Republican quotes KKK founder on House floor

Seriously; why is anyone even surprised anymore when the GOP whips out the hate card?

WTF????

Confederate Klan Generals aside (that should not require any additional comment- unacceptable) someone explain the part about Iraq and the confederacy.

Poe thinks we should give the generals (who likely aren’t really requesting anything) what they want because the last time Congress ignored the generals the south lost the war? Ah-buh-ah-huh?

Dear Rep. Poe,

There are a few items we need to clear up about your position on Iraq. 1) The war in Iraq has been described as a civil war, true. This does not mean that it shares anything in common with the U.S. Civil War (c.1865). 2) The Confederacy lost the U.S. Civil war and the Union was preserved by none other than the grandest of old Republicans, Abe Lincoln. 3) Quoting Confederate generals, particularly ones who formed the KKK, is as inappropriate at a BBQ as it is on the House floor.

All I have to add is Rep. Poe, WTF!?

That Forrest quote is old and hoary enough for me to conclude that this instance of it shouldn’t be attributed to malice, but to stupidity. It’s not even close to in the same league as Trent Lott’s praise of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 run for President as far as bigotry is concerned. Harping on it now is a waste of time and isn’t all that smart either.

Lets set aside (like that is possible) the Rethuglican fondness for the KKK and Confederacy, and lets set aside Poe’s ignorance in then quoting his racist hero incorrectly. Lets set aside the nonsensical nature of the analogy.

And having given Poe all of those breaks, lets consider what he said — he argues that to do the right thing we should “get there fastest with the mostest.” Which, frankly, if he believes it, should cause him to excoriate his party’s President, who signed off on the exact opposite 4-years ago, when contrary to the previously successful Powell Doctrine (which most Americans seems to generally support), we went into Iraq on a neo-con macho fantasy of beating up brown-skinned people with one arm tied behind our backs, that is, using the absolute minimum of troops (and even ignoring that one entire division couldn’t get there “fast” because he who winks at the Queen blew the negotiations with Turkey).

To recap: Bush is even dumber strategically than a defeated Confederate leader and KKK Imperial Wizard, and Poe is willing to support him in his stupidity.

Normally, I’d agree, but this is a tempest in a teapot. Unfortunately, the line is used often in military history and texts to describe maneuver warfare in its base simplest terms. Most of the time, it is quoted without mentioning the man who it is attributed to.

Not disagreeing with your point that Forrest was a douchebag though.

On one hand, I want the left to have as powerful and effective machine to create news, controversy and headlines as the right has done. The extent to which this site contributes to that, I encourage and applaud. On the other hand, much of what is annoying about the right’s echo chamber is often that what is written is not worth the time it takes to read it. Which is kind of what I thought after reading this post. (while at the same time condemning racist iconography and institutions)

I guess I want the echo chamber to talk about it, I just don’t want to have to listen.

He was the man who quoted Jefferson Davis on the floor as well.

That’s right, he used support of Civil War phrases from the Confederate President.

“Don’t send more questions, send more troops.”

That’s why neocon means neoconfederate.

Republicans just can’t win. Even when they quote Abraham Lincoln, they get in trouble. Like Rep. Don Young just a couple months back, the whole “members of Congress who speak out against the war should be hanged” thing. Luckily for Lincoln, it was a made-up quote.

What’s maddening about the quote is that Poe is excoriating Congress for not providing funding for the troops when Poe instead should be railing against the president for vetoing such funding. As Zeitgist pointed out, Poe should have used this quote about four years ago when we went into Iraq with too few troops to win the peace.

While Forrest was indeed one of the founders of the KKK (and it’s first imperial wizard), the KKK did not start out as a violent organization. In fact, when the KKK turned violent, Forrest ordered that the organization be disbanded and resigned from it.

This is from his Wikipedia article:

Because of Forrest’s prominence, the organization grew rapidly under his leadership. In addition to aiding Confederate widows and orphans of the war, many members of the new group began to use force […] In 1869, Forrest, disagreeing with its increasingly violent tactics, ordered the Klan to disband, stating that it was “being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace.” Many of its groups in other parts of the country ignored the order and continued to function. Subsequently, Forrest distanced himself from the KKK.

Come on guys! It isn’t that hard to do a little research before going off on tirade about quoting him. Besides, who says people can’t quote bad people? People quote Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and George Bush all the time. Ideas should be considered on their merits and not be tainted by our judgments of the people who came up with them.

Oh right, now Wikipedia is an authoritative source? Written by morons for morons.

As long as we’re quoting Forrest, he ALSO said:

“Keep up the Scare!”

Meaning that once you have the enemy on the run, KEEP them on the run, Keep them scared and running so they don’t have the chance to regroup.

Which, as you’ll recall, we DIDN’T do in Afghanistan, we went into Iraq instead … and we’re paying the price for it now.

Although I’m the sort who gets PO’d by Confederate flags and such, I’ve been saying “firstest with the mostest” all my life. I learned it from my dad, who also said it all the time without being a fan of the KKK. I had no idea it came from N. B. Forrest.

I was willing to give Ted Poe the benefit of the doubt on this until I saw the current top headline on his Congressional website: “POE SUPPORTS VETO OF HATE CRIMES BILL.” So CB, instead of asking you to cut Poe some slack, I say keep up the good work blowing the whistle on Poe and his ilk.

This statement by this republican idiot re affirms what I have always thought about my country – the land of the free talk is just a bunch of nonsense and the civil war was never resolved. My parents are southern and I love many southerners but for the most part they are traitors!

Always have been always will be. The sooner we get rid of them the better!!!

Screw separating Iraq or Israel we need to finish what we started and the north needs to ditch the south ASAP!

If we have to finish the civil war then ill gladly return from Japan to finish the job on these morons! If we dont stop them now then we deserve everything we get.

Im so happy my child due this october will never have to live in the US. Ill teach them that dad was from a country that had some great ideas but in the end could not deliver on the hype.

I agree with those saying this one’s a stretch. Bedford Forrest is a dark and complex figure (look up “Fort Pillow Massacre” on Wikipedia), but to armchair buffs he’s just another Confederate “hero” (and a military genius), and “Git thar fust” is as famous as “Give me liberty or give me death” and “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Invoking him isn’t necessarily a dog-whistle to the racist right.

Unless you also want to pull Ty Cobb and Jerry Lee Lewis out of their respective halls of fame–and the arguments are there–this is just another thing people with a more nuanced understanding of history have to live with.

this story lacks the full historical context. while it is dumb to favorably quote someone who has been associated with the kkk, nathan bedford forrest ended up disavowing their violence against blacks and distancing himself from the group.

so to use this as an implication of “a racist quoting a racist” is disingenuous at best. we’re supposed to keep the facts (and the truth) on OUR side, folks. this is just an attempt to score a cheap political point without providing full historical context.

it plays to ignorance and not truth. let’s leave that to the rightwing whackjobs, please.

the broader point is more important. bush got the funds for which he asked, and he turned them down. poe’s quoting of the civil war insurgent general is intended to deliver the message that congress is at fault for troops not getting funding.

nothing could be further from the truth. bush vetoed the funding. stupid quote (or misquote) is unfortunate, but don’t follow rep. poe into the land of misinformation by not providing the full context either, please.

Looks like the 28%ers are out today (aka Right Wing Authoritarians).

What were we thinking, CB? Who are we to criticize “southern cultural heritage” and the first grand wizard of the KKK? We should honor and respect Nathan Bedford Forrest’s military brilliance in defense of those pillars of the republic of the United States, secession and slavery.

Come to think of it (and speaking of terrorists, such as Bedford Forrest), perhaps we should have another look at the words of Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps OBL has some insight into how to best fund the Global War On Truth?

But who am I, anyway, but a “coastal elite” (albeit living on the coast of Lake Michigan).

It was the “War of Northern Aggression”–NOT the “Civil War”

there was nothing civil about it (ask atlanta)

by the way the Confederates urged their General Lee to the rear–and now ALL generals-north or south- do that.

should that change too??? Gen Petraeus??? your thoughts???

As a slave trader, Forrest was as respectable as they come in the ante-bellum South. When the war began, unlike most slaveholders, Forrest put his money where his mouth was, raised a company of soldiers, paid them, and armed them. He also led them from the front, fearlessly, ruthlessly. He quit the KKK after it got violent. This Poe should emulate rather than quote Forrest. He should go to Iraq with a brigade of his fellow war supporters and pitch in. I doubt his military genius is anything approaching Forrest’s who was brevatted to general on the basis of never having been defeated in battle, despite having numerous horses shot from under him.

Isn’t Bob Byrd a Dem.? What’s more upsetting, a quote by a Republican, or an actual member of the KKK being the president of the Senate? Because of the Dems, a member of the KKK is fourth in line for the Presidency.

ya know, whodahell, rather than criticize wikipedia, you could read the entry linked to and realize that it provides footnotes that further source the information there.

true, anyone can change the entries, but one would have to presume the source material isn’t as easily edited.

the point is, progressives, liberals, whatever…shouldn’t be subject to the crowd mentality that the rightwing noise machine tends to produce (the word comes down, today’s “talking points” as it were, and that’s the party line). we do have the ability to think and research independently.

when we provide factually incomplete accounts, knowingly or not, we are in danger of becoming what we despise — another noise machine that obfuscates reality. a little research to ensure the truth is maintained is worthwhile, do you not agree?

the war of northern aggression could also be called the southern insurgency. why is poe quoting an insurgent?

