Virginia Governor Proclaims April “Confederate History Month”

[one...two...tree 2,762]

No one can celebrate Confederate History Month without pointing out the things that the Confederate Constitution has to say:

. . .(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

In 1893, Wilson published his Civil War history, Division and Reunion, 1829-1889. Despite the dates, the period of Reconstruction is only summarily dealt with in forty-seven pages. Wilson regarded slavery as a necessary evil, taking the paternalistic view of master-slave relations in the south. He ignored the various economic arguments put forward to explain the war at the time, and insisted that the war had been the result of differing political philosophies, federalism vs. states' rights. Wilson upheld the racist views of his time, stating that African-Americans could never become full citizens and that segregation was a wholly appropriate measure for preserving "racial harmony."

http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/woodrow-wilson

What a dickhead!

[one...two...tree 2,762]

What a dickhead!

You are....for stupidly pulling a Booyah on the topic.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You are....for stupidly pulling a Booyah on the topic.

Sounds like a disparaging comment against a member, and wholly against the TOS

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The “Heritage not Hate” folks claim slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. Neo-Confederates – and there are more than a few in my native Kentucky – claim that 11 slave states – the Bluegrass State not among them — seceded over “states’ rights.”

I teach history. Slavery had everything to do with the Civil War. “To put it quite simply, slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war,” wrote Charles B. Dew in Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.

For my money, Dew’s little book is one of the best Civil War reads to come along in years. Published in 2001, it is especially timely as we get ready to mark the 150th anniversary of America’s bloodiest conflict.

Dew is a Southern-born historian with a family tree full of Rebel ancestors. No doubt, his book has made him an apostate to the neo-Confederates. Die-hard Rebels would have scorned him as a “scalawag,” meaning a fellow white Southerner who “betrayed” his race and region during the post-war Reconstruction period.

Dew uses the words of real Confederates to rebut the neo-Confederates.

He quotes a raft of Rebels from Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens to representatives of Confederate states who went to other slave states – including Kentucky – to try to talk their political leaders into secession.

“I believe deeply that the story these documents tell is one that all of us, northerners and southerners, black and white, need to confront as we try to understand our past and move toward a future in which a fuller commitment to decency and racial justice will be part of our shared experience.”

Dew explained that after the Rebels lost the Civil War, Davis, Stephens and other Confederate civil and military leaders wrote their memoirs, claiming “that slavery had absolutely nothing to do with the South’s drive for independence.” He added that their claim has been “picked up and advocated by neo-Confederate writers and partisans of the present day.”

Some of them plaster it on the bumpers of their cars and trucks.

In his book, Dew cited a multitude of primary sources: newspapers, letters, official publications and other documents. He carefully footnoted his research.

Davis praised human bondage as a worthy institution by which “a superior race” had transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers.”

Stephens was thankful the Confederacy was based “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 moral condition.” He added, “the Confederate States of America was “the first Government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature and the ordination of Providence…”

Dew also quotes from secession ordinances Southern states wrote as they exited the Union. When Texans pulled out, they denounced “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race and color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

Mississippi disunionists announced that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery….We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.”

Dew ‘fesses up that he teaches history at a Yankee school – Williams College in Massachusetts. But he was born in Dixie. He said he went to a boarding high school in Virginia and had a Rebel flag in his dorm room.

Dew’s pedigree easily qualifies him for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, though they might not let him in. “My ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy, and my father was named Jack, not John, because of his father’s reverence for Stonewall Jackson,” the author wrote.

Dew said as a boy, he had a ready answer for anybody who asked him why the South seceded: states’ rights. “Anyone who thought differently was either deranged or a Yankee, and neither class deserved to be taken seriously on this subject,” he explained.

But studying history in college mugged Charles B. Dew. In honestly examining his region’s past, he discovered that by using the term “states’ rights,” white Southerners of the 1860s meant the right of a state to have slaves (just as white Southerners of the 1960s defended segregation in the name of “states’ rights”). Apostles of Disunion ultimately resulted.

Dew focused his book on a group of state-appointed commissioners who traveled throughout the slave states in 1860 and early 1861. They were supposed to drum up support for secession in all 15 slave states, including Kentucky.

The commissioners preached the same racist line: the only way to keep the Yankees from destroying slavery and white supremacy was to start a new Southern nation.

“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,” a Mississippi commissioner said.

Declared another Magnolia State emissary: “Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.”

Likewise, a Kentucky-born Alabama commissioner to Kentucky pleaded that secession was the only way the South could maintain “the heaven-ordained superiority of the white over the black race.” Another Alabama representative said ideas that slavery was immoral and that God created all people the same were rooted in “an infidel theory [that] has corrupted the Northern heart.”

Dew concluded, “By illuminating so clearly the racial content of the secession persuasion, the commissioners would seem to have laid to rest, once and for all, any notion that slavery had nothing to do with the coming of the Civil War.”

This history teacher hopes Dew is right.

Berry Craig is the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Progressive Era

The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s.[1]

In response to the economic and social conditions of the late 19th century, Progressives advocated a wide range of economic, political, social, and moral reforms designed to modernize the the economy and the society, to eliminate waste and inefficiency, and reduce the causes of ignorance, disease, crime, poverty and corruption. [2]

Removing corruption from politics was a main Progressive goal, with many Progressives trying to expose and undercut political machines and bosses. They attempted to exclude illiterates, African-Americans, and others from voting, and to reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe through devices such as a literacy test. Many Progressives supported prohibition in order to destroy the political power based in saloons. At the same time, women's suffrage was promoted to bring a "purer" female vote into the arena.[3][4][5][6]

Initially the movement was successful at local levels; later it progressed to state and national levels. Progressives drew support from the middle class, and included many lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers and business people.[7]

Notable progressives

• Jane Addams, social worker
  
• Florence Kelley, child advocate
  
• Charles Beard, historian and political scientist
  
• Louis Brandeis, lawyer and Supreme Court justice
  
• William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential nominee
  
• Lucy Burns, suffragette
  
• Andrew Carnegie, steel and philanthropy
  
• Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragette
  
• Herbert Croly, journalist
  
• John Dewey, philosopher
  
• W. E. B. Du Bois, philosopher, intellectual
  
• Thomas Edison, inventor
  
• Irving Fisher, economist
  
• Henry Ford, automaker
  
• Charlotte Gilman, feminist
  
• Susan Glaspell, playwright, novelist
  
• Lewis Hine, photographer
  
• Charles Evans Hughes, statesman
  
• William James, philosopher
  
• Hiram Johnson, California politician
  
• Robert M. La Follette, Sr., Wisconsin politician
  
• Walter Lippmann, journalist
  
• John R. Mott, YMCA leader
  
• George Cardinal Mundelein, Catholic leader
  
• Alice Paul, suffragette
  
• Ulrich B. Phillips, historian
  
• Gifford Pinchot, conservationist
  
• Walter Rauschenbusch, theologian of Social Gospel
  
• Jacob Riis, reformer
  
• Theodore Roosevelt, President
  
• Elihu Root, statesman
  
• Margaret Sanger, birth control
  
• Anna Howard Shaw, suffragette
  
• Upton Sinclair, novelist
  
• Albion Small, sociologist
  
• Ellen Gates Starr, sociologist
  
• Lincoln Steffens, reporter
  
• Henry Stimson, statesman
  
• William Howard Taft, President and Chief Justice
  
• Ida Tarbell, muckraker
  
• Frederick Winslow Taylor, efficiency expert
  
• Frederick Jackson Turner, historian
  
• Thorstein Veblen, economist
  
• Lester Frank Ward, sociologist
  
• Booker T. Washington, social reformist, leader
  
• Woodrow Wilson, President
  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

[Danno 1,228]

Sounds like a disparaging comment against a member, and wholly against the TOS

Some VJers feel if their point is strong enough or on such a high plane...they can prove it by means of personal insult.

And we see this everyday... the personal insults.. the breaking of VJ rules, the special exemptions they grant themselves.

Not just to make broad attacks which most do but "personal" ones.

Tsk Tsk tsk.

[scandal 951]

Some VJers feel if their point is strong enough or on such a high plane...they can prove it by means of personal insult.

And we see this everyday... the personal insults.. the breaking of VJ rules, the special exemptions they grant themselves.

Not just to make broad attacks which most do but "personal" ones.

Tsk Tsk tsk.

Why don't you name some names? Who are these "they" of which you speak?

I know that I've been personally insulted by several on here who consider themselves on such a higher plane. The Australian of course takes first prize, but he's by no means alone.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

I think Abe said it best.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Abraham Lincoln

Danno,

Thank you for so eloquently proving my point on why the civil war and the confederacy is such a dark stain on our history. The Confederacy was a temporary nation that did not give a single right to a large percentage of its population who so desperately needed to be liberated!

