Mitch McConnell: Tea Party Is "Ruining" GOP

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@Thelibrarian:

Have you trotted out your "most slaves didn't have it that bad" argument yet?

Look at it this way: There are 1.1 million total troops in the US Army. The border with Mexico is a little less than two thousand miles. If you do the math, you will find that we could place a troop every ten feet. Do you really believe that having a soldier placed every ten feet along our southern border couldn't stop illegal immigration?[/b]

Your figures only work if:
1. you only monitor the Mexican/US border and ignore the Canadian border and every single coastal area.
2. every single member of the military was on border patrol duty and none anywhere else in the country (or world).
3. every single military member spent 24/7/365 on duty along the border.

Comparing the NSA collection of electronically obtained and maintained data and monitoring an expansive border for human movement is like saying gmail should be able to operate the US Postal Service's sorting and distribution networks.

I'm curious to know which states would align themselves with North and South? Can it be all southern states? what about the more conservative states in the north? Is there a list, or does it follow red state/blue state categories?

Just how badly did most slaves have it? Are you aware that Southern slaves are the only slave population known to history that reproduced itself?

Here is a brief article that accurately depicts Southern attitudes towards slavery. If you care to read it, you can make up your own mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie

Of all 1,515,605 free families in the fifteen slave states in 1860, nearly 400,000 held slaves (roughly one in four, or 25%)

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The early colonists of Virginia treated the first Africans in the colony as indentured servants. They were freed after a stated period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters.

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in 1640, the Virginia courts sentenced a black servant, John Punch, to slavery for attempting to escape his indenture.

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in 1662 Virginia passed a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrum (called partus, for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman. This was a reversal of common law practice, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the power relationships between slaveowners and slave women, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their mixed-race children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters.

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The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian, as well as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans. This established the basis for the legal enslavement of any non-Christian foreigner.

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In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section 2 of Article I designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to the total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths of their total number, to establish the state's official population for the purposes of apportionment of Congressional representation and federal taxation.[25] This increased the power of southern states in Congress for decades, affecting national policies and legislation.[26] The planter elite dominated the southern Congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly 50 years.

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in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years [had] a slaveholder as president of the United States, and, for that whole period of time, there was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder.

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Between 1830 and 1840 nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines.[38] In the 1850s over 193,000 were transported, and historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced migration of this new Middle Passage. By 1860 the slave population in the United States had reached 4 million.[38] As the internal slave trade became a dominant feature of American slavery, individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier settlers' previous glossing over of origins and combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost all knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa, as most had families who had been in the United States for many generations.

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Once the trip ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier significantly different from most labor in the Upper South. Clearing trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and backbreaking work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad water, and exhaustion from both the journey and the work weakened the newly arrived slaves and produced casualties. New plantations were located at rivers' edges for ease of transportation and travel. Mosquitoes and other environmental challenges spread disease, which took the lives of many slaves. They had acquired only limited immunities to lowland diseases in their previous homes. The death rate was so high that, in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some planters preferred whenever possible to use rented slaves rather than their own.

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In Louisiana, French colonists had established sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans entered the state and joined the sugar cultivation. Between 1810 and 1830, planters bought slaves from the North and the number of slaves increased from less than 10,000 to more than 42,000. Planters preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave purchases. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding than growing cotton. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the reliance on violence by the owners “especially savage.”

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The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. Treatment was generally characterized by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Whippings, executions, and rapes were commonplace.

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Some states prohibited religious gatherings of slaves, particularly following incidents such as Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. Planters feared that group meetings would facilitate communication and may lead to rebellion.

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a master could be held criminally liable only if the slave he killed was completely submissive and under the master's absolute control

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Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave.[61] Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders; in contrast with small slave-owning families, where the closer relationship between the owners and slaves sometimes resulted in a more humane environment.[62] William Wells Brown, who escaped and became a fugitive slave, reported that on one plantation, slave-men were required to pick 80 pounds-per-day of cotton, while women were required to pick 70 pounds; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were given lashes of the whip for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood right next to the cotton scales.

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Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated black women as property or chattel.[66] Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but, before the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of slave women.[66] Wealthy planter widowers, notably such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took slave women as concubines; each had six children with his partner: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally Hemings (the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife), respectively.

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To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, slave codes were established. Slave codes were laws established to demonstrate legal sanctions over the black population.

While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states.[70] According to the slave codes, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal, although it often took place as children taught each other.

Even though slave codes had many common features, each state had specific codes or variations that suited the laws in that region. For example in Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave from the premises of the owner without written consent, nor were slaves allowed to trade goods among themselves. In Virginia, slaves were not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or during public gatherings. In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in any of the slave states.

