South Carolina
Of all the great figures in American history, there is none with whom I feel a closer connection than with Robert Barnwell Rhett:
“Then they got the news. On November 7 the returns from the polls made it evident that Lincoln, despite receiving just 40 percent of the popular vote, had carried enough states to win in the electoral count. At once secession sentiment in Columbia seemed unanimous, and crowds gathered to call for speeches from Rhett, Chesnut, and others. Ruffin was there, as he always appeared when secession was in the air, and Rhett turned at once from the immediate success to the next step, wanting to know what Virginia would do now. Back in Charleston the Mercury hung a flag with a palmetto and a lone star out its upper floor window and published an exultant declaration. “The tea has been thrown overboard,” the editorial stated. “The revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”
What an inspiring scene.
Imagine what it would have been like to be there. We’re walking down the same road to the same destination:
“One people simply could not harmoniously rule over another with different institutions, industries, and social habits, and it hardly mattered to be represented in a legislature when such a majority stood firmly in control, for resistance was futile. “Between a representation incompetent to protect, and no representation, there is no difference where there is conflicting interests in a common legislative body,” he argued. And what point was there in voting for a president, when even if every single man in the minority section should vote against the majority section’s candidate “they cannot prevent his election?” With their old Constitution subverted and Washington in the hands of the Yankees, not just liberty but self preservation required the secession of the South. Their permanent sovereignty was all they needed to accomplish that, and he asserted that “there is not a fact in all history more indisputable” than that those states did not renounce their sovereignty when they ratified the Constitution.
There is no difference between representation and no representation in Washington: as the permanent minority, we are always hostage to the will of the majority, and our vital interests are incapable of being protected there.
Are we willing to be ruled by the Minority Occupation Government? Submit to their despotism? Allow them to determine our fate?
Aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, monarchy … anything, I don’t care, is preferable to being ruled by a “majority” of such people in BRA.
Give us King George III back … in hindsight, he wasn’t half bad, nowhere near as tyrannical as the people who rule us today.
Think about it: could King George III have gotten away with repealing the DADT policy, endorsing gay marriage, Obamacare, and forcing the colonies to submit to Indian invasions?
There is no historical figure I feel more closely to than Rhett either, HW. He’s my inspiration and hero. I wrote an article about him just today, battling the conservatives like Calhoun who refused to go along with secession in 1844. Rhett was always a man ahead of his time.
Hunter, the more I learn about the Constitutional Convention the more I doubt the document they produced. It has completely allowed our children’s future to be stolen out from under them, and our nation/inheritace jerked from your own hands. I’ve no doubt that people like Rhett were ahead of their time at recognizing it. As for me, I like Patrick Henry, who on hearing of the Constitutional Convention said he “smelt a rat”.
Massive review coming soon.
“Think about it: could King George III have gotten away with repealing the DADT policy, endorsing gay marriage, Obamacare, and forcing the colonies to submit to Indian invasions?”
No, but Elizabeth II could and does get away with the equivalent of all those things or at least doesn’t make a peep while they all happen.
Neither George Washington or John Adams could have ever gotten away with any of the activities you mention either.
By the hard time the people who drafted the U.S. Constitution get around here from some you would never realize that the majority of the text of the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of the Confederate States of America are word for word identical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitution