From: mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Slavery and the Civil War (was Re: Quayle on abortion)
Distribution: world
X-NewsSoftware: GRn 1.16f (beta) by Mike Schwartz & Michael B. Smith
Date: 28 Aug 92 15:07:26 PST
Organization: Amiga makes it possible

In article <1851@celia.UUCP> steve@celia.UUCP (Steve Tyree) writes:
> In article <1992Aug26.153340.16381@pmafire.inel.gov> cdm@pmafire.inel.gov (Dale Cook) writes:
>
> >Thank you, Nathan, for supplying the concrete example I lacked.
> >What we had then was a VOTE by the southern states to secede.  Did it
> >work?  Did it settle the issue, Steve?
>
>  I knew what Nathan stated all along. You are equating voting with war.
> The southern states wanted to secede from the Union because they probably
> felt that they were losing power to a huge Federal Big Government. They
> lacked a proportional Representation via a vote.

This is absolutely correct.  The thing that triggered secession was a
new law passed by congress that forbade any new slave-states from
being admitted into the union.  That fixed the number of slave-states
while the nonslave-state majority would grow.  As it happened, the South
was into agriculture - exporting tobacco and cotton, etc., while the
north was industrialized.  The governmental needs of these two types
of business were different...  Guess who had the bulk of the railroad
funding?  The north.  Who needs railroads?  Companies to ship their
wares to the coasts for export.  And farmers to get their product
to ports, too.

> This was the first in-
> dividualist revolution against the federal socialist. If the southern
> states had been empowered and could control what mandates where forced
> down their throats from the feds, they might have agreed to stay in the
> union.

At the time of the Civil War, there were likely people who had actually
known the founding fathers in person.  The country was really still in
its infancy...  The ideals of the constitution and founding fathers
got a lot more respect in those days.  Today, manifest destiny is dead -
we do not seek to aquire new land to make as states.  The states are
supposed to have massive power and the central government is supposed
to be weak.  That's what the constitution says.  That's the only way
most of the original states would adopt the constitution.

> The Big Government Socialists used the divisive issue of slavery
> to justify killing people via a war. The underlying issue wasnt slavery, it
> was empowerment. If you dont give people empowerment, they will eventually
> try to revolt. This is what happened in the former Soviet Union. It could
> happen here in the future if we dont stop the growth of federalistic
> socialists empowerment.

Promising "manufactured" rights that can't be delivered is also a good
reason for revolt.

>  ps - I would have voted that slavery be abolished.
>

I wouldn't have voted that slavery be abolished in the form it was.  100+
years later, the decendants of slaves are jobless, homeless, and criminals
at a 3-4x higher rate than those who weren't slaves.  The act of freeing
the slaves was a great one, but to free them and not guarantee civil rights
at the same time was a big failure.  There's no way that there should have
been segregated washrooms (for example) for 100 years after the slaves were
freed.  Nor were the slaves offered a free ride home, either.  Nor were they
given other benefits, such as free land via the homestead acts, that would
have helped them succeed.


>  Steve Tyree - These opinions are mine and mine alone.

--
Amiga programmer of: GRn, MailMinder, Budokan, Beyond Dark Castle, Dark Castle
Sega Genesis programmer of: Dick Tracy and Marble Madness.
Mike Schwartz  (ames!zorch!amiga0!mykes or mykes@amiga0.sf-bay.org)
1124 Fremont Ave.
Los Altos, CA 94024

Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh