Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3. No one shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The Real Significance of the 'Civil War' [It wasn't slavery]
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
SOURCE: http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods31.html (June 2005)

There can be no minimizing the abolition of slavery, and that it was an enormously significant result of the war. But one may certainly ask whether the abolition of slavery had to be brought about in a manner that resulted in 1.5 million people dead, wounded, or missing; overwhelming material devastation; the undermining of the concept of civilized warfare; and the destruction of the American constitutional order in a way that forever strengthened the federal government at the expense of the self-governing rights of the states. Every other country in the Western hemisphere that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully. It is rather unflattering to assume that Americans were so savage that they were the only people for whom a negotiated settlement of the slave issue was simply impossible.

It is not plausible to suggest that slavery could have lasted much longer, even in an independent South. With slavery being abolished everywhere, the Confederacy would have been an international pariah, and it is unreasonable to suppose that it could have long withstood the inevitable and overwhelming international moral pressure to which their isolated position would have exposed them. And according to Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, whose study of the war has been hailed by mainstream historians, "The fact that emancipation overwhelmed such entrenched plantation economies as Cuba and Brazil suggests that slavery was politically moribund anyway."

Slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace. The Republican-controlled Congress would have been able to work toward emancipation within the border states, where slavery was already declining. In due course the Radicals could have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery’s enforcement costs, the peculiar institution’s destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable.

What happened in the U.S. instead was a war that has been called the greatest atrocity of the nineteenth century. No one mourns the passing of the slave system. But those who can see nothing more than slavery at stake in this contest miss the insight of men like Lord Acton, who saw in this victory for centralization a defeat for the values of civilized life in the West. With the destruction of state sovereignty went both the main institutional restraint on the power of the federal government as well as the important moral example of a polity organized along different lines from those of the centralized states that would come to dominate the political landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There are still a good many libertarians and conservatives who, denigrating state sovereignty and political decentralization, seek to secure liberty by means of a strong central government, kept in check by periodic elections, that protects people’s individual rights. That this model has not exactly been a smashing success ought to make such thinkers reconsider their enthusiasm for the superficially plausible but dramatically failed project of liberty through centralization whose American founding father was Abraham Lincoln.

November 27, 2004
Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War by H. W. Crocker, III: Book Cover What Only Southerners Know About the Civil War....

If you suspect that most of the conventional "wisdom" about the Civil War, slavery, and states' rights has been hijacked by Northeast liberals, then you're going to love The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War. This provocative and entertaining new "P.I.G." exposes the real reasons the South tried to secede and why the war between the states was not really about abolishing slavery.

Charging through battlefields and bunkers, bestselling author H.W. Crocker III treats readers to a rousing, rollicking guide to the great and terrible war that shaped America. He also explains why the Southern states had more in common with our Founding Fathers and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence than most history textbooks admit.

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War Crocker profiles eminent—and colorful—military generals such as the noble Lee, the controversial Sherman, and the notorious Nathan Bedford Forrest. He also includes thought-provoking chapters such as "The History of the War in Sixteen Battles You Should Know" and the most devastatingly politically incorrect chapter of all, "What If the South Had Won?" Along the way, Crocker reveals little-known truths that your history teacher didn't tell you, including how if there had been no Civil War the South would have abolished slavery peacefully.

Austin Cline: Was the Civil War About Slavery?

Friday July 30, 2004
Online source: http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/07/30/was-the-civil-war-about-slavery.htm

There is a common myth that circulates in some places that the American Civil War wasn't really about slavery - instead, it was about Northern aggression, taxes, tariffs, that sort of thing. Is there any truth to this? Well, it's true that there were a number of other issues involved by denying that slavery was the root issue requires denying reality.

Charles Oliver, writing for Reason, reviews Charles Adams‘ book When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession:

Openly partisan to the South, Adams believes that the Civil War truly was one of Northern aggression. He believes that the Southern states had the right to secede and he believes that the war's true legacy is the centralization of power in Washington and the deification of the "tyrant" Abraham Lincoln. To this end, he collects all the damaging evidence he can find against Lincoln and the North. And he omits things that might tarnish his image of the South as a small-government wonderland.

Thus, we hear of Lincoln's use of federal troops to make sure that Maryland didn't secede. We don't learn that Confederate troops occupied eastern Tennessee to keep it from splitting from the rest of the state. Adams tells us of Union Gen. William Sherman's actions against civilians, which he persuasively argues were war crimes. But he doesn't tell us of Confederate troops capturing free blacks in Pennsylvania and sending them south to slavery. Nor does he mention the Confederate policy of killing captured black Union soldiers. He tells us that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; he doesn't mention that the Confederacy did also.

Before and during the war, almost every Southern political leader explicitly said the Southern states seceded to protect slavery. Perhaps the most famous statement came from Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. In 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Stephens bluntly declared that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution." He said the United States had been founded on the false belief that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, had been "founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural moral condition."