My gresat-great-great grandfather Peter Cleaver, who built a house in Catawissa Pennsylavania that has a secret room in its root cellar where the runaway slaves were hidden (which I discovered in 1972, visiting the old family homestead), and who helped found the Republican Party in Pennsylvania in 1854 as the party of freedom, is likely to achieve excape velocity as he spins in his grave, that the scummy traitors who he fought all his life now control the party he worked all his life to realize his ideals.

The Republican Party, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Southern Confederate Treason, Inc. Of course they’d quote their heroes.

Did you know that Texas, being the one state that was once an independent country, could leave? Wouldn’t it be nice to be a 49-state union, with no possibility of any more Lyndon Johnsons or George Bushes in the White House???

Difference between “White supremacist” and “White separatist” or “White nationalist.” In this regard, the Ku Klux Klan of World War II provided some of the best troops who fought fanatically against the Nazis, because the K-K-K, needed niggers, and the Nazis believed in doing their own hard work. The KKK are traditionally White supremacists, who sought to dominate Blacks, but not to separate from them.

B.F.D.

Please visit the Schapira blog, What we know so far …

… and tell ’em Big MItch sent ya!

Oh, and Matt: Robert E. Lee is the greatest traitor in the history of the United States. Offered the chance to keep the country together, by taking command of the national army, he displayed his Southern small-mindedness by going with the traitors.

most “confederates” were not traitors or aristocrats (or even slave owners), but simple farmers and ranchers (many not even landowners) who were unhappy that the northern armies were attacking.

when asked why they were fighting by northern soldiers, they were as likely to say, “because you’re down here.”

there was a political reality to the civil war, and there was a local and regional reality. most confederate soldiers didn’t understand the full reasons behind the war, but did understand that northern soldiers were attacking, burning crops and destroying property.

that’s normally what creates insurgencies. so just as you would defend your home from attackers, so did many of these dastardly confederates you disparage.

as has been mentioned previously, it’s not all black and white.

and the point about facts and historical context is large: we do not want to become anything like the right wing noise machine — i.e., get the talking points out, facts be damned.

Good Lord. (98% of whites in the South did NOT own slaves. Hell there are many instances of Black slave owners. It was a condition of Law at the time. The vast majority of whites were poor farmers, slaves were expensive. What is wrong with you all? If we follow the same logic as #47 then we all are technically “traitors” for taking up arms against Great Britain! What is the difference? Oh yah we did not lose that one. If we did some guy with a limey accent would be talking about what a scum bag George Washington was. As for racism yep it is bad but there has been more race focused rioting in recent history in the North or West then in the South. Look, Iraq was and is a crime, Corporate power is out of control, and our civil liberties are under siege from every front, all led by Bush and Cheney. They are not Southerners by they way, Bush is a Northern Aristocrat.

One more thing Tom.
If your great great grandfather and uncle were in the campagin to burn Atlanta, and took part in the pillaging and plundering of the Carolinas and Georgia, I want reperations for all the damage done to my family during that terrorist campagin. I want all the silver returned and reperations for buring my great great great families home, business, and farm.

jeez, tom cleaver displaying some class attacking ALL white people in the south. that will win some converts.

Whatever else one may say of him, Forrest was argueably the most effective fighting general in the Civil War, perhaps in American history.

He pretty much invented the concept of mounted infantry, today emulated in the U.S. Army. His tactics can be transposed into any modern conflict.

I cannot see how quoting one of his battle themes in ANY context can be racist.

At the end of the day, by todays standards of what is treasonous then the South was a bunch of treasonous scoundrels and they all should have been put to death! If Lincoln would have had any sense he might have followed Sherman’s advice and we wouldnt even be having a North/South isuue today! Jeez…mention the South and Confederacy and every imbred rushes out of his mobile home and starts spouting history like its something they are up on! Not even!

Ted Poe is a jingoistic opportunist, but we should leave this sort of miniscule pettiness to the right wing freaks. Forrest was a racist slave holder before the war, but he was a self taught military genius and while it’s true he was in the Klan, he thought of it as a resistance group, not a terror group. he left the Klan once it became violent and racist.

JewBoy…Are you going to use the term “way cool” next? “Not even…” what are you even referring to? You are advocating the massacring of all in the South after the civil war. Ok I’m done. I am a progressive who believes that any totalitarian approach is just straight wrong. I would bleed for any American when necessary as my fathers before me but to kill for subjugation purposes is disgusting. Looks like the NEO-Con view is catching on. Considering my Grandfather was half Native American I guess I can tell every one of ya’ll to burn in hell. To bad my ancestors on that side did not burn those ships in the harbor! (I don’t think this way) This is crazy and beyond negative. Any American that acts so righteously has a skewed view of history and I hope you all never have to face the wrong end of a sword. Peace.

Beaumont Office:
505 Orleans Street
Suite 100
Beaumont, TX 77701
(409) 212-1997
(409) 212-8711 fax
(877) 218-1997 toll free
Call and complain, that’s not acceptable!

You guys bashing NB Forrest are ignorant of history. The Klan was originally formed to defend Southerners against marauding militias and Northern carperbaggers.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest
“Forrest, disagreeing with its increasingly violent tactics, ordered the Klan to disband, stating that it was “being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace.” Many of its groups in other parts of the country ignored the order and continued to function. Subsequently, Forrest distanced himself from the KKK.”

Also regarding Fort Pillow:
“Only 90 out of approximately 262 blacks survived the battle. Casualties were also high among white defenders of the fort, with 205 out of about 500 surviving. After the battle, reports surfaced of captured soldiers being subjected to brutality, including allegations that they were crucified on tent frames and burnt alive. Whether or not these reports are accurate will probably never be known for certain as both sides used the battle as a political rallying cry and were prone to exaggerate the events. An investigation by Union general William T. Sherman did not find any fault with Forrest.”

“He was later cleared of any violations of the rules of war in regard to the alleged massacre at Fort Pillow, and was allowed to return to private life.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the greatest commanders that this American soil has produced and Congressman Poe should be commended for using a quote of his.

NB Forrest was not a “traitor” either. Lincoln was and is the traitor to the Constitution. The South was fighting to uphold that document agaisnt all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC. The South lost the war and with their defeat we lost our Constitution.

I agree that my southern ancestors were traitors and racists but you don’t need to rub my nose in it, Tom Cleaver. Some of them were poor old dirt farmers, drafted into the southern military meat grinder, who deserted and hid out in the hills while the Confederate true believers looked for them. True, they probably didn’t have strong antislavery or pro Union sympathies. They were just trying to raise their families in peace. I honor the memory of my great grandfather who served in the Union Army for the duration of the war and later came south to live in a county that had voted against secession. We southerners have come a long way during my lifetime but have yet to fully repudiate the past. We eventually must do that in order to escape the ever present temptation to fall back into the old bigoted Jim Crow patterns that have oppressed both black and white in the South. Yes, we must take down these treasonous flags and the inscriptions on Civil War statues that speak of defending the “white race.” And the Ted Poes of the world who like to wear their fundamentalist religion on their sleeves must finally learn true morality. He has a responsibility to know about the background of the Confederates he quotes. I suspect that he did since he is a a fairly well educated man with pretensions as an amateur historian. . . . Oh, and furthermore, “Forget the Alamo!”

///As someone who had two great-great grandfathers and a great-grand-uncle who helped burn Atlanta and then broke the South with the rest of the Georgia-Carolinas campaign – you traitors got what you deserved. ///

hey Tommyboy—come down South and repeat that.
——————————————————————————————————-
”l still say they’re not going to
make the parish line.”

My mistake, 142 years. I was using Rovian math principles.

“Slave” versus “Free” issue.
Slavery did not seem to be a big issue, the main reasons for the South’s secession from the U.S.A. was economic and political, rather than moral. The North sought to impose trade tariffs on foreign imports, on behalf of northern factories, and the South wanted to sell their cotton and tobacco to other countries in order to buy manufactured goods at lower prices than those of the North. In other words, the South was an early champion of globali­zation! The slave issue was mainly for the masses of dumb asses who would fight in this rich man’s war, for Black slaves were visible and comprehensible, whereas trade tariffs were not. White workers resented Black slaves, who generally lived better. A slave was property, so he or she had a value. A White worker was not property, so when he could not work for any reason, he was discarded like a wornout or broken tool, and so was his family. Black slaves were seen as property, labor and investments. The White worker was only seen as labor. In regard to land use, slaveholders were agribusinessmen of their time, like present day agribusinesses which are mechanized and rely by illegal aliens. In the 19th century, America was basically agrarian and every family had relatives who owned their own land and lived off it. The big change in farm versus city living came just after World War I in the U.S.A. Now, few people live off the land and few own it. Even a tiny suburban lot is usually mortgaged, so the bank owns it and not those who live on it.

Brazil is much older than the U.S.A. and their slaves were freed in 1888, without any war being fought over it. Slavery was not as cheap as hiring ‘free’ day laborers and sharecroppers. The new chains of slavery are debt.Morally, the Yankees were not the ones to point fingers of blame at the Southern slave­holders, for the Yankees and Jews sold the slaves to the South! So I see no justification for slavery, which corrupts master and slave alike. Had the South been allowed to secede from the U.S.A., slavery would have ended naturally, as in Brazil, not because of morality, but because of capitalist technology which made slavery uneconomic. Slaves were not needed for agriculture, as we saw in the vast farms of the West which were seeded, tilled and harvested by teams of horses or huge steam tractors. Work crews were often seasonal, so there was no need to pay for their food and lodging all year ’round, as with slaves. The Bonanza Farms were in big business around ten years after the Civil War.

