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The True Meaning Behind the Confederate Flag
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<blockquote data-quote="Tolkien R.R.J" data-source="post: 73912424" data-attributes="member: 411644"><p><strong>Loss of Political Power</strong></p><p></p><p>“<em>The majority, mean to plunder and wrong the minority. They mean to make the weaker section their tributaries. Between a representation incompetent to protect, and no representation, there is no difference, where there are conflicting interests in a legislative body. And in the election of a Chief Magistrate, of what use is the right of suffrage, when, if every man in the oppressed section should vote against the candidate of the stronger section, (as the Southern States did in the late Presidential election) they cannot prevent his election. …. By the forms of a free government therefore, a many-headed despotism may be established by a stronger section over a weaker section, far worse than the despotism of one man. One man may have a conscience; but men acting in masses, seldom exhibit conscientious scruples. Individuality and responsibility, are lost in numbers. That “a corporation has no soul,” is the proverbial aphorism of English law, indicating the unscrupulousness of men acting in masses. A single despot has no motive to oppress one portion of his people, more than another; but here, one half of a country rises up to plunder and oppress another half.”</em></p><p><em>-Report on the confederate committee of foreign affairs 1861</em></p><p></p><p><strong>“</strong><em>The majority section may legislate imperiously and ruinously to the interests of the minority section not only without injury but to great benefit and advantage of their own section. In proof of this we need only refer to the fishing bounties, the monopoly of the coast navigation which is possessed almost exclusively by the Northern States and in one word the bounties to every employment of northern labor and capital such a government must in the nature of things and the universal principles of human nature and human conduct very soon lead as it has done to a grinding and degrading despotism.”</em></p><p><em>-Florida Declaration of Causes of Secession</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>The Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament. “The General Welfare,” is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation, this “General Welfare” requires. Thus, the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government; and the people of the Southern State, are compelled to meet the very despotism, their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.” </em></p><p><em>-Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States Convention of South Carolina 1860</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>Between 1800-1850 the House was controlled by the north but the south could block anything from the north in the senate. However with the edition of states like Minnesota 1858 Oregon 1859 and Kansas 1861 for the first time the north controlled the senate. Lincoln said he would not allow any more slave states into the union. Southerns saw as a excuse for northern political dominance for the republican political agenda. The south had seen their political power decline, and now saw the attack on slavery into new territories as a attack on the whole economic system of the south by the majority or mob of the north. The south saw the loss of political power, economic power, and rights granted by the constitution under threat from the majority north. In 1860 Pennsylvanian and New York alone had more seats in congress than the entire deep south of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and even Arkansas and North Carolina added on to that. A Georgian sated “we are either slaves in the union or free men out of it” in time the north would control the south politically with no safeguards from the constitution or state sovereignty as they placed authority with the federal government.</p><p></p><p>”<em>liberty is always destroyed by the multitude, in the name of liberty. Majorities within the limits of constitutional restraints are harmless, but the moment they lose sight of these restraints, the many-headed monster becomes more tyrannical, than the tyrant with a single head; numbers harden its conscience, and embolden it, in the perpetration of crime. And when this majority, in a free government, becomes a faction, or, in other words, represents certain classes and interests to the detriment of other classes, and interests, farewell to public liberty; the people must either become enslaved, or there must be a disruption of the government. ”</em></p><p><em>-Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes 1868</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>Equality and safety in the union are at an end”</em></p><p><em>-Howell Cobb of Georgia 1860</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>The real issue involved in the relations between the North and the South of the American States, is the great principle of self-government. Shall a dominant party of the North rule the South, or shall the people of the South rule themselves. This is the great matter in controversy.”</em></p><p><em>-Robert Barnwell Rhett Montgomery, Alabama, 1860</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>The contest on the part of the north was for supreme control, especially in relation to the fiscal action of the government.. on the other hand southern states, struggling for equality, and seeking to maintain equilibrium in government”</em></p><p><em>-Rose Oneal Greehow My Improvement and the first year of Abolition rule in Washington 1863</em> </p><p></p><p><strong>Northern Violations of the Constitution- Majority Rule or Constitutional Republic?</strong></p><p></p><p>“<em>The people of the North have endeavored to destroy its limitations. To make it sectional in its operations, and subservient to their sectional interests, and to make the government of the United States itself a consolidated government, has been the aim of their steady and unintermitted efforts. …..All encroachments by Congress on the Constitution of the United States, they have uniformly upheld; until at last the Constitution, by their interpretation, is virtually abolished, and now consists only in three words — “the general welfare,” of which they are the judges and dispensers....With the Constitution overthrown, and the government of the United States in the hands of a hostile section, not only liberty, but self-preservation, demanded their separation from it.....In seceding therefore, from the United States, the Confederate States have only exercised a right inherent in all Sovereignties. In their judgment, the agreement they had made with the Northern States had been grossly violated. Its whole purpose was overthrown. Instead of an agency of very limited power, having for its object the defence of the States against the aggressions of foreign nations, it has been converted into a government of unlimited internal powers. Unless the people of the Confederate States were prepared to surrender forever their liberties, there was but one course left for them to pursue — they must escape from the domination of such a government...