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Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Are Your Sources Trustworthy? Remember, The Winners Write History...

...at least in the short term. Things generally begin to be sorted out looking backwards several generations later. 

That is certainly the case with the Lincoln cult, i.e. the "church of Lincoln." He was a great man in many ways. He was also a self-serving pragmatist, the highest paid lawyer in the country who argued for "Massah" in his one and only case involving slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo has several books showing the other side of Lincoln which is not a pretty picture.

I was a Lincoln worshiper as a teenager and still have the report I did in high school. But I no longer look at him as a secular saint who "ended slavery" with his Emancipation Proclamation. He did no such thing. The only slaves freed by that document were those in the South, slaves over which Lincoln had no control. He simply, in pragmatic fashion, hoped to stir up a slave insurrection. In view of the bloody revolts in Haiti and Ned Turner's Rebellion, where entire families were wiped out like the genocide in Rwanda, Lincoln apparently had no concern about the possibility he would stir up genocide against southern families. 

He was thrilled with his generals who committed all-out war on non-combatants in the South. When you look at Sheridan and Sherman, you see war criminals, unbridled in their promotion of burning and looting even in cities that had no opposing forces. Read it and weep! Even they admitted their war crimes promoted by Lincoln! Sherman may very well have been a model for Hitler's "final solution" a term he himself used in describing the assault against the Plains Indians after the Civil War.

What instigated this post was one of my commenters who exhibits both Trump derangement syndrome and a hatred for the Confederacy that is visceral. I'm not a big fan of Trump, but would Hillary Clinton have been better? If she had been elected we would now have all three branches of government controlled by the party of death and destruction. We owe Donald Trump gratitude, not only for a Supreme Court that is only partly insane, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decent judges at lower levels of federal jurisprudence.

My commenter often addresses Trump, Lincoln, slavery, the Confederacy, etc. on posts that have absolutely nothing to do with his pet themes. A recent post on the j@b elicited comments about "President warp speed," which at least was related to the issue and one of the things that I personally blame Trump for. But then he threw in a comment from "abolitionist" William Lloyd Garrison. That shifted the conversation to the Civil War (again):

"Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.” William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist.

That generated a response from  another commenter:

Garrison was a raving anti-Semite. He was not a Christian. But a spiritualist. As such he did not deign to publicly pray to Almighty God to end slavery. He was also a warmonger. Garrison refused to follow the British example and simply purchase the freedom of southern slaves. Instead he insisted on war which produced an ocean of blood and created a post war serf class of small black farmers. 

The debate was on:

If Garrison was an antisemite, it is the first I've heard, though now I've even heard that Ulysses Grant was an antisemite. There are many baseless claims of antisemitism today. Even so, then Garrison was a broken clock.

If he was "not a Christian", then the same argument could be applied against following President warp speed. So often we have been asked to pray for Trump when awkward things burble up about his past...he's an "unfinished work". Indeed.

Garrison/ Lincoln was not the warmonger...this was the confederacy! Lincoln argued that the war must continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword". But the war was started by the illegal secession of the South, intent on the permanent continuation of the slave regime (see Cornerstone speech of the confederacy for proof on this "permanent" intention). Some argue that we began our descent to totalitarian with Lincoln. But Lincoln was not the first totalitarian...that was the slave plantations, the slave patrols that kept slaves in their place, and the state laws that blocked manumission!

I am not familiar with the Catholic migrant situation and Garrison, though I know there was an unfortunate distance between Protestants and Catholics antebellum. Witness the Catholic draft riots in New York. But there was also the bad example given by bishops who would not denounce slavery. Arguably, one could even trace this reticence back to Nicholas V and his "Dum Diversas" greenlighting of perpetual servitude for African pagans.

The "simple purchase of freedom" for the slaves would have been more difficult than in Britain because the American South was where the British banksters shifted their money, in the form of slave mortgages, when they couldn't have slaves themselves. Who knows how high the confederate ransom would have demanded. And the British banksters arguably continued their leveraging of black white conflict by backdoor promotion of segregation in the post war South.

Public shaming was indeed what was called for about slavery and is called for about abortion. Another Garrison quote: “The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.”

Whew! That elicited a long response from me limited to the question of secession:

You put the accuracy of everything you say in question when you claim that secession was illegal. Three of the states explicitly included secession in their ratification of the Constitution. The colonies themselves seceded from England.
Lincoln obviously believed in secession because he allowed the secession of West Virginia from the state of Virginia making it clear that he also rejected the sovereign rights of the states. He was a federalist tyrant through and through.

There's a good article on the right to secession if you care to look at it. https://forloveofgodandcountry.com/2018/06/01/the-right-of-secession-as-reserved-by-the-states-in-their-ratification-of-the-us-constitution/

Here's a paragraph that explicitly discusses secession.

