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An old Irish proverb says: You build a dozen roads, but do they call you Connor the road-builder? No. You sire six wonderful sons, but do they call you Connor the child-rearer? No. But you fuck one sheep... It's true. Some men are remembered for their greatness, some men are remembered for their evil, and some men are just remembered for that one fantastic failure that taints their entire existence. Like... #6.
General Custer
Remembered For: Getting Massacred at Little Bighorn. Shortly before being killed, General George Custer supposedly stated: "Hurrah boys, we've got them! We'll finish them up and then go home to our station." Aside from "woops" and "bitchtits," those are pretty much the most hilariously inappropriate last words ever, because his last stand was a slaughter. The fact that he stands as the perfect symbol for America's mindlessly violent treatment of Native Americans ensured that his name would forever associated with laughably arrogant failure.
Not Remembered For: His progressive views and battle prowess. Custer was at West Point when the Civil War started, where he graduated bottom of his class (that's called foreshadowing, friends). Despite his apparently crippling stupidity, he nonetheless went on to participate in some of the war's most important battles, and he was promoted rapidly up the ranks. During the battle of Gettysburg he was promoted to brigadier general at the age of only 23, making him one of the youngest in the entire Union Army. He also led a team of cavalry called the "Wolverines," who we remember and honor to this day for singlehandedly turning back the Russian invasion of the United States.
What has been completely forgotten, however, is that Custer was also remarkably liberal for the time. During President Grant's term, Custer publicly opposed the standing government's anti-Indian policies, and his testimony to Congress about the abuses on Indian reservations almost lost him his command. Obviously his staunch moral stance didn't extend to "not trying to kill a shitload of them pretty much by yourself," but at the time that practically made him an Indian-loving hippie. #5.
John Wilkes Booth
Remembered For: Assassinating Lincoln. In 1865, two weeks after the Civil War drew to a close (and it was far too late to actually affect any policy change, genius) John Wilkes Booth entered a box at Ford's Theater and shot President Lincoln. It was the first successful presidential assassination in American history. He was cornered a few days later and died in a shootout with police, because that's the retirement package for presidential assassins; there's no 401k in it for you.
Not Remembered For: He was a hell of an actor. NOTE: WE ARE NOT FUCKING SAYING THAT HIS BEING AN ACTOR MAKES UP FOR KILLING LINCOLN. It's just that people don't realize if he hadn't shot the president in the head, Booth would still have had a place in history because he was a huge deal in the acting world. Maybe he wasn't at Brad Pitt's level of stardom, but he was at least equivalent to one of the Baldwin brothers. You know, like a good one. Not one of the ones you can rent for your kid's birthday party or anything (Stephen). To get there, he taught himself Shakespeare and elocution (that means talkin' all sortsa' pretty-mouthed) on his family's rural estate before moving to the city to pursue his career. He was called "the handsomest man in America" and a "natural genius" by some reviewers, and was also noted for having an "astonishing memory."
At the age of 22, after only five years on stage, Booth was earning the equivalent of $500,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid actors of the time. And he killed the President of the United States! Can you imagine how insane that was at the time? Like if you heard tomorrow that Tom Cruise tried to stab Obama you'd hardly be able to bel- eh, maybe that's a bad example. #4.
Herbert Hoover
Remembered For: The Great Depression. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Herbert Hoover dramatically declared that "The poorhouse is vanishing from among us." Seven months later, due to reckless mismanagement or possibly just fate's dickishly ironic sense of humor, the stock market crashed and sent America into the Great Depression. Hoover's name would become forever associated with skyrocketing unemployment, breadlines, towns of cardboard houses and those adorable hobos with bags on sticks.
Not Remembered For: His impressive service to his country. Up until that great depression business, Hoover was like one of those inspirational kitten posters: Despite all the odds, he hung in there. Orphaned at the age of nine, he put himself through Stanford, built a mining empire, was a millionaire by the age of 40 and he even contributed greatly to the Allied efforts in World War I (long before his country even officially entered it!) His entire life was nothing but financial successes in spite of severe hardship, and ultimately history only remembers him as being responsible for the worst financial disaster of all time. That's just far too cruelly ironic to be an accident. Either there is a God and Hoover used to pick on him in grade school, or else he made a wish from one of those dickhead genies that turns everything against you.
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HaizyMezcan, you're an idiot! The South were the ones who attacked Ft. Sumter. Also keep in mind that he liberated the slaves which was a good thing. And while you said, "Other countries did it without a war" that's true but it wasn't so much that Lincoln wanted the war. In fact when he entered office he said himself, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He said that Northerners and Southerneres spilled the same blood in the same Revolution. Above all else he wanted to keep the Union together, he only liberated slavery because he was given the chance to. Plus it wasn't so much that Lincoln declared war on the Confederacy. The Confederacy seceded just because Lincoln got elected. That being said along with Hoover I think should go with George Dubya Bush. Like Hoover it wasn't so much he did anything wrong, it's that he took too much time to react.
That erepublic bulls**t is almost relavent to this article...except it's f**king spam. It's interesting to learn about the possible origin of hoover's hubris and mentality. However, the stock market crash far from caused the great depression. Not even the wreckless banking. The land repossions on farmers that caused the dust bowl when the loosened soil no longer kept in place by long grass came free. As you can imagine suddenly having no food and a s**tton of people out of work does horrors to an economy. Oh, by the by, before the dustbowl the flyover states weren't so bad. They even used to be populist and democrats. Before talk radio and fox.
Create your Citizen and you will have the opportunity to develop your military, economy or political career. http://www.erepublik.com/en/referrer/Sirbeg
A little known fact: all Americans are forced on entry to the UK to announce in writing they intend to go to the "centre of the theatre, and to find the colour of honour". This policy is currently under review as contravening the Geneva conventions due to the number of maelstrom induced brain implosions. We Brits maintain it's funny.
States do not possess the right to secede from the government of the United States because they are bound to it by the Constitution. And the Constitution is not an agreement among the states but rather an agreement among "the people of the United States." Therefore while "the people" may have the right to alter and even dispose of the government the Southern states did not have the right to destroy the Union of the people.
O.K. you do make a good point on the situation with the Tariffs, though you did make it sound like that was something the Republicans intended to screw over the South. As for the 10th Amendment, the Constitution does generally work by reverse precedent, meaning if it's put into the Constitution later it has precedent over the earlier stuff. It worked that way with Poll/Income Taxes (Poll Taxes actually are a very different thing from Income Taxes, and since Poll Taxes tax everyone equally regardless of personal fortunes they're a very bad idea), Prohibition, and all the slave related stuff. (It also pretty much reveals the Forefathers intention for it to be a living doc*ment.) Keep in mind pretty much the same people who authored Article Six authored the 10th Amendment. They didn't just change their minds. The key phrase in the 10th Amendment is "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution...", including Article Six! You might say that's stupid. Why even have the 10th Amendment then? Basically the 10th Amendment was put in to reassure that the States weren't to be dissolved or assimilated by the Federal government. That is, that it was meant to be a federal government rather than a centralized one. It's a similar story as the 9th Amendment not excluding (though also not guaranteeing) rights not mentioned in the Constitution. You may wonder how that still excludes the right to secede since secession isn't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution or in Federal Law. Sure you get Constitution>Federal Law>State Constitutions>State Law. However consider this, just because YOU say you've seceded doesn't mean the Constitution and Federal Law no longer apply to you. That's kind of how law works. It applies to you whether you really want it to or not.
The tariffs did not apply equally to both the North and the South. Southern cotton in 1860 accounted for nearly 60% of US exports, and was responsible for about 75% of the cotton supply in the entire world. Tariffs lower the price of exports just as much as they raise the price of imports, thus the South would be much harder hit by tariffs than the north. Basically, tariffs forced the South to buy more expensive northern machinery and sell cotton to the North at cheaper prices.
Last time I checked, the constitution also contained the 10th amendment. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." As the Constitution does not mention secession, it must be a reserved right of the states.
Duh Texas, Texas was the other State in the Confederacy that had the legal right to secede. But, since Ft. Sumter didn't happen in either Texas or Virginia...