The code for the District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of another

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(during the War of 1812) Slaveholders, primarily in the South, had considerable "loss of property" as tens of thousands of slaves[citation needed] escaped to British lines or ships for freedom, despite the difficulties. The planters' complacency about slave "contentment" was shocked by seeing that slaves would risk so much to be free.[78] Afterwards, when some freed slaves had been settled at Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major Pierce Butler of South Carolina tried to persuade them to return to the United States, to no avail.

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(after the Turner Rebellion)Turner and his followers were hanged, and Turner's body was flayed. In a frenzy of fear and retaliation, the militia killed more than 100 slaves who had not been involved in the rebellion. Planters whipped hundreds of innocent slaves to quell resistance.[84] Across the South, harsh new laws were enacted to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. New laws in Virginia prohibited blacks, free or slave, from practicing preaching, prohibited blacks from owning firearms, and forbade anyone to teach slaves how to read.[84] Typical was the Virginia anti-literacy law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of whites and blacks, which specified heavy penalties both for student and teacher when slaves were educated.[85]

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Even though early discussions of scholars such as Eugene Genovese’s argue that slavery was a moribund, inefficient system that was only kept because of cultural reasons, close to 98 percent of the economists nowadays disagree with this possibility and believe that slavery was an investment with good returns compared to other assets.[87] Therefore, the use of human beings in bondage would not have ended in 1860 without the Civil War.

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Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Scott each sued for freedom in St. Louis after the death of their master on the grounds that they had lived in a territory where slavery was forbidden (the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise). (Later the two cases were combined under Dred Scott's name.) Scott filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom to the couple (and, by extension, their two daughters, who had also been held illegally in free territories). Missouri state precedent for 28 years had generally provided for freedom in such cases during the 19th century, but the State Supreme Court ruled against Scott, saying that "times were not what they once were."

After the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it denied Scott his freedom in a sweeping decision that set the United States on course for Civil War. The court ruled that, under the Constitution, neither Dred Scott nor any descendant of Africans, slave or free, was a citizen who had a right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had had no constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.

The 1857 decision, decided 7–2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, could not be citizens. A state could not bar slaveowners from bringing slaves into that state. Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, considered the decision unjust and as proof that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the decision effectively barred slaves and their descendants from citizenship. Abolitionists were enraged and slave owners encouraged, contributing to tensions on this subject that led to civil war.[94]

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The Confederacy was outraged by black soldiers and refused to treat them as prisoners of war. Many were shot, as at the Fort Pillow Massacre, and others re-enslaved.[105]

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With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the labor force at the lowest level. The system of convict leasing began during Reconstruction and was fully implemented in the 1880s. This system allowed private contractors to purchase the services of convicts from the state or local governments for a specific time period. African Americans, due to “vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing” made up the vast majority of the convicts leased.[114]

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the number of soldiers of the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia who either owned slaves or came from slave owning households is "almost one of every two 1861 recruits

On February 24, 2007, the Virginia General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution Number 728 acknowledging "with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans, and call for reconciliation among all Virginians."[118] With the passing of this resolution, Virginia became the first state to acknowledge through the state's governing body their state's negative involvement in slavery. The passing of this resolution came on the heels of the 400th anniversary celebration of the city of Jamestown, Virginia, which was one of the first slave ports of the American colonies.

On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.[119]

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a similar resolution on June 18, 2009, apologizing for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery".[120] It also explicitly states that it cannot be used for restitution claims.[121]

I want to share something with the posters on this thread.

When I, a Yankee, moved to Mississippi for a job in the 1990s, I befriended an old man named Joe (he was friends with Eudora Welty and a gentleman in every respect. Joe is in his mid-90s by now and is slipping into senility).

Anyway, back in the 1920s, he was raised by his wet nurse"Tiola" who was black. When this little boy hurt himself he wouldn't go running to his mother but to Tiola. Tiola was considered part of the family. Tiola used to tell Joe stories, and one day she told him a story from her childhood, a story about the day when the slaves were freed. Most of the slave-owners (at least in Mississippi) considered their slaves to be part of the family, and most of the slaves had a genuine love for their masters, who fed them, clothed them, and taught them how to read. The masters did this because they were above all Christians, who felt responsible for their slaves. (This was Tiola's experience.)

Tiola spoke of the day of "emancipation" as a day of sadness. The slave-owners suddenly had no one to run their plantations. Their property (slaves) had been confiscated, so they had no money to hire their former slaves as workers. The slaves for their part didn't know what to do anymore. They were not given any preparation about how to live on their own. Tiola's parents had to fend for themselves now, and the life that Tiola had known on the plantation, being well-fed, taught to read, and playing with the kids (including the owner's children), was suddenly taken away. It was after the emancipation that the days of suffering commenced for her and her family. Everyone became poor, and many starved.

Hearing this story shattered everything I had learned in school and from television.

Of course, this story represents only one person's personal witness of what happened at emancipation. However, it is a real story. I'm certain there are many others.

