the courts. It would have avoided the war if the South won in the Supreme Court and Lincoln abided by the decision. If they lost in Supreme Court, I am willing to bet that the South would not have seceeded. If they won in the Supreme Court, and Lincoln still refused to let them go, I am sure that a good portion of the North would not have supported Lincoln, and it is far more likely that the South would have received support from the likes of England and France.

The bottom line, the South's failure to pursue the matter in the courts, which was an option that clearly was available to it, was sheer, unadulterated arrogance.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Not sure how you came to that conclusion from available evidence Ned.

Are you stating the North instigated and started the Civil War for the sole purpose of removing troublsome states from the law making process so they could ammend the Constitution to free the slaves? Waited a little long to do that if this is the case, shuffled their feet for 5-6 years. The motivation for the North to participate in hostilities was in no way linked to freeing the slaves. There was a very vocal minoity of acitvists who did espouse such thoughts, but they are not representative in the slightest of the vast number of Northern citizens or its political leaders. Maybe some influential politicals did later, but never the Northern people themselves. Even a cursory study of Union wartime diaries clearly shows freeing slaves was not on most of their minds, especially in the early war. I would abandon this line of thougth if Iwere you.....

Pat, no, what I'm saying is that neither Lincoln as president nor Congress had the power under the Constitution to free the slaves. That would have required a constitutional amendment.

The reason the South succeeded upon the election of Abraham Lincoln was because the Republican Party platform called for an end to the slave trade, and I emphasize trade here, in interstate and foreign commerce and in the Territories. "Trade" was something that Congress could address by statute, but only in interstate and foreign commerce and in the Territories. They had no right to address trade in the states themselves.

I had no idea how Lincoln or any Republican was proposing to free the slaves in the South prior to the war other than through a constitutional amendment. Note, that slaves were finally freed in America through the passage the 13th amendment which occurred after the close of the war. This amendment was ratified by the Southern states.

[MrFun]

After 1863, the majority of white Northerners seemed to have supported the destruction of slavery when they reelected Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

[Ned]

MrFun, did any state not ratify the 13th Amendment?

[MrFun]

Ned, most of the states have ratified the 13th Amendment by mid-December of 1865. The only state that refused to ratify the 13th Amendment was Mississippi -- New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky initially rejected this amendment as well, but they later ratified it a second time around.

[Ned]

The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States was proposed to the legislatures of the several States by the Thirty-eighth Congress, on the 31st day of January, 1865, and was declared, in a proclamation of the Secretary of State, dated the 18th of December, 1865, to have been ratified by the legislatures of twenty-seven of the thirty-six States. The dates of ratification were: Illinois, February 1, 1865; Rhode Island, February 2, 1865; Michigan, February 2, 1865; Maryland, February 3, 1865; New York, February 3, 1865; Pennsylvania, February 3, 1865; West Virginia, February 3, 1865; Missouri, February 6, 1865; Maine, February 7, 1865; Kansas, February 7, 1865; Massachusetts, February 7, 1865; Virginia, February 9, 1865; Ohio, February 10, 1865; Indiana, February 13, 1865; Nevada, February 16, 1865; Louisiana, February 17, 1865; Minnesota, February 23, 1865; Wisconsin, February 24, 1865; Vermont, March 9, 1865; Tennessee, April 7, 1865; Arkansas, April 14, 1865; Connecticut, May 4, 1865; New Hampshire, July 1, 1865; South Carolina, November 13, 1865; Alabama, December 2, 1865; North Carolina, December 4, 1865; Georgia, December 6, 1865.

Ratification was completed on December 6, 1865.

The amendment was subsequently ratified by Oregon, December 8, 1865; California, December 19, 1865; Florida, December 28, 1865 (Florida again ratified on June 9, 1868, upon its adoption of a new constitution); Iowa, January 15, 1866; New Jersey, January 23, 1866 (after having rejected the amendment on March 16, 1865); Texas, February 18, 1870; Delaware, February 12, 1901 (after having rejected the amendment on February 8, 1865); Kentucky, March 18, 1976 (after having rejected it on February 24, 1865).

The amendment was rejected (and not subsequently ratified) by Mississippi, December 4, 1865