What were the Independents Really Fighting For?
POSTED BY: Ty
UPDATED: Saturday, August 9, 2003 14:22
VIEWED: 11782
PAGE 5 of 6
Because this is already getting monstrously long, I want to break it down without quotes. You quoted me in blocks, so I am simply going to number them
1) Right, it is no "right time to revolt". And I think it was Lincoln who said that they may have the right to revolt, but they do not have the right to succeed. There were two different interests at, well, war, literally there.
2) It was not a new republic being born, it was the breakup of the previous union. Other than a fundamental change in political theory, revolving around who decides tariffs and the issue of slavery, a lost by the Union would have showed the world that a nation so conceived on the concept of individual liberty cannot long endure.
America itself was the new experiment. But if it was allowed to dissolve, that would have shown the experimental form of government a failure.
3) Again we can talk about excesses in war, but it still has to be remembered that war is excessive. While Sherman was marching through Georgia, rebels were raiding farms in Kentucky and Indiana. That is the way wars were fought back then, and the way it was thought it had to be fought.
The purpose of warfare is essentially political. To get the other side to do what you want. One means of winning is to get the other side to stop supporting their forces in the field. And one way you do that with massive destruction of civilian targets. Remember this was in the days before mass media, so you had to make the suffering of war apparent to the population.
Someone once said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If following the rules gets you killed, you still get dead. If the choice comes up to set aside the Constitution in order to save the Union in a time of war, or follow it and end up destroying the Union in the process, well, it may be a tough choice but a clear one.
I would like to point out that I am unclear as to whether Lincoln DID violate the Constitution. Many of the claims, specifically regarding habeus corpus I think are overblown.
3) I don't really have much to add. I take it your are a Texican however. 
The racism argument I don't think flies too well. There were disparate cultures and languages between Mexico and America, and I think that alone, without regard to skin tone is possibly a valid enough excuse. And there is also an inherent hypocricy in conquering another country if you claim to believe in self determination. From an argumentative form, it seems an easy dismissive, which more clouds the issue than illuminates.
4) Sadly that is true. And one of the biggest reasons it happened was because the settlers could do it, and get away with it.
But that is not the whole story. Not all the "injuns" were killed, even on the trail of tears. Killing was not the only interaction between Europeans and natives. Ask my great gandma about that
5) Why does it not wash? Yes people lived, worked and died to make life better for an elite few. They did this of their own free choice, however, without being compelled by that elite few. Why is that?
Could it be that they found it made their own lives better as well?
Universally, humans want to live and be happy. They don't work for others unless the alternative is worse for them personally. People follow the bigger better deal, and that is exactly what happened here.
Were working conditions perfect? No, but they did not have to be. They just have to be better as judged by the individual immigrant.
And again, I gotta argue shoulders here. You gotta remember we are talking about the beginning of the industrial revolution here, where massive factories were for the first time practical. Working conditions may have sucked, and we may have it far better today, but it was still better working in the factory rather than trying to meek out a living substitence farming somewhere else.
6) I had not heard of that invasion during the "War of Northern Agression." It sounds interesting.
7) Alone my posts may sound "black and white" But this is a debate, and in that context, the
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The 3/5ths comprimise was actually pretty smart.
The slaves were not free, (well duh!) and were no part of a representative government. Yet the southern states wanted to "bulk up" their representation despite that fact. With the comprimise, it gave the south somewhat what they wanted, but ensured that they would be a minority, at least until the slaves were freed.
It got America off the ground, but did delay the Civil war for awhile.
"my kind of stupid"
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"Sorry to everyone for the colossal length of the above posts. Drakon gave me such good material to work with, I got all excited and couldn't help myself."
Yeah, it is an interesting discussion. I apologize as well.
"mu kind of stupid"
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"What we've seen thus far is the bitterness of losers, and melancholia over the loss of independence, and not so much the sort of personal loathing that such tactics tend to inspire."
Check the script for "Dead or Alive" please.
It kinda depends here. If you were killing off your women and children, well, you might be a bit more calm about them doing it to you. There is the added effect of what we know of Serenity Valley, where the fighting stopped for 5 days before they collected the wounded. Meaning Mal and Zoe saw a lot of folks, who could have been saved, die for no bloody reason at all.