"Three of the original thirteen states were particularly skeptical of the government that the newly-drafted Constitution created and so they ratified it only conditionally. These three states were Virginia and New York, the great powerhouses of the New World, and Rhode Island (tiny, but very liberty-minded). In their ratification documents, adopted at their Ratification Conventions, they specifically and carefully reserved the right of secession. These are referred to as the “Resumption Clauses” or “Resumptive Clauses,” and they are exceedingly important to understand this topic. I attached Virginia’s ratification document at the end of this article. You will see that Virginia conditioned her ratification on several things, including the Right to Secede and on the addition of a Bill of Rights (for which she made a number of suggestions)."

One more comment about Garrison(which I didn't post because I ended the discussion), I'll post here because it shows how much we need to research our sources. This commenter whom I respect very much can always be depended upon to do that.:

Re: "Another Garrison quote: “The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.” 

What a hypocrite! Over 2-million men served not on pedestals but in the Union Army. Garrison was not one of them. Half of those who served were either killed in action, died or were disabled by diseased or injury, or were wounded or went missing. A quarter of the Union Army was composed of poor immigrants. The same suffering immigrants who were literally on his doorstep which Garrison ignored. Many men Garrison's age, North and South, went into harms way or at least in their local militias. Not Garrison, who never publicly acknowledged Christ as his savior, but lusted for blood. And he got it. But it was the blood of the workers and the working poor, not his own. He was a truly evil man who got a lot of good Christian men killed. But in the end he freed the slaves in name only. And a visit today to any major, American city will show that the descendants of slaves are still in bondage.

Many people simplify the Civil War into nothing but a fight over slavery, i.e., North-GOOD abolitionists/South-BAD slavers! 

That is incredibly simplistic and downright wrong. It also shows an incredible ignorance about both the history of slavery, the economics, the commitment to state sovereignty, and other historical realities. 

Before the Civil War there were more abolitionist groups in the South than in the North. Stonewall Jackson disobeyed Virginia law by teaching slaves to read in preparation for the end of slavery, the "peculiar institution." Jackson purchased several slaves at their request who wanted to work off their purchase price and be freed. He was truly a good and honorable man!

The Cornerstone Speech was made by Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who was from the deep South was one man's opinion. Many in the deep South may have agreed with him. Many others particularly in the boarder states did not. Virginia, for example, would likely not have seceded if Lincoln had not forced the issue with Fort Sumter. How can one speech by one man be taken as the opinion of everyone in the South? It can't any more than Barack Obama or Joe Biden's views can be taken as the opinion of every American or even every Democrat. But that's a key argument for this commenter who brings it up over and over ad nauseum

Slavery was terrible. But can you find one single comment by Jesus in the Gospel saying Christians should have ended slavery by engaging in murderous war? No! In fact, he praised the centurion who begged him to cure his slave saying of the pagan, "I have not found such faith in Israel." That is not an argument for slavery; it simply points out that some evils are worse than others. And you don't hear much from the Confederacy haters about the slavery that still exists today.

At any rate, I try these days to check my sources. I want to know which historians are worth listening to and which have an agenda, i.e., critical race theory and the attack on white males who should be wiped from the pages of history! If someone is teaching hatred, don't trust him!

Critical thinking is sorely lacking in today's world. Those of us who love the truth should be diligent about trying to bring it back.  Jumping on bandwagons without thinking things through or really know what you're talking about is unfortunately too common today. 

Truth can set us free only if we are serious about pursuing it!

42 comments:

  1. Bravo, Ms Mary Ann! Thanks for mentioning Thomas DiLorenzo's books, which are real eye openers. Another historian I love is Hillaire Belloc, seldom mentioned these days in the mainstream. Paul Johnson, who recently passed away isn't bad, either.

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  2. Mary Ann, I think you would enjoy these videos by Bishop Sanborn. There are 4 videos in the link I've posted. These are not sede videos, but just short talks on Christendom from the French Revolution to VII. I've known for quite some time that our country was not founded by Christians, nor on Christian principles...but these talks give some insight into the why's and how's. I hope you'll consider giving a listen, and you do would love your thoughts on it.

