Confiscation Quotes
This frequent Jefferson quotation almost certainly was never written or uttered by him but was probably created by later opponents of private banks. It has never been verified from any studies of Jefferson’s prolific writings. Further the word ‘inflation” came into use in the 1860s and ‘deflation’ seems to have first been used in the 1920s. However, some ascribe it to a letter Jefferson wrote to Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin in 1802.
Sealed under duress and later repudiated by the King with Papal assistance. This clause was particularly interesting in that almost all freedoms have expanded from the Magna Carta in modern democracies. However in this one there was an absolute direct prohibition against the King—the State—taking private property without the owners consent. In modern democracies the right is not as strong as the original. The state, if it needs the property, wood or whatever, and the owner refuses to give it or sell it to the state, the government can condemn the property but must pay the owner the fair market value of the property seized. As a practical matter, the kings of England paid little or no heed to this clause. One of the sources of conflict between the English Royal Navy and the American Colonists was the practice of Naval agents finding tall straight trees, good for the main mast of a ship, and marking it thereby prohibiting the property owner of cutting down that tree until the Crown sent a crew to fell the tree and take it for ship building. They paid no attention to Aticle 31 whatsoever.
This was one of the several early unofficial Emancipations that was issued in the Civil War.
Vladimir Lenin. The “war-time” referred to the Civil War in Russia which broke out after the 1917 Revolution where the Whites and the Reds fought for control of Russia.
At this point, there had hardly been any fighting and no outrages or war crimes were yet committed by either side. These would come later—more on the Confederate side as they did not want to take the limited resources they had from their troops to fulfil abstract obligations to prisoners of war or to civilians. A few deliberately chose to use terror tactics. The Union troops also at various points in the war got out of hand and looted personal property of civilians. But at this point, this proclamation was just lies and propaganda.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
Writing about the railroad magnates and monopolists of his day:
Much of the South was so insular that people knew nothing about the notion of abolition and just assumed that no one would ever consider freeing the slaves. Many never knew that it was the South that first fired on the Union troops and flag. If the North won the war, the assumption was that Northerners would then own the plantations and the valuable slaves. In reality, while all slaves were emancipated in the South, very few plantations and farms were confiscated from their Southern owners by Northerners despite the fact that there was political pressure in the North to confiscate the land of all rebels who had committed treason and use the value to repay the Union bonds and care for the wounded Union veterans and the widows of dead Union Soldiers. Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
He may well have been right if the South had capitulated. But that is exactly what happened when they did not and were beaten. So the worst that the South could have ended up with by not following Vance’s view would be what they ended up without the many deaths and wounded and the massive destruction of property that took place in the latter part of the war.
This was the letter which triggered Lincoln’s famous reply. See {609337}.
Sealed under duress and later repudiated by the King with Papal assistance
He was explaining his repudiation of General John Fremont’s military proclamation in Missouri confiscating rebel property and emancipating their slaves. See {633732} .