Fuck Ron Paul

[eyeno]

Title 28 3002 definitions

(15) “United States” means—
(A) a Federal corporation;
(B) an agency, department, commission, board, or other entity of the United States; or
(C) an instrumentality of the United States.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/ ... -000-.html

You're not really this stupid, are you?

.

Legalese is a never ending game of semantics, yes I understand that, and yes I understand what you are getting at. Just delivering information because these definitions are one of the sources information often quoted in this argument.

And then there is the issue of whether the District of Columbia is a corporation, and on and on...

And, the argument really doesn't matter to me because I already know this country is under control of private entities.

[compared2what?]

I have to go with tariffs as being primary to slavery as a causal factor leading to the war of northern aggression.

There were acts of aggression on both sides.

All the talk of principles is to cover for the true motive- money, same as it ever was.

The folk back then could have bargained for a number between the 10% and 40% tariff positions. Nah, fuck that, lets all have a war instead.

I'm not so sure that either side really wanted war. I totally agree that wars are always fundamentally contests for wealth and power, ultimately. But you can't really consider economic interests as if they were separate and discrete from the ideological beliefs of the interested parties. The one might give rise to and inform the other, or vice versa, or both.

Know what I mean? The Confederate states were cotton states, so tariffs would have been important to them. But not as important as their beliefs about what it meant to be a cotton state, which beliefs were formed and held without the advantage of knowing that large-scale cotton-farming and the lifestyle/values associated with it were not going to be the wave of the future. The industrial revolution was pretty well underway already, obviously. But nobody even saw where that was going clearly enough to know that it was going to make the Civil War a new kind of war. So they wouldn't have had any way at all of knowing that the kinda-sorta neo-manorial rules they were living by were suddenly going to stop being the ticket to stability and prosperity for landed gentry/neo-gentry that they always had been.

Hm. I think I've failed to make my point. Maybe I'll try again later.

[compared2what?]

And then there is the issue of whether the District of Columbia is a corporation, and on and on...

It's an incorporated municipality. Like hundreds and hundreds of townships and boroughs and parishes and what-have-you all over the country, but not like all of them. Because some are unincorporated municipalities.

Corporations are more like Stuarts than they are like Orcs, fwiw. But they're not very like either, so it's not worth much. Suffice to say: Some corporations do one thing, other corporations another thing, and still other corporations nothing at all.

So yes. The District of Columbia is a corporation. But it's not principally a corporation. It's principally a municipality.

[Sounder]

Hm. I think I've failed to make my point. Maybe I'll try again later.

Maybe so, yet all is well as I enjoy your words even if they do not quite reflect your normal standards.

[publius]

This is the new nation that I mention coming from the Civil War.

http://mark1marti2.wordpress.com/tag/th ... coln-myth/

Chapter Six (6) of The Real Lincoln warns us that America’s 16th President launched an invasion of the South without consulting Congress, as required by the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports; suspended habeas corpus for the duration of his administration; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern citizens; arrested and imprisoned newspaper editors critical of him; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized railroads; created several new States without the consent of the citizens of those States; ordered Federal troops to interfere with elections in the North by intimidating Democratic voters; deported United States Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio for criticizing the administration’s income tax proposal at a Democratic Party rally; confiscated private property; confiscated firearms in violation of the 2nd Amendment; and eviscerated the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution.

DiLorenzo puts a 19th century historical perspective on the current vulnerability of those Americans who oppose the codification of the suspension of habeas corpus by Barack Obama and a complicit American Congress in the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA):

“Secretary of State William Seward established a secret police force that made thousands of arrests on mere suspicion of ‘disloyalty,’ broadly defined as disagreement with Lincoln’s war policies. Prisoners were not told why they were being arrested, no investigations of their alleged ‘crimes’ were carried out, and no trials were held. There was no legal process at all, and many Northern citizens were imprisoned for such alleged infractions as ‘being a noisy secessionist,’ selling Confederate trinkets, or ‘hurrahing for Jeff Davis.’ An Episcopal minister in Alexandria, Virginia was arrested for omitting a prayer for the President of the United States in his church services as required by the Lincoln Administration. A New Orleans man was executed by General Benjamin Butler for merely taking down a U. S. flag. [The Real Lincoln, page 138]“

And as the Loyola College professor ominously reminds us, Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor came to be known as the ‘American Bastille’ [read Guantanamo] because it housed so many political prisoners during the Lincoln Administration [more than 13,000 is the consensus among historians].

