September 4, 1862 is the fateful day that General Lee invaded the North with 50,000 troops. Historians will banter back and forth about the real reasons for the civil war, but we will probably never fully understand. It is my personal belief that General Lee was gambling on a quick offensive because the South did not have the resources for a prolonged war. Whatever the case was, President Abraham Lincoln trampled the Constitution and created the foundation for the “Big Brother” government we have today.
Preparedness Notes for Tuesday – September 04, 2018
Never trust the narrative about the guy who is given the biggest statue in an empire’s capital city.
Great point! Never thought about that.
Had not Lincoln “trampled the constitution” the country would have split and very likely we would all on the East coast be speaking German and on the West coast be speaking Japanese. We became strong because we stayed together. We would have been meat for the wolves had we split into two or more parts.
@ GoneWithTheWind: Did that presumption come from your magic eight ball or your pet unicorn?
History and common sense.
I’ve heard this before. The notion that had we peacefully split, we then would not have banded together at times of existential threat to us all, I find to be a bit absurd. All of us, north and south, have been the most charitable nation in history, and this isn’t just another one of the things Americans claim, like muh freedum, it’s measurable in dollars, we would have all pitched in. We would have hung tough I conclude.
i agree there is the bigger picture to consider….
Here you go…
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14004
To paraphrase Carl… “War is just another means of politics”
The free book hosted at Project Gutenberg does a good job laying out the realities of what Abe Lincoln and our nation was facing at that time. The why, if you will, to your question.
Lincoln was married to a Todd.
I doubt we United states would have fallen to some outside powers had Lincoln left the people to choose their own path, whatever that was. The states would have come together to defend their own ways of life from intruders, People were proud of their states and were state loyal back then, a common foreign enemy would have galvanized the Nation, But still retained the individual culture that states possessed that is long gone now.. ..I believe the Lincoln years were just an early form of forced diversity.
What if 51% of the voters of a state, let’s say California, voted to secede. Should we let them? Do the other 49% of citizens of the U.S. who happen to live in California deserve their constitutional rights??? Does all of the land owned by people outside of California get taken from them? What about the land owned by the federal government? The point is that a “democracy” is 51% of the people denying the other 49% their rights and THAT is what the constitution protects. So IMHO 51% or any % of the people in a state(s) cannot vote to secede legally/constitutionally. They can sell of their land and belongings and go away but they cannot take their land and belonging and everyone else’s land and belongings away. It is of course sedition or civil war and the result is predictable.
Forced ‘diversity’, it’s very interesting how history records the one and only Karl Marx as a great admirer of Lincoln.
Peacefully was out of the window the Moment the fire was opened on Fort Sumter.
Was there any article in the constitution, which allowed any state to secede?
The nation isn’t ruled solely by what is written in the constitution, there is an unwritten constitution with principles that are unconditional and irrevocable, such as: the union stays solvent, nobody leaves. If the written constitution gets in the way, it is sidestepped.
Had Lincoln left the Constitution intact and the people of this country to choose their destinies, Barack Obama would never have been the scourge on this nation that he became. I say that not because of his race, but because the ideology he espoused would have not been so long a part of American government when he came along, and the nation would not have been yet so damaged as to succumb to his siren song(which was written for him by others).
Lincoln cemented the supremacy of the federal government over the Statea so forcefully, that the stomach necessary to fight for liberty was stamped out in generations of Americans. In truth, we lost our liberty many years ago, and to those who have never truly tasted something, it is a hard sell to expect them to fight for it. It took a long time for enough Americans to be beat down and enslaved enough to think that Obama was the answer. Lincoln may not have started that slide, but he surely sped it up exponentially. Had he been shot at the beginning of the war rather than the end, perhaps America might still be a place of some semblance of liberty.
As it happens, we have been in chains so long, we now cling dearly to a few leftover priveleges, much like a forgotten elder clings to their sweater or crossword puzzlebook as the last vestige of their identity as they rot in a nursing home. It is hard to watch.
It was FDR who “cemented the supremacy of the federal government over the States”. What Lincoln did was the only option open to him. The real villains were a handful of Southern leaders/politicians/radicals who wanted to seize power over a vast empire. They easily duped the millions of poorly educated but honest and committed Southerners who never owned slaves and in fact were so poor they owned next to nothing. This was exploited by those Southern leaders and an army was easily formed and once formed had to be used. It is popular now by many to rewrite that part of history into some kind of righteous uprising by all Southerners over Northern imperialism but it wasn’t. It wasn’t (for most) about slavery either. It was about power for the few and duplicity to the many good Southerners who were easily lead to their destruction.
Interesting screen name for a character so closely aligned with the federal hegemony school of thought that caused the not so civil war to begin with. As well as a rather twisted take on history. While FDR was another dark addition to the history of this nation, and he did further the hegemonic control of the federal government over the lives of everyday citizens( never let a crisis go to waste, eh?), what he did would have been impossible, had not Lincoln used the standing army the Founders so despised to smash the wills of those who refuse to surrender their rights to Washington. Lincoln proved that the federal government would resort to military force to ensure its continued control of the territories and people it claimed as its subjects. Anything after that is simply mopping up.
I suppose it is clear which sides of that war we each would have been on. Who knows, the chance may yet present itself. This nation is so polarized now, a much worse war with many more sides, is almost assured. The time may yet come when we wish for the good old days of fighting over States’ rights and taxation…
You are not the first person to think my pseudo name has something to do with the civil war or race. It was a line Brett Butler used in the movie that struck me as meaningful since I was brought up by parents that struggled through the depression. It has more to do with prepping and understanding how tenuous life and security is than anything else.
I am first an American and will defend it to the death. My government may not always be right, it wasn’t under Obama or Clinton, but I will still be on the side of the government. It is foolish/childish to think there is another possibility. If we take up arms against our own government it will end badly and our constitution and freedom will be gone in a flash. There is no winning that kind of effort. The correct way to deal with our government is constitutionally and through the ballot box. Having said that I can see the handwriting on the wall. It will probably be over in a few decades anyway. The enemy is within and they often get more than 50% of the vote. Trump and a Republican congress could have been a godsend but Republicans like McCain and others threw it away in the anger at that upstart Trump. Well, like Rome, we weren’t going to last forever BUT I will not ever take up arms against my government or it’s representatives even if they are left wing socialist/communist. If we can’t fix it constitutionally then we can’t fix it; it will be gone with the wind.
Had the nation split, the Northern states would have likely backslid into an agricultural based society. The industrial age was in its infancy and the North was not capable of supporting itself. The South, through unfair export tarifff’s and taxes was essentially supporting the North and their threat to leave the union was a threat to the North’s existence.
The war, in its early stages was fought due to unfair taxation of the South. At the time, the agricultural economy of the South was based on manual slave labor for picking cotton and other items primarily used for export. Slavery at the time was looked upon as a needed commodity and the North was indifferent to it. Lincoln himself said in his first inaugural address that he had no intention to interfere with slavery, nor did he think he had a right to. The rallying cry of freeing the slaves came much later in the war as blacks were welcomed into the ranks of the Northern cause.