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I've said my piece on this. Arguing is pointless. I think the details and facts speak for themselves. If you choose to look at them closely.What's so funny is I am not supporting the southern cause. Or the northern cause. And that my friend is where real history begins to shine.
;DAnother Rankean, I wont feel quite so lonely anymore. ;D I hope I am not jumping to conclusions here? Why is it that people feel you have to take a moral position on history and any point you try to make is wrong by default if you fail to make a moral judgment?I sometimes think it is like what I was taught when I was young NCO about the difference between personal and professional. Some folks just cant make the distinction between the two. By the same token some folks cannot divorce the narrative of events from the emotion and let emotion cloud their judgment.
Returing to the topic of, “Could the South have avoided war?” Yes, I think the South could have avoided war. I think finding a compromise was very possible.Congress passed the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution near the end of Buchanan?s administration. (Due to the outbreak of hostilities the states never had the time needed to adopt or reject it.) It prohibited the Federal Government from abolishing slavery in the states where it existed. (It was identical to a earlier proposal that William H. Stewart made in the Senate.) Buchanan supported it. So did Lincoln in his first inaugural address. If I did the math correctly, there were 19 free states and 15 slaves at the start of the Civil War and had all the slave states passed the amendment it would have taken 8 free states to also pass amendment for it to become part of the constitution. I think that was doable. I believe there were other compromises that could have been found had the South wanted to avoid war. (Lincoln was most open to compromise.) However, I don't think the South wanted to avoid war. On the contrary I think war was the aim of the fire eaters.
ok i still think we are categorizing all of the men who fought for the glory and honor of the south as slave holders. I can give you 3 examples: Gen. Robert Edward Lee, Gen. Thomas Johnathan Jackson, Captain Nathan W. Slay (my great great great great grandfather). Now I believe Mr. Grizzard put it best when he said ” I am an American by birth, BUT SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD!” I have and always will defend the southern soldiers' good name and their symbols because they fought for what they thought was right as did those invading Yankees. Now Daniel, have you ever had a something a friend or loved one say or do something that creates bad blood in between you and finally you just go to blows? If not sir you are a luckier man than I! I think the writer's in the movie Gettysburg[/i put it best when they had Pickett talk about the cause. I think that my idea, my, uh… my analogy of a gentlemen's club is-is fair enough. It's clear enough. Colonel, think on it, now. Now you suppose that we all join a club, a gentlemen's club. And then, well, after a time, several of the members began to, uh… began to *intrude* themselves into our private lives, our home lives. Began tellin' us what we could do, what we couldn't do. Well, then, wouldn't any one of us have the right to resign? I mean, just…resign. Well, that's what we did. That's what *I* did, and now these people are tellin' us that we don't have that right to resign. Thats what it boiled down to.You brought up the fact that Lincoln was going to allow slavery…well he did…until 1862/3. It sounded like in your last post that you were trying to make Lincoln look like some great hero when in fact he was a hypocrite! He called Secession unconstitutional when in fact HE suspended the rights to habious corpus, arrested the Maryland State Assembly. In 1864 many people in his party decided to arrest some of …influential (political machines) citizens for ONE DAY. In Chicago they were held in Camp Douglas!Oh and on a new not Stop complaining about Andersonville! There were bread riots in RICHMOND…THE CAPITOL! WE DID NOT HAVE ENOUGH FOOD FOR OUR CIVILIANS HOW DO YOU THINK WE COULD FEED POWS? BUT the north had an abundance of food. Heck Chicago was a rail head and yet the soldiers their were forced to eat rats and the guards at Camp Douglas were a lot worse than those at Andersonville! (sorry to rant about that i just got ticked off)
