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Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Jul 7, 2015, 6:44 PM

It's long, but if you really think the flag is about "heritage", then please take a few moments to read the The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States. The flag stands for these causes, not "southern heritage". And by the way, nobody is stopping you from flying the flag in front of your house. No ones rights have been taken away. Stop that nonsense. Now let's go get the ACC Baseball Tournament back in Greenville, where it belongs.

South Carolina
Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.
In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."

They further solemnly declared that whenever any "form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government." Deeming the Government of Great Britain to have become destructive of these ends, they declared that the Colonies "are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; adopted for itself a Constitution, and appointed officers for the administration of government in all its departments-- Legislative, Executive and Judicial. For purposes of defense, they united their arms and their counsels; and, in 1778, they entered into a League known as the Articles of Confederation, whereby they agreed to entrust the administration of their external relations to a common agent, known as the Congress of the United States, expressly declaring, in the first Article "that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not, by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof."

Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended for the adoption of the States, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.

The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.

If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were-- separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.

By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that 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. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

Adopted December 24, 1860

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The first big lie, which is universally believed, is that Lincoln, dubbed the “Great Emancipator” by his cult of worshippers, went to war in order to free slaves. The abhorrence of racial injustice and the desire to abolish slavery played no role in the Union’s determination to strangle the Confederacy in its cradle. What did? One factor was Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union at any cost – including the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1862, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley (the leading Northern newspaperman of the day): “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

Similarly, in 1861 Congress resolved that the purpose of the war was not “[to interfere] with the rights or established institutions of those states,” but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” On the day that hostilities commenced at Fort Sumter (12 April 1861), only the seven states of the Deep South had seceded, there were more slaves within the Union than outside it and Lincoln hadn’t the slightest intention to free any of them. Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in Democracy in America (1835-40) remained true: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”

Another factor that motivated war was the Republican Party’s lust (which, with few and brief exceptions, it has retained to the present day) to tax and spend. The North waged war against the South in order to regain the federal tax revenue that would be lost if the Southern states seceded peacefully.(2) Republicans were then, and remain today, a Party of Big Government. In Lincoln’s time, Republicans championed a high (i.e., protectionist) tariff. They used the proceeds – which were laundered through roads, canals, railways, etc. – to dispense lavish corporate welfare to their backers. To Republicans, the fact that tariffs, corporate welfare and the like favoured an anointed few (whose residences, factories, etc., were overwhelmingly in the North) and punished a benighted many (Southerners were mostly “outs” rather than “ins”) was inconsequential. What was essential, however, was that consumers, Southern as well as Northern, subsidise Republicans’ wealthy backers. Southerners’ unwillingness to subjugate themselves to Republicans ultimately drove them to secede.

In Lincoln’s view, only by keeping the Union intact – by force of arms if necessary – could Republicans’ lust to tax, dispense largesse and build an empire be sated. In his First Inaugural Address (4 March 1861), Lincoln threatened to invade any state that failed to collect federal “duties and imposts.” On 19 April, he rationalised his order to blockade Southern ports on the grounds that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded.(3)

Lincoln the racist

A second wicked lie is that Lincoln championed natural rights and racial equality. Both his words and his deeds utterly repudiated any belief in or respect for these admirable principles. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he announced in the first (21 August 1858) of his celebrated debates with Stephen Douglas. Like many and perhaps most other men of his time and place, Lincoln was an unapologetic and irredeemable racist: “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favour of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” He added “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals.”

No reasonable person can possibly deny Lincoln’s staunch and vociferous advocacy of apartheid and white supremacy.(4) On 17 July 1858, he said: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.” And in the fourth of his debates with Douglas (on 18 September), he vowed: “I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with Negroes.” Lincoln enthusiastically supported the Illinois Constitution, which at that time prohibited the emigration of black people into the state; he also backed the infamous Illinois Black Codes, which deprived the small number of free blacks residing within the state any semblance of citizenship; and he applauded the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves and return them to their owners.

