The proper context is that Lincoln didn't care one whit about the slaves - he just wanted to keep the union together.
Lincoln thought slavery should not exist, but he did not view blacks as equal to whites. If he could have kept the union together and not freed one slave - he would have been a happy camper.
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government — that nation — of which that constitution was the organic law.
Those quotes do not back up your assessment that if the average Southerner stayed living in the South that they must have supported racism. I pointed out to you how silly that claim is by citing the Detroit equivalent.
People can't up and move on a whim, especially poor people. If they have a little bit of land - that's they way they make their living.
What did you expect them to do? Leave everything they owned and become beggars in the streets in the North?
I'm really curious to see how you defend that claim because from where I sit - it's ludicrous.
Maybe that's a tough call for you...since you prefer to debate a meaningless topic...but for me, telling you it's meaningless is an attempt to get you to understand just how pathetic you are being. I see that as a good thing.
OK, which is why the South seceded before he took office, because Lincoln didn't care about slaves and would do nothing to slow or stop the spread of slavery after he was elected.... Dang, it's too bad you weren't around in that era and you could have told the South that their slave based economy was perfectly safe under Lincoln!Slavery most likely would have been safe under Lincoln had they not seceded before he took office. He wasn't going to fight to end it - even though he personally opposed it.
Lincoln didn't see blacks as equal to whites, in fact, he would have been right there with the folks who opposed Civil Rights for blacks. Here's another Lincoln quote:
"“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”" ~Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln-Douglass debates, 1858.
He didn't want to let them vote or serve on juries or marry whites and he claimed whites were superior.
Where again is Lincoln's moral high ground again?
It's pretty clear - he was personally opposed to slavery, but acknowledged his oath was to preserve the Union. Your attempts to make that into a negative are laughable.
See above - what's laughable is that you insist on hanging some equality halo on the head of a President that considered blacks as inferior to whites.
I assume you mean white people can't just up and move, which is true. But they CAN vote and did vote and they consistently across every elected office from the highest to the lowest for almost a century elected white supremacists who supported Jim Crow and segregation. It's impossible to conclude the average white voter in those states opposed policies imposed at every level by leaders they ELECTED.
Like Lincoln, the voters likely didn't care enough about slavery to make a big deal out of it. You're forgetting the time in which these people lived. What they did care about was electing someone who would help them with their own needs. The Jim Crow segregationists had an identical ideology to that of Lincoln. See the comments from his debate again.
It's incredible how reluctant you are to even acknowledge what is the history of this region. You're engaged in a rewrite of what happened to blacks, with the support of the vast majority of the white population (at least those with any power) for nearly a century. No wonder you don't see a problem with a flag that represented that era, as you don't see the era as particularly troubling. A few bad apples.....
I'm not saying blacks did not suffer and that it wasn't wrong. It was wrong. I'm pointing out (again) that the flag, although some racists might have used it - long meant something else to millions more.
Walmart's pulling all its confederate memorabilia off the shelves, other stores are doing the same. Mattel is stopping production of toys with confederate emblems.
All that's doing is creating hatred for Southerners.
And hatred never heals anything.
The national government should not exist in any form if it cannot protect the rights outlined in the Constitution for ALL of its citizens. And the states were simply NOT "sovereign to rule over themselves as they see fit." They were bound by that Constitution, including the laws passed by Congress and upheld by the courts. That part just wasn't then and isn't now optional.
I don't know and can't see how it's relevant. The answer to systemic, state sponsored oppression isn't to ask those oppressed to move, it's to end the f'ing oppression and defend the rights of all citizens, not those with the right skin color.
OK, fair enough. I'm glad we've been able to keep this civil. No offense intended in case you read any of it that way.eace
Slavery most likely would have been safe under Lincoln had they not seceded before he took office. He wasn't going to fight to end it - even though he personally opposed it.
Lincoln didn't see blacks as equal to whites, in fact, he would have been right there with the folks who opposed Civil Rights for blacks. Here's another Lincoln quote:
Where again is Lincoln's moral high ground again?
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.
I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; 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.
See above - what's laughable is that you insist on hanging some equality halo on the head of a President that considered blacks as inferior to whites.
Like Lincoln, the voters likely didn't care enough about slavery to make a big deal out of it. You're forgetting the time in which these people lived. What they did care about was electing someone who would help them with their own needs. The Jim Crow segregationists had an identical ideology to that of Lincoln. See the comments from his debate again.
I'm not saying blacks did not suffer and that it wasn't wrong. It was wrong. I'm pointing out (again) that the flag, although some racists might have used it - long meant something else to millions more.
Walmart's pulling all its confederate memorabilia off the shelves, other stores are doing the same. Mattel is stopping production of toys with confederate emblems.
All that's doing is creating hatred for Southerners.
His moral high ground is determined by comparing to men of his era, not of our era. It's this:.
The level of Federal interference into State providence was never intended to be what it has gradually become. Expedience has brought things to where they are today.
I agree, but until that happen I'm not one to sit there and take it, so I was just asking the reason for staying put. I'll admit there probably was more but I'm being too lazy to go back and see the context which spawned the question.
You might not realize it but you just made the point I've been trying to make.
Just as Lincoln's morality must be judged by the era in which he lived - so must the decisions of the people of the Confederate South.
But I'm comparing Lincoln to other men making statements in that same era. It's apples to apples. Lincoln versus Texas legislators and the VP of the CSA - all of those statements within a year or two of each other. You compared Lincoln's 1860's era view of the inferiority of blacks to the views of the Jim Crow south 100 years later - that's what is illegitimate.
