Ole Miss Tries To Stop 'Dixie' Chant

#51
#51
The Confederate Constitution

The Confederate Constitutional Convention opened on February 4, 1861. Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, called the "Father of Secession" for initiating his state's withdrawal from the Union, thought that the model of the U.S. Constitution was best. The other 50 delegates agreed. He nominated Howell Cobb, a Georgia attorney and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to preside over the meeting.

In broad outline, the Confederate Constitution is an amended U.S. Constitution. Even on slavery, there is little difference. Whereas the U.S. Constitution ended the importation of slaves after 1808, the Confederate Constitution forbade it. Both constitutions allowed slave ownership. The preamble to both Constitutions was the same in substance and very nearly identical in language. The Confederate Constitution would make clear the Confederate State's governmental role in the states of the Confederacy as a limited government. The preamble began, "We the people of the Confederate States" and would have the addition of "each State acting in its sovereign and independent character."

The members of the Convention were hailed by their contemporaries as statesmen of unmatched stature. Thomas R. R. Cobb, of Georgia, one of the prime creators of the Confederate Constitution, wrote shortly after the deliberations in Montgomery: "The personnel of the Committee on the Constitution comprised the highest order of intellect, legal ability and statesmanship in the South, in no way inferior to the framers of the Constitution of 1789, and with the advantages of seventy years experience under that Constitution; and the instrument which they reported was perhaps as near perfect for its purpose as the wisdom of man could make it."

The Confederate Constitution was a document of appeasement and compromise. With few divergences it followed the old United States Constitution. This was in part a compromise to the feelings of the "new secessionists," the former Union men who argued long and futilely against secession but, faced with it as a fact, went with their states into the new Confederacy. It was in part a concession to the specious belief that the Southern states could peacefully leave the Union.

The Confederate Constitution, in an attack against pork-barrel spending, gave the President a line-item veto. It also set the office of the Presidency to one, six-year term limit. The Confederate Founders also tried to make sure that there would be no open-ended commitments or entitlement programs in the Confederate States. The Constitution read "All bills appropriating money shall specify...the exact amount of each appropriation, and the purposes for which it is made." It continued "And Congress shall grant no extra compensation to any public contractor, office, agent, or servant, after such contract shall have been made or such service rendered." Such a provision would have eliminated the "cost-overrun," a favorite boondoggle of today's government contractors.

The Confederate Constitution also eliminated omnibus spending bills by requiring all legislation to "relate to but one subject," which had to be "expressed in the title." There would be no "Christmas-tree" appropriations bills or hidden expenditures. These changes would have had a profound effect in keeping government small and unobtrusive. Their inclusion demonstrates much wisdom on the part of Confederate statesmen in improving on the Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, the United States federal government would not be willing to allow them to give their system a try.
 
#52
#52
tvolsfan said:
Why is it so absurd? There was no genocide, but blacks were considered subhuman in the confederacy, and they weren't treated like people should be. The Confederacy may not have been as bad, but it wasn't something to be proud of.
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The Nazis were responsible for murdering millions of innocent people and performing brutal experiments on some of them. If you have any information about Confederate concentration camps, please share.

I would also like to point out that black people were considered subhuman by many people in the North, as well.
 
#53
#53
Free black slaveowners resided in states as north as New York and as far south as Florida, extending westward into Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. According to the federal census of 1830, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. The majority of black slaveowners lived in Louisiana and planted sugar cane. The majority of black masters had not been slaves themselves. Yet, the ranks of black slave masters were diverse: some acquired slaves as soon as they had accumulated enough capital after their own freedom, others received slaves with their own freedom from their white masters, and others had been free for several generations.
 
#54
#54
Vol_4_Life said:
The Nazis were responsible for murdering millions of innocent people and performing brutal experiments on some of them. If you have any information about Confederate concentration camps, please share.

I would also like to point out that black people were considered subhuman by many people in the North, as well.
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I love how you point to a bad moment in history to make the fact that the south enslaved blacks for so many years not seem like a big deal. Nothing about that was okay.
 
#55
#55
tvolsfan said:
Not really the same thing. Americans obviously did take Native land, but it isn't like that was the country stood for. They were just trying to expand. They acted in ways that certainly weren't considerate of Natives, but the country wasn't created for the purpose of driving out Natives. The Confederacy was created for the sole purpose of allowing whites to enslave Africans. You can argue that it was about 'states rights' but the only right that mattered was the right to enslave Africans.
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I don't entirely agree. What white Americans did to the indigenous people of this continent was a crime every bit as heinous as what the Nazis did to European Jews. Both were systematic and deliberate extermination. The Germans were just more efficent at it. And as far as "just trying to expand" goes -- read _Mein Kampf_ sometime, if you can grit your way through Hitler's miserable and bombastic prose. His whole program was based on expanding German "living space." The Jews and the Polish, like American Indians, were just inconveniently in the way.

