Which President Was Worse -- Lincoln or Obama?

Book reviews? You're trying to convince me with book reviews?

OK.

Like I said, you don't know how to vette information. Reputable reviewers from reputable organization that specialize in the Civil War cite it as a significant or the definitive work on the subject. Such as Civil War Book Review, Southern Historian, The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of Mississippi History, and the Civil War Times.

Serious experts take this book seriously.

Unlike, say, a blog entry by a Psychology major at Rio Hondo Community College.

The author of your Black Confederates book is currently employed at Griffin High School. He is however the national historian in chief for the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

http://www.politifact.com/georgia/s...onfederate-veterans-spokesman-said-blacks-fo/

I'd say he might be a tad biased, but hey, I'm just one of those damn yankee carpet baggers.

Oh, more from the above link from Politfact:
http://www.politifact.com/georgia/s...onfederate-veterans-spokesman-said-blacks-fo/

Note that this is from the Georgia branch of politifact, and on their truth-o-meter they say they are lying assholes. Pants on fire is the worst possible rating for truthiness.

Sherman's troops impressed blacks into service as laborers. Of course, Sherman's troops also raped, pillaged, and burned their cabins too. They also burned the bridges behind the army and shot blacks when they tried to swim the rivers.

I accept your concession.

What Sherman did or did not do is irrelevant to the point at hand.

Stressing impressment is ridiculous in this context at its face. Blacks didn't voluntarily work as laborers for the confederacy. They were slaves, and they did what their masters said or they were beaten or worse.

You don't have to tell me about Kelly. I know him personally.

Even Edward Bearrs says there's been a concerted effort to write the black Confederates out of the history books since about 1910, and Bearss is Chief Historian for the NPS.

It's right there in one of the links I posted that you didn't read.

Free blacks served in the military and they were not slaves. They were free blacks.

That's in the links you didn't read too.

No concession offered.

As for Bruce Levine, he's one of the academics who mostly reference each other's contemporary writings but ignore or denigrate primary historical source documentation.

Ah, must be why all the actual journals that publish articles on this by real historians gave the work such glowing reviews. LOL.

Like I said: academics who quote each other and ignore primary documentation. The documentation is out there, but history is written by the victors.

Ever seen the parole forms of black Confederates where "soldier", "Infantryman", or "Cavalryman" was crossed out by the Union officers and "servant" or "cook" was written in?

I have.

The exact quote as cited by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans repeatedly by Bearss is:
I don’t want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks both above and below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910.

What I never see there are two things, one a source for such quote, two any context for said quote, and three the words 'BLACK SOLDIERS' in said quote. Even if it is a completely valid quote, there's no indication that is what he was speaking on.

Again, it's called vetting information.

Vet this!

9 out of 10 blacks in the South in 1860 were slaves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

You are saying that tens if not hundreds of thousands of them signed up to serve in the Confederacy, as opposed to the 3.5 million slaves that were ordered to perform duties by their owners.

It's farcical.

Not only was the average laborer helping the Confederacy a slave, the vast majority of them were.

And again, we have multiple individuals including the Secretary of War saying that none of the blacks working for the Confederate army in any form were soldiers, only menials and laborers.

Lieutenant Colonel Edwin "Ed" Kennedy, who was a tactics professor for some time at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth disagrees with you. He's done a fair amount of research on them.

LINK

I think he qualifies as "vetted".

There is NOTHING IN THAT VIDEO by the speaker at all that says anything at all about what you are claiming!

He is cut off before he approaches the subject AT ALL, only putting forward a couple of jokes.

Everything else is a framing device by the SCV to claim he says something relevant about the topic so you'll buy the DVD!

I'm sure he said something about the topic, but it's not in the youtube video. So we don't know what he said.

And you point this out to my comments that you don't know how to properly vet information?

REALLY?

HE SAID NOTHING RELEVANT IN THE VIDEO. Nothing about numbers, no facts, no figures, no citations, no quotes. Did you even watch it?

Lord have mercy Maud.

I can point to where to buy the full video if you'd like.

Lord have mercy Demi. You have eyes, but you cannot see.

I've seen the video, by the way. The FULL video.

Did you read down where it says:

That's Professor Edward C. Smith.

You might note:

Vetted!

LORD HAVE MERCY! HE KNOWS MORE THAN DEMI! IT'S...IT'S...IT'S THE DAY OF JUBILO!

I suppose it is too late to point out that EVEN IF (and they certainly did not), large numbers of blacks fought for the Confederacy.

That does absolutely nothing to validate the political or ethical position of the Confederacy.

Ultimately, the "state right" that the Confederacy was willing to fight for was the right to keep human beings as slaves.

and it matters not at all who was doing the fighting.

It doesn't matter that the Federal government violated the right of the states to secede? And you're forgetting that the US still had legal slavery in 5 states and Washington City when the war started.

You also seem to be forgetting that the slave trade was conducted by New Englanders and that the Confederates outlawed any foreign slave trade in their Constitution at the very beginning. No slave ship ever sailed under the Confederate flag. Not one. They all sailed under the US flag.

No Muab.

None of that matters. By the time the American Civil War was fought the United States had changed radically both in the role and form of the federal govt. and the roles of the states. And was continuing to change.