Also, those tariffs applied equally to the South as they did to the North. Now mind you I'm not saying that Tariffs are a good thing. I don't care for economic protectionism of any kind. But, that kind of invalidates your argument that it was all a big plot by the North. For that matter, the new territories only just gave the Republicans a fighting chance in the Electoral College because the College was Constitutionally required to count 3/5s of the slave population for the purposes calculating Electoral College votes. Meaning all those Southern voters were voting for their slaves the nice caretakers of the darkies that they were. The election of Abraham Lincoln was important in that the Republicans just managed to break the stranglehold on the Electoral College. Keep in mind Lincoln was not a Radical Republican. He had no intention to do any of the things you said the Republicans wanted to do to the South before the Civil War. That the Southerners weren't completely having their way with American politics is a pretty infantile reason to have tantrum, take your ball, and go home.
Here you're presuming that the South had the legal right to secede. Virginia did, in fact have the right to secede as they made it a condition of their ratification of the U.S. Constitution. (And, that condition is still on the books as it is for a couple of the States that remained in the Union. Likewise since Texas was annexed by the Union, rather than seeking and receiving Statehood, they never essentially ratified the Constitution, making it only 4 of the 50 States can legally secede.) None of the other Sates of the Confederacy had the legal right to secede, particularly since one of the Articles that they ratified was Article Six! "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States"..."shall be the supreme Law of the Land"..."any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding". That means the States pretty much sold their souls to the Federal government, and they couldn't just pretend they didn't do that. Caveat Emptor, baby!
Whether or not you think the attack on Ft. Sumter was a declaration of war depends on whether or not you think the South had the legal right to secede. If a foreign power is occupying a military base against your will in your own territory, it isn't really declaring war to force them out. Maybe Lincoln was trying to keep the country in one piece, but the country didn't need being kept in one piece. The Republican party at the time was very different than the Republican party now; it was a party of Northern interests that tended to f**k over the South. They supported high tariffs, which would both force the south to buy northern machinery instead of the less expensive foreign machinery, and substantially decrease the price of southern exports. The Republican party also supported abolition of slavery -without- compensation for slave-owners, which is how most other countries managed to abolish slavery. As southern interests was politically weakened with the addition of the new territories, you basically had one group of people (the north) subjugating a smaller group; the South had every right to secede from those conditions.
Dang, thought I cancelled that resend.
For that matter Japan declared war against us as well ... after Pearl Harbor . (They'd intended for it to be at the last minute to enhance the surprise; but their Foreign Ministry dropped the ball; and their ambassador was late. There's actually a famous photo of the ambassador leaving whatever government building in D.C. he delivered the declaration to, afterwards. And, there's this look on the face of a guy in the crowd that's like, "you a*****e".)
yeah.. sorry Hairy Mezican, the Civil War was about slavery. People's right (!) to own other people. You had one side trampling on the rights of an entire race (south), and the other overstepping the constitutional boundaries which protect our rights (north). "Lincoln deserved to be shot" Lincoln was just trying to keep his freaking country in one piece, and if you honestly believe in the people's rights, you would never support the execution of anyone without due process.
For that matter Japan declared war against us as well ... after Pearl Harbor . (They'd intended for it to be at the last minute to enhance the surprise; but their Foreign Ministry dropped the ball; and their ambassador was late. There's actually a famous photo of the ambassador leaving whatever government building in D.C. he delivered the declaration to, afterwards. And, there's this look on the face of a guy in the crowd that's like, "you a*****e".)
Another good example is that FDR never declared war against any of the Axis powers. Japan attacked us; and Germany declared war against the U.S. to stand by their ally. So, not only do you not need to declare war against someone you are already in a state of war with; but you don't need to declare war against someone who has declared war against you. War is by its nature a unilateral action.
South Carolina attacked Ft. Sumter. A declaration of war is to let the other guy know that as of this time you are at war with them. You do not need to declare war against a nation you are already at war with, because it would declaring something that is already happening.
Lincoln deserved to be shot. As far as war mongering presidents, he was way worse than Bush. No other president has jailed newspaper editors or even senators who disagreed with his policies. No other president has singlehandedly declared war without authorization from congress. No other president had a matter of policy that included fighting against women and children noncombatants, and destroyed civilian property (as opposed to collateral damage). Perhaps you believe that getting rid of slavery was worth the carnage this president inflicted; but the Civil War was not about slavery, congress even passed the Crittenden declaration stating that the north was not fighting a war to abolish slavery. Besides, every other country in the world managed to abolish slavery without some stupid war.
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