“The people of the North have steadily upheld the policy of setting aside the Constitution, and of thus rendering the government of the United States omnipotent in its legislation. They have endeavored to drain the treasury, to carry on internal improvements, and at the same time by its exhaustion, to afford a pretext for higher tariff duties to replenish it! They pushed their oppressions, by the tariff, to such an extent in 1828, that the whole South protested against it; and when one of the Southern States resisted it, and a compromise was effected by which the taxes were to be reduced and limited, they overthrew the compromise, and renewed the oppressions..... With these various means of sectional aggrandizement — protective tariffs — appropriations from the treasury — the exclusive settlement of our territories — and anti-slavery agitations — they have at last succeeded in uniting the North against the South. To escape their ruthless mastery, the Southern States were compelled to secede from the Union with them”</em></p><p><em>-Report on the confederate committee of foreign affairs 1861</em></p><p></p><p><em>“<em>A</em>nnounce a revolution in the government and to substitute an aggregate popular majority for the written constitution without which no single state would have voted its adoption not forming in truth a federal union but a consolidated despotism that worst of despotisms that of an unrestricted sectional and hostile majority, we do not intend to be misunderstood, we do not controvert the right of a majority to govern within the grant of powers in the Constitution.</em></p><p><em>-Florida Declaration of causes of secession</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>South Carolina has twice called her people together in solemn Convention, to take into consideration, the aggressions and unconstitutional wrongs, perpetrated by the people of the North on the people of the South.” </em></p><p><em>-Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States Convention of South Carolina 1860</em></p><p></p><p><em>“<em>We are fighting for the god given rights of liberty and independence as handed down to us in the constitution by our fathers” </em></em></p><p><em>-Confederate General John B Gordon to Pennsylvanian woman at York 1863</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>I believe most solemley that it is for constitutional liberty”</em></p><p><em>-Confederate General Leonidas Polk June 22 1861 Reasons for Southern Secession</em></p><p></p><p>The south saw the north as violating the constitution in many ways. The south thought their liberties threatened by a growing northern majority and political influence. Had the constitution not been violated, and their rights maintained, there would have been no need to separate. The south saw the tariffs aimed at certain industry as a violation of the constitution. They saw the north's attempt to use that money to benefit the Norths wanted internal improvements as another violation of the constitution. The federal government under the control of Lincoln sought to violate the 10th amendment and states rights by not allowing the western states to decide on slavery, instead the federal government would overpower the states, and violate the constitution to the benefit of northern polices. Among others.</p><p></p><p>“<em>Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control. They learned to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the principles of the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp" target="_blank">Constitution</a>been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/inaug_lincoln1.asp" target="_blank">inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln</a> in March last, he asserts as an axiom, which he plainly deems to be undeniable, of constitutional authority, that the theory of the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp" target="_blank">Constitution</a> requires that in all cases the majority shall govern; and in another memorable instance the same Chief Magistrate did not hesitate to liken the relations between a State and the United States to those which exist between a county and the State in which it is situated and by which it was created.” </em></p><p><em>-Jefferson Davis Message to Congress April 29, 1861 (Ratification of the Constitution)</em></p><p></p><p>“<em>The experiment instituted by our revolutionary fathers, of a voluntary Union of sovereign States for purposes specified in a solemn compact, had been perverted by those who, feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law but their own will. The Government had ceased to answer the ends for which it was ordained and established. To save ourselves from a revolution which, in its silent but rapid progress, was about to place us under the despotism of numbers...The tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism, has denied us both the right and the remedy. Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty</em> <em>”</em></p><p><em>-Jefferson Davis Inaugural Richmond 1862</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>“<em>Under the latitudinarian construction of the Constitution which prevails at the North, the general idea is maintained that the will of the majority is supreme; and as to Constitutional checks or restraints, they have no just conception of them..to keep the federal government within its proper sphere of delegated powers, that the Confederate States, each for itself, resumed those powers and looked out for new safeguards for their rights and domestic tranquility. These are found not in abandoning the Constitution, but in adhering only to those who will faithfully sustain it...They [the north] do not seem to understand the nature or workings of a federative system. They have but slender conceptions of limited powers. Their ideas run into consolidation...Whilst I was in Congress I knew of but few men there from the North who ever made a Constitutional argument on any question. They seemed to consider themselves as clothed with unlimited power...They looked upon it simply as a government of majoritiesThey did not seem to understand that it was a government that bound majorities by constitutional restraints. ”</em></p><p><em>-Speech of the Hon. Alexander H. Stephens to the Virginia Secession Convention, April 23, 1861</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tolkien R.R.J, post: 73912424, member: 411644"] [B]Loss of Political Power[/B] “[I]The majority, mean to plunder and wrong the minority. They mean to make the weaker section their tributaries. Between a representation incompetent to protect, and no representation, there is no difference, where there are conflicting interests in a legislative body. And in the election of a Chief Magistrate, of what use is the right of suffrage, when, if every man in the oppressed section should vote against the candidate of the stronger section, (as the Southern States did in the late Presidential election) they cannot prevent his election. …. By the forms of a free government therefore, a many-headed despotism may be established by a stronger section over a weaker section, far worse than the despotism of one man. One man may have a conscience; but men acting in masses, seldom exhibit conscientious scruples. Individuality and responsibility, are lost in numbers. That “a corporation has no soul,” is the proverbial aphorism of English law, indicating the unscrupulousness of men acting in masses. A single despot has no motive to oppress one portion of his people, more than another; but here, one half of a country rises up to plunder and oppress another half.” -Report on the confederate committee of foreign affairs 1861[/I] [B]“[/B][I]The majority section may legislate imperiously and ruinously to the interests of the minority section not only without injury but to great benefit and advantage of their own section. In proof of this we need only refer to the fishing bounties, the monopoly of the coast navigation which is possessed almost exclusively by the Northern States and in one word the bounties to every employment of northern labor and capital such a government must in the nature of things and the universal principles of human nature and human conduct very soon lead as it has done to a grinding and degrading despotism.” -Florida Declaration of Causes of Secession[/I] “[I]The Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament. “The General Welfare,” is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation, this “General Welfare” requires. Thus, the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government; and the people of the Southern State, are compelled to meet the very despotism, their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.” -Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States Convention of South Carolina 1860[/I] Between 1800-1850 the House was controlled by the north but the south could block anything from the north in the senate. However with the edition of states like Minnesota 1858 Oregon 1859 and Kansas 1861 for the first time the north controlled the senate. Lincoln said he would not allow any more slave states into the union. Southerns saw as a excuse for northern political dominance for the republican political agenda. The south had seen their political power decline, and now saw the attack on slavery into new territories as a attack on the whole economic system of the south by the majority or mob of the north. The south saw the loss of political power, economic power, and rights granted by the constitution under threat from the majority north. In 1860 Pennsylvanian and New York alone had more seats in congress than the entire deep south of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and even Arkansas and North Carolina added on to that. A Georgian sated “we are either slaves in the union or free men out of it” in time the north would control the south politically with no safeguards from the constitution or state sovereignty as they placed authority with the federal government. ”[I]liberty is always destroyed by the multitude, in the name of liberty. Majorities within the limits of constitutional restraints are harmless, but the moment they lose sight of these restraints, the many-headed monster becomes more tyrannical, than the tyrant with a single head; numbers harden its conscience, and embolden it, in the perpetration of crime. And when this majority, in a free government, becomes a faction, or, in other words, represents certain classes and interests to the detriment of other classes, and interests, farewell to public liberty; the people must either become enslaved, or there must be a disruption of the government. ” -Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes 1868[/I] “[I]Equality and safety in the union are at an end” -Howell Cobb of Georgia 1860[/I] “[I]The real issue involved in the relations between the North and the South of the American States, is the great principle of self-government. Shall a dominant party of the North rule the South, or shall the people of the South rule themselves. This is the great matter in controversy.” -Robert Barnwell Rhett Montgomery, Alabama, 1860[/I] “[I]The contest on the part of the north was for supreme control, especially in relation to the fiscal action of the government.. on the other hand southern states, struggling for equality, and seeking to maintain equilibrium in government” -Rose Oneal Greehow My Improvement and the first year of Abolition rule in Washington 1863[/I] [B]Northern Violations of the Constitution- Majority Rule or Constitutional Republic?[/B] “[I]The people of the North have endeavored to destroy its limitations. To make it sectional in its operations, and subservient to their sectional interests, and to make the government of the United States itself a consolidated government, has been the aim of their steady and unintermitted efforts. …..All encroachments by Congress on the Constitution of the United States, they have uniformly upheld; until at last the Constitution, by their interpretation, is virtually abolished, and now consists only in three words — “the general welfare,” of which they are the judges and dispensers....With the Constitution overthrown, and the government of the United States in the hands of a hostile section, not only liberty, but self-preservation, demanded their separation from it.....In seceding therefore, from the United States, the Confederate States have only exercised a right inherent in all Sovereignties. In their judgment, the agreement they had made with the Northern States had been grossly violated. Its whole purpose was overthrown. Instead of an agency of very limited power, having for its object the defence of the States against the aggressions of foreign nations, it has been converted into a government of unlimited internal powers. Unless the people of the Confederate States were prepared to surrender forever their liberties, there was but one course left for them to pursue — they must escape from the domination of such a government...