One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago On This Day

[BlueStreak]

Now, you two Marys have a nice, cordial day of mutual back patting.

[icenine]

Well Dave

when we were kids in school Lincoln was lumped with Washington and sort of presented as a equal to the Founders because he ended slavery. Simplistic yes but a good foundation for kids and future citizens to understand that freedom from slavery, equal rights regardless of color, and democracy were indeed good things. Nothing wrong with that at all.

You can get into revisionist territory when one becomes a graduate student and takes seminars on Civil War and the South and discuss the economics behind slavery and the military situation on the battlefield that influenced Lincoln.
I am by no means an expert on the Civil War. However I was taught by guys at Kent State who had all been influenced by the history department at the University of Wisconsin....in short the intellectual birthplace of American Civil War historiography.
No one ever took the sort of arguments about self-determination of the South seriously. In fact, none of us would even think of bringing up such an argument. We studied slavery and what made the South different, but the paradigm is that slavery was an evil institution and that Lincoln defeated it because the nation had to in order to survive.

Was Lincoln John Brown?
no
Was there racism in the North?
yes

at the end of the day however the North realized that slavery had to be ended.

The North had to militarily defeat the South on the battlefield and forge a complete surrender on the part of the Confederacy.

All the South had to do was wait it out and see if the North would get tired of fighting. We are lucky we had Lincoln.
A lesser President might have caved. The world is lucky too.

Imagine Hitler tearing across Europe 80 years later and the Western Democracies in Europe having an American ally only half as strong or completely isolated. Imagine Hitler having an alliance or a neutrality pact with a Confederate nation whose birth was indeed predicated on the institution of preserving servitude based on race.

Imagine apartheid being in place in half of our continent in 2013.

I don't like the revisionist world at all as you can tell.


If you make a statement that the South had the right of self determination because they wanted to expand slavery into new territories seized from Mexico you need to really think about what you are saying.

[bobabode]

Hell's bells, Mencken was known as the 'Sage of Baltimore' ferfuksake, a thoroughly rough and tumble, irascible in nature, segregated and bigoted city even into the 1970s, in my personal experience. The bars at Fell's Point were a classic example of the raucous, knock down & drag out and toss your ass into the street port town. Much like I imagine Port Royal, Jamaica was centuries ago before the earthquake and tsunami swallowed that pirate hellhole up.
That is until it was cleaned up and all gentrified by all those yuppified hipsters from the 'burbs in the '80s & '90s.

I've heard that the denizens of Balamer threw rotten cabbages and bricks at the Union troop trains as they rolled through the city on their way to the Capitol and points south during the Civil War. Most people think of B-more as some heroic and patriotic footnote of the Revolutionary war because some lawyer with a penchant for florid prose set a poem to paper while watching the British bombard and burn the city and Fort McHenry while sitting on his ass on a British prison ship.

They ought to take a stroll down the Block downtown with all of it's hookers, pimps, muggers, sneak thieves and dealers one summer night. It's been more than 30 years since I've been there so, that's probably been cleaned up too.
Hitting the Civic Center for more than a few concerts and getting hammered while barhopping at Fell's Point were fun as hell for me but what can I say? I used to enjoy low places when I was young and dumb as the proverbial fencepost.

Sorry for rambling and reminiscing as I hope there was a point somewhere in the previous. Maybe it's just that I view Mencken as a wicked satirist and a Baltimoron. Funny reading but not someone I would view as a great mind. Am I making any sense? Don't really give a crap...where's the bourbon?

[bobabode]

No offense intended to any Baltimorians, the gentrified or morons.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by bobabode

Hell's bells, Mencken was known as the 'Sage of Baltimore' ferfuksake, a thoroughly rough and tumble, irascible in nature, segregated and bigoted city even into the 1970s, in my personal experience. The bars at Fell's Point were a classic example of the raucous, knock down & drag out and toss your ass into the street port town. Much like I imagine Port Royal, Jamaica was centuries ago before the earthquake and tsunami swallowed that pirate hellhole up.
That is until it was cleaned up and all gentrified by all those yuppified hipsters from the 'burbs in the '80s & '90s.

I've heard that the denizens of Balamer threw rotten cabbages and bricks at the Union troop trains as they rolled through the city on their way to the Capitol and points south during the Civil War. Most people think of B-more as some heroic and patriotic footnote of the Revolutionary war because some lawyer with a penchant for florid prose set a poem to paper while watching the British bombard and burn the city and Fort McHenry while sitting on his ass on a British prison ship.

They ought to take a stroll down the Block downtown with all of it's hookers, pimps, muggers, sneak thieves and dealers one summer night. It's been more than 30 years since I've been there so, that's probably been cleaned up too.
Hitting the Civic Center for more than a few concerts and getting hammered while barhopping at Fell's Point were fun as hell for me but what can I say? I used to enjoy low places when I was young and dumb as the proverbial fencepost.

Sorry for rambling and reminiscing as I hope there was a point somewhere in the previous. Maybe it's just that I view Mencken as a wicked satirist and a Baltimoron. Funny reading but not someone I would view as a great mind. Am I making any sense? Don't really give a crap...where's the bourbon?

Damn, that sounds a lot like Colfax Avenue back in the '70's.

Chas

[bobabode]

Originally Posted by Charles

Damn, that sounds a lot like Colfax Avenue back in the '70's.

Chas

What city?

[Charles]

Originally Posted by bobabode

What city?

Denver.

Chas

[donquixote99]

Hadn't seen the Mother Jones one. It appears the the 'Killing Lincoln' crew, by being very careful to fudge nothing for the sake of onscreen drama, succeeded in making "a generally clunky and flavorless exercise weakly mimicking prestige filmmaking."

[Charles]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

Hadn't seen the Mother Jones one. It appears the the 'Killing Lincoln' crew, by being very careful to fudge nothing for the sake of onscreen drama, succeeded in making "a generally clunky and flavorless exercise weakly mimicking prestige filmmaking."

Let's give the reviewer credit for being brutally honest.

Chas

[BlueStreak]

Has it ever occurred to anyone that a man can have a change of heart? That, maybe at the outset he said he take preserving the Union with slavery, but at some point decided that preserving the union and defeating slavery were BOTH goals worth fighting for? Maybe once he realized that the Union could very well win the war he thought: "What the hell, let's emancipate the negro folks while we're at it. Two birds with one stone and all that."?

Ya think?

Dave