Egregious Reader

I made it a little further and they are talking about Lincoln's "House Divided" speech in 1858. It lost him the race for senate, but some think it may have won him presidency later.  "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half  slave  and half  free . He argues it will go one way or the other and that between the sham elections in KS that made it a slave state and now the dread scott decision he thinks we are heading toward being a slave nation. He talks about the danger of the "sacred right of self-government" being: so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any  one  man, choose to enslave  another,  no  third  man shall be allowed to object. Of course, southerns would never forget this line about it becoming permanently one thing or another ... you can see how they viewed it and why they took afront. But his speech is tha...

I am listening to a course on the Civil War by historian David Blight on my drives. It is really good and certainly challenging and informing me of this part of history. I was interested because of the recent monument discussions and other things in the air.  It seems the typical argument over this from a southerners perspective is -- it wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights. And then to support this they may say, heck only maybe 10-20% owned slaves anyway. In truth I think it was more like 2/3 rds. that owned or had owned slave (s). And the argument about states rights seems to be misdirection ... it was a states right to do what --- own slaves. There are 27 lectures and I am only on #8, but I think the re-painting of this issue and this war for southerns comes of how a country can deal with the aftermath of something like the civil war.  After the south lost (was defeated) and rejoined the union how do they go on, facing all that death and "the north"...