maximus Loc: Chattanooga, Tennessee

Was not the dossier that prompted the way too long investigation by Mueller bought by the Democrat party from an English spy who got it from a Russian source? What the heck do you call that??? I believe ANYBODY wold say 'Democrats digging up dirt on Trump'. Hasn't this ALWAYS been an e******n stunt? Lord, back when Pat Roberson ran for president, he had to back out because somebody found out that he and his wife lived together before marriage. Then there's that guy, I can't remember his name, had to drop out because someone found a photo of him on a boat with a girlfriend. One candidate is always trying to get dirt on the other guy. Been going on forever.

PeterS

Hope you don't mind but I've been saving many of your meme's. Conservatives think our treatment of Trump never matched on planet earth and I find it amazing how so they forget how they treated Obama. They will say their treatment was justified by his policies but the majority that they say about him them made up themselves and I have to keep pointing out to them that if Obama was the socialist they think he was he was he would have kept GM and much of the financial market that he bailed out as any good socialist would. Instead he turned them all back to the free market as soon as they repaid their loans. Tell me any socialist who would do that?

PeterS

Yes but we are still looking at five states mostly located along the MD line so these were agrarian states where s***es would have still been used.

You also seem to be using statistical fallacies in your use of the 1860 census. You claim that 1.4% of people owned s***es.

In 1860 only 15 states had a population of over 1,000 s***es and in Mississippi there were 49% of the households owning s***es and in Delaware 3% of the households so the median for s***e holding states was 27% of all households own s***es not 1.4%.

Also you said "The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free b****s owned s***es—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern w****s"

I could find nothing to show that 28% of free b****s owning s***es but if they did, Snip>>>As Woodson wrote in his 1924 book Free Negro Owners of S***es in the United States in 1830, "In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa. … S***es of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his s***es and were thus reported to the numerators."

So again, I think you are using statistical fallacies to show that s***ery was not as dominant as it really was in states that depended on s***ery to propel the economy.

https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/v***l-image/v***l-post-gets-it-wrong-extent-s***ery-1860/

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

Rumi,
You really need to be more careful in who you use as a source for historical posts. It’s evident your author didn’t use very many, herself, since her research yielded ZERO credibility to her book with her “wild-in-the-eyes” conclusions about Lee and s***ery.

Below, is a portion of a tid-bit of knowledge your author obviously failed to utilized for her research. As a “Civil War nut,” myself (I live in Tennessee and it’s home to the 2nd highest number of Civil War battles, behind Virginia), I’ve learned where to go to find creditable and usually unbiased sources for my research.

Robert E. Lee and S***ery
From the EncyclopediaVirginia
Contributed by Allen C. Guelzo

Robert E. Lee was the most successful Confederate military leader during the American Civil War (1861–1865). This also made him, by virtue of the Confederacy's defense of chattel s***ery, the most successful defender of the ens***ement of African Americans. Yet his own personal record on both s***ery and race is mottled with contradictions and ambivalence, all which were in plain view during his long career. Born into two of Virginia's most prominent families, Lee spent his early years surrounded by ens***ed African Americans, although that changed once he joined the Army. His wife, Mary Randolph Custis Lee, freed her own personal s***es, but her father, George Washington Parke Custis, still owned many people, and when he died, Robert E. Lee, as executor of his estate, was responsible for manumitting them within five years. He was widely criticized for taking the full five years. Lee and his wife supported the American Colonization Society before the war but resisted the abolitionist movement. Lee later insisted that his decision to support the Confederacy was not founded on a defense of s***ery. During both the Maryland (1862) and Gettysburg (1863) campaigns, Lee's officers kidnapped free b****s and sold them into s***ery. By 1865, Lee supported the enlistment of African Americans into the Confederate army, but he surrendered before a plan could be implemented. After the war, he generally opposed racial and political e******y for African Americans.

