Can you really not see that the northern states forcing their will on the southern states was wrong? That is as simply as I can put it. The union was formed by soverign states, each an individual. In my opinion, the constitution clearly says that the federal powers are limited, but the civil war was in fact fought to empower the federal government and destroy the intent of the constitutional powers of the individual states.

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"I did but teach the age to quit their cloggs By the plain rules of ancient Liberty, When lo! a barbarous noise surrounded me, Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs." John Milton
The jews need to throw a holocaust, they owe us one.
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What will were they forcing? Where did the Northern states ever force their will on the South? I'm asking that...and NOT getting an answer.

Name ONE instance where the north wrongly imposed on the south.

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Sani-Hut: Serving the Jewish Community since 1933.

“The South will Rise Again, not by war nor opposition to anything, but by taking its rightful place as the wealthiest, most cultured, most honorable and most dignified section of the greatest nation on the Earth.�

Political Dictionary: states' rights
states' rights: Definition and Much More from Answers.com

The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution states: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ This was a necessary part of the bargain which brought the United States into existence. The Constitution had to be ratified by at least nine of the then thirteen states. The nine had to include at least some Southern states, and therefore there could be no federal condemnation of slavery in the constitution. So on one interpretation, states' rights became, as it has always remained, an issue between the South and the rest of the country (see Calhoun; Lincoln). Since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has become more and more involved in states' spheres of influence. This arose in part from the attempt to enforce civil rights in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (ratified between 1865 and 1870). However, federal intervention in states' affairs did not increase significantly until the economic pressures of the New Deal. The Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments were not enforced until the 1950s.

Maybe you don't realize it, but the federal government had no power to dictate anything to the states until after the civil war, ALL the states lost their respective soverignty, north & south, in that war.

The federal government had no power to end slavery or dictate where the southern states could do business.

__________________
"I did but teach the age to quit their cloggs By the plain rules of ancient Liberty, When lo! a barbarous noise surrounded me, Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs." John Milton
The jews need to throw a holocaust, they owe us one.
http://zionistwatch.files.wordpress....ng-zionism.jpg

What did the federal government dictate to ANY state?

You give me "concepts" but no actual evidence that these "theories" ever happened.

The Federal Government never dictated any end to slavery, states dictated if slaveholding were permissible in their state or not; the Federal Government made no decision on which states were such.

__________________
Sani-Hut: Serving the Jewish Community since 1933.

“The South will Rise Again, not by war nor opposition to anything, but by taking its rightful place as the wealthiest, most cultured, most honorable and most dignified section of the greatest nation on the Earth.�

I’ve seen this discussion so many times that I am starting to think it is a matter of opinion. Here’s a slightly edited version of a message I posted in 2002:

Jude Wanniski’s column on July 6, 2002 titled Lincoln on the Fourth of July, 1861 quotes Chapter VIII from Benjamin Thomas’ 1952 biography of Abraham Lincoln A War for Democracy. My first excerpt is taken from that chapter:

“Lincoln`s primary purpose throughout the war was to save the Union. But this was incidental to a far more important objective: for as he saw the issue in its broader aspects, upon the fate of the Union hung the fate of world democracy. He must not allow the Southern people to dissever the nation or to renounce the philosophy of human freedom and equality for the false concept of a master race.”

It is the first sentence in the above quote that is important. I do not think there is anyone that doubts the truth of Lincoln’s reason for supporting the war as it is stated so plainly in that sentence. However, Benjamin Thomas quickly moves to a loftier plateau where the concept of a master race is implied during the Civil War era. I don’t know if anybody ever used the term
“master race” back around the time of the Civil War, but the term itself will always be associated with Nazi Germany; so Benjamin Thomas can be forgiven for using it in 1952; just seven years after the end of WWII.

My next excerpt comes from a most informative column by Walter E. Williams dated March 27, 2002 titled The Real Lincoln. You can access the full article in Williams’ archive at:

Townhall.com::Columnists.)

Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, “It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives ‘to the cause of self-determination -- government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.’ Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”

In Federalist Paper 45, Madison guaranteed: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” The South seceded because of Washington's encroachment on that vision. Today, it's worse. Turn Madison's vision on its head, and you have today's America.

