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BHM (Black History Month) (3) Fun Facts – More Evidence Against State’s Rights...
2/15/2012 4:37 pm |
(From BHM (Black History Month) (2) Fun Facts – Virtue’s Thunder) Not Slavery - as the Main Cause of the Civil War... Again, I give you the Cause of the Civil War, as stated in writing by the secessionists themselves. BTW, note that – as someone once said, the circumstance of White Supremacy does not require racial hate. It only requires a presumption of white superiority. This assumption rarely took on meaning within a Constitution, but it frequently was written into local laws. The issue is critically important for teachers to see clearly. Understanding why the Civil War began informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today. The distorted emphasis on states’ rights separates us from the role of slavery and allows us to deny the notions of white supremacy that fostered secession. Anyway, back to our Month....Black History FunFacts inside: Going! Happy Black History Month!  Breathe Deeply~ Peace +++ img: Ziarekenya Smith Doc_Sonar I advocate Simplicity, Patience & Compassion...and...More than Ever - "I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it." ~G Keillor |
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 2/15/2012 4:42 pm |
“....What were the South’s politicians saying? In late 1860 and early 1861, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana appointed commissioners to travel to the other slave states and persuade them to secede. The commissioners addressed state legislatures, conventions, made public addresses, and wrote letters. Their speeches were printed in newspapers and pamphlets. These contemporaneous documents make fascinating reading and have recently been collected in a book by the historian Charles Dew. William Harris, Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, explained that Lincoln’s election had made the North more defiant than ever. “They have demanded, and now demand equality between the white and Negro races, under our constitution; equality in representation, equality in right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony,” he cautioned, adding that the new administration wanted “freedom to the slave, but eternal degradation for you and me.” As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the Negro race.” The Georgia legislature ordered the printing of a thousand copies of his speech. Two days before South Carolina seceded, Judge Alexander Hamilton Handy, Mississippi’s commissioner to Maryland, warned that “the first act of the black republican party will be to exclude slavery from all the territories, from the District of Columbia, the arsenals and the forts, by the action of the general government. That would be recognition that slavery is a sin, and confine the institution to its present limits. The moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil – a sin – by the general government, that moment the safety of the rights of the south will be entirely gone.” The next day, two commissioners addressed the North Carolina legislature and warned that Lincoln’s election meant, “utter ruin and degradation” for the south. “The white children now born will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors.” Former South Carolina Congressman John McQueen was crystal clear about where things stood when he wrote to a group of Richmond civic leaders. Lincoln’s program was based upon the “single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on a position of equality with ourselves and our friends of every condition. We, of South Carolina, hope soon to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit to our posterity the rights, privileges, and honor left us by our ancestors.” Typical of the commissioner letters is that written by Stephen Hale, an Alabama commissioner, to the Governor of Kentucky, in December 1860. Lincoln’s election, he observed, was “nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the south, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. The slave holder and non-slaveholder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free Negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country.” What Southerner, Hale asked, “can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of Negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free Negroes upon terms of political and social equality?” Abolition would surely mean that “the two races would be continually pressing together,” and “amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable.” Secession, argued Hale, was the only means by which the “heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race” could be sustained. The abolition of slavery would either plunge the South into a race war or so stain the blood of the white race that it would be contaminated for all time.” Could southern men “submit to such degradation and ruin,” he asked, and responded to his own question, “God forbid that they should.” Congressman Curry, another of Alabama’s commissioner’s, similarly warned his fellow Alabamans that “the subjugation of the south to an abolition dynasty would result in a saturnalia of blood.” Emancipation meant “the abhorrent degradation of social and political equality, the probability of a war of extermination between the races or the necessity of flying the country to avoid the association.” Typical also was the message from Henry Benning of Georgia – later one of General Lee’s most talented brigade commanders – to the Virginia legislature. “If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished,” he predicted. “By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.” +++ As can be seen, the threat of racial equality - that is, the end of white supremacy over blacks via the institution of slavery - was bellowed by a cavalcade of politicians during the period after Lincoln's election. For these men, racial equality meant doom. Leave it to Alexander Stephens, the VP of the new Confederate government, to summarize with rhetorical flourish, what everyone knew: that the Confederacy was to be a government in which the white race would reign supreme over the African race. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery, as it exists amongst us the proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture (secession) and present revolution (Civil War)… Our new (Confederate) government…its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” (~ForeverFree) +++ State’s rights simply contradicts – according to secessionists themselves - what caused the American Civil War. It was due to white supremacy - [‘.....the heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race.....’] - and preserving the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. A person has the right to wave certain flags – just – why would they, reading what it meant to the original (Confederate) seceding southerners? Cognitive Dissonance, anyone? (Just say no.) Breathe Deeply~ Peace Doc_Sonar I advocate Simplicity, Patience & Compassion...and...More than Ever - "I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it." ~G Keillor
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 2/15/2012 6:02 pm |
Doc I know this is history! but it still fills me with horror and anger! I hope education can enlighten anyone evil and stupid enough to still have these views! A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw Jenny
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2/15/2012 7:30 pm |
Wow! I had no idea that their public statements were that filled with both fear and hate. A person who hates "is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule. . . Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically." (Vaclav Havel)
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2/16/2012 6:29 am |
Careful Doc. This sort of forthright truth telling isn't much respected among some of our more popular bloggers. Pfffft! I've personally witnessed the sort of attempted obfuscation, denial, and revision of American history your posts are addressing. Confronting it in context with the verifiable facts wins you a ban from further comment and a lasting enmity. In my estimation much of our present states rights advocacy,and antipathy towards the federal government shares a political heritage with antebellum modes of thinking at a genetic level. Both literally and figuratively. When the same people proudly displaying the Confederate battle flag,and typing phrases such as "the war of northern aggression" (while ignoring the the attack on Ft.Sumter) are the same people towing the Tea Party line while entertaining secession as a workable recourse to their grievances...well you can see how my perception is formed?
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2/20/2012 8:18 am |
Just wow.  You know my thoughts about those who seek to be superior.xoxoxoxo I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not" Kurt Cobain
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