...Alpineglow, that is an interesting, if not horrifying, question. My guess is that the blue states would form one country and the red states would form another. The horrors come into play since there are pockets of Americans in the blue states, and pockets of post-Americans in the red states. This is why I think it is such a shame the South, and like-minded states, weren't to secede in 1861. This war would be over rather than just beginning.

And war is just the word. I don't have time to look for figures, but when India was partitioned into Muslim and Hindu areas, I understand about ten million people died. I'm hoping we can sort out our differences more humanely.

After emancipation, the most likely group to leave were the house slaves--those closest to the whites--while the group most likely to stay after emancipation were the field hands--those farthest removed from whites.

You just seem to be calling for the majority of our national budget to be used for border patrol. The infrastructure set-up alone would cost a large fortune, and the logistics would be a nightmare.

Examples, please.

But it is interesting that the more liberal the country becomes, the fewer rights Americans have; it is called the police state and judicial tyranny.

What evidence is there that slaves would have been freed voluntarily in the south? Slavery was more than just an economic system, it was also a determiner of social status. The more slaves a person or family owned, the higher their status. And even those poor whites who didn't own slaves could at least tell themselves they weren't at the bottom of the social ladder with the slaves. And it's for that reason why slavery probably would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to uproot. While it's absolutely true that there had been slaves in the north for a time, the institution had hardly been so hardwired as it had been in the south. And it's absolutely incorrect to say that all poor whites in the south had fought for the Confederacy. Plenty of poor southerners had been drafted against their will into the Confederate army. There was indeed a significant number of white southerners who had either left to fight in the Union army, or like Newton Knight had organized Pro-Union resistance to carry out guerrilla warfare against the Confederate army and government. And it's no surprise that that virtually every one of these Pro-Union southerners were poor men who knew secession was a rich man's cause, and some like Newt Knight even was motivated by anti-slavery sentiments.

You are right that slaves were status, but only insofar as they were wealth. Back then, the rich owned slaves; today they drive a Mercedes. But that is hardly reason why slavery wouldn't have died of its own accord.

A much better argument that slavery would not have died is that the South had set up a true slave-based society--the first since ancient Roman times. But this position would expose the very deceitful liberal narrative on slavery for they lies they are. More particularly, Southern slavery was closer to European serfdom than slavery as it was practiced just about everywhere else.

Slavery was on its way out for a number of reasons: First, the supply of free or very cheap land was running out. The poor non-slave-owning whites managed to get by by squatting on land that they didn't actually own. They essentially survived by living off the land--land that wasn't theirs. The problem is that as land became scarce they would've been chased off of it, and would have had to have a way to support themselves. The only way would have been to end slavery in favor of free labor. With endless supplies of free land, the elites could afford to ignore poor whites. When this dried up, those poor whites would have had to have some way of supporting themselves.

Second as Genovese points out, slavery was already on the wane in Virginia and Maryland at the time of the war, though hardly dead. Slave populations were actually declining in favor of free labor, which is simply a more efficient way of doing things; this is why the north won the war. The reason was that the land had to be rehabilitated instead of used up and abandoned. This required a regimen of care that slavery was simply not capable of providing for a host of reasons.

Third, slavery was good at providing one thing: Unskilled muscle power. One of my favorite slave pictures is of a scrawny slave woman swinging a hoe on a handle that was as thick as a baseball bat. Why? Because tools had a way of self-destructing in the hands of slaves. As technology, and particularly the internal combustion engine, came of age, the need for muscle power was greatly reduced.

Fourth, world opinion. World opinion was turning hard against slavery, and while it may not have ended slavery in and of itself, it would have made it much harder. This factor, in conjunction with the others, guaranteed an end to slavery.

As far as anti-Confederacy Southerners, there were some of these, particularly German Texans, but they were a very small minority. The fact is that every Southern state held a referendum on secession, and in every single state these referenda passed overwhelmingly.

This does NOT mean that average soldiers fought to protect slavery; they had their own reasons for doing so. Thinking that poor Southerners fought to protect slavery is as naive as believing that average soldier fought in Iraq and Afghanistan to for the Jews or big oil. They too had their own reasons.

The 1st, 4th and 9th Amendment, and according to Supreme Court case law in the following cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas
Roe v. Wade vastly limited the prospects of a police state and judicial tyranny. If you were genuinely concerned about the powers of government, then you would embrace Roe v. Wade unconditionally.

I don't understand the above. The United States, under the Department of Defense, built our vast highway system. It was an extraordinary undertaking, tens if not hundreds of thousands of miles of sophisticated roads. And it didn't break the national budget in the least.

So: What in the world can be so hard about building a security wall across the southern border? That kind of undertaking is peanuts compared to what Eisenhower began in the 1950s. Moreover, it would be a great boon for the local economies involved in its construction.

I think there are only two reasons why people say it's too "cost prohibitive" to protect the southern border. 1) They forgot what the U.S. was able to accomplish in the 20th century in regard to infrastructure; or 2) they want illegal immigration.