with their newly elected Republican Governor Christie, so to are the Democrats flipping out over our VA Republican Governor McDonnell. The Democrats were so sure that the entire country was theirs to rule, and, now those evil Republicans have ruined it. They know that come November they will once and for all be the permanent minority in Washington and across the country. They are loud spitting venomous racist snakes in the grass, and, they are showing everyone who they truly are. One thing I thank Obama for is coming out from behind the curtain, and washing the makeup off the Progressive faces. The words good and Democrat can no longer be used in the same sentence.

and, sooner or later, you get Milli Vanilli …

and, sooner or later, ticket prices get too high…

and, sooner or later, what’s popular now (“New Ice Age!”, “Gary Glitter!”) is yesterday’s news….

The trick, and the best example of this is the Blues Brothers, is to have an act that is appealing, compelling, different from the mainstream, and is ready to go just as the last wave is on its’ way out.

Just a few thoughts.

Mew

and one of my gg/grandfathers died in the ANV in Mahone’s counterattack at The Crater. And like most old family Southerners I can rattle off that most of them were in Captain Kent or Captain Flanders’ company of Colonel McLeod’s regiment of Bg. Gen. Wright’s brigade, of Mj. Gen. Anderson’s division, of Lt. Gen. Hill’s Corps, of General Lee’s Army. I heard my g/grandmother’s stories of General Sherman’s troops in her yard in December of ’64 as a young boy at her knee. I got my “Civil War History” from the ghosts in the closets. I may not have made the 3000 books mark that your friend claims but I’ve read and researched from many hundreds and, I’m sorry, without slavery, there would have been no war.

You’re right it wasn’t a glorious, altruistic crusade into the vineyards where the grapes of wrath were stored where, as Jesus died to make men Holy, now Yankees would die to make men free. I can politely restrain myself from turning my back when that song is sung or played, but that is about the limit of my restraint. But, that said, in addition to a long list of both real and imagined abuses and usurpations which caused the North and the South to really dislike each other, there was slavery and there was a new President and political party that was wholly of The North and which did not have to seek compromise or concilliation with The South.

It is true that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments couldn’t be ratified even today if the slaveholding states remained unified, but even in 1861, the federal government had enormous power, especially economic power. The South faced a federal assault on slavery and the economic system underlain by slave labor commercial agriculture. The face of slavery that mattered was not the bucolic scene of one loyal Black family that lived much like the subsistence farming White family that owned them, nor was it even like Tara where the Master of the white columned mansion was also the master of twenty or even a hundred slaves that were in the main treated fairly well and lived at least as well, perhaps better, than an immigrant laborer in The North. The real face of slavery was the commercial cotton plantations that swept across The South like locusts devouring the land and moving west. This agriculture was owned by the rich, financed in the main by Northern banks, was set up to be temporary and used overseers to run hundreds of slaves in dismal conditions. This was the source of the terror of being “sold South” as the price of slaves skyrocketed after the importation ban and with the commercialization of short staple upland cotton. That slavery was a very big business and the slaves represented many billions of dollars and in most instances the bulk of the worth of the Planters. That slave-based agriculture needed new land every few years and it needed the “territories” to have that land. There was no way that there was going to be slave agriculture in the territories with an anti-slavery federal government.

With the spectre of a government openly hostile to slavery and to Southern economics, e.g., tariffs, the “Big Men” of the Lower South, the seat of commercial cotton agriculture seceded. When Lincoln called the Upper South states to supply troops to “suppress the rebellion, the Upper South mostly seceded except where held nominally in the Union by Union military forces, e.g., Maryland, Missouri, and the tortured states like Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas.

There are several reasons that The North committed to keeping the Union intact and abolishing slavery was not on that list for the vast majority of Northern leaders or the Northern people. There is a reason that The North was so interested in taking and holding the Mississippi and capturing the port of New Orleans; it put them back in the cotton business, mostly with slave labor until after the Emancipation Proclamation and under conditions that looked a lot like slavery after the Proclamation as well.

