Quote:I see people like you occasionally, whose political beliefs have led them to cherry-pick historical facts to support those beliefs.  I think that is what is happening with you.  Your belief in states' rights, and your belief that federal power should be minimized, has led you to minimize the parts of history that are inconvenient for your political belief.   You want to minimize the parts of history where federal power did something good, and states' rights was in support of something bad.  In the Civil War, states' rights were invoked in support of slavery.   You would like to ignore that.     

 

I honestly believe that we cannot in good faith stand here today and judge the actions of the actors of the Civil War. The politics, the landscape, even the basic understanding of the Constitution itself were so different from what we experience that we have no real frame of reference. I don't believe that Lincoln, Lee, Davis, Sherman, et al were bad people doing bad things, they were simply people of their times. Yes, the federal government did things they should not have, and yes, the South was fighting for the right to continue slavery. Those issues were decades old by the time the war broke out, it's a shame that it took so much bloodshed to do the right thing.

---