Lincoln brought these shamelessly racist attitudes and pro-slavery policy preferences to the White House. In his First Inaugural Address, he promised to support a proposed constitutional amendment (that had just passed the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives) that would have prohibited the federal government from ever assuming the power “to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labour or service by the laws of said State.” Also in his First Inaugural, Lincoln proposed to make this constitutional amendment “express and irrevocable.” Finally, Lincoln was a lifelong advocate of “colonisation,” that is, of shipping all black people to Africa, Central America, Haiti – anywhere other than the U.S. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he stated in a Message to Congress (1 December 1862), “that I strongly favour colonisation.” Indeed, he favoured it so strongly that he was the president of the Illinois Colonization Society. To Dishonest Abe, African-Americans could only be “equal” once they had been expelled from the United States.

A third myth is that Lincoln’s war saved the Union. Clearly, it did so geographically; just as clearly, however, by destroying its voluntary nature – which the Founders had emphasised and which had been taken for granted thereafter – the war ruined the Union philosophically. In the Declaration of Independence (1776), Articles of Confederation (1777-1781) and Constitution (1788), the states described themselves as “free and independent.” These documents could not be clearer: states delegated specified powers to the federal government which they had created as their agent, and they retained ultimate sovereignty for themselves. When they put their signatures to the Declaration of Independence, America’s Founders announced the secession from the British Empire of the states which they represented; and when George III signed the peace treaty ending the war, he named all of the states individually. He waged war against thirteen states, not a single entity called “the United States Government.”

"Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator: he was the Great Warmonger and Imperialist, the Great Racist, the Great Taxer-and-Spender, the Great Corruptionist, the Great Incarcerator and the Great Vandal of the Constitution."

Given those precedents, what sane person could possibly deny the same right of secession to Americans who withdrew consent from the federal government? Early in the 19th century, Northern rather than Southern states threatened to secede. Vermont considered secession in order to register its extreme disgust at the Louisiana Purchase – whose champion, Thomas Jefferson, knew was unconstitutional and who throughout his life affirmed the right of any state to dissolve the bonds of Union. Further, Massachusetts threatened to secede as a protest against the Embargo Act of 1807, the War of 1812 and the annexation of Texas in 1845. On none of these occasions did any Southerner (or any American of any description) threaten Yankees with invasion.(5) When Texans seceded from Mexico, no American doubted their right to do so and to join the Union. Quite the contrary: all insisted that they had such a right, and that no Mexican had any right to stop them. But to Lincoln and his henchmen, freedom of association did not permit freedom of disassociation: hence Southerners (including Texans) could join but couldn’t depart the Union. Like the insect in the Venus Flytrap and the guest at the Hotel California, you’re free to enter but you can never leave.

The truth, however, is that in 1861 the principle of freedom of association and right of secession was as widely understood and affirmed in the North as it was in the South. As The Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorialised on 13 November 1860, the Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone.” The New York Journal of Commerce concurred. On 12 January 1861 it warned that a coerced Union, one in which states were forcibly restrained from secession, would change the nature of government from “a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves” (see also John Remington Graham, A Constitutional History of Secession, Pelican, 2002).

Lincoln the dictator

A fourth blatant lie, cherished by Republicans, is the assertion that Lincoln was a “Defender of the Constitution.” The polar opposite is true: Lincoln was a tyrant and the despoiler par excellence of the Constitution. Generations of historians have accurately labelled him a “dictator.” “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship (first published in 1948). “Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal.”

James G. Randall documented Dishonest Abe’s assault upon law and liberty in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (first published in 1926). Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered the military to arrest tens of thousands of political opponents. At his command, but without a shred of legal authority, ca. 300 newspapers were closed and all telegraphic communications censored; elections in the North were rigged; throughout the Union, Democratic voters were intimidated; in New York City, hundreds of protesters against conscription (a form of slavery) were shot; West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia; and the most outspoken member of the Democratic Party opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, was deported. For good measure, duly-elected members of the Maryland legislature were gaoled, as was the mayor of Baltimore and a Maryland Congressman. In total disregard of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, inhabitants of Border States (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia) were disarmed, and wherever Lincoln’s evil tentacles could spread, private property was confiscated.

