Brian Barker wrote:
Sorry to be off topic, but the Confederate Flag has NOTHING to do with slave owners.
Brian...
Overview of the Confederacy
Its ideology far more conservative than revolutionary, the nation of seceded Southern states faced a paradox in maintaining a centralized government comprised of entities whose very motivation for departing the Union was their objection to federal authority. On February 4, 1861, representatives from the seven states Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas-that had already seceded from the United States met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new republic. On February 8, the convention announced the establishment of the Confederate States of America and declared itself the provisional Congress.
The following day, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens were unanimously chosen provisional president and vice president, two men moderate enough, it was hoped, to convince the eight other reluctant slave states to join the Confederacy. A committee spent the next five weeks composing a national constitution, which was approved on March I 1. The document closely followed the U.S. Constitution-including its Bill of Rights-**with a few notable differences**. Language promoting "the general welfare" was omitted, **while the right to own slaves was explicitly guaranteed** although foreign slave trade was forbidden).
Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was born, like Abraham Lincoln, in Kentucky. His family seems to have been of modest circumstances, and soon moved to the newly opened southern frontier in Mississippi. Possessing great intelligence and imagination, Davis was educated at a number of institutions, including Transylvania University before entering West Point, from which he was graduated. Robert E. Lee was a fellow cadet.
Davis then served in the army at a number of posts in Wisconsin and Illinois, and he (like Lincoln) served in the Black Hawk War in 1832. He resigned from the army in 1835, married the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor, who was the commandant of Davi s's post at the time, and returned to Mississippi as a planter. Davis's marriage was cut short by his wife's sudden death three months later of malaria. For ten years, Davis tended to his plantation, "Brierfield," read extensively, and made only infrequent excursions outside his community.
In 1845, Davis strenthened his ties to the Mississippi planter class by marrying a woman from a socially prominent family. At the same time, his career became more public when he was elected to Congress as a Democrat. With the outbreak of the Mexican War, however, Davis resigned his seat in order to command a Mississippi regiment. His bravery at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista won him acclaim.
Davis was then elected to the United States Senate where he became a leading spokesman for southern rights. Although willing to accept the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, Davis argued the right of slavery to go into the territories, and he adamantly opposed the admission of California as a free state. Davis's stand proved too extreme for Mississippi in the aftermath of the Compromise of 1850. In 1851, in a complicated political maneuver, Davis stepped down as senator to run against a pro-compromise "Union" candidate for governor, and lost.
Davis's return to the life of a planter proved only temporary. In 1853 he became secretary of war in the cabinet of President Franklin Pierce, where he demonstrated his southern expansionist leanings. With the close of the Pierce administration, he returned to the Senate and became a leader of the southern Democratic defense of slavery and its constitutional right to protection in the territories. More controversially, he advocated the revival of the slave trade.
Alexander Stephens was born in Crawfordville, Georgia, on 11th February, 1812. After graduating from the University of Georgia he taught in a local school. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1834.
Stephens joined the Whig Party and in 1836 he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. He served for five years before being elected to the 28th Congress and took his seat in October, 1843. He later joined the Democratic Party and was chairman of the Committee on Territories (1848-50). Stephens was a strong opponent of the Mexican War and was highly critical of President James Polk during this conflict.
An advocate of slavery, Stephens campaigned for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He opposed the election of Abraham Lincoln but argued against immediate secession after the Republican Party victory. Lincoln wrote a letter to Stephens pointing out: "You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us."
The Confederate Cabinet:
“This conflict, at least, is irrepressible - it is easily understood –we demand the equal right with the North to go into the common Territories with all of our property, slaves included, and to be there protected in its peaceable enjoyment by the Federal Government, until such Territories may come into the Union as equal States-then we admit them with or without slavery, as the people themselves may decide for themselves.”
—Robert Toombs Secretary of State, CSA
“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 subversion 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 peace and safety. On the 4th 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 through-out 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.
—C. G. Toombs, Secretary of the Treasury, CSA
Judah P. Benjamin, Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, CSA: Owned 140 slaves on his sugar plantation.
I just felt that this belonged here.
