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.
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, no logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." -- H.L. Mencken
How accurate is this quote in your opinion?
Why does Mencken overlook the fact that ~40% of the south were slaves and didn't have self-determination?
What specific rights would the ~60% of white southerners ever actually gain through secession?
Could secession cause problems that eventually cause chaos and instability if the US broke into several nations, thus hurting self-governence?
The people of course being the people of the entire United States which puts the words into better context; plus the fact that its a speech essentially commemorating the sacrifice made by Union soldiers at Gettysburg.
Why does Mencken overlook the fact that ~40% of the south were slaves and didn't have self-determination?
What specific rights would the ~60% of white southerners ever actually gain through secession?
Could secession cause problems that eventually cause chaos and instability if the US broke into several nations, thus hurting self-governence?
I always have trouble trying to figure out what to think of H. L. Mencken's work. The man was clearly a brilliant intellect and a wicked satirist -- but he was such a biting satirist that it is hard to say if his writing was from conviction or not.
On technique, Mencken is amazing. Said one of his contemporaries, James Weldon Johnson:
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Mr. Mencken's favorite method of showing people the truth is to attack falsehood with ridicule. He shatters the walls of foolish pride and prejudice and hypocrisy merely by laughing at them; and he is more effective against them than most writers who hurl heavily loaded shells of protest and imprecation.
What could be more disconcerting and overwhelming to a man posing as everybody's superior than to find that everybody was laughing at his pretensions? Protest would only swell up his self-importance.
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But it is hard to say that people should agree entirely with what he says, since much of it is designed for effect more than content -- and the effect he wants is multi-levelled, and I am never quite sure I grasped all he intended, or that he isn't off somewhere laughing his head off at those who try to figure out what he meant.
This is a man who, for example, was enthusiastic for the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, saw Hitler as "hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer", seems to have attacked in print every President during his long career, referred to culture in the American South as "The Sahara of the Bozart", had the legislature of Arkansas vote to pray for his soul after he called the state the "apex of moronia", was arrested for selling literature "banned in Boston", and ... well, you get the idea. He made his living from a sharp and edgy approach to everything, and he seems to have treated the idea of democracy with amusement. Keep all of that and more in mind when you read anything he wrote or said, and expect the sort of unexpected jab you get from reading Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce -- one of Mencken's favorite authors.
Regards,
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
I read the wikipedia article on Mencken too. It was the first time I had seen the word 'ennui' written. Know how they add words to the language from time to time? This one should be stricken!
Poetry or no poetry, Lincoln beat them in the end and maintained the boundaries of the United States.
In the Constitution of the Confederate States, the soldiers were fighting for the right of the citizen to own slaves and take them wherever they chose.
So much for universal self-determination.
Slavery was a cancer that killed the Confederacy. The Civil War proved it.
Some of the most able bodied southerners, were relegated to the cotton field. What an absence of logic.
But then that was southern self-determination as held by H. L. Menchen.
Mencken is wrong. The confederates were fighting to keep people of a different race from having the right of self-determination. The reason for secession was protection of slavery.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut we break the Union, will the evil stop there? Suppose the N. England States alone cut off, will our natures be changed? are we not men still to the south of that, & with all the passions of men? Immediately we shall see a Pennsylvania & a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What a game, too, will the one party have in their hands by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so & so, they will join their Northern neighbors. If we reduce our Union to Virginia & N. Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two States, and they will end by breaking into their simple units. Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose than to see our bickerings transferred to others." [Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 4 June 1798]
Mencken is wrong. The confederates were fighting to keep people of a different race from having the right of self-determination. The reason for secession was protection of slavery.
Regards,
Cash
How many states in the North allowed blacks the right to vote?.....One?.....Two?
In how many states did they actually dare to cast a vote?......Zero?
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
How many states in the North allowed blacks the right to vote?.....One?.....Two?
In how many states did they actually dare to cast a vote?......Zero?
What relationship is it that you see between your rhetorical questions and Mencken's quote (the topic of this thread)?
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
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