After a certain point, there is just too much death.
"my kind of stupid"
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There was also an issue of political parties in both Maine and California. The slave states were largely Democrats, and neither party would allow the admittance of a state leaning one way, without a counterbalancing state, leaning the other. The same thing happened to Alaska and Hawaii.
"my kind of stupid"
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Oh, I gotta answer this.
1)No government could ever have a legally coded time when it's appropriate to revolt, but when governmental excess becomes too great, people need to take up arms and draw the line. Again, let us revisit the plight of the Kurds as an example. The issue of unfair taxation was a driving force in the American revolution, and it was looming large again in this time period.
What confused me in your reply is that you seemed to imply (via referencing Lincoln's sentiment) that it would have been more justified if the southerners had overthrown the government in D.C. by main force and imposed their own government on the whole of the nation. I don't think you meant that, so I won't go into that matter until you've had the opportunity to clarify your point.
2)Whether or not a new republic was being formed depended entirely on who you asked. The Confederates said yes, the Unionists said no, the Unionists came in, shot the place up and got their way. Might made right in this instance, as it usually does historically, and the individual liberty of six million people got tossed out the window.
As far as I'm concerned, this is where the experiment did fail. Hubris, greed, and the natural corruption of institutions moved us toward an ever-more rapacious federalist form of government.
3) War is hell, and that can't be said often enough. But it seems that the point you are arguing is that it whatever it takes to win is legitimate. Again, we come to might makes right. (Coming back to my previous point, historically, might does make right in terms of who wins and who survives. But it does not always coincide with the moral right.)
4)I do view the constitution as a a suicide pact, myself. If the government cannot live by the rules it has set for itself, it is an unworthy government. Once the government takes powers and duties upon itself, it does not relinquish them easily, if at all. Once it steps too far over the limit, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt. In western civilization, governments tend to make a large pretense of 'serving the people' but as in any other form of government, the opposite proves to be true. Government and all that it entails should be viewed at best as a necessary evil, and viewed with suspicion and a healthy level of disdain by the citizenry.
Here's one example I can dig up easily of Lincoln's unconstitutional behavior.
Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution.
Clause 1: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
West Virginia does not legally exist. There is also the matter of the postwar coercion of states to ratify amendments to the constitution in order to get out from under military control. Not Lincoln, yes, but the people he represented and aligned himself with.
Quote:
3) I don't really have much to add. I take it your are a Texican however.
What, did the six-shooter and the cowboy hat give me away? No wonder we have trouble infiltrating other states...
6)Racism seems to have been a recurrent theme with the Whigs, though. From their views on blacks, immigrants, and indians as published at various points. I'm not fond of the racism argument myself, because it's vastly overplayed in political mudslinging these days, but it seems to be a valid point here.
But if you want to step on by that, we still have the situation of Mexico being a fractious nation at the time, with a history of continual sporadic uprisings. Hell, it still has the occasional hiccup. That would be a perfectly good reason for not annexing the country.
6)If all the injuns had died on the Trail of Tears, I wouldn't be here, being as how my great-something grandmother walked it. But it wasn't just the settlers, as you've implied. The government en
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Quote:
Originally posted by Drakon:
After a certain point, there is just too much death.
"my kind of stupid"
We've kind of hit the wall with regards to what material the show provided us to discuss. (GORRAM fox.) But the air I get from the show is more that the common citizenry seem like people for whom the army lost a war for them, which creates an entirely different demeanor than among people who had a savage variety of war land right on their doorstep. You could even extend our other discussion into this... in Texas, the war is much more of an abstract discussion because the war itself and the aftermath of reconstruction landed fairly lightly here, as compared to the diehards in Georgia and Virginia. People here go on about 'damn yankees' as a general form of antipathy, unlike the more heartfelt 'damyankees' epithet of the deep south.
Unfortunately, without further evidence the argument gets fairly circular in a hurry.
There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.