Racially and nationally, the question was not about ending slavery, but sending the Blacks back to Africa, as Jefferson and Lincoln advocated. The Civil War was a genocidal disaster for the White Race in America.

The south lost in many ways:
1) Militarily.(they fought Bravely)
2) Economically (should they have win America will be an underdeveloped country)
3) Morally (slavery)

The only point they still have is formal: The interpretation of the constitution, but even that is not going for them since they launched a preemptive attack and after loosing they went illegal with KKK and Jesse James sympathizers.

The best prove that they were wrong comes from the ideological field, nothing; not one invention, not one good writer, non-a great industrialist. The greatness of America comes from basically 3 cities NY, Chicago, and LA. The only good thing, intellectually speaking, that originated in the south-belt is Jazz and was done by blacks, It is a shame; hate gays, hate Jews, hate blacks, hate progress; but please be creative at least. Mark Twain was a southerner but only by birth, what about Tennessee Williams kind of gay.
LOL. ONLY TEXAS IS WORST IN THE CREATIVE COMPETITION. The south made America famous by the Klan, the crazy preachers, the monkey trial and the anti civil rights it a real shame. The south has the intellectual content of the dukes of hazard.
Sorry I forgot you have Elvis….

////The North just had more people thanks to immigrants and blacks being forced into the army////

and they almost lost the war……..

don’t forget the Irish and other immigrants—they enlisted with the promise of citizenship. they fought and died for a government they did not even know–certainly not because of slavery. then they gotr screwed by the army who HATED the Irish and treated them as badly as the slaveowners did the blacks.

Anglocreed, that can all have some elements of truth.

But these basic facts remain:

1) Southerners thought slavery was necessary to their economy as they saw it. Thus it’s technically true that they were acting for economic reasons; but they were still in the wrong morally.

For instance, if the South’s economy was based on torturing and eating babies, and the North wanted to tariff them and sold the war to the public on the basis that doing that to babies is wrong – the North would still be correct, because it IS wrong.

2) the South wanted to expand slavery into the new territories, and the North did not. Kansas, a new state, became a bitter battleground for this reason.

3) Sure, many to most of the Northerners at that time were racist. And a lot of our leaders wanted to deport blacks rather than admit them.

They still thought slavery was wrong. That they didn’t go all the way, doesn’t mean they weren’t part of the way along the path of righteousness.

Spliz, which side lost?

I submit that the side which lost is the side which got it’s ass kicked.

You can submit many facts which point out that the South did better on average – but it wasn’t an average. The South got it’s ass kicked by an overwhelmingly larger army with overwhelmingly greater resources, in a war which was fought almost entirely on Southern ground.

That’s how they got their ass kicked.

Thus the war was fought for States rights.

I’ll agree to this point – the war was fought to make the Southern states follow Federal decisions.

But the South fought to keep the right to own and sell people. They counted this right as one of their State’s rights.

That doesn’t mean the Northerners wanted Blacks to be equal, or even thought they were.

But many Northerners joined up to fight just because they thought slavery was wrong. If you doubt this, just look at the numbers of people who voluntarily moved to Kansas just so they could swing the Constitution of this newly-forming state against slavery.

So many battles were fought in Kansas that it became known as “Bloody Kansas”. just for this reason alone.

The South was morally in the wrong and deserved to lose; and the South fought as hard as it could and had many things break their way, and had tactically brilliant generals and fought on their home ground – and they still lost.

That’s the history of it no matter who writes it.

The south represent the Past, the north the Future.
The south Religion, the north Science.
The south Agriculture the north Industry
The south Slaves, The north Machines.
After the war the north went on to conquer the world the south still living in the past.

Most lists of the worst Americans in U.S. history include Nathan Bedford Forrest near the top.

Well, that’s just dumb. Forrest was no angel, but I can make a list of 100 worse Americans just among current Republican elected officials and that’s without even getting into people like Limbaugh and Coulter. Forrest was a product of his times, his most reprehensible views were shared by the vast majority of his white contemporaries. And your idea that the original KKK was founded to terrorize freeded slaves is wrong, as others have noted. Forrest in particular was well known for his opposition to violent tactics during Reconstruction.

Texas Republicans are naught but an albatross around the neck of my state. Thank Delay’s redistricting outrage for the existence of a Poe-boy in the US House. By no means are all of us supporters of the current regime – and many are looking forward to regime change both in Austin and in DC. There were true heroes from Texas at the time of the Civil War – one of them was Sam Houston who was opposed to secession and was removed as governor for his steadfast refusal to support it. Others included the Free Thinkers from Comfort who were murdered as they travelled north to join the Union forces. Texans were not all Confederate sympathizers then and we’re not all Bushies now!

PS – Cut the vitriol. Northerners are supposed to be the ones who always point out that the war is over.

I got nuttin’. Just want to get this thread to 100 comments.

Lifting a pertinent quote from a historical figure hardly equates to racism simply because you fine folks don’t like Republicans.

If we’re going to parse language for racism, here’s a quiz for you.

What party did the dynamic duo who protested the use of the word “niggardly” by Washington D.C. Public Advocate David Howard undoubtedly support?

Forrest may be a bad man, I leave others to argue that; but he is considered by almost everybody one of the most effective generals in U.S. history. I wonder who the Carpetbagger thinks we should turn to for military wisdom, Maya Angelou? Good thing Newton wasn’t a racist (maybe he was?) or we couldn’t mention his physical laws, since it would be racist to quote his law of gravity.

To quote Rommel on the effectiveness of tank warfare is not to be a Nazi. To use musical techniques pionered by Wagner is not to be an anti-Semite. To quote a top general on his understanding of warfare fundamentals is not to be a racist, even if the general himself was.

Quoting Forrest on military tactics is appropriate: he was a fairly capable cavalry general. This reminds me of the controversy where violence was threatened in Isreal when a visting symphony wanted to play some pieces by Wagner (a bit of an jew-hater whose music was loved by an even bigger jew-hater, Adolph Hitler). Take the good, and don’t forget the bad (or don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater). There are too many hypersensitive purists out there.

True as far as it goes, James Fish – except that when the Democratic party decided to support voting rights for Blacks in the south in the 1960’s, Southern Democrats took this as a betrayal.

It was at this point that these racists left the Democratic party, for the Republican party.

As a matter of fact, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act he told an aide, “We have lost the south for a generation.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,,1336713,00.html

It is at times like these, when I see my fellow Southerners losing their minds over the Civil War, that I am reminded of the eloquent piece written shortly after the 2004 elections:

Fuck the South.

It is unfortunate and unfair, but there is a reason people hear a Southern accent and think “Ignorant yahoo.” The massive out break of pants-wetting in this thread demonstrates why.

Note to everyone who lives below the Mason-Dixon line: We lost. The war is over and there will not be a re-match. Time to move on.

I for one am damn glad we did lose. After all, the southern traditions that really matter still survive: The food and … um…

I know there’s something else. Give me a minute…

Look Answer is Orange,

As a southerner I am less than thrilled by the propensity of many of my co-regionalists to go all weepy and defensive over the Lost Cause. But I am also very tired of guys like Daniel who bash the south by denying that it has contributed ANYTHING good to this country. That is demonstrably not true and only feeds the neo-confederates’ sense of being put upon.

If it is true that many southerners still want to fight the Civil War, there appear to be many northerners who are happy to oblige. Frankly, the whole thing is simply baffling.

You really gotta love those neo-Confederate lunkheads.

GOP Mess AmeriKKKa…

MORONS! What kind of rampant PC imbecility infects the majority of these posters? I don’t know the Rep who made the quote and care nothing for him or any ReThug ass, but this quote is used because it is a maxim of military tactics from the greatest military tactician in US (or CS) history. It doesn’t matter at all who said it or what the guy’s life was like… it’s just a military truth.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is typical of the nut-corps PC BS real progressives have to cringe over, just as real conservatives cringe when their people go ass-kissing in Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell World to steal a few Nazi votes. To see this garbage splashed all over HuffPo makes me more certain than ever that the Dems are going to f* it all up… ONE MORE TIME.

A REAL quote by Nathan Bedford Forrest

From a speech to the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, a precursor of the NAACP:

I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms, and wherever you are capable of going. I have not said anything about politics today. I don’t propose to say anything about politics. You have a right to elect whom you please; vote for the man you think best, and I think, when that is done, you and I are freemen. Do as you consider right and honest in electing men for office. I did not come here to make you a long speech, although invited to do so by you. I am not much of a speaker, and my business prevented me from preparing myself. I came to meet you as friends, and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come nearer to us. When I can serve you I will do so. We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict. Go to work, be industrious, live honestly and act truly, and when you are oppressed I’ll come to your relief.

DEMOCRATS, THEN AND NOW

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/search?q=democrat+copperhead
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/owens/02/racism.html
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15893
http://www.everythingiknowiswrong.com/2004/04/democrats_blata.html

There’s so much more, and so little time.

It was the Southern Democrats who were the slaveholders, and the Northern Democrats who sympathyzed with them and tried to subvert the war. They have their nerve pretending to be above racism, when the still practice it today.

P.S. Nice work #116!

Sure, yonason – and then Harry Truman desegregated the army in the 1940’s, and the Democratic party stood up for the rights of black voters and Civil Rights in the 1960’s – causing racist Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican party in droves.

See LBJ’s quote at #106.

If it is true that many southerners still want to fight the Civil War, there appear to be many northerners who are happy to oblige. Frankly, the whole thing is simply baffling.

