Which President Was Worse -- Lincoln or Obama?

This. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say Lincoln didn't want to be the president that lost half the country. The war was a tragedy that never should have happened.
But to his credit, Lincoln never sought out Marxist professors in college.

He would have loved this day and age.

Decent and honest academicians are becoming more and more of a rarity these days. They're often harrassed and denied tenure. Our students need teachers, not the left leaning, effete shitheads that have taken over our colleges and universities.

Demiurge's responses don't surprise me at all. I've watched him grow more and more Progressive and left leaning over the years.

The best research in history and archeaology these days is being done outside of the academic community. They're not hamstrung by concern for tenure.

State's rights died early when the Supreme Court held that a states right COULD NOT supercede that of the Federal Govt.

State's rights as a concept is utterly unworkable today anyway. Most Americans will live or work in a number of states during their lives and have close family spread across a number of others.

State or even sectional loyalty is effectively dead in the U.S.

And that, Dayton, is Progressive, Marxist thinking at its worst.

State sovereignty is not at all unworkable. It has taken a beating by an all powerful Federal goverment that has assumed more power and authority than it was ever meant to have. But then, that was the Lincoln's intent. He didn't give a damn about the slaves: he wanted that Federal power.

I've held professional licensure in 3 different states in 2 different professions and I've had to abide by the slightly different laws of regulations of each. I have to check the laws of any state I travel to regarding my carry permit.

Granted, a centralized, one-size-fits-all system might make things simpler...until the Feds assume too much power and pass a law that is too restrictive. Then, instead of having to check the handgun carry laws of each state that I travel to and comply with their differences, the Feds might outlaw my ability to carry at all.

And that's exactly why the Founders set up the system of government that they did. As a safety check against Federal encroachment and even state encroachment. Don't like the laws, taxes, or whatever of your state? You can vote with your feet. When the Feds assume that much power, there's no escape from it. If your state is intruding too much and losing too much population as a result, that's an incentive to correct what they're doing.

You are somewhat right about one thing: state and sectional loyalty have taken a beating. That's why we're in the mess we're in now.

Douglas was nowhere near a battlefield at any time during the war. All of his comments are based on what was related to him, not what he saw, and he certainly had a political bone to pick with that statement, as he was arguing that blacks should have all the freedoms of whites and more specifically should be employed in large number in the military for the cause of the Union. Men who were on the battlefield, such as Major-General Cobb, who oversaw armies that had thousands of blacks in support roles, swore up and down that they weren't soldiers and that to make them soldiers destroyed the very ideals that the Confederacy was founded on. It's hard to believe in such context that they 'snuck in' fifty to sixty thousand of them as soldiers. Your official war records comprise accounts of perhaps hundreds, not fifty thousand plus.

If you include slave labor then yes, you might get to that number. But you aren't saying that - you've gone so far as to say that there was a number as great as whole armies deployed by the Confederacy of free black men that willingly went to fight for their beloved Dixie.

This is a ludicrous fantasy and a blatantly political one, done so because you still want to believe that the cause of the South was just.

Ok, you want to believe that. Doesn't make it so, and any one without their head totally stuck up their ass in fantasy land understands that half the free black men in the South did not willingly volunteered for the armed forces of the Confederacy - a number that you are claiming, even if in all your imminent scholarship you don't understand.

Yes, and all the far lefties think I'm a far right reactionary. So I must be doing something right when all the fringe morons think I'm not ideologically pure enough for them.

The best research in history is not coming from high school teachers with a political axe to grind. Wishing doesn't make it so.

How do you explain the statements in the Official Records?

dp

So in a four year war with dozens of major battles and thousands of small ones I see a handful of accounts, all of them personal. Where I do, most of them are small in numbers. Any decent historian also understands that battlefield accounts are often exaggerated, indeed there's even an example of that in the accounts where the person relaying the account states that the numbers are likely overstated.

There are very few cases of any documented units, as there sure as hell should be for the numbers you are talking about. When we do find one that is documented like the Louisiana Guards, we find out other things as well - it was done largely as a publicity stunt, they were never allowed near a fight, and they were eventually disbanded because of racist laws.