[JackRiddler]

.

Imagine what a 19th century Guantanamo must have been like.







Rendition Flight:

[publius]

Pity the Civil War was not over slavery. Nor over human rights. Simply over money. 2 million dead, black soliders used as expendable by the North. The propaganda of the North is comparable to the propaganda of the World War I victors.

The Lincoln Cult's Latest Cover-Up

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

On July 19 the Associated Press and Reuter's reported an "amazing find" at a museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania: A copy of a letter dated March 16, 1861, and signed by Abraham Lincoln imploring the governor of Florida to rally political support for a constitutional amendment that would have legally enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution.

Actually, the letter is not at all "amazing" to anyone familiar with the real Lincoln. It was a copy of a letter that was sent to the governor of every state urging them all to support the amendment, which had already passed the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, that would have made southern slavery constitutionally "irrevocable," to use the word that Lincoln used in his first inaugural address. The amendment passed after the lower South had seceded, suggesting that it was passed with almost exclusively Northern votes. Lincoln and the entire North were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery forever in the Constitution. This is one reason why the great Massachusetts libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner, author of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, hated and despised Lincoln and his entire gang.

The Lincoln cult knows about all of this, but works diligently to keep it out of view of the general public. The fact that news organizations reported the "find," however, creates a problem for the cult. A cover-up/excuse-making campaign must commence.

The document was found in the Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, Historical Society archives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The director of the Society, Joseph Garrera, described in the press as "a Lincoln scholar," immediately announced that the document is not at all important, since such documents are "a dime a dozen."

Well, not really. Most of these kinds of documents have been meticulously whitewashed from the historical record. When they do surface and are made public, the Lincoln cult gets to work burying them in an avalanche of excuses designed to fog the real meaning of the documents in the minds of the average American. Garrerra's statement is the first attempt at this.

Every once in a while, though, a cult member (or an aspiring cult member) slips up and spills the beans. A recent example is the "political biography" of Lincoln recently published by the confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin entitled Team of Rivals. This is Goodwin's first publication on Lincoln, and she has apparently not been filled in on the standard modus operandi of cover-up and obfuscation that is the hallmark of "Lincoln scholarship." She discusses the above-mentioned "first thirteenth amendment" in some detail (as I do in my forthcoming book, Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe, to be published in October).

Goodwin dug into the same original sources that all Lincoln scholars are familiar with, but unlike most others, she includes the information in her book. Not only did Lincoln support this slavery forever amendment, but the amendment was his idea from the very beginning. He was the secret author of it, orchestrating the politics of its passage from Springfield before he was even inaugurated. Not only that, but he also instructed his political compatriot, William Seward, to work on federal legislation that would outlaw the various personal liberty laws that existed in some of the Northern states. These laws were used to attempt to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act. As explained by Goodwin (p. 296): "He [Lincoln] instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield. The first resolved that ‘the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.' Another recommendation that he instructed Seward to get through Congress was that ‘all state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed.'"

Goodwin reveals all of this because the theme of her book is what a great political conniver and manipulator Lincoln was and this, of course, is a good example of such deceitfulness. In the eyes of a lifelong statist like Goodwin, lying, deception and fakery are praiseworthy traits for a politician. She praises him for his pro-slavery amendment because it supposedly "held the Republican Party together."

Lincoln's efforts in this regard were enormously popular in the North, and especially in Boston. A thoroughly racist society, the vast majority of northerners wanted slavery to persist in the South because that would keep black people in the South. They opposed the personal liberty laws for the same reason: They wanted any escaped slaves to be eliminated from their midst. Thus, Goodwin writes of how, when Seward made a speech announcing these two proposals (the constitutional amendment and the abolition of personal liberty laws) in Boston, "the galleries erupted in thunderous applause." Lincoln's political handler and campaign manager, the thoroughly corrupt New York City politician Thurlow Weed, "loved the speech," writes Goodwin, again making the point that the proposals were good politics because they "kept his fractious party together."

Lincoln's slavery forever amendment read as follows:

"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State. (See U.S. House of Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, The Constitution of the United States of America: Unratified Amendments, Doc. No. 106-214).

In his first inaugural address Dishonest Abe explicitly supported this amendment while pretending that he hardly knew anything about it (i.e., lying). What he said was: "I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held to service." Then, while "holding such a provision to be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."

Lincoln was not an abolitionist and, unlike Lysander Spooner, he believed that slavery was already constitutional. Nevertheless, he also favored making it "express and irrevocable."

The director of the museum in Allentown where Lincoln's letter to the governors was recently discovered made a feeble attempt to dismiss this entire episode as unimportant by saying that Lincoln was only being "pragmatic." Actually, exactly the opposite is true. Another reason why abolitionists like Spooner detested Lincoln, Seward, and the rest is that he understood that their opposition to slavery was always theoretical or rhetorical. They never came up with any kind of pragmatic plan to end slavery peacefully, as the real pragmatists — the British, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Danes — had done. Indeed, the political leaders of these countries could have provided the Lincoln regime with a detailed roadmap regarding how to go about it. But as Lincoln repeatedly said, his agenda was always, first and foremost, to destroy the secession movement, not to interfere with slavery. And as this episode reveals, for once his actions matched his words.

[publius]

Left and Right converge on the Civil War. Interesting both agree that the STATE is the problem. I maintain that with the Mexican War behind it, the swollen Federal State-already a minion of Das Kapital-in the person of President Abraham assumed the role of Paternal Tyrant. Then after the Civil War, the new Federal State, the military state, the Moloch so called of Ginsberg, is enthroned and war after war rolls forward to this very day of the NDAA and Enemy Belligerents Act. Tactics of Lincoln towards dissenters are repeated in later Administrations. Especially in the two great Crusading War Presidents: Wilson and FDR. It is hardly a surprise that the men running for office are pawns of invisible backers whose role in promotion and advising is often unclear to all but the experienced eye. How could this not be so? War is profitable. War creates opportunities for new men. It did for Rome. It does for us.

War Is the Health of the State (Randolph Bourne)
Randolph Bourne's essay on the interrelation of war and the state.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/bourne.htm - Cached - Similar

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

[JackRiddler]

Pity the Civil War was not over slavery.

I guess you're attempting to illustrate that the Big Lie works only through repetition. It's also essential not to acknowledge contrary claims. Your performance here so far has been not to respond, but to repeat the Big Lie and then add more cut-and-paste demonization of Lincoln - as if, for example, questioning his credentials as an abolitionist (he was not one) somehow justifies the South's war to expand slavery. Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but given the circumstances that arose, he enacted abolition.

So here we go again:

The Confederate states seceded because northern voters elected a president who was pledged to prevent the establishment of new slave states. The Confederate grievance was not only their perception that they were threatened with abolition (which was not an immediate political threat) but rather that they would be unable to expand the slave system. Prior to 1860 armed gangs dispatched from the South had initiated hostilities in Kansas in an effort to terrorize the majority of settlers there into making it into a slave state. Without a doubt the secession, had it not been challenged immediately, would have been followed by wars over the West and inevitably a total war. Slavery could not have been sustained economically for much longer without expansion of the slave system (and, of course, was economically doomed regardless). While the motives and actions of either Lincoln or the northern industrial elites are subject to question and even condemnation, the Confederate secession was motivated by the question of slavery. Had there been no secession, there would have been no war. Defending slavery was the reason for secession, and secession was followed by Confederate acts of aggression against Union troops that furthermore made total war inevitable.

Thus it is absurd to pretend the war was not about slavery: The most vile crime imaginable, a multi-generational, genocidal crime by an entire society against millions of human beings, one that dwarfs anything Lincoln could have done in the course of the war that the South started, and one that makes a mockery of your fantasy of an antebellum constitutional republic with protection of individual rights. On the contrary, this republic, which still has never existed according to its ideals, first became possible after the end of institutionalized slavery - and took a giant step back with the history by which Reconstruction was sabotaged and abandoned, leading to the restoration of 1877.

The attempt to exculpate the Confederacy by pretending the war was simply about tariffs cannot be called revisionist, by the way, since it was already in use as the British propaganda in defense of the Confederacy at the time. Here is what one contemporary journalist and astute observer had to say about it at the time:

==========================================

The North American Civil War

by Karl Marx

Die Presse (Vienna), October 25, 1861 *

[As republished at http://www.tenc.net/a/18611025.htm, Nov. 2, 2008]

==========================================

London, October 20, 1861.