The sectionalism that led the south to secede no longer had a place in a fast changing world.

Southerners should've simply embraced an end to slavery as being inevitable and used their political power to insist on emancipated compensation. Thereby getting some money for their troubles (losing slavery).

Instead, they allowed themselves to be stampeded by groups of traditionally powerful planters who turned the souths traditional hyper patriotism and militarism to their own ends.

We both know most southerners did not own slaves, but they allowed the big landowners to influence them to fight a war that no sane person would get involved in.

And how did our Great Southern Nation repay their loyalty Muad? By treating both them and their descendants like dirt. Granted the Yankee Nation did no better. We should have stuck together as Southerner's All after the War.

Well I should certainly take your word for what it says, shouldn't I? LOL.

Impressive credentials.

There seems to be one thing missing.

An actual post-graduate degree.

Check out any other CV at American. They all list their masters, and doctorate degrees if they have them.

So I have no problem calling him Professor Smith.

I just can't call him Doctor Smith. He isn't one.

Guess that's why with all those impressive political connections, he isn't a full professor, despite teaching at that university since 1969. That's a LOOOOONG time not to make the grade.

Regardless, I still don't see one single shred of evidence that his theories back up your claim that 10% of the Confederates were not only blacks, but FREE blacks who volunteered.

Of course, you say they do. On that DVD you've seen.

That's nice. Have a cookie.

Dabton, do you mean "compensated emancipation"?

The compensated emancipation that Southerners tried to get but the Northern abolitionists had stopped by 1849? That compensated emancipation?

Yeah, OK, you're right. The South should have just given in, wrecked the economy, and let the Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the American Colonization Society ship them all back to Africa.

See, that was the difference. Southerners wanted to end slavery without wrecking their economy and use the graduated time to educate them and prepare them for freedom. The Northern abolitionists didn't give a damn about the South's economy; they just wanted to load them on ships and send them back to a land that probably most of that generation of slaves had never seen or known.

The Northern abolitionists, if they really gave a damn about the slaves, were their own worst enemy. Do you even know why it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write? It was because the Northern abolitionists were sending papers down south trying to incite the slaves to rise up and kill the whites. If they couldn't read, they wouldn't get that message.

Even then, a lot of Southerners did teach them literacy. Jefferson Davis taught his slaves. Stonewall Jackson taught his so they could read the Bible. Robert E. Lee's wife and daughter ran an illegal school at Arlington.

Considering that he taught history at the Command and General Staff College and has studied the primary docs on it, he's still more qualified as a historian than you are.

Have a turd.

But you might have one point: Kennedy says that 7-8% of the Confederate army was black.

Lincoln. Hands Down. Had Buchanan won a second term, The Civil War would likely been known as The Civil Secession to the history books, and I would likely be in the CSA with an entirely different guy as my President. God Save Buchanan's soul. While Lincoln was hell bent on the military option to preserve (even then) a broken nation, Buchanan would have continued every effort to sustain the country with as little bloodshed as possible, and if it did come straight down to "war or cession" Buchanan said quite clearly that there is no law or Constitutional Mandate that requires a state to remain within the Union. So the map would look quite different today, had Lincoln been defeated. And I am sorry to say that Lee fucked each of the three opportunities practically laid in front of him to end the war with a slamming victory for the South. I respect Lee, but he wasn't a tactical thinker. We needed someone less gentlemanly, with more guts, and more apt to take risks when a hole formed in enemy lines.

Obama is ripping the entire country and the economy to shreds without firing a single bullet here at home. By the time he's out, between being broke and unemployed, the "people" will follow ANYONE else, even a Hitler if he shines a light out of this mess. How great it is in democracy that men do not think.

But don't you all at least feel good to be absolved of your educationally induced WHITE GUILT?

:IMHO!::IMHO!::IMHO!::IMHO!::IMHO!:

You can thank 12 years of military occupation and Reconstruction for that. As Thomas DiLorenzo said, the military governors did a lot to "poison the well" of race relations during Reconstruction. The Jim Crow laws were the result of that.

No, that's the OTHER guy without a post graduate degree that you are saying I should believe over the guy that says they are full of crap - who has a doctorate, and is cited by every major Civil War publication as being the foremost authority in the field.

Hmm... the Civil War Gazette concurs...
http://civilwargazette.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/did-blacks-fight-in-combat-for-the-confederacy/

I've said it before, but I have no doubt that slavery would have easily ended well by 1870 without the war. Trade and diplomatic pressure from Europe would have seen to that and without the death and devastation of the war. I also have no doubt that even if the South had freed the slaves by 1860, there still would have been a war because emancipation did not address the tariff issues.

And you do raise a valid point about Lee: for all his tactical brilliance, he was fighting a defensive war. By the time he went on the offense, he'd lost too much manpower to fight it.

But it wasn't just Lee: it was Jefferson Davis too. Some of the Southern commanders wanted to take Washington right after First Manassas in 1861, but Davis wouldn't let them. If he had, they probably could have done it at that time.

That's how Beauregard wound up in Charleston. He mouthed off to the press that Davis wouldn't let him go ahead and take the Federal capital and got busted for it.

Davis is often derided as a micromanager, but so was Lincoln. He spent a lot of time in the telegraph office.

The CWG? McPherson?

OK, I understand you now.