    https://novusordowatch.org/2023/01/sanborn-history-christendom-1789-to-2022/

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  3. Slavery in the US could only be ended by a war (yes, it was about slavery - plenty of Confederates and their official documents, such as secession declarations, declare this clearly). Peaceful alternatives were exhausted long before then. After all, the Founders wanted to abolish slavery right at the ratification of the Constitution - and the Democrats kept it in. By one vote. It was a problem that was kicked down to future generations and it exploded when the South courted war by seceding on an utterly wrong cause (just because an action is legal does not mean that it is done for the right reason or is righteous). The Southern supporters and benefactors of slavery brought on this war and Lincoln and the generals under him should be rightfully commended for helping to eradicate this evil (through they did mistakes along the way) - and all the excuses the Confederates tossed about are all about one thing. Money. Keeping the slaves made them richer than they could've been otherwise - losing the slaves would've made them poor. That's it. God, country, Constitution, decency - all of these "reasons" were a smokescreen second-hand for their love of one of the greatest sins that was punished by immediate death in the Mosaic Law. To me (and to Lev Tolstoi and even the Caucasians), Lincoln is a moral exemplar because despite having the temptation to just go along to get along, he chose to do his best to spearhead the effort to clean America of this evil. He even died for it, by being shot by a villain who was specifically incensed by Lincoln's speech that outlined Lincoln's want to grant suffrage to the slaves. So at least he stood by for his principles in the end. "About the slavery that exists today" - it seems to exist only in lands that are not Christian in any way, shape or form. And the only way to solve that is colonialism and introduction of Western civilization - an unpopular opinion, given how the evil Communists have accomplished their goals of convincing everyone that populations that are not ready for self-government should be given independence. And the idea that a just war is not worth it (think of the southern slave-holding families! They shouldn't reap the benefits of their impudent attitude towards the freedom of others!) is one of the foremost platforms of every evil in any century. When cornered and at the cusp of being punished or thwarted, evildoers will never fail to appeal to goodness's mercy - and shed the fake tears of the battered serpent.

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  4. Sorry you lost me at Sherman and Sheriden as war criminals. Their actions were directed at property which are legitimate targets in war usage. There were no systemic military tribunals directed at reb civilians. Final destruction of the Shenandoah Valley was necessary in 64 to compel lee out of Petersburg and Richmond. Sherman's March thru Georgia showed the helplessness of reb government. North Carolina was treated with more leniency because of the strong union sentiment. There is no question that the radical repub abolushinist strategy shortened the war. Honestly the south didn't experience what happens in many civil wars. Google droghheda.

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  5. Sheridan and Sherman drove civilians out of their homes and burned their farms in some cases as winter was coming on. I think you might have a different perspective if it happened to your wife and children while you were away at war. The Burning is a film about what happened in the Shenandoah Valley. It's horrifying. It was all-out war. How is that just "directed at property?"

    The fact that other civil wars were worse doesn't make what was done moral.

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  6. And I think you might have a different perspective on this if you were a whipped slave whose babies were sold down the river. Or whose husband or parents were sold out from under.

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  7. Most southerners weren't slave owners. So why did they fight? There were very few slaves in the Shenandoah Valley, for example.

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  8. Why did they fight? You tell me. Why did people lockdown or take the shot.

    It is said that southern abolitionists were made to feel very uncomfortable in the south which is why they moved north or learned to keep mouths shut.

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  9. @Mary Ann Kreitzer

    To your first point, the food from those farms was feeding Lee's Army, and the Confederate government was so inept at administration that it resorted to confiscating private property. Destroying it was the only way to ensure it didn't reach the bellies of the Army. And yes, while they did suffer the consequences of hunger and privation, they were overdue for the reality check of what they had so eagerly cheered on in 1861. They had a romantic view of war; the burnings were reality kicking them square in the face. And like entitled leftists, they whined about suffering consequences and resisted any sort of soul-searching.

    To your second point, there are several things to consider: first, many white southerners who didn't own slaves were still tied to the institution. Overseers, slave-catchers, slave traders, and men whose fathers were the owners but were due to inherit fit the bill. This also must include the many men who aspired to become slaveowners, but were too poor to buy them in 1861. Others shared the planter class' paranoia about slave rebellions and a repeat of the Haitian Rebellion, where the whites were massacred by the blacks.
    The hill country, where slavery was nonexistent, overwhelmingly opposed secession and supplied 180,000 white troops to the Union Army before the first conscription law was ever passed. Given that the Confederacy mobilized 900,000 men during the entire war, this was not a drop in the bucket. The Shenandoah Valley had a lot of Unionist sentiment, and was the scene of intense partisan warfare in between major campaigns. Far from a unanimous Southern effort, the Confederacy was more akin to the Benjaminites in Judges 19-21.

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  10. Re: "whose babies were sold down the river"

    A Yankee, Margaret Sanger, started Planned Parenthood with the stated goal of the "extermination of the Negro race". She was funded by other wealthy Yankees. Yankee institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Brown were funded by the slave trade. The Jesuits at Georgetown owned slaves. The NYT was pro-slavery and pro-war and anti-Reconstruction. The abolition movement started to gain momentum when the Royal Navy stopped the Atlantic slave trade and the Yankee elites could no longer profit from it. War profiteering replaced the Yankees' elites profits from the suppressed slave trade.

    BTW kindly cite an actual instance wherein the babies of slaves were actually "sold down the river".

    Happy New Year.

    Richard W Comerford

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  11. Re: Slavery in the US could only be ended by a war" January 18, 2023 at 6:17 PM under sources trustworthy?