So, it is disingenuous to say that The War was not over slavery; it was. Had there been no slavery there would have been no Lincoln and the Northern dominated Republican Party. Had there been no Lincoln, there would have been no secession, and had there been no secession, there would have been no war.

I have glanced at the in depth diary and posts, I promise to respond to them in detail soon.

My post is a general support of Confederate History Month. We have nothing to apologize for and nothing the be ashamed of. On the contrary, Southerners have proudly remembered their fallen since the end of the war.

All Americans need to learn more history, not less. And anyone who abandons their forefathers who spilled blood for their country is abominable.

I don’t think we need to debate the cause of the war here. We can honor those who raised their right hands and gave the last full measure without trying to read their minds and second guess their world as if we are superior.

include mandatory finger wagging about (the still followed practice of) believers buried up to their armpits followed by stones hurled at their heads until they die?

merit the protection of attacks against the practice just because it happens to be a part of certain sects of Islam? As Mark Steyn says, we must tolerate the intolerant? What makes this one particular faith untouchable. Does a church, some of whose priests touch little boys rate the same benefit of the doubt?

It may be a leap, but only because southerners haven’t owned slaves for 150 or so years, but Muslims still stone people.

My first question: Why so many glowing comments, but no recco’s?

I know how proclamations such as this are made, and it (slavery) was an oversight (which may cost a young scribe his/her job…Hillary would fire, Bob may only forgive, but remember, for all you Beck fans who think is no difference between and R and a D.) that no one vetted. There was no war room or grand council that framed this. Just a piece of paper shoved in front of the Guv. And while Larry Sabato is glossing poetic about how this is not likely to go away, except among the usual suspects (all Left), it already has.

I do agree this may kill McDonnell’s presidential bid…only there isn’t one. When he runs for re-election, or if he runs for Senate some day, then we will see how Virginians handle this, and Larry Sabato will be nowhere to be seen to explain it all when he wins in a landslide. (In the Bible they threw false prophets off cliffs.)

Once again, we all sit and wonder when the Italians will apologize for slavery, or the Russians (hell, it seems they’re back in the business again, third time around). How about Muslim/black Sudan, who, last I checked practices it still, or Muslim Saudi Arabia? (UN Human Rights council, call your office.)

Don’t hold your breath. But a good piece of advice to Bob McDonnell. Quit running. Quit apologizing. It’s a sign of weakness. (John Wayne, Jethro Gibbs). And the way to do this is by informing the President of the United States that while he may “like or dislike”, or “approve” or “disapprove” of many things the several elected leaders around the states may do and say, it is not within his constitutional purview to find those things “acceptable” or :”not acceptable”. That implies a power he neither has, nor, by God, are we willing to relinquish.

you made some valid points for sure. The one you missed is why the average Southern volunteer joined for the duration whle the average Northerner joined or was drafted for only a year. The southerner did not leave his family and campaign in depredation because of tariffs. He did so because he saw the North as an invader.

Many here will say this man, Johnny Reb, was wrong. In fact, some top people here really have it in for the Confederacy. But saying someone was wrong does not in any way prove that such person did not have these feelings. As we all should know, very few in the South held slaves. In fact, the average blue collar joe in the North was much better off than a white worker in the south.

There was and is a southern pride the northerner will never understand. I don’t compare the present iteration in any way to the one of 1861 that led most southern males to fight ’til the end of the war or get knocked out through death, dismemberment, or capture.

Again, I think arguing whether the cause of the war was slavery or not is a fools errand, even though there are good arguments to make on both sides. It is a fools errand only in that it is near impossible to convince others and it is very difficult to disprove a negative. In other words, we can’t prove or disprove what was in the hearts of millions.

I do know this, the average southern soldier, if asked why he fought, would say he did so because “they were down here”. The average union apologist would say we fired on Fort Sumpter, as if that was the cause of the war lol.

crop of leaders, both North and South, R and D. Then we start from scratch and no mercy for any found wanting.