Thanks for that, I thought you were a confederate supporter by your avatar but I can see that you recognize just how awful the confederacy really was.

[Danno 1,228]

Danno,

Thank you for so eloquently proving my point on why the civil war and the confederacy is such a dark stain on our history. The Confederacy was a temporary nation that did not give a single right to a large percentage of its population who so desperately needed to be liberated!

Thanks for that, I thought you were a confederate supporter by your avatar but I can see that you recognize just how awful the confederacy really was.

Now tell us what year Slavery was abolished in the North..... after all, that was the great "stain" right ?

I'll wait for your answer.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Now tell us what year Slavery was abolished in the North..... after all, that was the great "stain" right ?

I'll wait for your answer.

The North effectively ended slavery with the Missouri Compromise in 1820 for itself. The Nation as a whole would end during the Civil War....technically it didn't occur until the surrender because obviously the South did not recognize it.

[Danno 1,228]

The North effectively ended slavery with the Missouri Compromise in 1820 for itself. The Nation as a whole would end during the Civil War....technically it didn't occur until the surrender because obviously the South did not recognize it.

Wait a minute..... I thought the Missouri Compromise was about allowing Slavery to spread in "new territories"?

My question was.

If Slavery was so great a Stain that the North felt compelled to take a path of war to end it, what year did they abolish it in the North?

HInt: here is what it looked like when the Federal troops invaded VA.

ONe wonders why NewYorkers traveled all the Way to VA to fight slavery when they could have stayed home and done the same thing.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Thanks for yet again providing proof of what I'm saying. As your map shows the North was full of free states hence my previous post. There were three border states that were slave states the last being Missouri. Being from Missouri I can tell you that the people of the state at the time were southerners. Most of the fighting was federal troops keeping the Governor of the State under control.

Your comment about New Yorkers confuses me as New York ended slavery in 1827...unless you are inferring that they should focus on Maryland.

We can have a debate on how border states fit into all of this I suppose since they did technically become part of the Union while have having connections to the south.

[Danno 1,228]

Thanks for yet again providing proof of what I'm saying. As your map shows the North was full of free states hence my previous post. There were three border states that were slave states the last being Missouri. Being from Missouri I can tell you that the people of the state at the time were southerners. Most of the fighting was federal troops keeping the Governor of the State under control.

Your comment about New Yorkers confuses me as New York ended slavery in 1827...unless you are inferring that they should focus on Maryland.

We can have a debate on how border states fit into all of this I suppose since they did technically become part of the Union while have having connections to the south.

Come on you must admit it rather odd that union states still had slavery.

Now you can call them "border states" if that somehow diminishes this glaring signal that the Union tolerated Slavery...even after it was outlawed in the South.

But the truth is, this "Stain" we speak of was legal on the Union side longer than it was in the South.

IN fact it stands to reason the Union forces where no doubt even nourished... to some degree by slave labor.

Now I know it always feels good and even superior to end up on the winning side of a moral question... especially when one limits himself to only one moral question: Slavery.

But if Slavery was the only question in the War..... The Union side can clearly only claim title to having liberated "another mans slave" and not his own.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Come on you must admit it rather odd that union states still had slavery.

Now you can call them "border states" if that somehow diminishes this glaring signal that the Union tolerated Slavery...even after it was outlawed in the South.

The fact of the matter is that prior to the civil war there were no distinct lines between the north and the south. As I said Missouri was primarily southern despite being a Union State. Maryland was probably 50/50 etc.

But the truth is, this "Stain" we speak of was legal on the Union side longer than it was in the South.

Are you arguing this purely based on the fact that the confederacy was so short lived? Thats not really a valid comparison then.

IN fact it stands to reason the Union forces where no doubt even nourished... to some degree by slave labor.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the Union produced more edible grain than the Confederacy. The Confederacy produced a lot of tobacco and cotton hence the failed Cotton Diplomacy with the UK. It turned out that Europe had plenty of cotton but was facing a serious grain shortage which made them reliant on Northern exports (corn primarily)

Now I know it always feels good and even superior to end up on the winning side of a moral question... especially when one limits himself to only one moral question: Slavery.

But if Slavery was the only question in the War..... The Union side can clearly only claim title to having liberated "another mans slave" and not his own.

Slavery was the problem, state's rights was the vehicle.

Revisionist thinking tends to pull slavery out of the Civil War and focus only on state's rights. This is dangerous especially as the primary state right on the table at the time was slavery...everything else played second fiddle.