    The Slave trade was ended when white, male, Christian British pastors led a prayer movement to convince the white, male British Politicians to send the largely white male Royal Navy to interdict the interdict the Atlantic slave trade. The British then went on to peacefully purchase their freedom of slaves throughout their Empire. The interest on which purchase is still being paid by the British tax payer to this day. A similar movement to free the slaves peacefully existed in the USA with supporters in both the North and the South. The Northern elites wanted war instead.

    Happy New Year

    Richard W Comerford

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  12. " For slave owners, who considered the basic family unit to be comprised of mother and child, husbands and fathers could be, and were, easily replaced. Many a slave woman was assigned a new husband by her master. Male children were also frequently taken from slave mothers. The bond between an enslaved mother and daughter was the least likely to be disturbed through sale. Yet this tie was also fragile. Owners could reap large returns by selling pretty girls, especially light-skinned ones, into prostitution or concubinage.

    The possibility of separation was an ever-present threat to every member of a slave family. When a master died, his slaves might be indiscriminately distributed among his heirs or sold off to multiple buyers. When a planter's child was born or married, he or she might receive the gift of a black attendant. Mothers were taken from their own children to nurse the offspring of their masters. And slave children were torn from mothers and brought into the house to be raised alongside the master's sons and daughters."

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  13. Re: "whose babies were sold down the river" - 2

    Again. Kindly cite an actual instance wherein the babies of slaves were actually "sold down the river".

    Just one case. Please.

    Happy New Year

    Richard W Comerford

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  14. "Lou Smith remembered a woman who bore three children who were subsequently sold when they reached the age of one or two, an experience that ‘broke her heart.” So when she gave birth for a fourth time she refused to relinquish her infant. Once the baby reached two months old, “she got up and give it something out of a bottle and purty soon it was dead.”[2] Such desperately tragic practices denied enslavers valuable future offspring and meant enslaved women would not bring infants into the harsh world of bondage."

    Emily West, professor of American history, University of Reading, UK

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  15. Sherman's March to the Sea was a gratuitous infliction of war on civilians intended to "break" and demoralize the South. This war on civilians ...known as Total War....had gradually been phased out in the Western world, note that at the Battle of Gettysburg, people showed up with picnic baskets to watch the battle between the armies. Lincoln was admired by Hitler and Stalin for his use of Total War on civilians, mostly elderly men, women and children at that point. The Confederacy had excellent generals, but they had no manufacturing base to make munitions, etc., the North was well financed and wanted the South at their disposal, and to profit off slavery, not eradicate it. Lincoln himself said that if he could end the war without ending slavery, he would. The war was about states rights and the subjugation of the Southern states by wealthy industrialists who wanted cheap (slave produced) cotton from the South, and the South to not be able to export it to Britain's textile mills. The pope even recognized the legitimate right of the states to secede. It is particularly shameful that Robert E. Lee's home was stolen and turned into Arlngton cemetery (it was his wife's inheritance through her Custis family).

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  16. "Lincoln was admired by Hitler and Stalin for his use of Total War on civilians, mostly elderly men, women and children at that point"

    It is my understanding Hitler admired Lincoln's denial of states rights but in Lincoln's case this was appropriate because we were talking about an inalienable right that took precedence. Hitler misconstrued Lincoln.

    And whatever Lincoln was going into the civil war he was an abolitionist going out.

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  17. Anon is mistaking Gettysburg for first manassas. Lee was a traitor and escaped the hangman by Grant and Lincolns leniency. His loss of Arlington was minor. He was offered command and resigned and joined rebs. What many of you advocate is McClellan war with rosewater. No Grant no Sherman the confed and slavery still going.

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  18. Re: Emily West, professor of American history, University of Reading, UK

    West is a Marxist. A professional liar. She is, at best, reporting hearsay. Where are her primary documents?

    Yet again. An actual case please.

    Happy New Year,

    Richard W Comerford

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  19. Newguy,

    You equate believing that a war that killed 600,000 and created a massive tyrannical federal government with desiring "slavery still going?"

    Is there no room for civil disagreement over the tactics to end slavery without bloodshed and carnage. Everywhere else in the world slavery ended through compensated emancipation? (Although slavery continues today.)

    I'm disappointed that this thread indicates the civil war is still on.

    I particularly lament the maligning of a good man like Lee while justifying the war crimes of Sheridan and Sherman. Sheridan went on to repeat his crimes against the Indians describing his tactics of annihilation by saying,“If a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers; but, with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.”

    I guess red babies were worth less than black babies to him. Although somehow I doubt his motivation in the Civil War was to end slavery.

    Even liberal Ted Turner saw the complicated situation of the Civil War and supported a more balanced view in the film Gods and Generals where he made a cameo appearance. I recommend the film if you haven't seen it. I also recommend historian John Taylor's book on Robert E. Lee, Duty Faithfully Performed. He attempted to correct the historical revisionism attacking Lee.

