Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
As has been said, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The whole thing was so aptly summed up in the exchange between Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun back I think in the 1830s, and I think this one actually happened.
Jackson, at a dinner, but directly addressing himself to Calhoun: Our federal union. It must be preserved.
Calhoun: The union, next to our liberty, the most dear.
And now we are removing Calhoun's name from dorms.
I had a teacher way back in the day who was young then but became a well=known Civil War scholar. His theory was that it was what he called a preemptive counterrevolution by the South.
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I have no idea if it's true but I've seen that anecdote. If it isn't true, it still perfectly encapsulates the two men and what would become the great conflict of American history.
I love history and there are many complicated things in it, but I think the origin of the War is made a lot more complicated today than it really was. It's all there, all documented in detail by the people who chose and fought it. Each state defined what it was doing and why, and the individuals have left millions of pages of documentation. Some of the deep South put slavery right in their declarations of secession; the southern romantic notion that it was a side issue is as false as todays coastal elite narrative that it was just a bunch of evil racists who wanted only to be racist and deserved to be annihilated by the federal state. Even the North didn't decide until 1863, half way in, that their position going forward was that the war was largely about ending slavery.
In a time where the federal state was seen as a loose collection of independent states, and that federal state is becoming dominated by one block of states and used as an economic weapon against the other block of states, it isn't hard to see why people might want to pull out of that confederation. Slavery is one part of that, the biggest part of that for certain states whose economies were especially reliant on it like South Carolina, but not for other states like Virginia. Virginia's leading reason was that they would not invade their brother states, and thus joined the defense. It is easy to see why the side dominating the confederation wouldn't want the others to be permitted to leave. Lee's choice is exceptional in that he was offered the command of the North or the command of his state (not the Confederacy, just Virginia), but his choice was faced by thousands. I disagree with many modern views, but I think I will never understand why people expect a man to be willing to invade his own home. Some might and some did, but I cannot see why it would be expected. I could never do it. I doubt most advocating it today and condemning Lee's choice would. I have a hard time imagining California and New York elites joining in invading their home states if the federal government said to do it...