Well, Adams says in effect, Stephens was lying. Southern leaders knew that people couldn't be roused to fight over something so unappealing as tariffs. So they whipped up a fear that slavery was at stake. "Men will not willingly, and with zeal, die for an economic purpose, but they will die for some 'cause' that has a noble purpose," writes Adams, neglecting to lay out precisely why slavery was so noble. Indeed, Adams' thesis is a completely unsatisfying one. Even if true, he can't answer an important question: Given that most Southerners didn't own slaves, why was this a more attractive issue for raising fighting passions than tariffs? Why would so many die with "zeal" for a "noble" purpose from which they were excluded? After all, less than one third of Southerners owned slaves.

Why do people try to deny the importance of slavery to the Civil War? In the past, it might have been racism in many cases — but probably not as often now. More common motives might be to whitewash the South (if South was defending something less immoral than slavery, then they don’t look so bad) or perhaps to vindicate the South’s alleged motives. In this case, the cause of “states’ rights” is often invoked as the reason the South seceded and went to war. Arguing that as the “real” cause can allow a person to argue that states’ rights should be considered more important than they currently are. By framing the North as the “anti-states’ rights villains,” not only does the South look better but the causes of states’ rights does as well.

SECONDARY SOURCE: David Goldfield's STILL FIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR.

Newcomers to the South often remark that southerners, at least white southerners, are still fighting the Civil War-a strange preoccupation considering that the war formally ended more than one hundred and thirty-five years ago and fewer than a third of southerners today can claim an ancestor who actually fought in the conflict. But even if the war is far removed both in time and genealogy, it survives in the hearts of many of the region's residents and often in national newspaper headlines concerning battle flags, racial justice, and religious conflicts. In this sweeping narrative of the South from the Civil War to the present, noted historian David Goldfield contemplates the roots of southern memory and explains how this memory has shaped the modern South both for good and ill.

He candidly discusses how and why white southern men fashioned the myths of the Lost Cause and the Redemption out of the Civil War and Reconstruction and how they shaped a religion to canonize the heroes and reify the events of those fated years. Goldfield also recounts how blacks and white women eventually crafted a different, more inclusive version of southern history and how that new vision has competed with more traditional perspectives.

As Goldfield shows, the battle for southern history, and for the South, continues--in museums, public spaces, books, state legislatures, and the minds of southerners. Given the region's growing economic power and political influence, the outcome of this war is more than a historian's preoccupation: it is of national importance. Integrating history and memory, religion, race, and gender, Still Fighting the Civil War will help newcomers, longtime residents, and curious outsiders alike attain a better understanding of the South and each other.

Lincoln: Tyrant, Hypocrite or Consummate Statesman?

SOURCE: http://www.dineshdsouza.com/articles/abelincoln.html

THESIS: The key to understanding Lincoln's philosophy of statesmanship is that he always sought the meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice.

By Dinesh D'Souza

Most Americans -- including most historians -- regard Abraham Lincoln as the nation's greatest president. But in recent years powerful movements have gathered, both on the political right and the left, to condemn Lincoln as a flawed and even wicked man.

What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school--made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians--holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus. Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. Some libertarians even charge -- and this is not intended as a compliment -- that Lincoln was the true founder of the welfare state. His right-wing critics say that despite his show of humility, Lincoln was a megalomaniacal man who was willing to destroy half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions. In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Bradford, an outspoken conservative, excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his Manichaean vision -- one that sees a cosmic struggle between good and evil -- on the country as a whole, ended up corrupting American politics and thus left a "lasting and terrible impact on the nation's destiny."

Although Bradford viewed Lincoln as a kind of manic abolitionist, many in the right-wing camp deny that the slavery issue was central to the Civil War. Rather, they insist, the war was driven primarily by economic motives. Essentially, the industrial North wanted to destroy the economic base of the South.

This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century.

Contrary to Bradford's high-pitched accusations, Lincoln approached the issue of slavery with prudence and moderation. This is not to say that he waffled on the morality of slavery. "You think slavery is right, and ought to be extended," Lincoln wrote Stephens on the eve of the war, "while we think it is wrong, and ought to be restricted." As Lincoln clearly asserts, it was not his intention to get rid of slavery in the Southern states. Lincoln conceded that the American founders had agreed to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, and he confessed that he had no wish and no power to interfere with it there. The only issue -- and it was an issue on which Lincoln would not bend -- was whether the federal government could restrict slavery in the new territories. This was the issue of the presidential campaign of 1860; this was the issue that determined secession and war.

Lincoln argued that the South had no right to secede -- that the Southern states had entered the Union as the result of a permanent compact with the Northern states. That Union was based on the principle of majority rule, with constitutional rights carefully delineated for the minority. Lincoln insisted that since he had been legitimately elected, and since the power to regulate slavery in the territories was nowhere proscribed in the Constitution, Southern secession amounted to nothing more than one group's decision to leave the country because it did not like the results of a presidential election, and no constitutional democracy could function under such an absurd rule. Of course the Southerners objected that they should not be forced to live under a regime that they considered tyrannical, but Lincoln countered that any decision to dissolve the original compact could only occur with the consent of all the parties involved. Once again, it makes no sense to have such agreements when any group can unilaterally withdraw from them and go its own way.

The rest of the libertarian and right-wing case against Lincoln is equally without merit. Yes, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested Southern sympathizers, but let us not forget that the nation was in a desperate war in which its very survival was at stake. Discussing habeas corpus, Lincoln insisted that it made no sense for him to protect this one constitutional right and allow the very Union established by the Constitution, the very framework for the protection of all rights, to be obliterated. Of course the federal government expanded during the Civil War, as it expanded during the Revolutionary War, and during World War II. Governments need to be strong to fight wars. The evidence for the right-wing insistence that Lincoln was the founder of the modern welfare state stems from the establishment, begun during his administration, of a pension program for Union veterans and support for their widows and orphans. Those were, however, programs aimed at a specific, albeit large, part of the population. The welfare state came to America in the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt should be credited, or blamed, for that. He institutionalized it, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon expanded it.

The left-wing group of Lincoln critics, composed of liberal scholars and social activists, is harshly critical of Lincoln on the grounds that he was a racist who did not really care about ending slavery. Their indictment of Lincoln is that he did not oppose slavery outright, only the extension of it, that he opposed laws permitting intermarriage and even opposed social and political equality between the races. If the right-wingers disdain Lincoln for being too aggressively antislavery, the left-wingers scorn him for not being antislavery enough. Both groups, however, agree that Lincoln was a self-promoting hypocrite who said one thing while doing another.

Some of Lincoln's defenders have sought to vindicate him from these attacks by contending that he was a "man of his time." This will not do, because there were several persons of that time, notably the social-reformer Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who forthrightly and unambiguously attacked slavery and called for immediate and complete abolition. In one of his speeches, Sumner said that while there are many issues on which political men can and should compromise, slavery is not such an issue: "This will not admit of compromise. To be wrong on this is to be wholly wrong. It is our duty to defend freedom, unreservedly, and careless of the consequences."

Lincoln's modern liberal critics are, whether they know it or not, the philosophical descendants of Sumner. One cannot understand Lincoln without understanding why he agreed with Sumner's goals while consistently opposing the strategy of the abolitionists. The abolitionists, Lincoln thought, approached the restricting or ending of slavery with self-righteous moral display. They wanted to be in the right and -- as Sumner himself says -- damn the consequences. In Lincoln's view, abolition was a noble sentiment, but abolitionist tactics, such as burning the Constitution and advocating violence, were not the way to reach their goal.

We can answer the liberal critics by showing them why Lincoln's understanding of slavery, and his strategy for defeating it, was superior to that of Sumner and his modern-day followers. Lincoln knew that the statesman, unlike the moralist, cannot be content with making the case against slavery. He must find a way to implement his principles to the degree that circumstances permit. The key to understanding Lincoln is that he always sought the meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice. He always sought the common denominator between what was good to do and what the people would go along with. In a democratic society this is the only legitimate way to advance a moral agenda.

Consider the consummate skill with which Lincoln deflected the prejudices of his supporters without yielding to them. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the race for the Illinois Senate, Stephen Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of believing that blacks and whites were intellectually equal, of endorsing full political rights for blacks, and of supporting "amalgamation" or intermarriage between the races. If these charges could be sustained, or if large numbers of people believed them to be true, then Lincoln's career was over. Even in the free state of Illinois -- as throughout the North -- there was widespread opposition to full political and social equality for blacks.

Moreover, Lincoln was acutely aware that many people in the North were vehemently antiblack and saw themselves as fighting to save their country rather than to free slaves. Lincoln framed the case against the Confederacy in terms of saving the Union in order to maintain his coalition -- a coalition whose victory was essential to the antislavery cause. And ultimately it was because of Lincoln that slavery came to an end. That is why the right wing can never forgive him.

In my view, Lincoln was the true "philosophical statesman," one who was truly good and truly wise. Standing in front of his critics, Lincoln is a colossus, and all of the Lilliputian arrows hurled at him bounce harmlessly to the ground. It is hard to put any other president -- not even George Washington -- in the same category as Abraham Lincoln. He is simply the greatest practitioner of democratic statesmanship that America and the world have yet produced.

Rhyme: Internal Black Debate

Factoid: "Minority students, particularly African Americans, tend to be suspended or expelled more often than their white and Asian peers (March 2012)." http://www.dailybulletin.com

Factoid: "Black Male Incarceration Rate is 6 Times Greater Than Rate for White Males." (2009) allotherpersons.wordpress.com

Factoid: "Forty years ago, a government report on the state of the black family in America warned that almost one out of four black children were born to unmarried mothers. Recent figures suggest that now, almost 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4865449

Factoid: "Nearly 40 percent of black and Hispanic kids fail to graduate on time." http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/

>The argument isn't necessarily about the data above, it is primarily about how one explains this. This takes us back a century ago to the debate between WEB DuBois & Booker T. Washington: how best to improve things for African-Americans?