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  20. I meant "babies" in the same sense as this:"Family members said one of the three, 14-year-old Brandy Wilson, slipped on a piling at the water’s edge near Lamarque Street at about 5 p.m. Saturday and entered the water. Her 8-year-old sister, Ally Berry Wilson, and Wilson’s 15-year-old boyfriend went over to help her but they fell in as well.

    The boy’s family is not releasing his name while the search is still underway.

    Gathered on the levee near the spot where the children went in, relatives of Brandy and Ally answered the questions of investigators and hoped for a miracle.

    "My babies are in there," the girls’ father, Allen Berry, said, gesturing out toward the river as tears ran down his cheeks."


    And indeed there is ample documentation on slave children sold at those ages. Nonmarxist profs are few and far between and I don't have time to research the literal form of my statement at present. Maybe I will make time when you present the literal interpretation primary source evidence for " British then went on to peacefully [sic] purchase their freedom of slaves throughout their Empire. "





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  21. Mary Ann,

    I appreciate your humility in not mentioning the brave chaining self to abortion table in protest and subsequent arrest. This is a type of nonviolent resistance few attempt nowadays. I believe it is because they have seen the power of propaganda to misrepresent and misshape their efforts to protest, so they have retreated to merely helping pregnant moms (similar to underground railroad). But in the end, it took the Civil War to produce the thirteenth amendment. Most of the seceding states mentioned slavery in their secession statement as a motive, and it is clear from both these and Jeff Davis and VP that slavery was *intended to be permanent* (*not* transient as our founders implied in their hopes). I believe Lincoln was as principled in his treatment of the Confederacy as the US was in fighting Hitler. Both the Confederacy and Hitler were totalitarian systems and required massive resistance both internal and external, to defeat. I am not proposing violence or war now, merely massive nonviolent protest that will make it clear that once more an inalienable right is being transgressed. In particular, the torch of "created equal" must be held high as it is the only hope that feminist minds will repent and be turned against abortion.

    Fooling around at the state level only waves the flag of incrementalism and defeat. It is a cynical dodge laughingly tossed at prolifers by President Warp Speed, who had also wanted to impose rape exceptions on the GOP platform, transforming it also into a contradiction of "created equal".

    The Constitution's slave clauses, including the 3/5 of a person, actually gave Virginia 4 out of 5 of the first US presidents as Virginia slaveholders. This along, with the *knowledge* (Madison's notes on the Constitution, embargoed for fifty years, document) that abolition of the slave *trade* would not extinguish slavery as states like Virginia could breed slaves faster anyway, is why the South did not have a moral right to secede. Ever since the slave code of 1662 that designated the baby of a slave to be a slave, our country has been in the grip of eugenics, and that is one thing that certainly was not extinguished with the thirteenth amendment, only directed in another way. The Lost Cause myth and Jim Crow segregation was a Democrat phenomenon, only it has been turned back around to falsely blame the GOP, which has always been the platform of abolition, even though infiltrators have obscured this. One critical example of this last was Trump's passionate and unnecessary bag holding for the Democrats in declaiming the "beautiful" Confederate flags. This has obscured for all that the slaveholders, the Confederates, and the segregators were by and large Democrats. The single longest standing monument to slavery is in fact the Democrat party.

    This is one reason you find me criticizing President Warp Speed, though as you know, there is actually quite a long list of other reasons. It is not logical to say, "would you rather have had Hilary?" In one sense, it would have been better because then conservatives would not have had their guard down and allowed the coviet transgressions. But going forward, GOP should certainly eschew Trump and also learn from the mistake of nominating him in the first place. While noone is perfect Rand Paul does have a human life at conception act that I don't believe has rape exceptions. And yet he is blocked because of those who cling to President Warp Speed.

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  22. I appreciate your comment but disagree on a number of points. Frankly, though, I'm too tired to get into it. The North was just as guilty for slavery as the South, not to mention the virtual slavery of the Irish indentured servants, the Norwegians in the canning factories, etc. Greed will always exploit and greedy tyrants ran the North.

    Slavery was very soon going to be economically unfeasable with technological advances. If you ever go to Monticello look at Thomas Jefferson's extensive records on the maintenance of his slaves. There is no way it was going to continue in perpetuity.

    To say all that is not a defense of slavery! I get a little tired of people saying I'm pro-slavery because I do not believe a horrendoous bloody war was necessary or inevitable.

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  23. Re:" present the literal interpretation primary source evidence"

    See William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) an Evangelical Christian who led the movement to peacefully abolish slavery in the British Empire and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.


    Happy New Year

    Richard W Comerford

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  24. Maryann - Thanks for sharing your thoughts'. I guess, for me, the ACW is just like everything else these days. Folks can't be talked with on any subject without taking offense. So, I should have not responded at all.