While in the South you might hear spontaneous outbursts on the lines of “The North Attacked Us!” In the North you will never hear: “Yeah! We Kicked the South’s Arse!”

In my experience the CW does not become a causus belli unless someone either from the South or who identifies with the Confederacy (think confederate flags in New England and even England) gets a wild hair about the topic. Not too surprisingly, people become sarcastic and then annoyed when someone plays the sore loser over a war that ended more than a century ago.

Oh, for crying out loud! Do we have to re-fight *that* war, when there’s a much more immediate one going on? The only relevance US’s Civil War might have in today’s situation is to remind everyone that no occupied population likes the occupant. An occupation is likely to unite the population, against the occupant, irrespective of individual beliefs (the conflict between the Sunni and the Shi’a has been going on longer than the grievances between the South and the North).

And what’s important about Poe — hopefully, no relative to Edgar Allan — is not whom he quotes, but how he votes. *That* — his voting record — is what we need to condemn him on, not on a quote by some guy that half the population, even in the US, has probably never heard of before today (I haven’t, but I learnt my American history in Polish school, 45 yrs ago)

The almost the entire southern racist wing of the old Democratic party left in one migration, when Strom Thurmond led the Dixiecrat secession in 1948. I’ve always thought that the fact that most of them eventually found refuge in the party of Lincoln might have been made a little more palatable for them by another great schism back in 1912, when the Teddy Roosevelt and pretty much the entire progressive wing of the old Republican party split off to form the Progressive party.

Robert Byrd(D). Enough said,Hypocrites!

What Poe represents is 100 years of self-labeled conservative “thought” and segregation and what that has done to the “brains” of its adherents.

As a ten-year old, I watched an old lady hobble past me in a Woolsworth store in the late ’40’s while I was drinking chilled water from a fountain marked “Whites Only” and go to the broken, non-chilled fountain marked “Coloreds Only.” Finding nothing to drink, she hobbled out on her cane past the soda fountain, which served ice water to “whites” when their fountain was broken, but not to “coloreds.” She then hobbled out into the hot Texas summer sun. She was treated in this dispicable manner by Woolswortn, thanks to laws by self-labeled “conservatives” (Democrats then, Republicans now).

Southern (and Poe) apologists who claim that the Civil War wasn’t “about race” have to become “brain dead” to one hundred years of violence and the injustice of BILLIONS of scenes like the one above in order to maintain their hateful racist attitudes, exemplified by Forrest, Poe and their ilk.

As a Southerner, I am sick to death of the “War Between the States” and Segregation apologists who still lurk in the backwaters of my State. May the Lord have mercy on their sorry souls!

Once again, this bogus dustup isn’t about Nathan Bedford Forrest. This is about having a chance to bash the south.

(I had ancestors who fought on both sides, btw, and am no apologist for the Confederate cause, although I see a bit more complexity in the choices faced by Lee and others than some here do, starting with some understanding of Lee’s choice between loyalty to his state or to the federal government, which appeared to him much like the choice a modern Brit might make between loyalty to Great Britain or loyalty to the EU. Our concept of the federal government as the primary government deserving first loyalty was in large measure a result of the north’s winning the civil war, and it’s naive at best to apply post-civil war standards to those who had to decide before the event.)

The consequences of this southern bashing are that it reduces the possible base of the Democratic party, and perpetuates the dominance of those willing to posture, however hypocritically, as sympathetic to southern culture.

If your concern is about the future, and the world as a whole, and not long past nineteenth century conflicts, my advice is to get past your cultural condescension, and start thinking about how to make common ground with southern populists so we can make a start at reclaiming this country.

If you would rather wax righteous and talk about great grandpappy’s root cellar, well, fine for you, but it only means that your own great grandchildren aren’t going to have much positive to say about your contributions to the many crises confronting us now. They will recall you as the self righteous prig who watched the ship of history go sailing past while you impotently preached about battles long past.

////October 7, 1868: Democrats’ national slogan: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.”///

current GOP national slogan : THIS IS A RICH MAN’S COUNTRY. LET THE BUSHIES RULE

THE GOP did by the way get almost all of the southern segregationists-they left the southerd Democratic party and joined the GOP under Nixon.

forget Lincoln……his day is way over (and he didn’t fight the war for the blacks either)

PRAC

Despite the asides, it’s still about a member of the US Congress quoting a traitor with approval.

I cannot imagine what the GOP would be saying about any Democrat who did this. Especially since the GOP did not repudiate those who called for “a traitors fate” for those who opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

////Is this the site for morons? ////

yes PRAC

welcome

Scott, there’s nothing wrong with “quoting a military maxim from one of the greatest cavalry commanders in U.S. history.”

My comment refers to the clear fact that the GOP would have pilloried any Democrat who quoted a traitor from the floor of the house. Great military commander or not.

As an aside, this may be the only nation in history that would permit the veneration of rebellion and rebels to occur so openly. Speaking in favorable terms of rebels customarily earned one a quick trip to meet their maker.

////Tribal leaders and tribesmen are joining Coalition forces in Iraq and the Iraqi Police force by the THOUSANDS////

I used to get mad at my school
Now I can’t complain
The teachers who taught me weren’t cool
Now I can’t complain
You’re holding me down, ah, turning me round, ah
Filling me up with your rules, ooh ooh

{Refrain}
I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, better
A little better all the time, it can’t get no worse
I have to admit it’s getting better, better
It’s getting better since THE SURGE

Me used to be angry young man
Me hiding me head in the sand
You gave me the word, I finally heard
I’m doing the best that I can

Getting so much better all the time
It’s getting better all the time
Better, better, better
It’s getting better all the time
Better, better, better

obl-do obla-da

The people who have stated that only 2% of Southern Whites owned slaves before the Civil War are just WRONG…

It actually was more like 25-40% of White southern families owned slaves (depending on the southron state)–see US census stats from 1860 available on the internet….

The war was about slavery from the very start -the southerners that state that it wasn’t are also historically challenged–see the famous “Cornerstone” speech by the CSA VP from 1861 (also available on the “internets”) wherein Alexander Stephens makes this fact rather plain.

26% of the White Population (NOT 2 %)–And the relatively wealthy & politically involved elite and middle class of the South owned the slaves–

“Studies of the Old South social structure since Frank Owsley’s work have concentrated on the place of slavery in the region and its effect on white class relations. As a group slaveholders were extremely wealthy in the South. Their average wealth in 1860 was $24,748, almost fourteen times greater than that of nonslaveholders ($1,781). They accounted for 26 percent of the white population in 1860 and they owned 93 percent of “agricultural wealth.” Historians have emphasized the growing concentration of slaves in the possession of the largest slaveholders. John Boles pointed out that between 1850 and 1860 slaveholders with more than 20 slaves increased from 10 percent of the total slaveholding group to 12 percent. William J. Cooper and Thomas E. Terrill pointed out that these elite 12 percent owned 48 percent of the slaves in the South. So, historians have focused on the elite slaveholders and concluded that their power was not only substantial but also increasing”

Every once in a while, when I’m reading my favorite blogs (and this is one of them), I come across something that I believe to be inaccurate. My areas of expertise & semi-expertise are fairly narrow — mainly philosophy, history, computer science — so it doesn’t happen often. When it does, I will usually post to try to correct the inaccuracy. I figure we’re part of the “reality-based” community, so we all have an interest in historical accuracy. Evidently I was mistaken.

I’ve run into this with Forrest before. People seem to want to hate him, and they don’t seem to want to be distracted with the facts of his life. Personally, I find the guy interesting percisely because he tried to overcome his racism, something like John Newton (the guy who wrote “Amazing Grace”). For reasons I don’t fully understand, Newton is a hero, wheras Forrest is the Devil incarnate.

In a less pedantic criticism of the original post, focusing on the source of the quote (Forrest) detracts from what should be the main point about Poe: the sheer idiocy of what he said. We can’t get there “first”. The Iraqis beat us “there” by at least 10,000 years. As for getting there “with the most”, it’s at least 4 years too late to be thinking about that. “A day late and a dollar short” would be more a accurate saying.

“The following is the 1st paragraph of the Virginia ratification of the U.S. Constitution. To parse it down, in a capsule it says that if the state of Virginia feels it it being stepped on by the Feds, they reserve the right to leave the union. This was stated as condition of their acceptance of the U.S. Constitution, meaning that there was NOTHING treasonous in a decision to leave the union. And though not spelled out in all state ratifications or acceptance to the union, this principle was generaly understood to be a fact.”

Yeah, it was understood to be a supposed FACT put forth by obvious traitors—If Treason prospers none dare call it treason…..

Also Virginia left the Union rather late (after Fort Sumter in fact) and mainly its action in 1861 was in response & reaction to Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion–so that statement should really be seen in light of that reaction….

“So the state representatives who approved the Constitution that formed the U.S. were nothing but a bunch of traitors for the presumption that they could, if desired, leave the very same club that they had just created???”

No the traitors were those who, well after the the fact of that 18th century 80+ year old statement, in 1861 and later, used that vague statement of states rights as a post-facto excuse for their treason against the USA.

“There was no “rebellion”. There was no “civil war” (the southern states did not want to wrest control of the government). ”

There was a war of succession already in effect when Virginia seceded from the Union–Ft. Sumter had already been fired on and federal property had been taken over by traitors all over the South.

“Could you highlight the expiration date on the statement please? I can’t find it. Oh, and there was nothing vague about it.”

