Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
If you are unable to admit that those Southern soldiers meant what they said simply because it undermines your view, then we have an insurmountable problem that will unavoidably impede future discourse, don't you think?
Hal, what I did was to ask you if the Southerners you quoted meant the same things by words like "liberty" and "freedom" and "rights" as the Southerners I quoted. It seems likely they might have. It was a very common way of looking at things in the ante-bellum South.
You mention McPherson, and say these are all quotes from one chapter of his work. I assume that's true, although I have not read the particular work you cite. But one of the things McPherson has said about such quotes throughout all the essays and books I have read from him is that these people do not necessarily mean what you think when they speak of these issues. I bet that if you really look at the work you cite, he makes the same point there.
To McPherson, generally, the South wanted things to remain as they were after the Revolution. That was their concept of "freedom" and "liberty" and "rights" and the "principles of the Founding Fathers". Even then, it seems to have been a very limited and incomplete vision of the situation and the Founding Fathers, for certainly Washington and Jefferson and others of them seemed different on slavery. The North had moved on from that -- and quite possibly the South would have as well if Eli Whitney never invented the Cotton Gin. McPherson, "Citizen Soldiers of the Civil War: Why They Fought":
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Now these Confederates were using the word "slavery" in the same sense that American Revolutionists of 1776 had used it. Some of them could go on in the next sentence to assert the protection of property rights in black slaves as a reason for fighting. I think that the leaders of the revolutionary generation, Jefferson, Madison, George Mason, George Washington, and others saw considerable incongruity and felt considerable embarrassment about fighting for their own liberty while continuing to hold blacks in slavery. That sense of embarrassment and awkwardness in the revolutionary generation did not exist among most Confederates, as far as I have been able to determine. I think that a generation or more of the pro-slavery defense of the institution as a positive good had actually caused southerners of the Civil War generation to believe deep in their bones that slavery was a good. Therefore, they saw no hypocrisy, no inconsistency, no incongruity about saying they were fighting for liberty at the same time they were also fighting to preserve slavery. ..."
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In many cases, Northerners and Southerners used the same words to describe why they were fighting: "liberty" and "freedom" and references to the principles of the "Founding Fathers" abound on both sides. Only by understanding what these people actually meant by what they said can you understand them.
But to give you another cite from his work, how about this at the end of the essay "The War of Southern Aggression", after discussing many examples of double-speak by South Carolinians:
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Little wonder then that the "common people" of South Carolina, as a contemporary observer put it, were "the most resolute" opponents of "Northern aggression." With the slogan "Freedom is not possible without slavery" ringing in their ears, they went to war against the Yankees alongside their slave-owning neighbors to "perpetuate and diffuse the very liberty for which Washington bled, and which the heroes of the Revolution achieved." George Orwell need not have created the fictional world of 1984 to describe Newspeak. he could have found it in the South Carolina of 1861.
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"...these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been such accomplices FOR A PURELY PECUNIARY CONSIDERATION, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the war). And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood-money, were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future, for the same pecuniary considerations. But the slave-holders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price which these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future - that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South - that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, in order to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These - and not any love of liberty or justice - were the motives on which the money for the war was lent by the North....
The whole affair, on the part of those who furnished the money, has been, and now is, a deliberate scheme of robbery and murder; not merely to monopolize the markets of the South, but also to monopolize the currency, and thus control the industry and trade, and thus plunder and enslave the laborers, of both North and South.
The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor"....
Their pretenses that they have "Saved the Country," and "Preserved our Glorious Union," are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people....
All these cries of having "abolished slavery," of having "saved the country," of having "preserved the union," of establishing "a government of consent," and of "maintaining the national honor," are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats - so transparent that they ought to deceive no one - when uttered as justifications for the war, or for the government that has suceeded the war, or for now compelling the people to pay the cost of the war, or for compelling anybody to support a government that he does not want...."
I see lots of "..." Will now be required to look up the entire statement.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
OK, you have posted a quote that seems related to nothing under discussion here, by a man who will be very obscure to most, with no context included to show what you think it means.
Just to give people an idea of what Spooner was like, this is a Massachusetts man strongly identified with Abolitionism, who frequently defended slave fugitives pro bono, was an opponent of the Republican Party, and who supported the Confederacy in secession. He is generally considered an Anarchist as well.
I have to wonder what your intent is in supplying this quote, or whether you understand what he meant by it. How about explaining yourself here?
Background for those who wonder who he was:
Lysander Spooner was indeed an Abolitionist. He was also a failed real estate speculator and lawyer who preached disobedience to man-made laws and exhalted "natural law". Before the Civil War, his biggest achievement was the founding of the American Letter Mail Company, a challenge to the US Postal Service (for which he was known as "Father of Affordable Postage.") He is remembered today largely as a philosopher and pamphleteer for Abolition, but he was really an Anarchist more than anything else.
In 1846 he published "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery", which is the basis for almost all discussion of whether the Constitution is pro-slavery or pro-freedom. Spooner was pro-freedom. This was greeted with great acclaim as well as criticism, and caused a split in the Abolitionist movement. It was adopted by William Gerrit, Frederick Douglass and the Liberty Party (it was the official platform of the Liberty Party in 1848). William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips held that the Constitution was pro-slavery, and thus immoral. Even a committed Southern pro-slavery man like Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of MS recognized the strength of his anti-slavery arguments and considered them the best he had seen from the Abolitionists.