For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathizing with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North. Qui s'excuse s'accuse.

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavor to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not the separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and assure to it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt of, development? Accordingly must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to put it down by a bloody and futile civil war?

Point by point we will probe the plaidoyer of the English press.

The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protection system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slaveowner enjoy the fruits of slave labor in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff in Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served her, to be sure, as a pretext, but also only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the maintenance of the Union by force. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different, if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as, among others, The Saturday Review categorically declares, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not emanate from the North, but from the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on, while the secessionists appropriated to themselves the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a sensational act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a parley with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the place in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: "No man can say where the war opened today will end." At the same time he prophesied "that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy would wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston." Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln summoned for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely, the summoning of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress, that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognized as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of the foundation of a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defense of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, it was telegraphed from South Carolina: "Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact"; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 15 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was fixed to take secession into consideration. But Lincoln's victory was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence came, on the other hand, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-1790 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States themselves that have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri entered the ranks of the United States as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36º 30' latitude and west of Missouri. By this compromise the slavery area was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical line setting bounds to future propaganda for it seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the originator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38º north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet number half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government, its officials and contractors to drum together a sham popular representation in New Mexico, which imposed slavery on the Territory and with it the rule of the slaveholders.

However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Supreme Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had been long the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labor in the Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder is entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had wiped out every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, then the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from places for the cultivation of free states into places for the cultivation of slavery.

At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order as far as possible to hinder the colonization of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure to the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.

In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact purchased the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by robbery or by force of arms, is proclaimed as the great task of national politics. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The restless, piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the extension of slavery and the rule of the slaveholders, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been indented from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year has amounted to fifteen thousand.

Armed propaganda of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of the national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, at resistance to the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto suffered shipwreck. At length there came a turning point.

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and by the most unheard-of atrocities sought to dislodge her settlers from the Territory colonized by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the Northwest, a relief organization was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organization arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to relegate Kansas onto the ranks of the United States as a slave state with a slavery constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 1858) entered the lists against the government and its allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would contradict the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a northwestern state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonized by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.

The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Frémont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes that were cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the Northwest. In their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans repeated their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatized. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonization.

The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined to the limits of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual extension of slavery beyond their old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.

The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raised slaves in order to export these slaves into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has for years been almost completely stationary in consequence of the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina is already transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the states of the extreme South and Southwest for four million dollars yearly . As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, in order that one section of the slaveholders may equip new, fertile landed estates with slaves and in order that by this means a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the section left behind it. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would long ago have been wiped out. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, has strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years more," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."

As is known, the representation of the individual states in Congress depends, for the House of Representatives, on the number of persons constituting their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of the Northern Representatives was bound very rapidly to overtake that of the Southern. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, be its population great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to maintain its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers constantly grew through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these "poor whites" with those of the slaveholders, to give their turbulent longings for deeds a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.

A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the side of the "poor whites." With the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. Meanwhile, this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.

The Kansas struggle had already caused forth a split between the slave party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and by itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalization. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any increase of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would merely have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas' "settlers' sovereignty" could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by means of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the Northwest, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old Northern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over the Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the Northwest four years longer, and begin the struggle under more unfavorable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played va banque! When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the "poor whites" of the South, the South secured Lincoln the victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.

The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device. In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favorable and only possible solution of the conflict.


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Footnotes and Further Reading

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* Karl Marx, “Der nordamerikanische Bürgerkrieg,” Die Presse (Wien), Nr. 293, 25. Oktober 1861; English translation: “The North American Civil War,” in Karl Marx and Frederick [sic] Engels, The Civil War in the United States, edited by Richard Enmale, New York, International Publishers, 1937, 2nd ed. 1940, pp. 57-71.