The 80+ year old statement (in 1861) itself says nothing on the subject of succession–in fact it mirrors almost the language found in the Constitution about certain rights being retained by the people & the states—almost no nation-state or union in the world is setup with the premise that it can be dis-solved at a moments notice by some local legislative fiat—the statement itself, used in this case for the purposes of providing an excuse or cover for succession & treason, is no more valid or legal than Bush’s many sweeping post-facto ‘signing statements’ … and it only applied to a SINGLE CSA state-Virginia-what is your excuse for the other TEN CSA states ??

“Again, timing is irrelevant. Anyway, that’s SEcession, which means separation or leaving. Not the taking control of a government by a competing party”

Actually this is obviously false in reality–the CSA attempted to suborn the legal governments of Kentucky, Missouri, & Maryland—Jeff Davis was keen to expand the borders of the CSA to the Ohio River and the Far West and perhaps beyond. The cause of the CSA was not just succession but also became expansion–the expansion of the “slave power” far beyond its natural borders.

“(that action, by the way, is civil war by definition). “Federal property” became forfeit and returned to its original jurisdictions when their (the Fed’s) permission to be there was recinded by the end of association. They refused to leave, and in fact, as means of provocation, insisted on trying to resupply and garrison those properties. This provocation brought about hostilities which could have been avoided had they simply allowed people to go their own way peaceably”

The idea here is that treasonous acts become post-facto legal just because a de-facto (and loser) succession government is setup and operates for several years. Obviously I reject this idea and outlook. The CSA government was obviously illegal–it was legally recognized internationally by only one small German mini-state (and the head of that state had married a southern belle).

“… and it only applied to a SINGLE CSA state-Virginia-what is your excuse for the other TEN CSA states ??”

What was the justification cited for the five New England states that considered secession in 1814? Exactly what I’m saying is that it was generaly understood, both north, south & in between, that what was voluntarily joined could be voluntarily disassociated. Up until the 1860s, states were, in most practical matters, independent entities that considered themselves participants in a voluntary union. The only contact with federal government for most people was the post office, and in some areas, a military outpost. When the post-revolution treaty was signed, it was addressed by Britain to, and specificly lists, individual states as parties to the treaty, not one monolithic entity called the United States. This is the intended purpose of the 9th and 10th amendments. To retain power to states and people, not a monolithic, central government that the founders rightly anticipated would become tyranical & despotic.

“The CSA government was obviously illegal–it was legally recognized internationally by only one small German mini-state (and the head of that state had married a southern belle).”

Lack of popular support (nor military might for that matter) does not make right.

P.S.
“almost no nation-state or union in the world is setup with the premise that it can be dis-solved at a moments notice by some local legislative fiat—”

‘Kinda glad the founder’s didn’t have your, “oh, well, it’s established and all. No need in standing up to the system or anything. I’ll just go back & earn what I can and send it to the crown. After all what kind of subversive scum would ever even THINK of de-centralizing the almighty central nation-state.” , or the recent visit of the Queen would have been to subjects rather than equals.

Again, and finally, whether or not we disagree with their stated reasons,

“…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…”

When it was determined that safety & happiness had been encroached upon, the right was there, stated, evident, and held dear by the founders. If not for that principle, there would have been no United States.

“Kinda glad the founder’s didn’t have your, “oh, well, it’s established and all. No need in standing up to the system or anything. I’ll just go back & earn what I can and send it to the crown. After all what kind of subversive scum would ever even THINK of de-centralizing the almighty central nation-state.”

Here again the 13 colonies were already in a state of war with the British crown for over a year before independence was actually declared—they largely controlled their national territory and quickly earned direct recognition, foreign aid, and military support from major powers in Europe—-other than a very initial control of a supposed “national” territory the CSA had NONE of these attributes of internationally legitimate relationships and legal status.

Funny, I came here expecting to find that Poe quoted Robert Byrd. Oops…

“but the fact remains that Virginia explicitly, and other states implicitly through the 9th & 10th amendments reserved the right to voluntarily leave what they had voluntarily joined.”

This is just another neo-Confederate LIE and legal fiction….only FOUR of the eleven states of the Confederacy were part of the 13 colonies….only ONE (Texas) had been a partly recognized nation-state (and that only for nine years) & ALL the other six Confederate states (LA, AR, AL, MS, TN, FL) had been created and recognized legally by acts of the US Congress when they moved from unorganized status, to territories, and to admission as states.

So this: “reserved the right to voluntarily leave what they had voluntarily joined” is pure moonshine, particularly in relationship to the six states that formed the central territorial mass of the CSA.

“other states implicitly through the 9th & 10th amendments reserved the right to voluntarily ”

Again this is neo-Confederate legal fiction—in the real world the Constitution of the United States, even in the 19th Century, was NEVER intended to be a suicide pact and a mere express ticket to national crackup, internal breakup, and inter-state warfare.

“Please tell me, when confronted with a dictatorial, ideologicly loaded central government in D.C., what would you propose as recourse for states and / or groups of states that are being used and coerced? ”

Well in the context of the American Civil War & succession (the original subjects) this is pure crapola theory at the practical & historical levels…

The CSA was formed in reaction to the results of an election NOT a: ” dictatorial, ideologicly loaded central government in D.C”.

In fact & by any measure the Southern states had far more influence of the Federal government than what was warranted by their populations or wealth in the 40 odd years of the history of the American Republic before 1860…

So I reject your diversion from the historical issues at hand…

“If amendments 9 & 10 have no teeth what practical recourse do states or regions have against a central government? Please refrain from applying your opinion of whether or not one was / is wronged. If they feel thay are, what can they do about it?”…

You don’t break up a Continent spanning republic based on a ‘feeling’….

You really don’t get where I’m coming from JT—you treat these scraps of paper like the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and similar CSA/state documents as if they were some type of holy writ unchangeable for the ages–a “frozen” set of constitutions—You would allow the present to remain in thrall almost forever to the jottings of long dead country gentlemen from the 18th Century…

JT, you are welcome to that world. I live in the reality-based planet of nation-states, history, and gritty current-day & historical civil war era socio-politcal practicalities…I reference what actually happened and the intentions of the historical actors—You reference and are concerned mainly with musty documents and made up legal theories that have NO bearing out where the rubber hits the road

“You don’t break up a Continent spanning republic based on a ‘feeling’…”

You know as well as I that my question didn’t mean the same as “oh, I feel sad”. If you need to, insert “deduce”, “gather”, “discover”, “surmise”, whatever, just stop begging the question.

“You reference and are concerned mainly with musty documents and made up legal theories that have NO bearing out where the rubber hits the road”

I am concerned mainly with preservation of liberty. A priciple that is in increasingly short supply. It’s also a principle that the founders rightly knew must be closely guarded, and most effectively so when the centers of political power are kept as decentralized as possible. As it stands, without a massive PR campaign, a massive bank roll, or both, citizens of the U.S. have virtualy zero input into the policies, regulations, services, and levies that affect their lives. Daily. (the vote? ask people in minority communities in Florida and Ohio how that worked out for them) This is where centralization leads us.

Though the capacity for graft & corruption exist at all levels of government, it is much easier and practical to prevent and eliminate such problems at state or local level than it is within the distant central bureaucracy.

‘Tell you what, ‘have a concern in your life that should be politcally addressed? Crime, pollution, taxes, whatever. Try to get face time with your U.S. Senator, then do the same for your state representative or city council rep. You bring no money to the table. Who pays more attention to your point? Who is more responsive?

Contary to your assertion of theory vs. practicality, my point is EXACTLY the kind of real world concern which is EXACTLY where the rubber hits the road. Our daily lives and actions. And who controls them.

“1860 – 1776 = 84 years”

“1860 – 1787 = 73 years”

What that tells me is that almost no one who was a young adult in 1787 or 1776 in America was still alive in 1860 to see their country split by Succession and Civil War.

The people of the 1860’s, particularly those on the Union side, were forced to make their own history & face the challenges of their era with little reference to the doings of long dead country gentlemen of the 18th Century who gathered at their various political doings in Philadelphia in the 1770’s and 1780’s. They didn’t work on, or try to figure out the arcane writings of the Federalists papers–or talk about what the Founders ‘intended’-they were concerned with putting down the South’s rebellion with bayonents, fire, executive actions, and acts of Congress, a collective effort that amounted to a 2nd American revolution by the time the dust settled at a plain farm house in Virginia when Robert E. Lee laid down his sword.

“They didn’t work on, or try to figure out the arcane writings of the Federalists papers–or talk about what the Founders ‘intended’-they were concerned with putting down the South’s rebellion with bayonents, fire, executive actions, and acts of Congress, a collective effort that amounted to a 2nd American revolution by the time the dust settled at a plain farm house in Virginia when Robert E. Lee laid down his sword.”

And in doing so, as Lincoln himself said,”” … in saving the union, I have destroyed the Republic. Before me I have the Confederacy, which I loath. But behind me I have the bankers, which I fear.”

“Sorry, but I deal with realities–Not American constitutionalist based fantasyland theories.”

What you call fantasyland theories are what gave rise to ordinary people having a say in their lives and fortunes. The destruction of same is leading to what Gen. Lee accurately predicted when he said, “The consolidation of the States into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”

The reality is, you & I are a little less free today than yesterday. A little less free tomorrow than today. Your beloved central government is,and has been for quite some time, completely out of control. It is a bull in a china shop. I fear that with people like you, who view the the foundations of your society as nothing more than irrelevent dead guys & dusty papers, the only course correction will be when it’s hubris is ground in the gears of history, just like all empires.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your burgeoning serfdom. You certainly seem insistent upon it.

P.S. Please. For the love of God. The word is secession. With an “E” and 1 “C”.

“…None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free…”
– Carl Klang

“Who is that ??”
No idea. Random quote that fit.

“You guys don’t even reference actual social/poltical trends & events or bother to answer the questions I posed”

If you’d actually answered any of my questions, I’d be more inclined to try and further explain what you ask of me. The primary ones I asked very early in the conversation are still on the table.

“My critics are reduced to quoting the jottings of long dead men on theory…thats their sum total of points of reference with reality….”

You keep repeating your belief that any theory older than contemporary, or any dusty document, or anyone who is dead, is irrelevent. That is your basis for all reality? What are you, seventeen? This is why anyone in the good ‘ol free USA can now be picked up, indefinitely detained with no charges, tortured, and killed without recourse. You’re so busy running around chanting “we’re number one!” you don’t stop to notice that we are being taken down the dark road eventually taken by all empires. Empires, a club which the U.S. has joined (terminology according to our leaders, not just me)

Pick up a book from time to time. Something other than Time, People, or a comic. It might do you good. However, based upon this exchange, I tend to think you’re pretty much beyond, and this has all grown very tiresome.

For all of you people who continue to parrot the same incorrect “history.”

An 1871 Congressional investigation of the KKK by the Radical Republicans concluded that Forrest did not found the Klan, did not lead the Klan, did not participate in the Klan and worked only to have it disband.

Is there something there that is too complex for your limited perceptions?

Now…why were Davis, Lee and other spared charges and trials for treason? It had NOTHING to do with any “benevolance of the Union” – it had to do with the fact that the Federal government could find no lawyer who thought they could win the case. Davis formally requested twice, in writing, that he be tried for treason because he knew that he would prevail and that the Federal government would condemn itself.

“Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham – a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff — protested imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers.” – “Constitutional Problems under Lincoln,” James G. Randall, 1951, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

I will be happy to offer an itemized list of Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution if anyone out there would like it.

As for “the fortitude to perservere until the war was won, the union preserved and the slaves freed” this continues the tired old fable that the war was fought over slavery with the gallant, free North fighting against the evil all-slave South. Now that that lie has been listed let us deal with the facts of history.

The 1860 U.S. Census showed that there were just shy of a quarter-million Free Blacks and Free People of Color in what would become the Confederate States, more than in the future Union states. Of the Free Blacks and Free People of Color in the South more than 25,000 were themselves slaveowners.

The status of Blacks in the South was different from your stereotyped, Ken Burns garbage suppositions:

“Almost fifty years before the (Civil) War, the South was already enlisting and utilizing Black manpower, including Black commissioned officers, for the defense of their respective states. Therefore, the fact that Free and slave Black Southerners served and fought for their states in the Confederacy cannot be considered an unusual instance, rather continuation of an established practice with verifiable historical precedence.”- “The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell” by Lt. Col [Ret.] Michael Lee Lanning, Birch Lane Press (June 1997)

Incidentally, the first all-Black regiment of the War was the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, CSA, from New Orleans.

What about the issue of slavery? Lincoln tried to permanently preserve slavery with his support of the Corwin Amendment in 1861 when he was President-Elect. He sent letters to the state Governors urging their support and five of those letters still exist.

“Article Thirteen: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” – Submitted to the Senate by Corwin and supported by President-Elect Lincoln as the proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution as voted on by that body on February 28th, 1861. The Senate voted 39 to 5 to approve this section passed by the House 133-65 on March 2, 1861. Two State legislatures ratified it: Ohio on May 13, 1861; and followed by Maryland on January 10, 1862. Illinois bungled its ratification by holding a convention.

Interestingly, the Southern states – which could have returned to the Union and helped ratify permanent Constitutional protection of slavery – did not leap to the task to protect slavery. Nor did they accept Lincoln’s December, 1862, offer of gradual compensated abolition with slavery lasting until 1900.

If the South was really fighting to preserve slavery why not take steps which could have preserved slavery without war? The answer is simple – it was not about slavery or even states’ rights – it was about money.

“The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole…we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty persent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.” – Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860

“They (the South) know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest…. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They (the North) are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are as mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it.” ~ New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 21, 1861

“…the Union must obtain full victory as essential to preserve the economy of the country. Concessions to the South would lead to a new nation founded on slavery expansion which would destroy the U.S. Economy.” – Pamphlet No 14. “The Preservation of the Union A National Economic Necessity,” The Loyal Publication Society, printed in New York, May 1863, by Wm. C. Bryant & Co. Printers.

Now let us consider that the Union – which was, in this left-wing fantasy world – was supposedly fighting to end slavery while there were slave states in the Union throughout the war and AFTER the war ended. Slavery ended in the Confederacy in April, 1865, but continued as a legal institution in Delaware and Kentucky – Union states – until December, 1865, some eight months later.

Understand? The United States of America – NOT the Confederate States of America – was the last slave nation in North America.

Want to talk about Lincoln’s character and the conduct of the Union? The only person tried or convicted of “war crimes” during the Civil War was a Union Colonel named Turchin. He was tried by Union Court Martial for ordering his troops to savage Athens, Alabama. Turchin and one of his regimental commanders, Col. Gazlay, were found guilty and dismissed from the Army.

Within a few days of the court martial, President Lincoln reinstated Turchin and promoted him to the rank of Brigadier General. A few months later Lincoln would make a similar promotion. In November Lincoln promoted Col. John McNeil, one of the senior officers responsible for the October 1862 Palmyra Massacre in Missouri, to Brigadier General.

So much for Lincoln’s “morality.”

What about the kind and compassionate Union military and their treatment of captive and wounded Confederate soldiers?

“As Hansen and Nicolson note, ‘Fort Pillow’ became the battle cry of the black troops, and one of the U.S.C.T. (U.S. Colored Troops) commanders, Brigadier General William A. Pile, brought his outspoken abolitionist views into the field with him, ‘advocating death to all supporters of the South, past and present.’ They write that while there was no general massacre, many of the union black troops did attack the Confederate whites after surrendering, and even shot two of their own officers trying to stop them. One white sergeant who was commissioned an officer the day after the assault wrote home and stated his regiment took no live prisoners, they killed all they took to a man.” – “The Siege of Blakeley and the Campaign of Mobile,” by Roger B. Hansen & Norman A. Nicolson, 1995, Nall Printing co., Mobile AL, with an introduction by Mary Y. Grice, Executive Director, Historic Blakeley Foundation.

And for you lovers of the truly grusome:

“Lincoln Hospital, Aug. 14, 63…If a wounded Reb should come in to our ward I would hardly dress his wound…the Drs cut the Rebs up when they die. They are…taken to pieces. I see one the…day after he died…he was…cut up and put in a tub. It was an awful sight. But I could stand it very well knowing that it was a Reb.” – Letter of Pvt. James Morrison, Co. E, 149th N. Y. V. I.

I note with amusement that the folks leaning left who post here never seem to back up their postings with something called FACT. Note that their posts are filled with opinion and conjecture and lack the substance of any sort of historical research.

Perhaps Irish-born Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne both explained the purpose of the war and predicted why the left-wnigers keep repeating old lies when he wrote his January, 1864, letter which proposed the mass emancipation and enlistment of Black Southerners into the Confederate Army:

“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late…It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision…The conqueror’s policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them…It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”

It should be a greater insult to quote Lincoln than to quote Forrest.

Your Obedient Servant,

Colonel Michael Kelley, CSA
Commanding, 37th Texas Cavalry (Terrell’s)
http://www.37thtexas.org
“We are a band of brothers!”

“I came here as a friend…let us stand together. Although we differ in color, we should not differ in sentiment.” – LT Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA, Memphis Daily Avalanche, July 6, 1875

“You should wake up and smell the coffee–the USA has been an empire probably since 1900 and certainly since WWII…this is not some new development in the American story….”

Did I say when? You really seem a little ocd on keeping time. I simply stated that it had become such, with earlier implication that the progress reached it’s stride with Mr. Lincoln.

“Sure Bush’s recent laws and policies in the torture and internal security area have been fairly repressive, and I largely oppose much of what has been done in that area in the last few years”

And what can any of us actually DO about it? Again, if the states who oppose it could refuse and / or cease to participate in funding and staffing D.C. whims, those repressions would stop immediately.

—but are they really much different than what Wilson’s Admin. did in WWI and after?? Or FDR/Truman vs. the Japanese-Americans and Nazi spies & SS men in 1941-45 and after??

The “War on Terror”, we’re told, is a “generational” one (read: Permanent) This is a major difference in that it becomes not despotism for short term gain, which is bad enough, but a way of life.
Maybe you never read about it, but Julius Caesar took the dictatorial position “only until the crisis passes”. When the Roman Empire collapsed centuries later, the crisis had apparently never passed.

“Maybe you should read up on a little history and get back with us—it might help you answer the questions I posed above which I have cut and pasted below:
Are blacks LESS free now in 2007 or in 1950 living in some Jim Crow state in the heart of the southland ???
Are women LESS free now in 2007 than back in 1914 when they didn’t even have the vote ??
Are gay people LESS free now in 2007 or back in 1940’s ??
Are Mexican -Americans in the Rio Grande valley LESS free now in 2007 or back in the 1920’s when it was said that all Texas Rangers had Mexican blood—-on their boots—-??”

It’s not so much that those groups are more or less free, it’s that everyone is less so, evening the field. We are all subject to the desires of a detached, distant central government, bent on sticking their fingers into every festering boil on the planet, and enacting blanket requirements on an ethnically, geographically, economically, and culturaly diverse almalgamation of people. Oh, and the boss’s name changes every now & then.

