Re: The War on Pleasure

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
m>, Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
><snip>
>> I have to ask--if the South had negotiated with Lincoln, promising to
>> return to the Union in return for a perpetual guarantee on their right to
>> own slaves, would slavery still be the issue that threatened the unity of
>> the country?  After all, Lincoln didn't pass the Emancipation
>> Proclaimation until over a year after the start of hostilities.  Could it
>> be he was unwilling to ban slavery outright when there was a chance 
>> (in his view) for a negotiated settlement?
>
>If the south was willing to settle for that, they would never have
>secceded in the first place. Without the civil war, banning slavery
.would have required a constitutional amendment. Which the 
>south had the votes to block. The south not only wanted to
>preserve slavery, a morally and etically reprehensible goal, they
>also wanted to expand the institution, through violence, terror
>and conquest. And naturally, preserve the power of the 
>slavocrates over all of southren society. The confederacy was 
>basically a distilate of unadulterated political Evil, and the way 
>people try to defend it and slam Lincoln for putting a stop to it is
>quite frankly deeply perplexing to me.

I'm not clear that the south wanted, particularly, to turn the whole of
the U.S. back(?) to having slavery as a major element in their
economy, except as an indirect remedy to the south's actual
concerns.  They seem to have perceived, accurately, that the non-
slave states' non-support for slavery in slave states represented a
threat to their property rights; if slaves escaped to a non-slave
state, or if southerners travelled in the north with their slaves and
the slaves absconded, there was inadequate redress for the loss.
Did I just see a signature about the critical importance in society
of property law...

Looking from the outside, the south does seem pretty evil - not
that most of the whole world hadn't had the same evil not long
before - and much of the anti-Lincoln argument is motivated by
stupid apologism for southern sins: standing up in defence of
slavery.  However, a separate argument still stands as to whether
Lincoln and the north violated the proper Constitutional and moral
limits of their authority, in rejecting secession and in taking it to
the point of war.  Moral and constitutional limits on the powers of
the government are, or should be, superior to immediate
questions of good and evil and expediency; the limits exist to
frustrate evil acts by the executive branch rather than to bear on
good acts, but whether an act actually is good or evil can be quite
difficult to determine.  Whether a President has acted outside his
legitimate authority may be easier to tell - and that the people he
socked it to had it coming to them is not sufficient justification.

To put it another way, the good that a President legitimately can do
in matters not under his direct authority is limited to what he can
get the other people in authority whose concern it properly is, to
agree to.  Otherwise, the line that is crossed is the line between
legitimate authority and tyranny.

To put it another way, again, suppose the President decides
without any good reason that /you/ are evil, what exists in the
Constitution and in the makeup of the republic to protect you from
him?

Robert Carnegie at home, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at large
-- 
Surely no-one has read down to here.  (from author Warren Ellis)