Lee was born in 1807, into two of Virginia's most prominent families. His father, Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, served as a cavalry officer in the American Revolution (1775–1783), a governor of Virginia (1791–1794), and a member of the House of Representatives (1799–1801), while his mother, Ann Hill Carter Lee, was the great-granddaughter of colonial-era Virginia's most prominent s***eholder, Robert "King" Carter. Lee spent his early childhood at Stratford Hall, the family plantation on the Northern Neck, surrounded by more than thirty ens***ed African-Americans. Even after various financial setbacks and a move to diminished quarters in Alexandria, the family still retained s***es, including at least six at the time of Ann Carter Lee's death in 1829. There is no record of Robert E. Lee owning s***es prior to that year, which coincided with his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Ann Carter Lee itemized the s***es she bequeathed to her daughter, Ann Kinloch Lee, but the only designation of property to her youngest son was a vague division of "the remainder of my estate" among Robert and his two older brothers, Charles Carter Lee and Sidney Smith Lee.

This "remainder," however, may have included other s***es, since a letter written by Lee to his brother Charles Carter Lee, on February 24, 1835, mentions "Mrs. Sally Diggs" and "Mrs Nancy Ruffin & her three illegitimate pledges," who are "are all of the race in my poss[ession]." Lee may well have owned one other s***e as a result of his mother's estate, a man known only as Nat (or "Nate"), who accompanied Lee to his first posting as an engineering officer on Cockspur Island, Georgia, at the mouth of the Savannah River. But Nat was evidently both elderly and ill—"very weak & his cough is still bad," Lee wrote to his brother Charles on January 4, 1831—and died soon after.

But even if Lee owned few s***es in his own name, he became part of a large s***eholding household when he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis in 1831. Mary Custis Lee was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington and the owner of three major plantations—Arlington, overlooking the Potomac River in the District of Columbia, and Romancocke on the Pamunkey River and White House on the York River—and 198 s***es by the 1850s. Thereafter, Lee had little need to acquire s***es himself, and the family's summer-vacation peregrinations to visit various relatives included, according to one 1839 account, "a squad of children, Negroes, horses, and dogs." On the other hand, the various postings to which Lee was ordered after his marriage did not accommodate large numbers of s***es, especially in the North. In 1840 Lee was stationed in Saint Louis, where he was in charge of a multiyear project to dredge the Mississippi River ship channel. That year the federal census lists him as owning twenty-two s***es, but it is more likely that these were ens***ed laborers hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the dredging project. In a letter to his wife, dated April 18, 1841, Lee noted that his quarters at Fort Hamilton in New York harbor offered "poor encouragement about Servants," since "every one seems to attend to their own matters." In 1850, when Lee was assigned to Baltimore to begin the construction of Fort Carroll, a census taker only itemized three "mulattoes" as household s***es, all of them drawn from the Arlington s***e population.

Despite the family's extensive investment in s***es, the Custises were not entirely comfortable with owning s***es. George Washington Parke Custis's step-grandfather, George Washington, had manumitted, or freed, through his will the s***es owned in his own name, and like many elite Virginia s***eholders, the Custises took the opportunity of s***ery's steady drain toward the southwestern states to profess their distaste for the "peculiar institution," although without necessarily doing anything about it. The elder Custis described s***ery as a "vulture" that gnawed at the "vitals" of southern society; Custis's brother-in-law, William Henry Fitzhugh, had scheduled the postmortem manumission of his own s***es "after the year 1850." Mary Custis Lee herself operated a small Sunday school for ens***ed children at Arlington.

While it was legal under the laws of the District of Columbia, the classes became suspect under Virginia law once Arlington was retroceded to Virginia in 1847. And, like his Custis in-laws, Lee supported the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States. In 1855 he purchased a life membership for his wife.

With his connection to s***e owning being mostly tangential rather than direct, Lee preferred to treat the ens***ed people around him as invisible. In an 1832 letter to his brother Charles, written during his first posting in Georgia, he noticed only that "B****s in this part of the Country are mostly Labourers, & Mechanics white." Thirty-five years later he was posted in Texas as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Cavalry. In a letter to his wife, dated March 28, 1857, he remarked obliquely on "our troubles" in maintaining "servants" at Camp Cooper.

It was not until the mid-1850s that Lee offered his first extended commentary on s***ery. After the Mexican War (1846–1848) brought to the United States a substantial amount of new territory known as the Mexican Cession, Congress began debating the possibility of legalizing s***ery there. The controversy was abated by the Compromise of 1850, which permitted s***ery in the Cession under the rule of "popular sovereignty," which allowed the settlers of a given territory to decide for themselves whether to allow s***ery. But peace lasted only until 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act attempted to apply the "popular sovereignty" rule to the other western territories acquired earlier by the Louisiana Purchase. The Whig Party dissolved under the weight of the controversy. A new political party, the Republican, emerged in adamant opposition to any expansion of s***ery into the territories and in 1856 nominated its first p**********l candidate, John C. Frémont.

