Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 1:41:12 PM
‘The federal response to the slavery question was quick and right – President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War restored for all time the founding promises of the Declaration of Independence.’ –Ben Shapiro
Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2009/04/15/whatever_happened_to_states’_rights
Mr. Shapiro, how can you advocate for state sovereignty and praise Abraham Lincoln at the same time? Do you know anything of men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson? Do you dismiss these men as racists because they owned slaves? Are you ashamed of what the Old Testament says of slavery? Is the modern practice of slavery to state welfare any less cruel than the OT laws governing the practice of bond servants? We could learn much toward the principles of general equity from a study of the Mosaic civil law dealing with the poor and the widow and the orphan.
To the men like Lee and Jackson and many more like them the issue of the war was one of state sovereignty, not slavery. When offered the command of the federal army, Lee issued his famous quote (that goes something like this), “How can I raise my sword against my native state of Virginia?” Lee’s quote says much about the real issues.
You are grossly mistaken to refer to this war as a ‘civil war’; the Southern states fought for their constitutional right of secession; they had no interest in taking control of the Northern states. This war is more appropriately called the Second War on Independence. President Lincoln breeched the Constitutional protection of state sovereignty, and in doing so he assured the death of the tenth amendment along with liberty and federalism.