Anniversaries: ending slavery in America

Good things often happen very slowly: 200 years ago today it became illegal to import slaves into the United States; 145 years ago today, all slaves in Confederate territory were freed.

An ugly similarity

I haven't thought this through, but this sort of Confederate apologetics sounds like a petulant spouse trying to justify divorce:

The Gettysburg Address was brilliant oratory, but it was also political subterfuge. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, it was the Southerners who were fighting for the consent of the governed and it was Lincoln's government that opposed them. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, DC. Lincoln's admonition that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" would perish from the earth if the right of secession were sustained was equally absurd. The United States remained a democracy, and the Confederate States of America would have been a democratic country as well. Lincoln's notion that secession would "destroy" the government of the United States is also bizarre in light of the fact that after secession took place the US government fielded the largest and best-equipped army and navy in the history of the world up to that point for four long years.

From lewrockwell.com via the wikipedia entry for Paleoconservatism. I once leaned toward the 1980s pre-internet sort of paleoconservatism with its then-excellent magazine Chronicles and Pat Buchanan's autobiography. I left them when I discovered they're shot through with Jew-hatred.