DiLorenzo does a yeoman's job in documenting Lincoln's ruthlessness and hypocrisy, and how historians have covered it up. The Framers had a deathly fear of federal government abuse. They saw state sovereignty as a protection. That's why they gave us the Ninth and 10th Amendments. They saw secession as the ultimate protection against Washington tyranny.

(Williams is referring to Thomas DiLorenzo in his book The Real Lincoln.)

Lincoln’s motivation for denying the Confederate States their constitutional Right to secede from the Union has been an ongoing debate for more than a century. My question is where would Lincoln come down on America’s continued independence in today’s world? I think an examination of that question sheds a lot of light on Lincoln.

Abolishing slavery was not Lincoln’s first concern, while independence itself, meaning national sovereignty in the context of the American Revolution, was a primary motivation for separating from England.

To the Founding Fathers, independence was an obvious solution to the problems at hand. Individual liberties only came after sovereignty. The very thing that the Founders won from England is being handed away to the UN every day. When sovereignty goes we can kiss any remaining individual liberties goodbye as well.

Having laid the foundation for my anti-UN position, my first question is this: If
Socialists/Communists have their way and American sovereignty is handed to the UN, can it be said that Lincoln would agree with that turn of events?

If denying the Southern states their Right of secession was so critical in enforcing Lincoln’s view of the world, then he would certainly feel the same way about a global union, wouldn’t he?

My next questions are obvious: Will the American people have the Right to secede from the UN after the Socialists have the power they seek? Or will a Lincoln-like UN secretary-general react in exactly the same way the federal government reacted to the Right of secession that the Confederacy tried to exercise?

Surely, the high-sounding rhetoric surrounding the American Civil War will be dusted off in support of preserving world government just as Lincoln got carried away with his own eloquence in defense of the government’s power at the expense of self-determination.

My final question concerns the Founding Fathers: Would they even consider giving away the sovereignty they risked everything to get? I can easily see Socialists/Communists citing Lincoln to further the concept of communist totalitarian government, but I just can’t see the Framers coming out in support of the UN or voting for Lincoln.

My understanding of the Founding Fathers is that they envisioned a world of sovereign nations; each nation eventually copying the American experiment by establishing limited representative governments of their own. If my assessment is accurate, then the message that must be sent to foreign governments seeking aid must be a message of sink or swim on your own. Instituting that kind of foreign policy may amount to tough love to the socialist priesthood magnanimously redistributing everyone else’s labors, but it is the only way that today’s Americans, and those who follow us, can further the American ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

International socialism/communism, foreign aid, and still more government can only bring humankind centuries of brutality, injustice, slavery, terrorism, and worse. The choice that many people, including our own liberals, must face in the near future boils down to renewing America’s pre-Civil War promise, or continuing on Lincoln’s road to central control and omnipotent government.

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Flanders

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refrain, withdraw and abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible. Eric Hoffer

Well, let's see what the Vice President of the Southern Confederacy had to say about it:

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other —though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Cornerstone Speech by Alexander H. Stephens

The straw that broke the camels' back. The true nature of the conflict was the conflict of an agrarian culture versus an industrial culture. A conflict which remains today.

>>>I don't think the Civil War was about anything other than wealthy southern land owners and Baptist preachers being able to whip poor southern whites into a frenzy with catchy sloganeering and 'patriotic' song writing. Just like they are doing 160 years later. That's why southern elites hate education.

George, that's bullshit.

Northern slavery

INTRODUCTION
African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]

When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2]

African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England. Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (cf. “African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery,” The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).

I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:

"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]
Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.

Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]

The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.

More at the link.

__________________
"I did but teach the age to quit their cloggs By the plain rules of ancient Liberty, When lo! a barbarous noise surrounded me, Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs." John Milton
The jews need to throw a holocaust, they owe us one.
http://zionistwatch.files.wordpress....ng-zionism.jpg

Hmmmm....yet the agricultural West went with the Industrial North instead of the agricultural South. There were no big cities in Iowa, for instance, but they sent regiment after regiment to the war for the Union