As far as "Dixie" and the Confederate flag and all that stuff goes -- what I have never understood is why people don't get that there's a basic courtesy issue here. Just because your great-grandfather Jethro seriously believed he was dying for state's rights, and to him that flag symbolized a freedom from the oppressive northern tariff of abomination -- if that same flag mortally offends a third of your neighbors, and you know that they deeply regard it as a symbol of hate and oppression, then why would you want it flown in their face as a public symbol? Why would anybody want to grind something in the teeth of his neighbors like that?

I am proud to be a child of the south. But that's no reason to excuse or explain away the horrors of slavery. Or to pretend that the entire southern economy didn't depend completely upon the enslavement and abuse of human beings. "State's rights" is the bill of goods that the rich southerner sold the poor SOB from Tennessee and North Carolina to convince him to go fight and die to protect the rich guy's wealth.
 
#56
#56
tvolsfan said:
I didn't say whites invented slavery. I'm saying the Confederacy was created to protect the right to enslave others. Big difference.
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Two things are wrong with this.

1) The CSA Constitution outlawed importation of slaves, and
2) There were slave-holding Union states. Seems to me that, were secession and war over slavery or mostly over slavery, they would have been idiots to align themselves in a way that would have been signing their own death warrants no matter what the outcome would be
 
#57
#57
jed said:
We did (and it does), I live beside the trail of tears
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There's one very narrow branch of the family tree that has been in this country for over 100 years. As such, my great-great-great-great-grandfather accompanied the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears.

Knowing that someone in my family stepped where you live freaks me the hell out.:p
 
#58
#58
Indians, Blacks and Whites owned slaves in the South, but still approximately only 20% of southern populace were slave owners. Most white slave owners were of English, Scottish or Dutch decent and were mostly affluent land owners. Very few whites of Irish decent ever owned slaves as they were considered not much better than blacks during that period of time.
 
#59
#59
Ohio Vol said:
Two things are wrong with this.

1) The CSA Constitution outlawed importation of slaves, and
2) There were slave-holding Union states. Seems to me that, were secession and war over slavery or mostly over slavery, they would have been idiots to align themselves in a way that would have been signing their own death warrants no matter what the outcome would be
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Okay, so two things about this.

1. The Atlantic slave trade had already been illegal for most of a hundred years before the Confederacy, so any constitutional prohibition to that effect was just posturing. The south didn't need to import any more bodies, because they already had plenty.

2. The slaveholding Union states' economies weren't primarily based on slave labor -- otherwise they wouldn't have been Union states. "The answer to all of your questions is money," as the saying goes. Maryland and Delaware didn't depend on slave labor like Georgia and South Carolina did; therefore they jettisoned it easily. You don't go to war over "states' rights"; you go to war over money. Slavery, tariffs -- for the south, the whole economy was at stake. So they went to war. They weren't fighting for slavery, per se -- but since their economy was dependent on slavery, it was functionally almost the same thing.

(You're one of my favorite posters on this site, BTW; I wouldn't bother to criticize your points in this clearly unwinnable-for-anybody argument if I weren't interested in what you have to say.)
 
#60
#60
Vercingetorix said:
(You're one of my favorite posters on this site, BTW; I wouldn't bother to criticize your points in this clearly unwinnable-for-anybody argument if I weren't interested in what you have to say.)
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Does that mean I'm one of your favorites, too? :)
 
#62
#62
Vercingetorix said:
I don't entirely agree. What white Americans did to the indigenous people of this continent was a crime every bit as heinous as what the Nazis did to European Jews. Both were systematic and deliberate extermination. The Germans were just more efficent at it. And as far as "just trying to expand" goes -- read _Mein Kampf_ sometime, if you can grit your way through Hitler's miserable and bombastic prose. His whole program was based on expanding German "living space." The Jews and the Polish, like American Indians, were just inconveniently in the way.
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Are you sure it was that extreme? I can't pretend I know the exact mindset of the people in colonial times, but you sure that the takeover of native territory was part of a deliberate extermination, or were Native deaths more of an effect of expansion?

And I understand about Hitler and Lebensraum, but I don't think Jews were the problem with living room, seeing as they were a small part of the population. He obviously had no problem with violent takeover, and he was trying to improve Germany, but the Final Solution and everything associated with concentration camps just seems to be on another level of evil.
 
#63
#63
Vercingetorix said:
Okay, so two things about this.

1. The Atlantic slave trade had already been illegal for most of a hundred years before the Confederacy, so any constitutional prohibition to that effect was just posturing. The south didn't need to import any more bodies, because they already had plenty.

