For those supporting the peculiar institution in the South it was all about maintaining the social, financial and political control of what was tantamount to a feudal aristocracy. Slaves allowed them to maintain control in those areas that free people who could become voters never would.

Regards,
Dennis

Regards,
Dennis

My apologies!

The sun is slavery and the planets are all the other listed causes. Without the sun the solar system would not exist or go careening off into space. Absent slavery all the other “causes” would never have existed or been without resorting to armed conflict.

You’re new here, so you get one warning, and one warning only.

To be quite clear about this: I pay for this website, so that means that I get to make the rules. The rules are what they are. I am the sole arbiter of them, and there is no right of appeal. Ever. If you don’t like the rules, there’s a simple solution: don’t bother coming back here, because they most assuredly are not going change just because you don’t like them.

There are three rules: (1) no posting under false or assumed names or anonymously (you’re okay with that one); (2) Be polite and respectful at all times; personal attacks are never acceptable and are never tolerated; and (3) nobody–and especially people whom I don’t know–gets to insult me on my own website.

Those are the rules. As I said, they are not negotiable, and there is no right of appeal.

Your comments are coming dangerously close to crossing the line on rule number 2. Again, I couldn’t possibly care less whether you think your comments are appropriate in tone or content. Your opinion about that subject is entirely irrelevant, as this is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship with me as the benevolent despot, and when it comes to the application of the rules, my opinion is the ONLY one that matters.

Here is my ruling: Either dial back the snarky semi-personal attacks, or you’re gone. This is the one and only warning you will get. You will get no further warnings. There is no right of appeal. Make a comment that I think is inappropriate, it will be deleted, and your IP address will be permanently banned.

I trust that I have made myself abundantly clear.

Eric J. Wittenberg
Site Owner

If that is what Massachusetts wants, fine. I suspect that Foskett will agree the people of Arkansas have no right to interfere. But when it comes to a right of the people of Arkansas to honor the memory of David Dodd, well that’s different, see? Foskett hypocritically implies he has a right to intervene.

Furthermore, to repeat, the Arkansas secession document had *no* reference to slavery. About 80% of her families did not own slaves. But the did fight to repel invaders, and that’s a pretty satisfactory reason to fight.

2. Yes, it *is* pretty simple. Lincoln was interested in emancipation chiefly as a weapon of war because it would damage the other side at no cost to his own.

3. Guys like Foskett often claim that states rights and independence were excuses made up by southerners after the War. But statements by Davis, Cleburne and others during the War demonstrate the error in such claims just as does the naming of Confederate General States Rights Gilst preceded Sumter by thirty years.

There *was *a fundamental difference between north and south in the primacy of states rights and conservative interpretation of the constitution. Pretending otherwise is common Yankee revisionism.

4. Foskett repeats standard Yankee hypocrisy by permitting Lincoln to change his war aims but not Davis.

5. I have ancestors on both sides of the War, but can readily concede the Yankee forebears shamelessly waged the war for economic domination of North America. I think they were wrong to do it. But I have no obligation of “heritage” to deny their selfish motivation and ruthless, cowardly conduct against helpless civilians.