From Texas, Lee wrote his wife on November 19, 1856, that he was "much in the dark as to what is going on in the outer world." But he was apprehensive that there was "no hope" of electing the last of the Whig candidates, Millard Fillmore, in order to promote national compromise. He was certain that Frémont could not be elected, and predicted that a victory by the Democrat, James Buchanan, would best guarantee "the Union and Constitution." His guesses were confirmed the next month. He wrote his wife on December 27 that "full files of papers" had arrived "from New Orleans," along with news of outgoing President Franklin Pierce's final State of the Union Address. In the same letter he wrote to condemn "the systematic & progressive efforts of certain people of the North, to interfere with & change the domestic institutions of the South." The driving force behind the movement to restrict the legalization of s***ery in the territories was a movement to abolish s***ery entirely—not just in the territories, but in the southern states as well. This, Lee believed "can only be accomplished by them through the agency of a civil and servile war."

It was, however, the violence of the abolitionist solution that alarmed Lee, not a love for s***ery itself. "In this enlightened age, there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge, that s***ery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any country," he wrote his wife. The burden of the evil actually fell more to "the white than to the black race," since "the b****s are immeasurably better off here then in Africa, morally, socially & physically," and their "painful discipline" as s***es will "prepare & lead them to better things." What he dreaded was the disruption caused by a sudden and total emancipation of the s***es. It will accomplish nothing, Lee argued, for the abolitionist to "create angry feelings in the master […] if he means well to the s***e," since the abolitionist has no more ground for interfering in the legal relations of masters and s***es than in any other "kind of interference with our neighbors when we disapprove their conduct." The "final abolition of human s***ery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power," he wrote, but it is a process that cannot be rushed, and "will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy."

Events did not permit Lee the luxury of dealing with s***ery in such detached terms. His father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died in October 1857, having designated Lee as the executor of his estate. Taking a leave of absence from his regiment, Lee found both the will and the estate a tangled mess, not the least because Custis had stipulated that his s***es were "to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper." He further stipulated for "the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease." To accomplish that, Lee had to satisfy Custis's substantial debts and fund several benefactions to Lee's own children, which could only be created by overhauling the management of the Custis estates and, according to an anonymous letter critical of Lee and published in the New-York Tribune on June 24, 1859, keeping the s***es "harder at work than ever," with "no time given them" for "making a little now and then for themselves, as they were allowed to do during Mr. Custis's life." The s***e population, especially at Arlington, balked at Lee's new discipline, especially since a number were convinced that Custis had provided in his will for their immediate freedom. In a letter to A. E. S. Keese, dated April 28, 1858, Lee described how three of the Arlington s***es had "refused to obey my orders, & said that they were as free as I was," and attempted to run away. They were arrested in Maryland, he later told his son George Washington Custis Lee, "making their way to Pennsylvania," and Lee, at least according to a newspaper report, ordered them whipped and hired out. These difficulties required Lee to apply to the Alexandria County circuit court for an order confirming his authority to maintain the Custis s***es in bondage through the five-year term, until payment of the legacies and debts had been finished.

Emancipation in another form struck close to Lee in October 1859, with John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry. Although Lee was still on leave, he was ordered by the secretary of war, John B. Floyd, to take command of a detachment of ninety U.S. Marines and suppress Brown's attempt to provoke a s***e uprising. Lee was able to capture Brown with surprisingly little resistance, and, in his report, dismissed the raid as "the plan […] of a fanatic or a madman that could only end in failure."

Lee returned to Texas in February 1860, just as the furor over the 1860 p**********l e******n was mounting. Lincoln was elected in November. The s***e states began seceding from the United States and in February 1861 formed a breakaway republic, the Confederate States of America. Lee was recalled from Texas by the U.S. Army's general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, but after Virginia joined the secessionists on April 17, 1861, Lee resigned his commission and instead took command of Virginia's state forces. Lee did so with serious reservations about the constitutionality of secession.

If you want to read more, here’s the link:
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lee_Robert_E_and_S***ery

BTW, Guelzo is a nationally recognized authority on the US Civil War. He’s written several books and articles about various aspects of the Civil War and has been a “technical expert” on several movies and TV shows about the Civil War. As such, I’ll take his word over the word of your author, anytime.