2. The slaveholding Union states' economies weren't primarily based on slave labor -- otherwise they wouldn't have been Union states. "The answer to all of your questions is money," as the saying goes. Maryland and Delaware didn't depend on slave labor like Georgia and South Carolina did; therefore they jettisoned it easily. You don't go to war over "states' rights"; you go to war over money. Slavery, tariffs -- for the south, the whole economy was at stake. So they went to war. They weren't fighting for slavery, per se -- but since their economy was dependent on slavery, it was functionally almost the same thing.

(You're one of my favorite posters on this site, BTW; I wouldn't bother to criticize your points in this clearly unwinnable-for-anybody argument if I weren't interested in what you have to say.)
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I agree wholeheartedly that this is an issue that neither side will ever succeed in winning. So why can't we all just reach a compromise? Those who believe in secession as a right and those who wish to honor their forefathers who fought (whatever the cause) adopt a new flag to display (I'd go with the Bonnie Blue or the seven-star naval jack), and those on the other side agree that there is absolutely no racial overtone present or glorification of slavery/racism.

I doubt the SCV would be on board, but I think getting them publicly involved would go a long way toward putting this issue to bed once and for all.
 
#64
#64
tvolsfan said:
Are you sure it was that extreme? I can't pretend I know the exact mindset of the people in colonial times, but you sure that the takeover of native territory was part of a deliberate extermination, or were Native deaths more of an effect of expansion?

And I understand about Hitler and Lebensraum, but I don't think Jews were the problem with living room, seeing as they were a small part of the population. He obviously had no problem with violent takeover, and he was trying to improve Germany, but the Final Solution and everything associated with concentration camps just seems to be on another level of evil.
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On the first point, I lean more toward the latter. A historian whose name escapes me wrote a fairly long essay on exactly why there was no grand plan to dominate America at the expense of natives.

On the second point, Hitler's idiotic ideas of a "master race" were built around the completely bizarre notion of "the Nordic superman"; somehow a few people got the idea that northern Europeans were the pinnacle of human evolution and everyone else was just in the way. There existed certain classes of "undesirables", which included but was not entirely comprised of Jews. The real irony is that among Hitler and his closest circle, not a single one was actually Nordic.
 
#65
#65
tvolsfan said:
Are you sure it was that extreme? I can't pretend I know the exact mindset of the people in colonial times, but you sure that the takeover of native territory was part of a deliberate extermination, or were Native deaths more of an effect of expansion?

And I understand about Hitler and Lebensraum, but I don't think Jews were the problem with living room, seeing as they were a small part of the population. He obviously had no problem with violent takeover, and he was trying to improve Germany, but the Final Solution and everything associated with concentration camps just seems to be on another level of evil.
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I just think it's a distinction without a difference. The Americans rounded up people who had lived forever in the mountainous forests of the east and marched them off to live in the desert; the Nazis rounded up people and sent them directly to the gas chamber. Is it "another level of evil" because it's more honest and direct? Is killing somebody by shooting him in the head worse than tying him up, taking him 200 miles out to sea, and putting him in a rowboat without any food or water?

I'm not really that interested in motivation or ideology -- nor is the guy whose body is collapsing in the gas chamber or smoking in a pyre in North Dakota. Murder is not more or less reprehensible dependent on the esoteric, high-level motivations of the guy doing it. You're just as dead either way.
 
#66
#66
Vercingetorix said:
I just think it's a distinction without a difference. The Americans rounded up people who had lived forever in the mountainous forests of the east and marched them off to live in the desert; the Nazis rounded up people and sent them directly to the gas chamber. Is it "another level of evil" because it's more honest and direct? Is killing somebody by shooting him in the head worse than tying him up, taking him 200 miles out to sea, and putting him in a rowboat without any food or water?
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I'd say so, simply because in the Nazi's case, elimination was the goal. Although the results may not have been pretty for Natives, I don't think they were intended to die. To me, it's a big difference. On one side of the spectrum is a country whose drive for expansion leads to unfortunate results, and on the other side you have a political party doing their best to conduct a secret mass extermination.
 
#67
#67
Ohio Vol said:
I agree wholeheartedly that this is an issue that neither side will ever succeed in winning. So why can't we all just reach a compromise? Those who believe in secession as a right and those who wish to honor their forefathers who fought (whatever the cause) adopt a new flag to display (I'd go with the Bonnie Blue or the seven-star naval jack), and those on the other side agree that there is absolutely no racial overtone present or glorification of slavery/racism.

I doubt the SCV would be on board, but I think getting them publicly involved would go a long way toward putting this issue to bed once and for all.
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Picking a different flag would pretty much diffuse the entire thing. Unfortunately, that's far too rational for it to ever happen. The Stars and Bars is just too radioactive for everybody. We need another 50 years or so.

Again, I say this as somebody who thinks that secession from pretty much everything should always be a right, and who has a picture of his highly-decorated-in-the-Confederate-Army-great-grandfather hanging on the wall in his house. I just think that part of embracing your southern heritage needs to be reflecting honestly about slavery and what it meant to the south.
 