There is no historical record for tens of thousands of black confederates - even people often quoted for your side, such as Professor Ervin Johnson, say that while some certainly did exist there's no way the evidence supports thousands, let alone tens of thousands.

The difference between you and me when we read these things - I don't have a firm underlying conviction that reality needs to fit what I already believe. I'd have no problem with the existence of Black Confederates in large numbers - wouldn't mean a thing to the underlying question for me that the Confederacy was morally in the wrong even if the Union was far from the benighted saints that is often inculcated in children now.

The evidence just doesn't support it. The people who were there said it didn't happen, and the argument against doing so was profound to the nature of the Confederacy and that argument was still raging way past the time it would have had any chance of saving them.

Yeah, right!

John Noland

OK, show of hands, who here plays dress up on weekends for Civil War reenactments?

I'm far more moderate on this stuff than you are Maud. I just don't buy your particular brand of bs. I've had discussions with friends that buy into the Union propaganda too, including one close friend that had just visited a symposium on Lincoln that didn't like hearing about alternate points of view.

Yes, read about him before. You keep showing me one or two guys, I'm waiting for the four divisions.

The anti-black confederate argument is that it's nothing but a series of anecdotes. You can't refute that with anecdotes.

http://www.calebstriumph.com/black_confederates/biographies.html

I've produced link after link, quote after quote. I'm still waiting for you to produce even one piece of evidence that they didn't exist.

Of course Dayton spanks it over the idea of a giant, all powerful Federal Government. If he had lived in Germany in the 1930's Dayton would have made a perfect Brownshirt.

As have I, from far more reputable sources than yours, which includes virtually every significant scholarly group with acknowledged expertise on the topic matter.

There's some anecdotal evidence as stated. There could even have been whole companies.

That doesn't prove your assertion of numbers (10%) or the fact that they were free man who volunteered for this.

Yes, all I have to do is prove a negative. Easy peasy! LOL.

What makes you think that more state and sectional loyalty would make things any better?

Somehow, if he had been in Germany in the 1930s he would've made the perfect Brownunderpants at the prospect of war.

No, you haven't. All you've done is proclaim that you're right and I'm wrong. You haven't produced a single shred of historical evidence to prove your case.

Because it brings government down to the local level, which is more manageable and responsible to the needs of the constituents.

That's one reason globalism will never work.

*Thinks of the corrupt nepotistic knuckleheads on the town board*

GUFFAW!

Oh, we've got 'em here. I could tell you some stories.

But then I look at Washington City and I realize it could be worse.

Besides of course the leaders of the Confederacy saying that they didn't have black soldiers, the writer that put it into a recent history book recanting, and the fact that your anecdotes don't come in any way close to supporting your claims.

Another notable, Ken Burns, celebrated documentarian and considered almost universally as producing the finest documentary on the Civil War:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pEBSY_oLtE&feature=related

I bolded the part where once again the foremost experts in the field are laughing at you. You are welcome.

Ken Burns? Ken Burns?



Geezus, Demi! You keep getting deeper into Liberal-Progressive moonbat territory!

Ah, here's another one of those ignorant Confederates on the nature of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee:

On the matter of incorporating slaves into the Confederate Army:

“Unless their freedom is guaranteed to them,” Robert E. Lee also understood, we “shall get no volunteers”

-- (8) R. E. Lee to John C. Breckinridge, March 14, 1865, Army of Northern Virginia Headquarters Papers, R. E. Lee Papers, Virginia Historical Society

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow/12_2010/historian3.php

Note that this reference exists is confirmed here:
http://www.vahistorical.org/arvfind/leehq.htm

This was at the very end of the war, when Lee was still debating with Secretary of War Breckinridge on how to start incorporating slaves into the Confederate Army.

That was the national army. Much of the Confederate army was made up of state militias.

Keep trying.

This coming from the guy whose sources are almost universally a political movement dedicated to historical revisionism, I can understand how you would prefer to avoid any reference source that didn't come from someone whose family tree doesn't branch.

This from the guy whose resources include a PBS documentary director and producer.