Nice Bob! Preach it on that scum fascist dictator Lincoln... worst President... EVAR!

/Tony
 

Actually, as I remember, the royal governor of Virginia did, in fact, promise freedom to any slave who fought alongside the British during the Rebellion/War for Independence.

I believe he did so in a Proclamation, believe it or not.

Good call, Dr. Murphy.

There is some difference in that there were prominent men of the south who said things like

"Our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea...its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man..."

-Alexander Stephens

The great puzzle of Lincoln is either statism in the name of universal freedom, or classical liberalism on a crutch of slavery.

As much a jerkface as Lincoln may have been, his southern counterparts were a bunch of total d-bags.

It's like the eastern front of WWII: who do we /really/ want to lose?
 

For the analogy to work, the American colonists during the revolution would have to have been rebelling to preserve the institution of slavery, and England resisting to end slavery. I don't think the fact that the British promised freedom to slaves if they would fight is the same thing.
 

The Blackadder Says:

The U.S. colonies had slavery when they seceded from Great Britain. If King George had promised to free the American slaves, would you have rooted for the colonists to lose the American Revolution?

Yes. The real question is how anyone who believes in liberty could think otherwise.
 

The Blackadder Says:

By the way, suppose Lincoln had simply let the southern states go. Does anyone really think there wouldn't have been at least one major war between the North and South over the next century and a half, if not several?
 

Although I agree with the sentiment behind calling the south d-bags for slavery, you need to also acknowledge that the north was just as racist at the time. Go check out how the north treated them when Lincoln decided to make slavery an issue in the war. Look also at how many in the north deserted after they found out they were fighting to free slaves. It isn't as if Lincoln freed the slaves and there was peace from then on. They only had freedom is the loosest sense of the word. Had we had a peaceful removal of slavery we would have probably had much better race relations in this country.

blackadder,
Slavery ended everywhere else without a civil war and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. The slavery that governments put everyone under is more powerful than ever in this country and Lincoln was the catalyst. I think the reason people who believe in liberty would disagree with your answer is because they don't really see the difference in being a slave to a plantation owner or one to the State. Lincoln didn't end slavery in the since of more liberty on a net basis. Lincoln was a tyrant of the worst kind and was an antithesis of liberty. Although the freedom of black people was a positive of the civil war it is dwarfed by the amount of negatives for all people, including black. Go check a prison some time if you believe the State gave real freedom to the slaves.
 

Lincoln was an unbelievable tyrant, quite possibly the worst in American History. He had a dissenting member of congress deported, prevented certain members of state legislatures with unfavorable opinions of him from meeting, had newspapers that published anti-war stories silenced or destroyed, jailed all sorts of people who spoke out against him and so on and so forth. He was the original man who threw out the constitution (not FDR or George W. as so many others like to claim). I would point anyone interested in this to pick up some books by Thomas DiLorenzo, none are too long and could probably be read in a single day. Very interesting information in his books.
 

I like Cody's comments: what about the confederacy deserves our praise?

From what I understand they continued racism, drafting, taxes, etc...
 

To Erick: Look to the changes they made to their constitution for reasons to praise them. Of course the distinct and unquestionable legalization of slavery was no good. But aside from this they outlawed internal improvement subsidies (pork, TARP, everything the government wastes money on), required that every spending bill be for a defined amount of money and could have NO more money that what was spelled out in the black letter of the bill. And they required each bill to be about one subject which was clearly stated in the title of the bill. The confederacy has been vilified due to their attitudes towards slavery, but their commitment to a small government larger personal liberty is something to respect, or to at least consider. As a final point you could look back to Northern attitudes before, during, and after the war, they were minimally as racist as the south if not moreso. Lincoln's home state of Illinois passed anti negro statutes to prevent black people from even entering the state. The South believed in property rights far more than the North or contemporary Americans do, the flaw in their thinking was that they considered slaves (other people) to be their property.
 

What about the Confederacy deserves our praise?

Decentralization is always beneficial in the long run for the cause of liberty, and centralization is always detrimental in the long run. The great evil Lincoln was fighting wasn't slavery, but the South leaving the union. He defended slavery so long as the south stayed. He attacked slavery when the south left. All he really cared about was centralizing power in D.C. Everything else was secondary -- including the rights and lives of the mundanes.

Centralization depends on the utopian notion that "it can't happen here." It is an article of faith and vanity.
 

Jim,

I want to collect facts about the ways Lincoln failed to advance liberty without weaving them into a story about a.) Lincoln's evil ideology or intentions and b.) the Confederacy's heroic ones.

This storytelling is no doubt how people in northern states created the more widely held story of a heroic Lincoln battling evil, southern racists.

The way I see it: In general Confederacies are good ideas. The civil war's death, destruction and conscription was tragic. Stopping the Confederacy's slavery was good.
 

The Blackadder Says:

Slavery ended everywhere else without a civil war and the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

Maybe so. Bob's hypothetical, however, would involve it ending in the United States 70 years before it actually did. And since the American Revolution happened anyway, it wouldn't even have meant any additional bloodshed.

The slavery that governments put everyone under is more powerful than ever in this country and Lincoln was the catalyst.

Doubtful. Canada was spared its Lincoln, yet it still developed into a welfare/nanny state. The same goes for pretty much every other developed country on the planet. You seem to think that developments in other countries show what would have happened in America absent a Civil War. Why doesn't this also apply to social democracy?

I think the reason people who believe in liberty would disagree with your answer is because they don't really see the difference in being a slave to a plantation owner or one to the State.

If someone can't see the difference between being a citizen in today's United States and being a slave in the antebellum South, then he's a idiot.
 

Lincoln: Suspension of habeus corpus, censoring of hundreds of newspapers, shutting down of newspapers, deportation of an opposition congressman, kidnapping of a sizable portion of the Maryland legislature, political imprisonment of over 1300, and a draft.

Jeff Davis: Draft.

The fact that slavery is even brought up here is funny and sad at the same time. Two words: BORDER STATES. Several slave states, including Maryland, Kentucky, and the illegal West Virginia, remained in the Union throughout the War. Using slavery as an attack on the Confederacy is rather pathetic coming from folks who should know better. To the person who criticized the CSA for taxes, just how were they supposed to fund the war? The draft was certainly wrong, and there was no excuse for it, but that's about the CSA's worst. I think I'll stick with Murphy, Woods, DiLorenzo, and the other Neo-Confederates.
 

The Blackadder Says:

Allow me to quote from John Majewski's book Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation:

lthough southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own. Scholars have classified the Confederate central government as a form of "war socialism." The Confederacy owned key industries, regulated prices and wages, and instituted the most far-reaching draft in North American history. The Confederacy employed some 70,000 civilians in a massive (if poorly coordinated) bureaucracy that included thousands of tax assessors, tax collectors, and conscription agents. The police power of the Confederate state was sometimes staggering. To ride a train, for example, every passenger needed a special government pass...Political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel writes that "a central state as well organized and powerful as the Confederacy did not emerge until the New Deal and subsequent mobilization for World War II."

Oh, and Jeff Davis also suspended habeas corpus.