“The people of the North have steadily upheld the policy of setting aside the Constitution, and of thus rendering the government of the United States omnipotent in its legislation. They have endeavored to drain the treasury, to carry on internal improvements, and at the same time by its exhaustion, to afford a pretext for higher tariff duties to replenish it! They pushed their oppressions, by the tariff, to such an extent in 1828, that the whole South protested against it; and when one of the Southern States resisted it, and a compromise was effected by which the taxes were to be reduced and limited, they overthrew the compromise, and renewed the oppressions..... With these various means of sectional aggrandizement — protective tariffs — appropriations from the treasury — the exclusive settlement of our territories — and anti-slavery agitations — they have at last succeeded in uniting the North against the South. To escape their ruthless mastery, the Southern States were compelled to secede from the Union with them” -Report on the confederate committee of foreign affairs 1861[/I] [I]“[I]A[/I]nnounce a revolution in the government and to substitute an aggregate popular majority for the written constitution without which no single state would have voted its adoption not forming in truth a federal union but a consolidated despotism that worst of despotisms that of an unrestricted sectional and hostile majority, we do not intend to be misunderstood, we do not controvert the right of a majority to govern within the grant of powers in the Constitution. -Florida Declaration of causes of secession[/I] “[I]South Carolina has twice called her people together in solemn Convention, to take into consideration, the aggressions and unconstitutional wrongs, perpetrated by the people of the North on the people of the South.” -Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States Convention of South Carolina 1860[/I] [I]“[I]We are fighting for the god given rights of liberty and independence as handed down to us in the constitution by our fathers” [/I] -Confederate General John B Gordon to Pennsylvanian woman at York 1863[/I] “[I]I believe most solemley that it is for constitutional liberty” -Confederate General Leonidas Polk June 22 1861 Reasons for Southern Secession[/I] The south saw the north as violating the constitution in many ways. The south thought their liberties threatened by a growing northern majority and political influence. Had the constitution not been violated, and their rights maintained, there would have been no need to separate. The south saw the tariffs aimed at certain industry as a violation of the constitution. They saw the north's attempt to use that money to benefit the Norths wanted internal improvements as another violation of the constitution. The federal government under the control of Lincoln sought to violate the 10th amendment and states rights by not allowing the western states to decide on slavery, instead the federal government would overpower the states, and violate the constitution to the benefit of northern polices. Among others. “[I]Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control. They learned to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the principles of the [URL='http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp']Constitution[/URL]been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the [URL='http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/inaug_lincoln1.asp']inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln[/URL] in March last, he asserts as an axiom, which he plainly deems to be undeniable, of constitutional authority, that the theory of the [URL='http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp']Constitution[/URL] requires that in all cases the majority shall govern; and in another memorable instance the same Chief Magistrate did not hesitate to liken the relations between a State and the United States to those which exist between a county and the State in which it is situated and by which it was created.” -Jefferson Davis Message to Congress April 29, 1861 (Ratification of the Constitution)[/I] “[I]The experiment instituted by our revolutionary fathers, of a voluntary Union of sovereign States for purposes specified in a solemn compact, had been perverted by those who, feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law but their own will. The Government had ceased to answer the ends for which it was ordained and established. To save ourselves from a revolution which, in its silent but rapid progress, was about to place us under the despotism of numbers...The tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism, has denied us both the right and the remedy. Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty[/I] [I]” -Jefferson Davis Inaugural Richmond 1862[/I] “[I]Under the latitudinarian construction of the Constitution which prevails at the North, the general idea is maintained that the will of the majority is supreme; and as to Constitutional checks or restraints, they have no just conception of them..to keep the federal government within its proper sphere of delegated powers, that the Confederate States, each for itself, resumed those powers and looked out for new safeguards for their rights and domestic tranquility. These are found not in abandoning the Constitution, but in adhering only to those who will faithfully sustain it...They [the north] do not seem to understand the nature or workings of a federative system. They have but slender conceptions of limited powers. Their ideas run into consolidation...Whilst I was in Congress I knew of but few men there from the North who ever made a Constitutional argument on any question. They seemed to consider themselves as clothed with unlimited power...They looked upon it simply as a government of majoritiesThey did not seem to understand that it was a government that bound majorities by constitutional restraints. ” -Speech of the Hon. Alexander H. Stephens to the Virginia Secession Convention, April 23, 1861[/I] [/QUOTE]
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