    Thanks for your suggestion on that Lee biography. I've hit Southhall Freemans Lee biography as well as his "Lee's Lieutenants". Most of my reading current interest is campaign level. Going thru Hennessey's coverage of first and second manassas. Sword's Franklin and Springhill and Nashville rightly eviscerates Hood as an independant army commander.

    Cheerio--

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  25. Necessarily long extract of two articles!
    "LONDON (Reuters) - British investment bank Rothschild and top law firm Freshfields said on Wednesday they “greatly regretted” links between their 19th century founders and the slave trade.

    Founders Nathan Mayer Rothschild and James William Freshfield both supported the abolition of slavery. But new historical research showed both were engaged in business linked to the trade, the Financial Times reported last weekend.

    Both companies issued statements on their websites in which they said they had been unaware of the connection.

    “We greatly regret that the firm is linked in any way to the inhumane institution of slavery,” Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer said. Rothschild said the company greatly regrets being linked in any way “to the abhorrent institution of slavery”.

    The links could prove contentious for both firms’ operations in the United States, where numerous banks and other bodies have come under pressure to make amends for profiting from slavery, the FT said.

    Documents from Britain’s national archives, which academics at University College London are studying, showed that Rothschild, a founder of the banking dynasty, had allowed the use of slaves as collateral when banking with a slave owner, the FT said.

    The documents also indicated that Freshfield acted as a trustee for some clients in deals involving Caribbean slave plantations.

    “James William Freshfield was an active member of the Church Missionary Society ... (which) was committed to the abolition of slavery,” the law firm said in its statement.

    Rothschild himself arranged a loan on behalf of the British government which accelerated the abolition of the slave trade by facilitating the payment of some compensation to slave owners, the bank said."

    To be continued...


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  26. Second of three necessarily long postings...
    Rothschild himself had been a beneficiary of this compensated emancipation, having himself owned qualifying slaves. But there's another chapter...Rothschild in American slavery:

    "Still the Louisiana legislature churned out new bank charters......Alabama did not issue state bonds, but the ***Rothschilds, financiers of London and Paris and bitter rivals of the Baring Brothers, invested heavily in Alabama’s banking system. *** ......By the end of the 1830s, the state-chartered banks of the cotton-growing states had issued bonds for well over $50 million dollars.

    Armed with repeated infusions of new cash lent by banks who handed it out with little concern for whether or not mortgaged slaves had already been “hypothecated”—assigned to someone else as a hedge against loans—southwestern enslavers brought tens of thousands of additional slaves into the cotton states. '''........

    A quarter million people were moved by force, sold, mortgaged, collateralized, securitized, sold again 3,000 miles from where they actually toiled. Each summer they learned how to pick the fields clean faster, at the end of a whip. From 1831 to 1837, cotton production almost doubled, from 300 million pounds to over 600 million. Too much was reaching Liverpool for Manchester to spin and weave, much less to sell to consumers in the form of cloth. Prices per pound at New Orleans, which had begun the boom in 1834 at eighteen cents, slipped to less than ten by late 1836. “Everybody is in debt neck over ears,” was the word from Alabama, but slave “traders are not discouraged”—many of their buyers believed that cotton prices would begin to climb again. They had no evidence to suggest a return to rising prices. Supply clearly exceeded demand. Yet here was the psychology, the animal spirits of the typical bubble at work, saying: this time is different. But as the slowing prices began to pinch, the Bank of England, alarmed at the outflow of capital to the U.S. in the form of securities purchases, cut its lending in the late summer of 1836. (At the about the same time, Andrew Jackson issued his Specie Circular, which slowed the purchases of public land, but appears to have had little effect on what transpired next in the cotton market.) Merchant firms subsequently began to call in their loans to each other.

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  27. Third of three necessarily long postings
    "
    In early 1837, a visitor to Florida, which was already—as it has ever been—one of the most bubble-prone and speculative parts of the U.S.—wrote that “there is great risk to the money lender and paper shaver—for the whole land, with very few exceptions, are all in debt for property and a fall in cotton must bring a crash with most tremendous consequences to all trades and pursuits.” Back in Britain, the crash had already begun. Three massive Liverpool and London firms, unable to meet their commercial debt because cotton prices had dropped, collapsed at the end of 1836. The tsunami rushed across the ocean to their trading partners in New Orleans. By late March each of the top ten cotton-buying firms there had collapsed.

