Reconstruction is the readmission of the Southern states to the Union. Lincoln decided that ten percent of the eligible voters in 1860 had to take an oath of loyalty to the Union. Andrew Johnson, after Lincoln, added that wealthy Southern Planters had to beg for pardons. The Southern states were militarily occupied.
It's either crazy, or perhaps the explanation is right before our eyes: the Republicans find their true foreign allies in religious totalitarians who see killing as the answer to all human problems.
Secession is a progressive, not a reactionary force. It is civilized. Jefferson Davis argued that because secession is not mentioned in the Constitution it is retained by the states under the Tenth Amendment. Thomas Jefferson said that the time for separation had not yet come.
States had the right to secede. The War Between the States was not launched to free slaves. Lincoln believed that whites were superior and favored the deportation of freed slaves. The South was for free trade; the North wanted protectionism.
Lysander Spooner in the antebellum period has been overlooked. He was a radical abolitionist lawyer. He wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. William Lloyd Garrison felt the Constitution was a bloody pro-slavery compact.
For both of our modern wings of politics, Iraq is a lesson in government, and not the one either of them wants to learn. It proves the assertion that the best way to keep the state down is to get everyone a weapon.
1798 was an important year. The Principles of ’98 influenced all of American history. The Alien and Sedition Acts and the Kentucky Resolutions revealed these principles.
But as long as people can be led to believe that running the printing press and issuing fiduciary media can substitute for saving and capital accumulation as a way to achieve prosperity and create wealth — or, yes, prosecute a war — government will continue to get away with this particularly insidious and underhanded form of expropriation.