Compliments of Bob Holsworth:

FINAL CHAPTER OF THE CIVIL WAR DAYS

WHEREAS, April, 1865 found the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in its last struggles for existence; and

WHEREAS, Virginia’s Robert Edward Lee determined that his nation would be reunited and not suffer through generations of bitter partisan conflict, and

WHEREAS, General and future President Ulysses S. Grant countered by offering the most magnanimous terms in history to a vanquished foe, threby setting the nation on the course toward reconcilation and reconstruction; and

WHEREAS, President Abraham Lincoln having stayed the course through the four bloodiest years of our national existence, was felled by an assassin’s bullet at the very moment of triumph; stealing from the people and the ages one of mankind’s greatest figures; and

WHEREAS, Virginia is pleased to join in remembering those who sacrificed in this great struggle, and in reflecting on a period when civil war divided citizens, and families as well,

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Lawrence Douglas Wilder, Governor, do hereby recognize April7-15, 1990 as the FINAL CHAPTER OF THE CIVIL WAR DAYS in Virginia and call its significance to the attention of all our citizens.

I don’t see anything about the evils of slavery in this proclamation from the first elected black governor in the history of this country. Of course, maybe I missed it in the thirty times I read it.

What a manufactured piece of crap this whole “incident” is.

I don’t think any serious study of the time period would ever suggest the North was pious and all that was well and good. But you attempt to focus on their racism and ignore what happened in the war and what the conflict was about.

Any serious study of the conflict and the years leading up to it clearly state the war was about slavery and the expansion of it. Simply look at the election of 1860 for starters. The southern Democrats (the traditional party of racism) broke from the Northern Democrats precisely because Stephen Douglas opposed the Dred Scott decision and slavery’s expansion in the newly acquired western territories. It was not about the tariff. The tariff had been risen and lowered ad infinitum for years. There was anger about it, sure, but Civil War? Secession? Over taxes and tariffs? Not true. By the numbers, the Democrats, united North and South still had enough votes to block the tariff. All Democrats agreed on it in principle. It was slavery. Stephen Douglas said some of the most racist things on the stump I’ve ever read, but it wasn’t enough for the South. They wanted unfettered access for slavery in the territories. That alone split the Democratic Party and that means Slavery was the divisive issue.

The reason slavery was the main issue was that the South was wholly dependent economically and culturally to the idea of slavery by the 1850′s. They even defended it as the best scenario for blacks. Poor whites that could not afford slaves could still say they weren’t slaves if nothing else. There was also a deep concern about social order due to the slave uprisings witnessed in Haiti, South America, and the threats of people like John Brown.

The South loved, defended, and ultimately fought a war to preserve slavery. I can provide tons of quotes to back that up. I mentioned this upthread, but when confronted with black soldiers on the battlefield the South’s troops murdered those trying to surrender and barring that enslaved them. General Lee also did this when he invaded Pennsylvania in 1863. They captured and enslaved blacks in their path.

It is a sad, but undeniable truth that the South went to war to protect an awful institution. It is also a sad, but undeniable truth that the North was full of racists that could not care less about slavery. However, the North did not want slavepower to go into the territories because it would give the south more states that could possibly feed slave supporting senators and congressmen. It is also true that there was a significant anti-slavery coalition up North that opposed slavery on moral natural rights grounds. Especially in the Northeast.

I don’t see how we can not judge the South to have been tragically on the wrong side of history. As a southern American I am happy that we lost the war and that the North prevailed. I think we wouldn’t have the country we have today without Northern victory. I fear for what would have happened in Europe when Hitler rose as a divided America possibly sat it out. I worry about Stalin and the rise of communism if a free and united America was instead a weak and divided backbencher.

The South and the North were absolutely racist. Some Northern Generals, like Sherman were racist right on through judgment day. Other Northerners like Grant and Lincoln changed their attitude over time and helped make a more perfect union. But it can not be said that the South was right or that they were on the right side of history or that they fought for a lower tariff that they could have gotten in Congress.

Remember, never invoke the Founders for the Confederates. The Founders did not have representation when they rebelled against unjust taxation. The Confederates had plenty of Senators and Congressmen along with an election year in 1860 to express any concerns about taxes and tariffs.