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As a side note, remind me when I get back in town that we should talk about the underpinnings of a command economy a la the Alliance. I'd contend that what keeps them functional is precisely the sort of black marketeering we witnessed in Shindig. I'll never forget a line I saw on Slashdot once, when somebody referenced Russia's space tourism and snidely commented on the irony of the former Soviet Union leading the way in space capitalism.
(Go Russia! Some day, I'm gonna ride a Russian rocket into orbit.)
There was a reply from a Russian who lived during the Soviet era, and roughly paraphrased from memory... "We always had a market economy. It just wasn't public."
Command economy does horrendous things because it's built on wishes and intentions instead of facts. But the agile hairless ape overcomes conditions in order to make the system function.
There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Veteran:
First I have to say that this thread has been very educational and a lot of fun to read. My hat is off to everyone especially Drakon and Archer. I'd like to sit quietly at that corner of the bar while you two discuss history and politics someday.
Your drinks will be on my tab too. I'm feeling generous today.
(Archer prepares to be inundated with Browncoat volunteers who 'want to hear the political discussion!')
There ain't nothin' I can't overcome or come to know. So lay your heavy load down on me, strip everything I have away. I am not your prisoner, I am not afraid.
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1) We are talking about two different concepts of the term "rights". As expressed in the Declaration, we are endowed with our rights by our Creator, not by the government. The Declaration recognizes a man's right to rebel when the situation is intolerable.
The legal justification is not an issue. Whether it was morally right for the South to exercize their right, over the issues they did, is what is. Rights are not derived or granted by governments. But the property of each person.
In a practical sense, what the US had done is recognize that those who abuse their rights to the detriment of others, have to be stopped even if that means depriving them of their rights as a result. And in a practical sense, it does not matter whether you have a right to rebel from God or the government. The right to succeed at your rebellion is not guarenteed by either.
2) I hear that phrase "Might makes right" a lot. I think it is backwards. In combat, the side that has better, more accurate intel on the opponent, as well as a better understanding of his own abilities, wins the battle. The side with a better understanding of science and technology, accurate theories on how the universe works, is able to build better weapons. The side that has the better political rhetoric, the most appealing argument, usually wins and keeps their side from deserting their troops, and working on the weapons. Being Right is what makes one powerful and able to stop rebellion, or conquer territories.
This is not a very popular sentiment, and can be taken to extreme, obviously. But it does illustrate a central problem the south had. As an agrain economy, the North had it beat economically. Also as an agrain economy, which is land intensive, the more populace North had a demographic and therefore a political advantage over the South. As long as the South maintained the plantation system and kept their slaves, it was not going to change. To put simply, the south was not right in keeping its slaves. That led to the friction it had with the north, as well as their ultimate defeat in a contest of arms.
You talk about the individual liberty of 6 million people. It also liberated how many million of slaves that those same 6 million were keeping? For better or worse, the war decided the issue of slavery once and for all here in America.
3) It goes back to shoulders again. We can condemn the way wars were fought in the past, and indeed, I don't want to make too much of a defense against your charges. But that was not something that was isolated solely to the North. Both sides were doing the same thing. The trouble was the North was simply better at it.
4) There are times when a government must act or else it is effectively a suicide pact. Right now we are debating whether the prisoners at Gitmo should be accorded full legal representation and rights under the Constitution. I see a problem as one of the rights ensured is the right to face one's accuser. Unfortunately in the kind of war we are facing here, with this enemy, much of intel is secret. For good reason. We have to protect sources and methods, or else get blinded to a future and potentially more devastating attack. So do we burn our spies, get them killed, and risk another attack like 9-11? Or do we hand it to the military, and let them deal with the prisoners as they see fit?
This is just one example that pops to mind readily. And this is not a civil war that we are in, but a war with an external enemy.
It goes back to the primary function of government, to protect and defend the population. It does this by establishing rules, laws and the such, but it must be recognized that not all rules can be fit into every concievable situation. And if you find yourself in an unconcievable one, then what do you do? Prevent the government from performing its primary function?
4) Hold on a second here. West Virginia, as I understand it, was formed by forty counties that did NOT want to cede from the Union when Virginia did. So if Virginia is arguing the right to cede from the Union, it can't tu
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