    Except for planters, who were mostly debtors, almost every market actor—cotton merchants, dry-goods merchants, Southern bankers, Northern bankers—now realized that they were both creditors and debtors. But as they scrambled to collect debts from others so that they could pay off their own, two things were happening. The first was that their individually rational pursuit of liquidity created the collectively irrational outcome of systemic failure. No one was able to pay debts, and so most buying and selling ground to a halt. An attempt to restart the system failed. A second, bigger crash in 1839 finished off many of the survivors of the 1837 panic. During those two years, meanwhile, a second consequence had emerged: the discovery that most of the debt owed by planters and those who dealt with them was “toxic,” to use a recent term. It was unpayable. The planters of Mississippi owed New Orleans banks alone $33 million, estimated one expert, and could not hope to net more than $10 million from their 1837 crop to pay off that debt. Nor could they sell off capital to raise cash because prices for slaves and land, the ultimate collateral in the system, had plummeted as the first wave of bankruptcy-driven sales tapped what little cash there was in the system. This meant that the financial system wasn’t just frozen, but that many creditors’ balance sheets were overwhelmed....

    Sorry, one more posting to go...

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  28. Fourth and final
    "
    After the cotton-brokerage and plantation-supply firms, the next to go were the southwestern banks, whose currency and credit became worthless. They were unable to continue to make coupon payments—interest installments on the bonds they had sold on far-off securities markets. Some might have been able to collect from their debtors by foreclosing mortgages on slaves and land, but, of course, the markets for those two assets had collapsed. Many slave owners had layered multiple mortgages on each slave, meanwhile, and were using political leverage to protect them from the consequences of their financial over-leverage. The ultimate expression of this practice was the repudiation of the government-backed bonds by the legislatures of several southwestern states and territories, most notably Mississippi and Florida—in effect, they toxified the bonds themselves, emancipating slave-owning debtors from the holders of slave-backed securities. The power of the state had created the securitized slave, and now the power of the state destroyed it, in order to protect that slave’s owner from his creditors.
    ...
    But not all debts could be repudiated. And many of the creditors were located in northern states. Their attempts to collect increasingly brought Southern planters to calculate the value of the Union. Nor could Southern entrepreneurs recapitalize their own institutions. After repudiation, outside investors were cautious about lending money to Southern institutions. ...By the early 1840s, Wall Street and New York had emerged as the definitive victor. Slave owners continued to supply virtually all of the industrial world’s most important commodity, but the post-1837 inability of Southern planters to control their own financing or get the capital that would enable them to diversify led them to sacrifice massive skimmings of their profits to financial intermediaries and creditors. They sought greater revenues in the only ways that they could. The first was by making more and more cotton. They forced enslaved people to achieve an incredible intensity of labor, ... but the increase in cotton production (which rose from 600 million pounds in 1837 to two billion in 1859) was more than the market could absorb. The price remained low in most years in comparison to historic levels....

    The second method of enhancing revenues was by seeking new territory, both in order to add to the land under cultivation and with the hope of provoking a new boom. ...

    Financial innovation in the 1820s and 1830s thus had massive, unforeseen, and often ironic consequences. But they were consequences in the “real” economy. Of course, there is something magical, fictitious, and strange about commodifying houses, land, and most of all, human beings. Each of those things has its own claim to being treated as something unique, with moral rights. ... *The securitization of a human is far more offensive still to our moral sensibilities, turning persons into numbers and paper bonds, and so dividing them up and recombining them by legislative fiat that you can carry them across the ocean in suitcases and sell them to people who profess their support for emancipation.​​ If that isn’t fiction, then I don’t know what is. And yet in the end the reverberations set off by the leveraging of slavery’s inequities into further equity for those who exploited them were what brought the structure of real-life slavery crashing down."

    So Rothschild, slave owner, gets the profit from making a loan to the British people to pay slaveholders for emancipation (from which he also benefits as slaveholder), then goes on and finances American slavery. This is they type of thing that happens with paying ransom rather than simply declaring and then supporting inalienable rights. And don't think that's the last chapter of Rothschild, who recognized a eugenic cash cow when he saw one.

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  29. "New research by University College London has uncovered links between British Investment bank Rothschild and City law firm Freshfields and slavery.

    Reported in the Financial Times, documents from the British National Archives reveal that Rothschild founder, Nathan Mayer Rothschild used slaves as collateral in a bank deal with a slave owner and James William Freshfield, founding partner of Freshfields, acted as a trustee in deals involving Caribbean slave plantations.

    Both men have been historically portrayed as opponents of slavery, with Mr Rothschild organising the government loan used to compensate slave owners in the 1830s.

    The £20 million compensation package, which was used to persuade slave owners to finally end slavery, was equal to 40 per cent of state expenditure at the time.'"

    So bankster dealing out antislavery act loan is slaver himself with hand in till for his own payoff.

    But there's more..
    Immediately after this antislavery act pays off slavers, Rothschild goes to American South and uses money to peddle slave mortgages anew.

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  30. No matter how complicated you think history is, it is more complicated than you think.

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  31. I don't question your belief that Lincoln committed war crimes or that the South had a right to secede, I just wonder how you square your beliefs w/your support of Putin's invading Ukraine.

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  32. What makes you think I supported the invasion?

    This is where assumptions distort reality.

    I never supported the invasion and don't now. God help the poor Ukrainians who are pawns in this horrible "game of thrones."

