Keefe As for "the South was right"...well, they were. The South decided to secede from the Union, which was - and still is - a perfectly proper, legal, Constitutional process. The Union treated secession as being illegal, which it wasn't - it was in their own Constitution. They chose to ignore that bit.
The Civil War started at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. After SC seceded with the rest of the Southern states, some Union troops in SC retreated to and holed up in Fort Sumter. Beauregard basically beseiged the fort and fired upon Union resupply ships. See, because this fort was on Confederate land, it was perfectly reasonable for South Carolina to defend its property by removing the Union troops and the fort. The Union committed the first act of war by occupying this fort in South Carolina.
The Union continued the interventionist war - they didn't like slavery and they didn't like secession, and they wanted to South to do things the way the North wanted them to. Contrary to popular belief, Abraham Lincoln wasn't all he was cracked up to be. He was an interventionist war monger. I guess he was butthurt that the South seceded in response to anti-slavery Lincoln's being elected President.
I can't fault you for not knowing American history, obviously, but now you know how Dr. Paul was right by saying the South was right - because they actually were. The North did what we still do today, occupy and intervene and cause wars that don't need to be fought.
Oh dear, there you go again. Your posts & Danoffs constantly put forward these kinds of sweeping statements that are based on an absurd over-simplification of the issues & a lack of any kind of in-depth knowledge of the history. And Lincoln was “
butthurt”?! That is your assessment of one of the most conflicted, heroic figures in US history who agonized over his decisions & ultimately paid for them with his life?
Please!
Very briefly: forcing the Southern “Slave states” to end slavery was not the most pressing objective for Lincoln & the Republicans prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. The major concern was resisting the EXPANSION of the power of the "Slaveocracy" into the new territories & states that were emerging as the population expanded west. The "Free Soil" movement (which became an important element within the Republican party),grew up in opposition to this potential expansion of slavery. The Free Soilers were concerned not so much with the rights of slaves (although many people were), but that rich slave owners would move into the new territories, use their cash to buy up all the good lands, then use their slaves to work the lands, leaving little opportunity for free farmers. To put it to you more clearly in libertarian terms: the slave-owning oligarchs would take land & use slave labor to work it, preventing “homesteaders” from establishing a claim based on their own free labor.
The ultimate irony is that the disproportionate political power wielded by the southern slave states was partly dependent on the slaves themselves. The Three-Fifths Clause” counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person, not in respect of their own (nonexistent) rights, but in granting additional representatives in the House based on the population of slaves in those states. In order to protect their privileged position, the southern states fought (politically & literally) to ensure that new states admitted to the Union should be “slave states” in order to preserve their own influence in the House, the Senate, the Presidency & the Judiciary.
A series of political & legal events – among them the acquisition of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Dredd Scott decision – demonstrated the slave states' politicking for “states rights” where it suited them & against where it didn’t. In the words of historian Henry Brook Adams:
“Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power… Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use.”
Eventually the Northern/Republican side became convinced that a stand had to be made against the efforts of the southern states to spread slavery. In contrast, the slave-owning oligarchs of the Southern states believed that only by protecting & expanding the institution of slavery could their own future prosperity & political influence be ensured. I guess if you consider this a legitimate goal then you could say: “the South was right.”
The bigger question, quite aside from these historical points, is the actual
MORALITY of the issue. Why on earth would
you choose to champion the extremely questionable legalistic principle of “
states rights” over the extremely clear
human rights of the enslaved is a mystery to me. It is that attitude that makes people like myself deeply suspicious of the ideology of “libertarianism”. As you have demonstrated in your posts repeatedly, your basic moral compass is completely skewed by your fanatical & misguided application of ideological “principles”.
Canada suddenly doesn't look so bad after all.