As to those on here who said Lee did NOT own any s***es, you, too, need to brush-up on your American history. The “Lost Cause” is just that, a “lost cause.” So, actually, at various points in time, Lee DID own or had control over s***es; yet he disliked the institution of s***ery. He felt that b****s were of a lesser class and intelligence than w****s and that as s***es, b****s were better off, here, than even in Africa, except for Liberia.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

—————-

Pennylynn,

We seldom agree on anything, but, I must say your post, here, is excellent!

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

———————-


“... War of Northern Aggression ...?!” Well, that, alone tells me you’re already prejudiced and only look to buttress your own prejudices. The “War of the R*******n” is its “official” title. Like I told rumi, “... the ‘Lost Cause’ is just that; a lost cause.” What the states who joined the Confederacy did was treason against the Federal government by the means of armed i**********n. The Constitution, which you so like to claim to follow, allowed the Federal government to defend itself against aggressors, both foreign and domestic.

And, seeing as you love to claim your oath and allegiance to the laws of the land, try looking-up the “I**********n Laws” and the “Posse Comitatus Act.” The “I**********n Law”is what Lincoln used to put down the r*******n of the Southern states who began an armed r*******n against the Federal government.

Most Americans believe that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops to enforce the law in the United States. They also believe that the President has to wait until a governor asks for help before he can send federal troops to help and even only to quell an i**********n. These beliefs are erroneous. They are based on complete misunderstanding of the two major laws that pertain to this issue. This is important, for understanding the true status of the laws and authorities is essential if we are to provide for the security of the homeland in an age of terrorism and catastrophic natural disasters.

I hope to address both the Posse Comitatus Act and the I**********n Act, using different approaches to help you understand what each really means. I will parse the Posse Comitatus Act to allow you to understand what it really means. I will tell the story of the I**********n Act to allow you to understand how it came to be enacted.

This is important, for the true status of the laws and authorities are essential if we are to provide for the security of the homeland in an age of terrorism and catastrophic natural disasters.

A lot of people are talking about the Posse Comitatus Act, and almost all of them get it wrong. Few, if any, of the media and academia pontificators have even read the law itself. Well, here it is-United States Code Title 18, Section 1385.

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Forces as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years or both.”

In order to help the readers understand what this one-sentence law means, I am going to parse it. That is, I am going to examine its meaning by determining the parts of speech in the sentence. As older readers will remember, this is known as diagraming a sentence.

It should be noted at the outset that the law does not contain the word "prohibited." The law says nothing about the provision of relief or support from or by the federal government. It pertains to the use of the Army or Air Force to execute the laws as a member of a "posse comitatus" formed by a U.S. Attorney, U.S. marshal, a sheriff, law enforcement officer, or other public official or private citizen.

A sentence has to contain a subject, verb, and an object. The subject in this sentence is the word: "Whoever." The verb is "uses." The object is "part of the Army and Air Force." The rest of the sentence consists of clauses that modify the subject, the verb, or the object. Stripped of the modifiers, the sentence reads: Whoever uses part of the Army and Air Force.

Next we will address the modifiers of the verb. The first modifier is the adverb "willfully." This means that the using is done on purpose and not accidentally. The second modifier explains the kind of the use to which the verb applies. In this law, this use is "as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws." The sentence now reads, "whoever willfully uses any part of the Army and Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws."

Note that the offender under this law would not be the Army or Air Force, or members of the Army or Air Force but the person who uses them in violation of the law. This may explain why no person has been convicted of violating the Posse Comitatus Act since it was enacted in 1878.

I know you are waiting to find out what happens to those "whoevers" that do this bad thing willfully, so we next add the consequences of such an action, and now the law reads as follows:

Whoever willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years or both.

This is almost the complete law. If it were the complete law, the pontificators would be correct in asserting that the law prohibits the use of the Army and Air Force from enforcing the law in the United Sates. However, Congress included an important qualification in the sentence that is often overlooked by those who prefer an absolute prohibition. The important exception is the following clause that modifies the subject: Except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.

It is clear that Congress has someone in mind that could lawfully authorize the Army and Air Force to execute the laws. Who is this person or persons to whom Congress grants that authority?

