Gone With The Myths

On Dec. 20, 1860, 169 men — politicians and people of property — met in the ballroom of St. Andrew’s Hall in Charleston, S.C. After hours of debate, they issued the 158-word “Ordinance of Secession,” which repealed the consent of South Carolina to the Constitution and declared the state to be an independent country. Four days later, the same group drafted a seven-page “Declaration of the Immediate Causes,” explaining why they had decided to split the Union.

The authors of these papers flattered themselves that they’d conjured up a second American Revolution. Instead, the Secession Convention was the beginning of the Civil War, which killed some 620,000 Americans; an equivalent war today would send home more than six million body bags.

The next five years will include an all-you-can-eat special of national remembrance. Yet even after 150 years full of grief and pride and anger, we greet the sesquicentennial wondering, why did the South secede?

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19Ball.html?_r=1&hp

I get a log-in page which they want me to register for. It's an OLD thing that they had dropped for a long time and now appear to have reinstated.

Anyone else having to log in at the above link?

But I do occasionally get that log-in page on other newspaper websites. The best guess I have, based on my activity, is I get scrubbed from those site's user-lists for irregualar use.

So I don't think that's it.

It may be that they have me programmed for one free link per day. That's what happened yesterday. I started an op w. a snippet from the story , then went back to link to the whole think I got the log-in dealie.

Bummer.

Also might have something to do w. the fact thaI I get the online NYT by email... all separate,I thought....... from the above.

I'll figure it out. I'll read your article in the email version. Thanks for the feedback.

"But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.

South Carolina: “The non-slaveholding states ... have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and “have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. ... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”"

Southern states started organizing militias to protect them from rebellious slaves and abolitionists from the North. That incident in the fall of 1859 sort of lit the powder keg that exploded 14 months later.