    But I think the U.S. and the EU pushed Putin into it and I doubt he is the satanic black-hearted villain the woke media make him out to be. There are plenty of other villains in the piece. In fact, most of the primary characters pushing the on-going hostilities deserve the hook; although I doubt the penis piano player actor is more than a puppet whose strings are being pulled by others.

    The war would be long over if not for the warmongers and money launderers in the U.S. and Ukraine who have a lot to gain from the continued conflict. How much of the money that we're sending to Ukraine is ending up in offshore accounts of Zelensky and his handlers? How much of our war machine is being sold to our enemies on the black market to be used against us in the future? Nobody knows because we're writing blank checks with no accountability.

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  33. Re: ." I believe Lincoln was as principled in his treatment of the Confederacy as the US was in fighting Hitler." January 19, 2023 at 5:02 PM under Winners write history.

    Before war the USG aided Hitler in his racist persecutions of Jews (See MV ST Louis). US Corporations provided invaluable assistance to the Nazis for the Holocaust (See DEC). After the war started USG refused to discus peace terms with Germany but instead insisted on unconditional surrender. USG ensured, with vast expenditures of American blood and treasure, the survival of Stalin. USG conducted a ruthless bombing campaign against German non-combatants to include terror, fire bombings (See Dresden). At Yalta the USG surrendered eastern Europe to Soviet totalitarianism. And now at Devos USG applauds the efforts of the son of a high Nazi official as that son attempts to put in place a Nazi-like one world government.

    The foregoing are violations of St Augustine's teachings on Just war. The USG waged unjust wars against both the Confederacy and Nazi Germany.

    Happy New Year

    Richard W Comerford

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  34. Re: "I just wonder how you square your beliefs w/your support of Putin's invading Ukraine." January 20, 2023 at 12:45 PM

    Several weeks ago the Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Army, in a bid for more NATO assistance, said that the Ukrainian Army had not been fighting for 8-months but for 8-years. He was correct. In 2014 the USG overthrew the democratically elected government of the Ukraine. Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior Troops (trained and funded by USG) launched an attack on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The Interior Troops were recruited from the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement (OUM) who were actual swastika flying Nazis. Their targets in the Donbas were ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who were attempting to revert to Christianity. The fighting was literally between Neo-Nazis vs Neo-Christians. After 8-years of slaughter Putin intervened with the professed aim of destroying Nazism in the Ukraine.

    The EU, NATO and the USA are on the side of the Nazis against the Christians..

    Happy New Year.

    Richard W Comerford

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  35. Thank you for your intelligent article. The winners write the history books. Occasionally falsehoods may be corrected, but rarely. I will avoid a long comment, but as a trivia matter: As Federal troops marched into Richmond after the surrender of Lee, there was one legally owned slave in the Confederate Capitol. That slave’s owner: Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. Sorta ironic, don’t you think?

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  36. In this case, history was written by the Lost Cause.

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  37. Re: "In this case, history was written by the Lost Cause". January 23, 2023 at 9:52 AM under "history"

    In this case St Augustine would write that the war was unjust and unChristian in that not all options for peace were exhausted, efforts at peace negotiations were ignored, war was made upon non-combatants and the damage done by the war far exceeded the damage if the peace was maintained.

    One only has to visit a large US city to realize that the descendants of slaves are, in the main, still held in bondage with iron manacles replaced by absent fathers, porn, drugs, violence, gangs, anti-education and the near eradication of Christianity.

    Happy New Year.

    Richard W Comerford

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  38. In this case, the Democrats who had been the slaveholders, the confederates, and the lost cause segregators, managed to roll over their power into the eugenic welfare state and *then* get the GOP to hold the bag for them. Without ever apologizing.

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  39. https://youtu.be/JsPJXx3WFH8

    Lincoln got what he deserved.

    Lincoln got the nickname Honest Abe for the same reason a 400 LB mobster gets the nickname "Tiny."

    America died owing to the malign actions of the mercantilist dictator.

    Abbeyville Institute

    Prof Clyde Wilson

    https://mises.org/topics/decentralization-and-secession

    Public schools are the seminaries that teach the America religion. Open your mind...become an autodidact

    ReplyDelete
  40. You are not on your own. The truth is out there. Go and get it.

    https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/founding-father-s-library-a-bibliographical-essay-by-forrest-mcdonald

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  41. The socalled "founding fathers library" article omits the Declaration of Independence in its long list of sources.

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  42. Re: "the Democrats who had been the slaveholders, the confederates, and the lost cause segregators" January 23, 2023 at 2:25 PM under "History".

    The New England elites grew rich from participating in the slave trade. When the Royal Navy shut down the Atlantic slave trade (at no little cost in blood) the New England elites became abolitionists and grew rich from war profiteering.

    Happy Year

    Richard W Comerford

    ReplyDelete