Congress has on several occasions enacted laws that authorize one person-and one person only-to authorize the Army and Air Force to execute the laws. That person is the President of the United States. To make it clear what the sentence really says, I will substitute this meaning of the exception clause in the parsed version of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Whoever, except the Congress or the President of the United States, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus of otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned or both.

Restated even more clearly, the intent of this law reads as follows: “Only the Congress or the President of the United States may authorize the use of the Army and Air Force to execute the laws.”

That is what the Posse Comitatus Act means-or at least what it meant when it was enacted in 1878. Unfortunately for the Nation, the meaning of the law was completely revised by conservative, activist judges in the 1970s, so recent case law is the opposite of the law itself. That modern revised version of the Posse Comitatus Act is what most people are citing when they assert that federal troops are prohibited from enforcing the law in the United States. Fortunately, the I**********n Act stands, and it permits the President to use federal troops to enforce the laws either at the request of a governor or on the initiative of the President.

The I**********n Act consists of four statutes enacted at different times for different reasons that, when considered as a whole, provide the power that Presidents have used many times as the legal basis for using troops to enforce the law. The four sections of law are as follows.

Title 10, Section 334 was enacted in 1792 as the Calling Forth Act to give President George Washington authority to call forth the m*****a when in his judgment they were needed to repel invasions, suppress i**********ns, or enforce the laws. To assure that this authority was not abused, a reluctant Congress specified that before using the troops, the President would have to issue a proclamation calling on the insurgents to disperse in a limited time.

Title 10, Section 331 is a combination of two laws. One was enacted in 1795 to correct weaknesses in the Calling Forth Act (1792) when it was used to suppress the Whisky R*******n in 1793. This law gave the President specific authority to call forth the m*****a upon the request of a governor or state legislature, if the governor were unable to apply for the assistance. The second law was enacted in 1807 at the request of President Thomas Jefferson to extend P**********l authority to call forth the standing army as well at the m*****a. This section allows the President to use the armed forces to enforce the laws or suppress a r*******n whenever, in his opinion, unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages or r*******n against the authority of the United States make it impractical to enforce the laws using the course of judicial proceedings.

Title 10, Section 332 was enacted in 1861 at the request of President Abraham Lincoln to increase P**********l authority to use the m*****a and the regular army to suppress i**********ns and enforce the laws. This law was the legal basis for waging the Civil War. This law allows the President to use federal troops on his own initiative and act on his own judgment without waiting for a request from a governor.

Title 10, Section 333 was enacted in 1869 at the request of President U. S. Grant to empower him to use federal troops to suppress the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. The original version of this law said that it was the duty of the President to use the armed forces or m*****a to respond to i**********n, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracies that deprive any portion or class of people their Constitutional rights and privileges when state authorities are unable or refuse to protect such people.

The I**********n Act empowers the President, either upon his own initiative or at the request of a governor to use federal troops to address a variety of civil disturbances that could be provoked by a major terrorist attack. Sections 332 and 333 make it clear that it is up to the President to determine when and where to use federal troops to enforce the laws. The prudent reader should see for him or her self by going to the Internet and reading the statutes cited.

The t***h of the matter is that the Posse Comitatus Act is irrelevant. It need not be changed. What needs to be changed is the prevalent misconception of its original intent. As the parsing exercise above shows, it was intended to allow the President and only the President to use federal troops to execute the laws. As the discussion of the I**********n Act shows, the President has sufficient authority to do what needs to be done to use federal troops to maintain law and order. The people, the politicians, and the President all need to understand that.

Boo_Boo Loc: Jellystone

Truly, I did not intend to seem biased. I often yank Rumitoid's chain... He is originally from New York, New York..... and I was born, raised, and will die in one of the most beautiful (Tennessee being another) places in the world.... Virginia. In fact, I am 6th generation... living on the same farm that our first settler in the 1600s bought and paid for .... twice.

Having said that, I thank you most kindly for the information you provided.

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

So who does the r**ting when their candidate loses?

Whining Crying R**ting Hillary Millennial Theme Song - Dana Kamide
https://youtu.be/aVlHZh5dvbA

vettelover Loc: Richmond Va

I am assuming you completely forgot about Obama's hostile takeover of Fannie and Freddie and then using those funds to push into O'care shortfalls.! How convenient you forget that!

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Outstanding posts, Alabuck.