Now, your turn:

1. If amendments 9 & 10 have no teeth what practical recourse do states or regions have against a central government? Please refrain from applying your opinion of whether or not one was / is wronged. If they feel (deduce, surmise, become convinced, etc) they are, what can they do about it?
2.How is it that the declaration and amendments 9 & 10 don’t really say what they plainly say?

“Actually his official position was: “Dictator for Life” when he was assassinated in March 44BC on the Ides….that sounds fairly permanent to me.”

That was after he’d wrangled into position. His original justification was as I stated.

“Well if thats the case you seem to have a problem with the WHOLE course of American history from 1860 on…”

A good bit of it, yes, as act after act has contributed to a slow burn into general subjugation, picking up speed post WWII.

“It seems that you would rather entertain fantasies about how a small nation of 18th Century farmers “should” be governed…”

These are NOT fantasies. They are SUPPOSED to be the building blocks upon which we stand. It is a framework that, if observed, is timeless. Throw away the blueprints during a building project, and things would tend to get a bit haphazard at best. If you desire to throw out the constitution and other founding principles & documents, at least have the intellectual honesty to just say so.

“…than deal with the gritty 21st Century realities of running a large post-industrial superpower.”

This was never intended to be a “superpower”. I care nothing for being a subject of a superpower empire. I’d rather be a free citizen of a free republic. Nations can still be economically and socially influential to the world at large without using muscle to get in every door. Superpower empires tend to have a nasty historical habit of flying apart in nasty fasion. Your embrace of what you call gritty realities is nothing more than justification for giving up, and living as just a cog in the machine.

BTW, STILL on the table:

1. If amendments 9 & 10 have no teeth what practical recourse do states or regions have against a central government? Please refrain from applying your opinion of whether or not one was / is wronged. If they feel (deduce, surmise, become convinced, etc) they are, what can they do about it?
2.How is it that the declaration and amendments 9 & 10 don’t really say what they plainly say?

“joe…
everything you beleive is not fact.
that big mouth of your’s is supported by alot of the history you twist and interpret to your convenience.
JT is right , you have alot of reasons and excuses for giving up.”

Sorry pal, I’m not the guy who has a big mental problem with the whole sweep of American history (and Western history) since 1860, that would be JT who does by his own admission.

I’m not the guy who lives in a fantasyworld of American Constitutional theor generally advanced, in this country, by the most backward “Original intent” folks on the planet earth.

I’m not the guy who views the American Civil War through some type of neo-Confederate lens little different from the ilk of the authors of “The South Was Right”.

God bless man !
What country do you live in ?

“God bless man !
What country do you live in ?”

In the country of the blind…where the one-eyed man is king…

More Seriously, I live in reality-based, results-oriented world. My detractors apparently live elsewhere….

The UK managed quite well with an unwritten Constitution–All this whoo-ha about American scraps of paper is an interesting cultural/political aspect–little more….It rather reminds me of rigt-winger supporters of the Iraq War in 2005 making a big deal over the Iraqi Constitution–telling us that we were “on the verge of victory”—when the whole country of Iraq began a spin into sectarian/factional civil war

“As a real practical matter the CSA supporters of 1861 were involved in the offense (with it was legally recognized or not) of: “acting to overthrow” the government of the USA. The CSA attempted to suborn other states out of the Union and was interested in expansion NOT: ” just being left alone to go their own way” as represented by neo-Confederates.”

Interested in expansion by having other free states join them, NOT overthrowing the government in D.C..

“Fact is that millions of people in a VERY specific time and place: those who remained loyal to the USA in 1861, largely considered those who supported and fought for the CSA traitors and/or rebels….in fact the official postwar history of the conflict called it: The “War of Rebellion”.
I also, in 2007, consider them at the very least rebels, and probably also traitors. Therefore there is nothing wrong with my use of those words in reference to the CSA supporters of 1861.”

Oh, so you, and alot of people who agree with you, call it that so it must be that. How very Orwellian of you!

“Oh, so you, and alot of people who agree with you, call it that so it must be that. How very Orwellian of you!”

Millions of people in 1861-65 offered their lives, their tax money, and their sons to preserve the Union against people they believed to be rebels & traitors….Many of them came to realize in the course of the conflict the threat the ‘slave power’ of the South offered to free people everywhere in North America, and as a result slavery was ended & thrown down decisively, & ruled out as a future option in the USA.

If you can’t get your head around those simple facts of American history I’m very sorry for you JT.

The neo-Confederates and their pack of LIES.

a) “Their action to leave the Union was legal.”

Simply a false legal theory—almost no Constituation and almost no national union in the world is setup with the idea that either can be dis-solved simply by the uni-lateral action of some local legislative body that purportedly acts legally and on behalf of a population.

When the CSA was brought down in 1865 likely a majority of the residents of the eleven CSA states (adding up blacks, pro-Union whites, and war-weary Southerners) were happy to see it go.

b) “Slavery wasn’t the really the initial issue of the Civil War or the crisis of 1860-61.”

Again utterly false as evidenced by the statements at the time of the founders of the CSA–the “Cornerstone Speech” being only one example.

c) Only a small elite owned slaves in the South pre-Civil War…

Totally false–US census figures 1860 and other sources show that the vast bulk of what passed for a Middle Class below the Mason-Dixon line owned slaves–likely if one looked at slave-owners and former slave-owners and Southern whites without slaves who wished to own them one would probably close in on a figure of 40-50% of the white population of the South in 1860.

“False, the very fact that they rebelled in the way they did and the means they used offers the lie to this idea…From they very first the rebels/CSA supporters were ready, willing, and able to engage in the use of force to get what they wanted–that force involved everything from the illegal use of state militias under the cover of authority to lynch mob type activities–and on to the threat & use of force by their defacto officials”

Military force was raised to,

1.Compel Federal force to remove from the seceeding state boundries

2. Defend against the coming invasion force

As I stated long ago, the only reason shots were fired was Lincoln’s provocation of insisting that former Federal properties continued to be supplied and garrisoned when they could have been evacuated peacefully. The sectional (i.e. Kansas) were just that, sectional. They were not a spark that accelerated into all out general warfare.

“Millions of people in 1861-65 offered their lives, their tax money, and their sons to preserve the Union against people they believed to be rebels & traitors…”

Yeah, the ones who weren’t burning NYC and engaging federal troops in draft protests.

And again, just because alot of people call a square a cirle doesn’t make it one.

“Many of them came to realize in the course of the conflict the threat the ’slave power’ of the South offered to free people everywhere in North America, and as a result slavery was ended & thrown down decisively, & ruled out as a future option in the USA.”

Irony at its finest in that your great emancipator (early 1861, before the war) proposed & signed, and even procured one state ratification (his home state of Illinois) for a proposed 13th amendment reading:

“ARTICLE THIRTEEN, No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.”

Hmmmmm. So in your world…

U.S.-“We’ll never interfere with slavery.”

C.S. – “let’s go to war to keep slavery!”

WTF???

You may be surprised to find that some of the what could be called “major players” in that ever-so-just cause kind of disagree with your reasons for the conflict;

Gen. U.S. Grant
“The sole object of this war is to restore the union. Should I
become convinced it has any other object, or that the Government designs
using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge you
my honor as a man and a soldier I would
resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side.”

“Help me to dodge the nigger–we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union and the power of the Govt–on no other issue. To gain that end we cannot afford to mix up the negro question–it must be incidental and subsidiary. The President is perfectly honest and is really sound on the nigger question.” *General George B. McClellan

Including St. Abraham himself…

Abraham Lincoln said the following on September 18, 1858 in a speech in
Charleston, Illinois:
“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been , in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black
races [applause]: that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making
voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there
is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe
will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do
remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I
as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race.”

“I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office.” Campaign Speech

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery”. First Inaugural Address

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”.

“What then will become of my tariff?” Abraham Lincoln to Virginia
compromise delegation, March 1861.

I will say here…I have no purpose to introduce political and social
equality between the white and the black race…there is a physical
difference between the two, which…will forever forbid them living
together upon the footing of perfect equality, and…I am in favor of the
race to which I belong, having the superior position.”
Reply to Stephen A. Douglas in the first joint debate, Ottowa, IL; 21
Aug 1858

December 1, 1862, message to Congress, Lincoln
reiterated that ‘I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I
strongly favor colonization.”

“I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor
colonization…in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood
and race.”
Annual message to Congress; 1 Dec 1862

In his State of the Union addresses as president, he twice called for the
deportation of blacks. In 1865, in the last days of his life, Lincoln said
of blacks, “I believe it would be better to export them all to some fertile
country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves

“The [Emancipation] proclamation has no constitutional or legal
justification except as a war measure.”
Lincoln in a letter to Sec. of Treas. Salmon P. Chase; 3 Sep 1863

…and a couple of contemporary observers:

Earl Russell, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, said
“The Emancipation Proclamation… professes to emancipate all slaves in places where the United States authorities cannot exercise any jurisdiction… but it does not decree emancipation… in any states occupied by federal troops.”

Forty-six years after the war Charles Stowe, son of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” addressing a negro university in Nashville, Tenn., said: “It is certain there was a rebellion, but the Northerners were the rebels, not the Southerners.”

