A quote from the civil war, before it ended. You all should read this.

Originally posted by The Benevolent Adversary
this is really great read succint and telling! you should create a thread out of this as it truly sums up far too much of what america has come to. everyone should read this and at least have chance to understand what american politics has unfortuantely reduced itself to.

reply to post by RealSpoke

sure explains where the hate on the poor, SS etc. is coming from?
not that i'm defending northern yankee or any of the other 9 "elites" [American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America www.powells.com...]
reply to post by The Benevolent Adversary


perhaps i will

seeing as many are just ignoring it or this additional bit:
www.alternet.org...

The Battle Between the Elites

Since shortly after the Revolution, the Yankee elites have worked hard to keep the upper hand on America's culture, economy and politics -- and much of our success as a nation rests on their success at keeping plantation culture sequestered in the South, and its scions largely away from the levers of power. If we have to have an elite -- and there's never been a society as complex as ours that didn't have some kind of upper class maintaining social order -- we're far better off in the hands of one that's essentially meritocratic, civic-minded and generally believes that it will do better when everybody else does better, too.

The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn't been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview -- even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.

Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country's major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal -- and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt -- fatally loosened the Yankees' stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism www.powells.com... these post-war Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals -- a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.

Plantation America

From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand -- who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age -- it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America.

The Scottish side of the struggle for Gaelic independence has never really been told. It's just the British with their victor's history.

reply to post by Castillo


So if we've heard the British side of it, then we've heard the Scottish side of it....

England could have sent every soldier it had,,,and they still would have lost. And any soldier worth his rank, will tell u why.

reply to post by BobAthome


Jesus, England, Britain, the United Kingdom or the British Isles?

But besides that, what a joke of a statement.

Originally posted by deerislander
reply to post by xstealth

 

To that I reply thusly: Other than ending slavery, express succinctly one other manner in which winning the Civil War caused the Laws of the United States to change. You cannot think of any because there were no such changes. Excepting for the abolition of slavery, the North's victory in the civil war caused no changes whatever in the Laws of the Nation. Hence your argument is specious, disingenuous, and generally without the slightest foundation.

Duh, nothing has changed other than slavery. They were trying to get out of this BIG GOVERNMENT TYRANNY that we have today. The north won, so we still have a big government tyranny. No change, because a change wasn't won.

I don't like what this government is today no more than they did.

Originally posted by TheInfamousOne
This thread does not seem to have a point. Are we really talking about North vs South again? In the end does it matter? Is this thread political since we have a black President? It appears some parts of this country is still trying to drag the hillbilly's to the 21st century.

No this has nothing to do with race. The president is MIXED, not black, but I don't like his white side either.

The point of this thread is obviously over your ability to comprehend the meaning of quote.

Originally posted by xstealth
They were trying to get out of this BIG GOVERNMENT TYRANNY

They were trying to escape from constitutional government, which would eventually have outlawed slavery, as free states entered the US in the west. Secession was enacted in order to preserve and extend private tyranny a thousand times more odious than anything we endure today.

The idea that the south favored "small government" is nonsense. What they favored was maintaining the 'property rights' of a favored few at the price of thousands of lives. Southern planters loved the government, as long as it was being used to maintain their power and wealth.

Originally posted by CoolerAbdullah786History was written accurately. I wish the "South will rise again" crowd would just get over it. They lost. Plain and simple. And thank God that they did.

History was written accurately. Hahahahahaha. Yeah, we're all taught about how a few families in Europe that owned the Bank of England committed massive financial theft and fraud, captured and controlled the governments of most of the world, and engineered wars for personal profit and revenge for centuries.

We're all taught these basic things, like the reason Lincoln decided to issue greenbacks, what the Confederacy thought about the "Civil War" and who was financing the North and the South. We're all taught about the history of the First Bank of the United States, the Second Bank of the United States, and Andrew Jackson's veto of its charter renewal. We're all taught these things in history class.

Oh wait, no we aren't. We're only taught that the "Civil War" was about slavery, and how everyone in the south are ignorant racists, unlike enlightened people like you that are oh so tolerant of everyone (except white people that live in the south).

I don't really know if i can support this thread. Your trying to give the impression the the people in the south were somehow upstanding, and fighting for so-called "freedom." Who's freedom exactly? Who's rights were they protecting? They weren't the rights of the natives, or the rights of the slaves. I, for one, thank lincoln. For without his backhanded trickery, I'd still be picking cotton in my small clothes while being beaten half to death on a nearly daily basis. This is one deception that's worked in my favor. And like the person above me said. The southerners only cared about supposed "freedom" once their pockets started getting hurt. They for damn sure weren't fighting for any rights of mine. And no, I'm not "brainwashed" for not wanting to pick cotton. That's exactly what a damn racist would say (last comment not necessarily intended for the author of this thread).

All history is written by the victors of war. Look at that little book called the Bible, that's the hebrew version of events..... need i say more. The south was becoming an economic powerhouse and was fastly getting rich by selling our wares to who else, Britian. The north could'nt have that so slavery became the mantra for war. Just as the guise we use now called the war on terror.

IMHO the folks up north now kinda wish we had won that war. Their still pissed off they won.. explains NY'ers disposition toward folks from the south & east & westm hell those folks don't like anybody. and by the way OP I thought that was a great quote, that turns out to be correct all these years later S&F for you.

reply to post by xstealth


I have been reading ATS for many years and rarely if ever can I remember feeling so compelled to leave a reply.

My "people" weren't even on these shores (USSA) when the War between the States broke out. I was born in NJ and spent most of my over 40 years of life living there. Call me a "Yankee" if you will but I am a "Southerner of Heart & Mind" and have resided in SC for many years now. As for the knee-jerk race card playing, ask my half black niece how much our entire family loves her...