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

Her is a fact ALL Americans need to be aware of.
A C*******t MO is to erase a country's history.
That is what they did in Russia, after becoming the USSR.
Even changed the names of cities to Leningrad and Stalingrad.

Beware of C*******m.
Beware of L*****ts.
They are using mobs in the USA right now to remove statues, just like they did in Russia.

Smedley_buzkill

Actually, Lee DID own a few s***es which he inherited on his father-in-law's death. He never bought any himself. As for the s***es he inherited, he freed them all within five years of his inheritance. Along with the s***es, he inherited a pile of his father-in-law's debts, which, in order to pay off, he wasforced to use the s***es. They were, in accordance with the terms of his father-in-law's will, freed within the five year period specified. Lee never purchased any s***es, nor did he own them except in this one case, temporarily. Contrast this with Ulysses S Grant, whose wife owned four s***es who remained in bondage until she was forced to free them because of ratification of the 13th Amendment, about a year after the end of the war.
Except for Ms Elizabeth Pryor Brown, who wrote a rather poorly researched and heavily biased book about Lee, there are few accusations of his cruelty to s***es. He may or may not have ordered a flogging of a s***e, but he was a professional military officer at a time when flogging was an accepted punishment for mutinous soldiers, also.

Smedley_buzkill

Perhaps you can show us where, in the year 1861, secession was prohibited by either the Constitution or by Federal Law. Then perhaps you can reference the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and explain why Virginia, New York and Rhode Island, three of the last four states to ratify, included statements of their right to secede if they felt it necessary. Perhaps you can show one instance where prohibition of secession was a condition of statehood for any state admitted to the Union between December of 1791 and the beginning of the War. In the case of Virginia, where Ms Pennylynn hails from, this was definitely a war of Northern Aggression. Virginia held a plebiscite on secession and it was defeated. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Virginia was ordered to provide troops to the Union Army. At this point, they held another v**e on secession which was successful, and seceded not as a part of the Confederacy, but as an independent republic, which they had enumerated as a retained right in their ratification statement some seventy years earlier. It was not until Union troops invaded their legally seceded country that they actually joined the Confederacy. They had seceded legally and peacefully and unlike South Carolina, did not initiate hostilities.

Boo_Boo Loc: Jellystone

Robert may have inherited 3 s***es from his mother's estate. His mother, Ann Hill Carter Lee, was the great-great grandfather was Robert "King" Carter who owned the vast majority of land and s***es in Northern Virginia. In 1834 Robert wrote a letter to his brother and provided us with names: Mrs. Sally Diggs", "Mrs Nancy Ruffin" and a gentleman, apparently in bad health he identified as Nat. You are correct, I can find no record of either Robert or his wife, Mary, buying or selling a single s***e. Mary did inherit 198 s***es residing at 3 plantations: Arlington, overlooking the Potomac River in the District of Columbia, and Romancocke on the Pamunkey River and White House on the York River. Robert was only the executor of the will of George Washington Parke Curtis, not a recipient of benefits. However, he was handed a mess. The plantations were almost bankrupt. As for as him mistreating any, there is only one record and that is a letter, once again to his brother. Apparently 3 s***es had run away because they did not like the idea of change. He thought they were heading to Pennsylvania... so he asked his son to find them and when he did, to whip them and then hire them out. There is no record of those s***es being caught, so I do not know if his son whipped them or not. There is no record that they were hired out. This is the only record of Robert directing discipline or anything close to mistreatment.

Your comments are spot on....

May I also welcome you to OPP. It is an interesting place and I see you will fit in quite nicely. So, welcome.

truthiness

...
This has been a good discussion about the war of northern aggression. Pennylinn in good style has added historical perspective and relevant comments; the data from both sides of the antebellum s***e population issue has been illuminating. Any expertise that I might contribute has to do with the war itself. I published a paper some years ago on the battle of Bull Run; leadership mistakes caused the Confederacy to not win the war there as it did in other places during the war.
Douglas Southall Freeman (Lee’s Lieutenants) would have us believe (correctly) that in general the upper command of the Confederacy was superior to that of the Union—at least until the resources of the Union outstripped the South; Grant’s and Sherman’s generalship also contributed mightily at the end. The passion that the southern soldiers had for Lee and Jackson was unbelievable and contributed to the length of the war in my opinion. I cannot understand why Lee, with a smaller army and less materiale, consistently used the frontal attack thereby wasting precious man power. He could have learned from Jackson who was a genius at flanking, but who unfortunately had to do his own reconnoitering which cost him his life.