The North was right. We are all lucky it turned out like it did. I honor bravery and courage which surely the South exhibited especially in the avatar of the great General Robert E. Lee, but the South was wrong then and wrong now to celebrate what was our darkest time as a nation.

Actually it depends how you look at it.

The Civil War was about slavery — according to the President and Vice President of the Confederacy. The CIvil war was about stopping an illegal and violent rebellion, according the President of the United States.

Most people just adopt whatever view fits into their prejudice, that is human nature. Mankind has forever seen things in a way that suits them, especially when they get social points for that view.

But one thing that is not an opinion, is the fact thatSouthern leaders were intent on spreading slavery into the new states, the territories. They saw slavery, perhaps correctly, as ordained by God, and that they had every right to spread slavery into the territories, with or without the consent of the people there.

Davis wrote in his books about why the South seceded, of course. And he boiled it down to one grievance, which the South could not tolerate.

Davis said the intolerable grievance was Lincoln speaking out against the Dred Scott decision. He said this in his own book “Short History of the Confederacy”

Lincoln gave this speach years BEFORE he even ran for president. He was running for Senator of Illinois. Lincoln was just a private citizen Lincoln had spoken out against Dred Scott, when he was a private citizen, in the famous “House Divided Speech”. in Springfield, before he even debated Douglas about the spread of slavery.

For Davis to claim this speech was the reason the South seceded — it’s revealing what the speech was about. Lincoln alleged a conspiracy by Southern leaders to spread slavery by illegal and fraudulent means. What the Southern leaders could not do by consent of the people, they were trying to do by judicial corruption, and legislative deceipt.

Was Lincoln right? Well that depends on what actually happened. But regardless, this speech so infuriated Davis that 30 years later, he was still seething about it. Lincoln didn’t mention Davis by name, but he didn’t have to. IF there was a conspiracy to spread slavery, Davis would be in the middle of it.

Davis said the intolerable grievance was NOT the fugitive slaves, he said, it was NOT the personal liberty laws, it was NOT any tariff. It was Lincoln’s speaking out against the Dred Scott decision — the decision which said blacks were not human, and had no more rights than a wagon or chamber pot.

Lincoln dared, as a private citizen, to speak out against that, and THAT SPEECH, according to Jefferson Davis himself, was the reason the South had to secede. How DARE anyone speak their mind about such things!

The North did not fight the war over slavery — the North fought to put down the violent rebellion. The biggest irony of the war — and there are many – is that the SOUTH seemed to have fought it over slavery, while the NORTH fought it to stop an illegal rebellion, or what they considered was illegal.

Actually the violence had started 20 years before, in the violent attempts, successful and otherwise, to spread slavery, against the will of the people, but that is another comment.

The North reacted to the violent attack not just on ONE fort — but twelve. The ordeal at Fort Sumter was but one of a hundred things going on.

The South attacked 12 forts, invaded treasuries and armories, killed voters, plundered the seas, and threatened the US capital. The South may have been very correct, but they did a lot more than bombard Ft Sumter.

Read Sherman’s letter to Hood in Atlanta about the start of the war — and what he thought started it. This letter is almost unheard of in the South, even today, even though it was letters between these two men that coined the phrase “tell it to the Marines” and “war is hell”. right outside Atlanta.

For anyone who pretends to know anything about Sherman, Hood, the history of Atlanta in the CIvil War, and not know these letters, needs to read the letters.

Sherman gives his view of what started the war, and while doubtless no Confederate supporter woudl agree with that few, its probable that no Confederate supporter has even read it. Much less read the full exchange between Hood and Sherman. .

Hiton Helper, a very well known Southern writer, wrote that if real elections were held, with free speech (something that didn’t exist in the South) slavery would have been outlawed by the South itself, and the slave owners kicked out of power. He wrote this in the book “The Impending Crisis” His theme was, an illegal group had taken over control of the South, stopped free speech, stopped real elections, and that they were destroying the South by allowing slavery to spread. Slavery was a cancer, and it was going to kill the host sooner or later.

Helper hated blacks, but he hated slavery worse. He was of course banned from the South, and had he come back in, he would have been tortured, according to the “anti incendiary laws” which stopped free speech in the South.