A fifth lie is that Lincoln was a “great humanitarian” who bore “malice towards none.” The truth is that Lincoln planned and managed a total war upon Southern civilians (see in particular Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, Cambridge University Press, 1997). Like Robert Mugabe today and sordid host of dictators during the 20th century, Lincoln ordered his troops to murder women and children. His war included the destruction of entire towns populated solely by civilians, massive looting, rape and execution without trial (or even charge) of non-combatants. To this day, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea (November-December 1864) remains the worst act of terrorism committed on American soil (see, for example, "Sherman’s March" by Clyde Wilson). Americans would be wise to remove their blinds and recall that this evil act was perpetrated by the agents of the U.S. Government at the vengeful behest of a Republican president. Sherman wrote on 24 December: “We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organised armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect.” Using the rules established by the Allies after the Second World War, Lincoln and the high command of the Union Army unquestionably qualified as war criminals.(6)

A sixth lie, perhaps the most despicable of all, is that the War of Northern Aggression was necessary. Only war, say its mythologisers and apologists, could have ended slavery. The truth, of course, is that it was a war of choice and not of necessity. This war, the deadliest in American history, caused the deaths of 620,000 soldiers and an undetermined number (but possibly as many as 250,000) of civilians. Approximately one in four adult, white male Southerners perished. And it was all for nothing. During the 19th century, dozens of countries, including the British, Russian and Spanish empires, abolished the indefensible institution of slavery. They did so peacefully and by means of compensated emancipation. Among the countries of the Western Hemisphere that followed this route were Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, various French colonies, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Only in the Land of the Free is war and the destruction of property and constitution regarded as a necessary condition of emancipation. Whether in the American South or the Middle East, Republicans, it seems, have to destroy a country in order to deliver it.

Abraham Lincoln, then, was not the Great Emancipator: he was the Great Warmonger and Imperialist, the Great Racist, the Great Taxer-and-Spender, the Great Corruptionist, the Great Incarcerator and the Great Vandal of the Constitution. He was a war criminal and America’s worst-ever president.

Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Re: Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Re: Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Re: Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

How about

How about,The Gtreat and Sovereign State of South Carolina"?***

Come on maaaaan

here you go, stanley...

I'm sorry friend

it's ok, stanley, it's easy to understand how you've lost

See what I mean?

People are stopping you from flying it outside your house

Re: People are stopping you from flying it outside your house

The Lounge is thatta way >>>>>>>>>

Re: The Lounge is thatta way >>>>>>>>>

Re: The Lounge is thatta way >>>>>>>>>

Re: The Lounge is thatta way >>>>>>>>>

Simple Fact

Getting your butt kicked in the Women's World Cup?

To long to read twice.

Re: To long to read twice.

I'm retired.

Re: I'm retired.

Re: To long to read twice.

Abe had no love for blacks it was all politics.

Re: Abe had no love for blacks it was all politics.

I'm sorry, but that's also two long.

Re: Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Re: Simple Facts for the "heritage" folks -

Yeah, we ALL know the Civil War was fought because

Of course it wasn't ONLY about slavery

Re: Of course it wasn't ONLY about slavery

If that's not enough, here's how Mississippi started out

Thank you. It's so readily evident, yet some have blinders

Re: Of course it wasn't ONLY about slavery

Lincoln's views on slavery have nothing to do with

Does it matter?

That's extremely well stated and I agree with most of it but

No doubt, it was wrong, and those who fought to preserve it

I promise you my intent has nothing to do with judging.

I agree completely. I'm just addressing the complexity of

I don't see where the declaration

Secession was all about preserving slavery. That flag was

Nothing about the flag, your reading comprehension

All that aside, did each state have the right to secede?***

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