I meant originally. This has been a long topic and it started with discussing the opinions of those who served in the Confederacy. The sad truth was - back then most people really didn't see blacks as being equal. It's unfathomable to us today, but it happened. The debate here has centered on slavery - but the fact was, while most didn't own slaves, and many did not think anyone should own another human being, the vast majority - both Union and Confederacy did not think blacks were equal to whites.
When we demonize the South, we put forth the false narrative that only the South was racist. That is untrue as demonstrated by Lincoln's own words. He was every bit as racist - he just didn't think people should own slaves. But he didn't care enough about slavery to make that his reason for the Civil War - he stated so more than once. He just wanted the union together.
When I mentioned that Lincoln's ideas matched those who opposed Civil Rights - I know that was a different time - but I think people forget where we've come from.
It's hard to know what you're referring to, but if you are referring to passing the CRA and VRA and related court cases that forcibly ended nearly a century of state sponsored and enforced at the point of government guns brutal oppression of blacks, in my view that is EXACTLY the primary function of a national government. If it doesn't do that, protect the rights of its citizens, everywhere, then plow that government under and sow it with salt.
Perhaps, but it's very easy to sit back 50 or 100 years later and pretend that if you were black and faced oppression, you would have moved. Because of Jim Crow and purposely inadequate schools, many or most would have been at best barely literate, with no skills with which to land decent jobs in the North, ALL of them penniless or nearly so because of slavery, NONE could draw on family support from other former slaves, there were few safety nets, and so no cushion or ability to spend even a few months looking for work. Further, it's not like on one side of the line was oppression (black if you will) and cross over into equality nirvana (white) - all they gained from a trip North was the end of state sanctioned and enforced oppression into the dark gray zone where blacks were still widely discriminated against, but not as completely and systematically disenfranchised, but still forced to the fringes of society in most areas and facing huge racial obstacles.
And the point was, I think, that "markets" could have solved this. And if that was the point, I don't agree because functioning markets assume that the rights of the participants are equally enforced. There is nothing approaching a 'free market' when some large share of the population has no rights, and others 'competing' in the same space have ample rights protected by the state. It's an evil kind of market distortion, with the government of the South picking and guaranteeing that blacks are always the losers in any 'market' competition with whites.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I see this kind of argument all the time in libertarian outlets. That if the North and black slaves had just been patient, "free markets" would have solved slavery. Perhaps, and that's fine and very easy as a white man in 2010 to opine about how JUST another generation or two or three of blacks might have had to endure being owned by whites and then their grand children or great grandchildren might, if all worked OK, been allowed some freedom. It's an morally offensive argument to me from people who claim to believe in natural rights, liberty, freedom, etc. that an entire race should have been OK to have NONE of those things and wait until their complete and total subjugation by whites was no longer PROFITABLE for their oppressors in this bastardized version of "free markets" before they could expect the process of gaining freedom to begin, and only at the pace at which it was maximally profitable for their oppressors.
Hmm...more I read/hear on the confederate flag, the more I'm tempted to make a proposition/proposal/w.e. to have the flag of the United Mexican States fly in front of the State Legislature in Arizona. After-all it's just a flag, and how dare Arizona deny it's history as part of Alto California! We should honor it, not cowtow to the liberal agenda that wants to destroy the history of our state!
while we're at it, why aren't the New England states flying the flag of the British Empire? Why do those liberals not respect history and tradition?
I'm not sure. I would have to believe however that violations of the law are grounds for impeachment and likely go against the oath of office. Contrary to what seems to have become the standard mindset of many in America, Executive Branch officers are not Kings that simply can disregard and break the law because they feel like it.
1. There was an announced bounty and bail to be paid for such action.Update: The Flag was removed and then put back up 45 mins later.
Woman removes Confederate flag in front of SC statehouse.....
The Confederate flag was temporarily removed from the front of the South Carolina Statehouse on Saturday when a woman climbed the flagpole and — despite calls by police to get down — removed the banner. Bree Newsome, 30, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was about halfway up the more than 30-foot steel flagpole just after dawn Saturday when officers of the South Carolina Bureau of Protective Services ran to the flagpole and told her to get down. Instead, she continued climbing to the top and removed the flag.
She and a man who had climbed over a four-foot wrought-iron fence to get to the flag were arrested. The flag, which is protected by state law, was raised about 45 minutes later, well ahead of a rally later Saturday by supporters of keeping the flag where it is.
Sherri Iacobelli, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said Newsome and James Ian Tyson, 30, also of Charlotte, have been charged with defacing monuments on state Capitol grounds. That's a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to three years or both.....snip~
Woman removes Confederate flag in front of SC statehouse
1. There was an announced bounty and bail to be paid for such action.
2. The woman who did this is one who participates in activism for such payments.
So basically it was a paid activism stunt.
Hopefully she and the ones offering the bounty get the maximum charge and sentence for the stunt.Do you think she will be given time?
She did? When?Haley had already announced when it will be taken down.
Money making opportunity for the social activists. The bounty was only $10,000 + bail/bond.So what was the point of the stunt?
Hopefully she and the ones offering the bounty get the maximum charge and sentence for the stunt.
Hopefully he is charged.
She did? When?
That seems odd that she could announce such, especially as it takes a super majority to pass such legislation.
Money making opportunity for the social activists. The bounty was only $10,000 + bail/bond.
Which was $3,000.
The amount gathered for it far exceeds the amount required.
She has the ability to call a special session. It still takes a super majority to change it.They mentioned something about the 4th of July.....I am not sure if they settled on that date tho. Be a good time, keep everybody celebrating.
She has the ability to call a special session. It still takes a super majority to change it.
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