Spooner was a major force in the theory of "Jury Nullification", still a very controversial topic. This basically holds that a jury can rule not only on guilt or innocence and the facts of the case, but also can choose to rule on the validity of the law itself. To give an example most people will be familiar with, many people today would regard the jury decision on O. J. Simpson as a form of jury nullification, where the verdict may not have been based on the facts of Simpson's guilt or innocence.
He was a fan of Jeffersonian political philosophy -- hence his stress of "natural law", although he went far, far beyond Jefferson in his ideas. In 1860, William Seward tried to get him to support the Republican Party and was rejected. Spooner became an outspoken critic of Republicans, considering them hypocrites. In his view, they were soft on slavery.
Spooner was also a supporter of the social contract theory government. His No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority was written after the war as an argument that the Constitution was now null and void. It includes a defense of Confederate soldiers against the charge of treason. These found great favor in DeBow's Review and other Southern magazines during Reconstruction.
The quote you are supplying, from 1870, is completely in accord with this. Spooner would have supported a war to exterminate slavery, and was opposed to the Civil War because the US had not gone to war to do that. He thought a war to preserve the Union or to put down an insurrection was against his philosophy of natural law and social contract.
Interesting guy. Pretty extreme. He thought it was wrong to coerce the seceding states into remaining (as many Northerners did before Ft. Sumter, at least), but he was perfectly willing to lay the South waste to put an end to slavery.
Now just what is it you are trying to show with this quote?
I see lots of "..." Will now be required to look up the entire statement.
Ole
Battalion's quote is from Spooner's No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority, which you can find online at http://praxeology.net/LS-NT-6.htm.
Lee told you many times -- as documented -- what he would do and what he thought. He was consistent about it. He said often that secession was rebellion/treason/revolution. He said he saw no good in it. Right or wrong, he saw his primary duty to Virginia, and he would follow her no matter what she did. That is what he considered his "honor". That is the only "lesser of two evils" choice he made. What is the choice you think he made?
Regards,
Tim
It's quite clear what he chose to defend.
"Feeling the agression of the North, resenting their denial of the equal rights of our citizens to the common territory of the commonwealth, etc,..."
"...I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and her institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded...."
"...I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress. It is the principle that I contend for, not for individual or private benefit....";
, "[The Southern States] have seen with profound indignation their sister-State deprived of every right and reduced to the condition of a conquered province.
Under the pretense of supporting the Constitution, but in violation of its most valuable provisions, your citizens have been arrested and imprisoned upon no charge and contrary to all forms of law; the faithful and manly protest against this outrage made by the venerable and illustrious Marylander to whom in better days no citizen appealed for right in vain was treated with scorn and contempt; the government of your chief city has been usurped by armed strangers; your legislature has been dissolved by the unlawful arrest of its members; freedom of the press and of speech has been suppressed; words have been declared offences by an arbitrary decree of the Federal executive, and citizens ordered to be tried by a military commission for what they may dare to speak.
Believing that the people of Maryland possessed a spirit too lofty to submit to such a government, the people of the South have long wished to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen and restore independence and sovereignty to your State....";
“Lincoln denounced the doctrine of the right of secession from the Union as unconstitutional, and declared his firm purpose to hold, occupy, and possess the places and property in the South belonging to the Fed. Government. This announcement was received in the South as equivalent to a declaration of war.”
"We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavor."
"The South has contended only for the supremacy of the constitution, and the just administration of the laws made in pursuance to it."
"All that the South has ever desired was that the Union, as established by our forefathers, should be preserved, and that the government as originally organised should be administered in purity and truth."
"If all were to be done over again, I should act in precisely the same manner; I could have taken no other course without dishonor."
You mention McPherson, and say these are all quotes from one chapter of his work. I assume that's true, although I have not read the particular work you cite. But one of the things McPherson has said about such quotes throughout all the essays and books I have read from him is that these people do not necessarily mean what you think when they speak of these issues. I bet that if you really look at the work you cite, he makes the same point there.
You would lose the bet. In spite of being the standard-bearer for the victors' spin, he said this about what the Confederates meant when they used those terms:
"Confederates professed to fight for liberty and independence from a tyrannical government..."
"Patriotic holidays had a special tendency to call forth meditations by Confederate soldiers on the legacy for which they fought....The folk memory of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat four score years earlier sustained the morale of the Confederate soldiers during times of discouragement."
"The rhetoric of liberty that had permeated the letters of Confederate volunteers in 1861 grew even stronger as the war progressed."
"The opposites of independence and liberty were 'subjugation' and 'slavery.' These two words continued to express the fate worse than death that awaited Confederate soldiers if they lost the war."
"These [CSA] soldiers were using the word 'slavery' in the same way that Americans in 1776 had used it to describe their subordination to Britain."
Once again, distortion and omission of Lee's words by you. All anyone has to do is to scroll back to the earlier posts in this thread that show what you omit and how you twist the quotes. Now that it has been shown to you repeatedly, we can only assume this is deliberate on your part. This is a very bad policy. It can only discredit what you say and I urge you again to stop using it.
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