#68
#68
tvolsfan said:
I'd say so, simply because in the Nazi's case, elimination was the goal. Although the results may not have been pretty for Natives, I don't think they were intended to die. To me, it's a big difference. On one side of the spectrum is a country whose drive for expansion leads to unfortunate results, and on the other side you have a political party doing their best to conduct a secret mass extermination.
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If you gave Andrew Jackson gas chambers and railroads, he would have exterminated the natives with the same sort of grim, enthusiastic efficiency as Hitler went after the Jews. The difference between what white Americans did to the natives and what the Nazis did to their undesirables was more a difference of technology than anything else. When we were extirpating our miserable, hated minority, about the most efficient thing you could do was round them up at the point of a gun and march them off into the desert a thousand miles away. Once the gas chamber had been invented, things were a lot easier.
 
#69
#69
How many? Four states that gave them up without much of a complaint? The Civil War was fought because the south wanted to enslave black people. Any other reason and you are just trying to put a positive spin on an ugly issue.
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Being taught false hoods for generations brings about folks that think just as you. Please allow me to say that yes Slavery was an ugly issue, but not the main reason for the War between the States. Now lets ponder the facts.

Most Americans, no doubt, imagine the prewar South as a region so thickly dotted with immense plantations on which most of the black and white populations worked and lived. But, on the contrary, while slaves made up 40% of the total population of the South, only 20 to 25 percent of free families, most of them white, owned any slaves at all, and fully one-half of this minority (12.5%) held fewer than five slaves. Only an owner of twenty or more slaves, and of substantial land, could qualify as a planter, and fewer than 10 percent of slave-holding families qualified. The plantation elite of the antebellum South made up less than 3 percent of the free population in the region and less than 2 percent of the total free and slave populations combined.

So why would so many Southerners fight a war and die to protect slavery or rich land owners? The Confederacy was formed and waged war to protect a culture a way of life that just so happened to include slavery. If your culture, lively hood was in serious danger of being destroyed would you be willing to fight to preserve your way of living?

Keep in mind everything in this country was drastically different in 1860 than in our country today and it is difficult for us today to fully understand without in-depth study of how northern or southern folks thought about things 150 years ago.

Each state was like it's own country there was no big centralized government. There was no income tax and folks didn't live on government sustenance. Freedom from governmental tyranny prevailed in the mind set, thus the term Rebel. If congress today passed a tariff that overnight raised the price of gasoline by 70% and the profits of that tariff went to oil companies would you set back and say oh well or would you fight such an action.

So, was the main reason the Civil War is fought and so many died was because the south wanted to enslave black people?
 
#70
#70
NashvilleUTVol said:
Being taught false hoods for generations brings about folks that think just as you. Please allow me to say that yes Slavery was an ugly issue, but not the main reason for the War between the States. Now lets ponder the facts.

Most Americans, no doubt, imagine the prewar South as a region so thickly dotted with immense plantations on which most of the black and white populations worked and lived. But, on the contrary, while slaves made up 40% of the total population of the South, only 20 to 25 percent of free families, most of them white, owned any slaves at all, and fully one-half of this minority (12.5%) held fewer than five slaves. Only an owner of twenty or more slaves, and of substantial land, could qualify as a planter, and fewer than 10 percent of slave-holding families qualified. The plantation elite of the antebellum South made up less than 3 percent of the free population in the region and less than 2 percent of the total free and slave populations combined.

So why would so many Southerners fight a war and die to protect slavery or rich land owners? The Confederacy was formed and waged war to protect a culture a way of life that just so happened to include slavery. If your culture, lively hood was in serious danger of being destroyed would you be willing to fight to preserve your way of living?

Keep in mind everything in this country was drastically different in 1860 than in our country today and it is difficult for us today to fully understand without in-depth study of how northern or southern folks thought about things 150 years ago.

Each state was like it's own country there was no big centralized government. There was no income tax and folks didn't live on government sustenance. Freedom from governmental tyranny prevailed in the mind set, thus the term Rebel. If congress today passed a tariff that overnight raised the price of gasoline by 70% and the profits of that tariff went to oil companies would you set back and say oh well or would you fight such an action.

So, was the main reason the Civil War is fought and so many died was because the south wanted to enslave black people?
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Yes. If slavery isn't an issue then there is no war.
 
#73
#73
tvolsfan said:
Yes. If slavery isn't an issue then there is no war.
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You have a lot more to learn about the Civil War and the events that lead up to it. Slavery was only a portion of the reason the war was fought.
 
#74
#74
KB5252 said:
You have a lot more to learn about the Civil War and the events that lead up to it. Slavery was only a portion of the reason the war was fought.
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I've studied the Civil War both inside and outside of school. The South may have been unhappy about other things, but if there was no slavery, there was no war.
 
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