[publius]

A war can be "about" damn near anything. The issue is power and money and specifically Federal power. A man that supports an Amendment to enshrine slavery may well find slavery to be a political issue. Lincoln is such a man. "May the members of a union of states leave this union?" This is the Civil War. My point is clear: the Civil War created a Prussian style military industrial bureaucratic complex-a Fascism if you wish. This was a new thing in the life of Americans. This did not exist before the Civil War. The overwhelming Thou Shat of military force had not occured prior to the Southern States legally withdrawing consent from governance from the Constitution according to their legal understanding of that Constitution-and parenthetically, according to the understanding of some of the best minds of the era-Lord Acton among them. Your moral approval of the Confederacy was not at issue among the men o the era - leaving the union was. Nor is it at stake in this discussion of Fascism in America.
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It is a matter of the military might of the Northern States and availabiliy of credit to purchase war materials. God is on the side of the victor, not good. Good has not come forth from the Civil War but a sprawling Imperialsm that straddles the globe has. Let us look then for the roots of this great evil and we see it lies in this American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, racist appeals to white skin privilege, EXACTLY LIKE RON PAUL.

Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? "Thou shalt" is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, "I will." "Thou shalt" lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales; and on every scale shines a golden "thou shalt." Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales; and thus speaks the mightiest of all the dragons: "All value of all things shines on me. All value has long been created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall be no more 'I will.'" Thus speaks the dragon.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). Part I, Chapter 1

And for my exegesis of this bliblical text in this year of the Dragon let us ponder the majesty of the State like atheists do God and bear with fortitude disintegrating America, the Federal state is dying from biting off more than it can chew. The elections are about who eats the corpse and who gets the brains of the body.

[JackRiddler]

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In this reading the authoritarian centralized state, modern total warfare and the accompanying permanent bureaucratic military, high and advanced capitalism and finally fascism all come from "the Civil War," or rather your reduction of it to a vaguely foreign-influenced northern aggression staged by Lincoln. Developments that were hundreds of years in the making (and yet at each stage always contingent on the outcome of present struggles, to this day) and occurred in many nations can be traced to one great fall from grace, blamed on a single demon. That's a hell of an obsessive enemy image Johnny Reb's still got going, 150 years later, when no one's forced to identify with either side in the war. I'll concede it's disheartening, to see these tropes in defense of the Confederacy still so vital and blind as ever.

.

[Sounder]

Thanks Jack, I did not know these specifics about the formation of the Republican Party, and find it amusing to be learning them from Karl Marx.

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and by the most unheard-of atrocities sought to dislodge her settlers from the Territory colonized by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the Northwest, a relief organization was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organization arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues……

…..The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Frémont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes that were cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the Northwest. In their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans repeated their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatized. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonization.

The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined to the limits of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual extension of slavery beyond their old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.

........the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, it was telegraphed from South Carolina: "Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact.

So, it seems then that principles did come into play and they were a threat to slaveholder moneymaking pursuits.

[compared2what?]

Jack, thank you very much for that clear and cogent summary. I love reading you. And thanks also for making it unnecessary for me to continue worrying about how and/or whether to clarify whatever parts of the stray half-baked thoughts I'd posted about tariffs (etcetera) might have been open to misconstruction if they had in fact been comprehensible at all.

You're the best.

I have a question about Ron Paul, if anyone's interested in returning to a discussion of him. BTW.

[compared2what?]

So, it seems then that principles did come into play and they were a threat to slaveholder moneymaking pursuits.

Totally. It's also worth noting that the slave states only developed their ostensibly principled opposition to federal government after they lost the not-very-republican electoral advantage that had, until then, allowed them to dominate it. (The The Three-Fifths Compromise.)

It's not a perfect analogy, but the big plantation owners were kinda-sorta the 1 percent of their day. And...Well. I might have a half-baked thought about that in relation to then-current feelings about manifest destiny. But I'm not sure. It might just be half-unbaked.

Thank you very much for your sweet and kind words, btw.

[compared2what?]

Pity the Civil War was not over slavery. Nor over human rights. Simply over money. 2 million dead, black soliders used as expendable by the North. The propaganda of the North is comparable to the propaganda of the World War I victors.

The Lincoln Cult's Latest Cover-Up

You mean the cover-up of the exact same proposed constitutional amendment that he prominently mentioned in his First Inaugural, the ongoing suppression of which I continued by highlighting it in bold-type here?

You're confused again. That's never been covered up. It's always been right there, in full public view, flatly contradicting all that bullshit about secession as a response to federal encroachment on states' rights that one still hears today.