Another state which didn't allow them full participation in government decisions, unlike the southern states had before the war. Not the same thing at all. Not by a long shot.
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Another state which didn't allow them full participation in government decisions, unlike the southern states had before the war. Not the same thing at all. Not by a long shot.
I do not doubt the ability of Americans to perform all forms of mental acrobatics to avoid that very issue, or to claim that it is wholly different.
In the end, though, it isn't.
No. Might makes right, as it did in the Civil War and in the American Revolution before. The winner gets to decide wheter the act was legitimate or not; nothing else really matters. Certainly not that piece of paper you're waving there.
Very different.
See, I too can make assertions without actually answering the post you are trying to refute.
umm...
while "might makes right" certainly works, there's actually a right in the absolute sense. there's a right in the legal sense as well.
the secessionists broke their oaths which they swore. they were awful people doing things for an awful cause. they should have been punished much more than they were, but regardless, they were terrible people.
The British altered the status quo with the colonies by abandoning their established policy of Benign Neglect in favor of direct rule from London. Instead of restoring to violence, the colonials defended their cause for self-rule through existing channels. British heavy handedness then prompted the rebellion.
The South had plenty of one-sided deals to pacify it thrown its way, had full participatory rights in the US government and opted for open revolt the first instance where it didn't get its way; i.e. the election of Abe Lincoln to the Presidency.
As i've said before, two very different situations that are definitely not similar to each other.
Everything you said applies just as much to the founding fathers.
There are no rights in the "absolute sense".
The Americans who rebelled in the American revolution were a rich merchant elite concerned with one thing and one thing only, to maintain or increase the high profits they had been making trough slavery, smuggling and the virtual absence of taxes (British subjects in Europe were taxed much heavier than those in the New World, just like those new "Americans" were taxed more heavily after the revolution than before).
"British heavy handedness" consisted of not allowing a private army created to overthrow the government to form on British territory; surely this is no unreasonable move for any state. The violence was started by the rebels, not the British.
The situations are not so different at all.
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we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
that just came to me off the top of my head ;-)
the secessionists, moreover, broke their oaths sworn to the constitution. so they were breaking the law.
they were bad people, doing a bad thing, illegally.
The 'Founding Fathers' broke sworn oaths and committed treason under the law too.
By the same reasoning they were bad people, doing a bad thing, illegally.
The only difference is they won, so got to write history while the CSA lost.
Has the Loyalists won the Revolution, it might well be remembered as being 'all about' smuggling and slavery, with self-determination and taxes as the disguise they hid behind just as the motivations of those Confederates who said they were fighting for States Rights and against centralisation are discredited out of hand because the people who wrote the history decided that it was all about Slavery and only Slavery.
By the same reasoning they were bad people, doing a bad thing, illegally.
The only difference is they won, so got to write history while the CSA lost.
Has the Loyalists won the Revolution, it might well be remembered as being 'all about' smuggling and slavery, with self-determination and taxes as the disguise they hid behind just as the motivations of those Confederates who said they were fighting for States Rights and against centralisation are discredited out of hand because the people who wrote the history decided that it was all about Slavery and only Slavery.
and yet, while the declaration says this,
it's the constitution that's the document that says
And that's the one that was made law of the land.
It is disingenuous to say the Constitution was not at all hypocritical to the positions that were championed in the American Revolution.
however, I think we can all agree that slavery is a position that is considerably less popular now than it was, and as a result, the CSA's reliance and support of the peculiar institution by extension makes the CSA considerably less popular than it had been at the time.
Sure, i was just interested if there were some hard info on ongoing (economic) struggles far before the secession, aside from the slavery issue.
As i said, i still think if there was such struggle, it got taken out of proportion in the literature by what i know.
Could be another interesting aspect to think about. Simply curious, as its ages ago that i read about it.
Don't read that much anymore..
..i feel old.
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This thread looks like fun, I'll be back for more after dinner . . . .
Oh good, Yakman has begun cutting and pasting his arguments from every thread he has ever posted on already. Didn't see that one coming. While a rational individual at times, when this comes up he can only see things as black and white, literally, and has no subtlety whatsoever on this topic. He takes slavery very personally and feels that he himself has lived 12 years a slave. Not to mention his recurring dreams where the entire Army of Northern Virginia dances around burning crosses at night like some kind of Confederate Nuremberg with RE Lee as the Grand Wizard laughing maniacally as he rejects Lincoln's offer to lead the Union Army at the outset of the war. When he gets to the line where he demands that Kennedy is a hardened cold warrior, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah, we will have come full circle and he will start over again from the beginning.
Other than that, looking forward to reading more about this topic and seeing how far we've gotten down the actual historical path of the war and the policies that drove it.
Oh good, Yakman has begun cutting and pasting his arguments from every thread he has ever posted on already. Didn't see that one coming.
While a rational individual at times, when this comes up he can only see things as black and white, literally, and has no subtlety whatsoever on this topic. He takes slavery very personally and feels that he himself has lived 12 years a slave. Not to mention his recurring dreams where the entire Army of Northern Virginia dances around burning crosses at night like some kind of Confederate Nuremberg with RE Lee as the Grand Wizard laughing maniacally as he rejects Lincoln's offer to lead the Union Army at the outset of the war. When he gets to the line where he demands that Kennedy is a hardened cold warrior, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah, we will have come full circle and he will start over again from the beginning. Other than that, looking forward to reading more about this topic and seeing how far we've gotten down the actual historical path of the war and the policies that drove it.
oh the silliness...This thread looks like fun, I'll be back for more after dinner . . . .
Oh good, Yakman has begun cutting and pasting his arguments from every thread he has ever posted on already. Didn't see that one coming.
Other than that, looking forward to reading more about this topic and seeing how far we've gotten down the actual historical path of the war and the policies that drove it.
to quote the US CONSTITUTION:
Secession is ILLEGAL and UNCONSTITIONAL.
By depriving the people of their states from their Constitutional rights by seceding, the secessionists in the State Legislatures were breaking the oaths which they had sworn.
They were horrible people advancing horrible causes, and they were doing so illegally. There's a clear black and white, and a clear right and wrong here.
News flash, god didn't come down from on heaven and bless any state (well I suppose a biblical literalist might point to Israel.) It's possible that a seperatist state could leave the US for good reasons. That didn't happen. They started a war for really really bad reasons.
Defenses of the south always argue by first whitewashing out the details. They say "right to secede" and never say "right to secede for this cause". "States rights" not "states rights to do these things not other things". The real hypocrisy is they act like they have internal consistency when they always could dish it but never take it.
You do know that these are just as made up as any other rights, don't you? They're not a law of nature. They're just what a bunch of old slavers decided to write down.
There's no need to whitewash anything. Slavery was despicable and I would have applauded the Union cause if they had fought for and achieved just that. What ruins it is that while doing so, they forced people into a nation they did not want to be part of. War to end slavery = good. War to subjugate and conquer the South = bad. Pretty simple.
oh the silliness...
i'm not even going to bother at this point. if you don't understand what was really happening, then that's on you. if you don't understand right and wrong, again, that's on you.
Ontario bundled up with New England, New York and Michigan makes more sense than with Yukon, Québec and Newfoundland...