I want to applaud all of the non-brainwashed that have supported the opening poster.

In a way it is comedic but in the end it is sad, very sad, that so many cannot think for themselves and cheer on and worship at the feet of the puppets of their captors.

Noted abolitionist Lysander Spooner info from Wiki:

Although he denounced the institution of slavery, Spooner recognized the right of the Confederate States of America to secede as the manifestation of government by consent, a constitutional and legal principle fundamental to Spooner's philosophy; the Northern states, in contrast, were trying to deny the Southerners that right through military force.[23] He "vociferously opposed the Civil War, arguing that it violated the right of the southern states to secede from a Union that no longer represented them."[19] He believed they were attempting to restore the Southern states to the Union, against the wishes of Southerners. He argued that the right of the states to secede derives from the natural right of slaves to be free.[21] This argument was unpopular in the North and in the South after the War began, as it conflicted with the official position of both governments.[24]

And finally this quote from Spooner the ABOLITIONIST that should end things if you have a functioning brain. Notice the sentence that contains "greatly increased".

"The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals. No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle --- but only in degree --- between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure." – Lysander Spooner (Nineteenth-Century lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur)

TRUTH!

Here endeth the lesson.

Deo Vindice!

Originally posted by xstealth

Originally posted by TheInfamousOne
This thread does not seem to have a point. Are we really talking about North vs South again? In the end does it matter? Is this thread political since we have a black President? It appears some parts of this country is still trying to drag the hillbilly's to the 21st century.

No this has nothing to do with race. The president is MIXED, not black, but I don't like his white side either.

The point of this thread is obviously over your ability to comprehend the meaning of quote.

Yep, they have no clue what is being stated in your quote, they immediately go straight to slavery, there is no thought to what it really means.

reply to post by DrEugeneFixer

Secession was enacted in order to preserve and extend private tyranny a thousand times more odious than anything we endure today.

Thank you. Thank you so much for stating plainly what so many people seem to have overlooked.

reply to post by DrEugeneFixer

They were trying to escape from constitutional government, which would eventually have outlawed slavery,

brainwashing complete or you would be aware that Lincoln himself authored the Constitutional amendment that would have solidified slavery eternal with no Congressional interference.
But, don't let the truth stand in your way.

reply to post by kaiode1

if you weren't so jaded and misled you might notice that the "slaves" of the south were emancipated long before those in the North and you would understand that the Emancipation Proclamation did NOT apply to Northern slaves so how was that "fair" in the long run ??

got any proof that plantation slavery would exist today or is that your brainwashing speaking ??
do you even know where the greatest concentration of slaves were in 1860 ??
hint: it wasn't in the South.
doesn't it bother you that the Northern army leaders had slaves in their employ while they desecrated the South?

Originally posted by xstealth
“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”


Maj. General Patrick R. Cleburne, CSA, January 1864

History has always been and will most likely always be written by the winners. There are two sides to every story.

Originally posted by FissionSurplus
The Civil War was all about the destruction of state's rights, and not really about slavery. The north had plenty of slaves, too.

And somehow it was banned in entirety, without compensation, after the North won.

The only state's rights that the south really cared about enough to go to war was the right to continue and extend slavery.

Originally posted by Honor93
reply to post by kaiode1

 

if you weren't so jaded and misled you might notice that the "slaves" of the south were emancipated long before those in the North and you would understand that the Emancipation Proclamation did NOT apply to Northern slaves so how was that "fair" in the long run ??

That is because Lincoln was President, and not a dictator. Where U.S. law prevailed, i.e. the Union, he could not make a proclamation, he would need a law passed. And eventually it was.

got any proof that plantation slavery would exist today or is that your brainwashing speaking ??
do you even know where the greatest concentration of slaves were in 1860 ??
hint: it wasn't in the South.
doesn't it bother you that the Northern army leaders had slaves in their employ while they desecrated the South?

Yes, but they knew that when the North won, slavery would be abolished, and if the South won, slavery would continue and expand. They fought for principle and the human rights of people they still thought were inferior.

Originally posted by redwilldanaher

"The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

The slaves didn't get to vote on which government or employer they wanted, did they?
If slaves could vote, what would the policy of the southern state legislatures have been?

Originally posted by camaro68ss

Originally posted by CoolerAbdullah786

Originally posted by xstealth
"It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”

Meaning our right to own slaves. I don't care what this guy claims. He knows damn well he was fighting for slavery. And pointing the finger at the "Northerners." Please. History was written accurately. I wish the "South will rise again" crowd would just get over it. They lost. Plain and simple. And thank God that they did.

to bad Patrick R. Cleburne didnt have any slaves, Also 1864, Patrick called together the leadership of the Army of Tennessee and put forth the proposal to emancipate slaves and enlist them in the Confederate Army to secure Southern independence!

Well good for him. Now, some details. Did the powers in the south take him up on this proposal? Enlist by choice, or by force? What did the slaves have to think about this idea?

Virtually all of ex-slaves who knew their ass from a hedgehog joined the Union army and not the Confedracy. Why?

So your argument doesn’t hold water. Not Everyone in the south was a slave owner. Slaves were expensive and only the wealthy farmers had them. The slave issue was not brought into the war until later when Lincoln was losing the war. He needed an issue that would unite the north, SLAVERY.

The South brought the issue in right at the beginning, and they shot first. Slavery united the south long before it united the north. Why?

Well of course; ALL warfare is based upon deception. History is written by the victor, and history is filled with liars. The winner's truth becomes THE truth, and the loser's is forgotten. The victor makes himself out to be completely justified, and the loser to be completely evil. He "forgets" his own flaws and capitalizes upon his enemies'. It's nothing new, it's been around since man first raised a fist against his brother.

It's human nature.