No matter how many times you call secession, treason, it does not make it so. And, despite a century and a half of canonization, if one looks at facts, not the propaganda, it is ovious that,

1.Lincoln was most asuredly NOT the benevolent father-liberator he’s cracked up to be

2. Slavery was, at best a secondary reason for the war.

“The census actually notes less than 385,000 individuals owned slaves in 1860. Out of a white population in the slave states of apx. 8 million”…

A silly numbers game–actually the white population of the 11 states that actually went whole hog with the idea off leaving the Union was about five to five and a half millions…..

The slaveowners were the white heads of household….if one figures 4 to 5 whites per household (a not unreasonable figure for the time) one ends up with the SAME conclusion historians have come to today—-about (and at least) 25+% of white families in the eleven states of the Southland in 1860 owned slaves at that point in time —

Notice how dishonest JT’s analysis and selection use of statistics is on this issue…its part of a pattern…..

“Note the Lincoln-proposed 13th amendmant above. Oh, and have you ever heard of someone “chumming the water”? (surely not from a politician! )”

Its interesting that JT would even use a failed amendment idea that went almost nowhere as a centerpiece of his case.

It, at its bottom, was all a diversion & a political manuever by Lincoln specific to the crisis of 1860-61… seven or more states had already left the Union
when he proposed and moved on this failed amendment—it was a last-ditch attempt to hammer out a compromise and avert a possible military conflict…Also it didn’t really address the Southerners various problems with taking slaves into free states (i.e the expansion of slavery which is what “Bloody Kansas was about) and their issues with the abolitionist movement in general –a movement that they (the slaveholders) wished to be suppressed.

Naturally the CSA & its supporters didn’t take up this compromise —they were busy handing out offices in their “new” defacto government at the time and giving speeches like the “Cornerstone” speech (also from March 1861) that let the other slaveholders & traitors-in-waiting know what they were about–that they had set up their new government chiefly to protect & expand slavery

So you’re saying that Lincoln was forward position of a cadre of slimy, tell-you-whatever-you-want-to-hear politicians. Congrats. Now you’re getting somewhere.

The REAL 13th amendment:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

On The phony 13th amendment JT brought up–more properly known as the “Corwin Amendment” which represented a last ditch attempt by republicans to avoid sectional dis-solution and Civil War:

“The Corwin Amendment was, and remains, a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. Ohio Republican Congressman Thomas Corwin offered the amendment during the closing days of the 2nd Session of the 36th Congress in the form of House (Joint) Resolution No. 80. The proposed—but unratified—amendment would forbid any attempt to subsequently amend the Constitution to empower the Federal government to “abolish or interfere” with the “domestic institutions” of the states (a reference to slavery). In particular, the Corwin Amendment was intended to prohibit Congress from banning slavery in those states whose laws permitted it. Offering the amendment was a last-ditch effort to avert the outbreak of the Civil War. Corwin’s resolution emerged as the House of Representatives’ version of an earlier, identical proposal in the Senate offered by William H. Seward of New York. However, the newly formed Confederate States of America was totally committed to independence and ignored the Corwin Amendment.”

“On February 28, 1861, the United States House of Representatives approved the resolution by a vote of 133–65 (Page 1285, Congressional Globe). On March 2, 1861, it was adopted by the United States Senate with a vote of 24–12 (Page 1403, Congressional Globe). Since proposed constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority, 132 votes were required in the House and 24 in the Senate. Seven Confederate states had already declared their secession from the Union at that point; they had joined what they thought was an entirely new nation and ignored the amendment.”

“The resolution was endorsed by outgoing President James Buchanan (the President plays no formal role in the constitutional amendment process.)”

T”he Corwin Amendment had the distinction of being the only constitutional amendment offered to the states by Congress to have an actual numerical designation prematurely assigned to it by Congress. It appears as “Article Thirteen” in the proposing Congressional resolution.
[edit] Ratification actions in the states”

“Consideration of the Corwin Amendment then shifted to the state legislatures, pursuant to Article V of the United States Constitution. In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he made reference to the Corwin Amendment, declaring his support for the proposal: “[H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” The initial ratification of the Corwin Amendment was from the Ohio General Assembly on May 13, 1861, and the second ratification was by Maryland General Assembly in January 1862. Also in 1862, Illinois lawmakers—sitting as a state constitutional convention at the time—approved it, but that action is of questionable validity. The Amendment was considered in Connecticut, Kentucky, and New York, but was not approved by legislators in those states. Technically still pending before America’s state lawmakers, the Corwin Amendment would today need ratifications from the legislatures of 36 more states in order to become part of the Federal Constitution.”

As we can see JT wrongly ascribed an importance to that did not exist to this not-starter amendment and got several critical details wrong—-It was passed BEFORE Lincoln even became president and well after seven states already had formed the de-facto CSA.

JT says in another dishonest passage:

“All you’ve done is shift those numbers from individuals to families. Considering multiple generations living in one place, this helps bolster your %, but only by manipulation of the numbers which you have not disputed, but accused me of manipulating. And before you start with “if the individual owned them, then that includes the family too”, Gen. Lee was but the most prominent example of those whose families owned slaves, but personally found the practice morally objectionable. BTW, he saw to it that his families slaves were freed before the war,while his union counterpart (Grant) only freed his after the constitutional amendment prohibiting their ownership.”

Well JT, I don’t know what to say—slaves were owned generally by white families—almost all members of those families benefited from the labor and service they could get from the slaves. In Gen. Lee’s and Gen. Grant’s cases the slaves in question came from the wife’s side of the family or as a result of an inheritance after somebody passed–in effect they represented what we would call ‘community property’ in these post-modern times. And I have read bios of Gen Lee that suggest that he rented the slaves out to pay-off the debts left by his wastrel relatives….

But all that “Generals to be having slaves as ‘community property’ ” is unimportant and merely a JT patented diversion from the issues at hand which concern in the main the crisis of 1860-61, and the course & consequences of the American Civil War, and the history of the American republic.

So thats what we have from JT:

1) personal attacks on Union folks like Lincoln & Grant

2) a defective Constitutional theory based on the spoutings of long dead 18th century white gentlemen.

3) an amendment that never went anywhere that was put forth as a last ditch compromise to prevent a civil armed conflict.

4) A comment made by Lincoln 13 years before the civil war, years before the Republican party was even formed, and made when he was a semi-radical back-bench congress-critter.

5) A numbers game on slavery–when its well known that slavery ownership was well-spread out throughout the southern middle and upper classes (i.e. those with political power).

In other words JT has presented us with a whole load of nothing !!

The South was right ! Forrest was a legend and still a hero of the South . Attention all Yankees : Stay out of the South – do not move here – keep visits short .

Joe, doesn’t this say it all?

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been , in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black
races [applause]: that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making
voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there
is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe
will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do
remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I
as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race.”
– A. Lincoln (1958)

Of course your ilk will find some way to twist this around and make it seem unimportant.

One more basic fact: The colonies willfully entered the Union, and all held the belief that they had the contitutional right to willfully leave it. It was threatened many times before Mr. Lincoln’s War, but you would not know that unless you had done a little research.

Bottom line: You will have a difficult time finding a US president who was more racist than Lincoln. The propoganda-writing historians of the north have served him well.

Forrest was a controversial historical figure but the “homogenized “Weekly Reader” politically correct” history of this man and his times and accepted as absolute truth on this board is appalling.

Victors write the history and the “gubmint schools” are working. Good grief.

“And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do
remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I
as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race.”

– A. Lincoln (1958)

Gee I had no idea that “A. Lincoln” lived on into the 20th Century to “1958 “to make that statement…

Likely that quote is from 1858, well BEFORE the American Civil War, when he was debating Douglas in IL.

Let me share a newsflash with the other posters here:

Guess what, my Southern fried, neo-Confed, and so-called ‘state rights’ believers–the very act of going to WAR & killing people to advance political causes CHANGES things…..A CIVIL WAR by its very nature twists politics around and by its very existence also alters the political landscape and constitutional nature of the nation within it was waged.That was true both within the defacto CSA and within the rump constitutional USA (and between those two entities) during those bloody years of 1861-65. These are the historical facts of life my friends…I suggest you guys DEAL with that bloody history and not dredge up quotes from 3 years and 13 years BEFORE the Civil War even started to make up the core of your case….History will end up handing you a rather different verdict in any case,,

“One more basic fact: The colonies willfully entered the Union, and all held the belief that they had the contitutional right to willfully leave it. It was threatened many times before Mr. Lincoln’s War, but you would not know that unless you had done a little research”

This again is a historically FALSE ‘fact’—only 4 of the eleven CSA states were even part of the 13 colonies: GA, NC., SC, and VA. The other 7 of the eleven were created, owe their existence as states, and their state borders ALL confirmed by acts of the US Congress…

Sorry the US Constitution was not set up as a suicide pact….

why does every black person i don’t know think i might be a racist wihle every black person i know sees me as eqaual

It was a great germaine quote, Are you suggesting it wasn’t?

Robert Byrd was a Grand Pooh Bah of the Klan …HELLO?

“It was a great germaine quote, Are you suggesting it wasn’t? ”

Its about as germane as some Republo Congress-critter quoting N.B. Forrest in the context of the Iraqi insurgent/civil war—

hello please dont hurt me

What an uninformed moron. Forrest did not found the Klan.

How is this congressman’s usage of Forrest as a source of quotation harmful? Touchy? Yes. More empty political correctness? Yes.

Boo Hoo!

Whiner.

HAHAA thats the kind of suitcase boys we all need,,yall make it a big point to make sure he was the founder of the great Ku Klux Klan!! All you scumbag tree hugging bums hes a rewal man and nathan bedford forest fought for what he and i believe in you bums
oh my god why would he say that that is so totally racist ah

WP KKK!!!