In order to make some contribution to the discussion about s***ery and the past-war aftermath, I need to try to convince that I occupy a neutral position based on the fact that I have spent as much of my life in the South as in the North thereby having the opportunity to see both if not several sides of the results of the war.
I was born, raised, and educated in a Midwestern county that was and is as Republican as Orange County. At 17 I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and upon release from active duty matriculated to a state university in Texas: two degrees in Texas, one degree from a university in Arkansas. I have rounded up sheep and sheared them in West Texas; lived in Austin; raised Arabian horses and Brahman-crossbred cows in central Texas; worked for a major oil company in Houston; worked in the woods of central-south Arkansas for a decade; lived in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee (where I saw a completely different attitude of warm friendship to the point of familiality of European Americans (EA) with African Americans (AA) than I experienced in the plantation-like fields of western Tennessee). I spent the better part of two years teaching college courses in Virginia (where I heard much about the war of northern aggression). I am in my 80th year, and have spent at least half of my pre-retirement life in the South.

The following observations may be offensive to both Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats, and rural folks and city dwellers as I draw general conclusions about large groups of people. I will take that as an indication of self-proclaimed neutrality.
1) Northerners rarely think about the war. The war lives on in the minds of (many) Southerners. This obviously is not due to the old saw about history being written by the victors. There is something more compulsive about the memory of a lost war after half a century and the uniting effects of two world wars. One possibility is the fact that the unaltered states-rights part of the Constitution has replaced the amended s***ery part of the Constitution in the minds of southerners as the real cause of the war.

2) Northerners completely reject the confederate notion that AAs were better off in America as s***es than they were living in Africa. Hard to fathom a s***e being beaten or having his neck about to snap at the end of a lynch rope saying, Sure glad I am in America. Even Jefferson Davis’ household s***es, who were not beaten or mistreated,were later found to be forwarding information to the northern army.

3) The affection and passion that the southern grunt soldier had for Lee, for other generals, and for the Confederacy itself is difficult for Northerners to understand since few of the southern rank and file soldiers themselves had s***es and were often poor, sometimes as poor as s***es. The North was motivated by abolition. Northerners wonder what motivated the rank and file of the South to bleed for a system that did not benefit them that much.
Some Northerners find the answer in the words of a contemporary Southerner that if applicable now were certainly valid in the antebellum South: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he will empty his pockets for you,” said Lyndon Johnson.

4) Northerners chuckle when they hear Southerners talk about the War of Northern Aggression rather than call it the Civil War. That is because Southerners view it as an invasion of their homeland when they tried to leave the Union over an issue that was legitimately theirs according to the Constitution. Southerners ask, What would you have done if we in the mid-nineteenth century with our strong political coalitions had passed laws that outlawed your factories because of the excessive profits resulting from immoral use of human labor---especially children?

5) EAs in the South today wonder why the North would want to take away the remaining symbols of the war. The f**g and the statues, while admittedly offensive to AAs, are reminders of the glory days of the confederacy. We lost the war, but why do you try to make us forget our heritage? they ask.

6) The North likes to point to r****m in the South while completely ignoring their own brand of r****m. The r****m of the North is covert, tied up in very real local laws involving zoning. real estate, and equal educational opportunities. The overt r****m of the South is at least not hypocritical. My (Northern) father was r****t in words and attitude toward any European immigrants that emigrated after his group left the old country. However, his attitude would never allow him to reveal his r****m at an open protest activity.
(P.S. There is r****m in the West where I now reside).

7) The differences that I saw between North and South was more a divide between rural and city
outlooks rather than North versus South attitudes. This is playing out in contemporary v****g patterns. Come to think of it, that is the overview picture of the war between the states.

I do not take time to read alternative history speculations. But I wonder what would have happened if s***ery had not been allowed and justified in the Constitution. Clearly the southern states would not have joined the Union. The individual states could not have been kept free of European influence and authority, and the North and/or the South could well have been made individual colonies of European powers and the American experience would be quite different for AAs and EAs alike. So America has paid and continues to pay a heavy moral and practical price for its gross imperfections. How many generations and wars will it take to heal these flaws? It doesn’t feel that we are progressing much in that direction today.