there is no good news :-D

Syphilis is what did him in. Of course, Cheney's too smart for something like that. I mean you'd have to do something stoopid, like allowing yourself to be sodomized by a gay male prostitute posing as a reporter. We all know that Cheney isn't Gay. Closeted Gays usually have anger management issues, so that leaves him out. Also I've noticed the Gay gene kinda runs in the family. So again, not a problem for Dick.

Actually it was about the Federal Supremacy Clause, and the Southern states mistaken idea that they had the power to Null and Void federal decisions.

It was also economic, they wanted the feds to pay for each slave's freedom, which of course the fed couldn't afford, and was similar to today's eminent domain/taking problems where property owners feel like they can do anything, environmental laws be damned!

Additionally, most of the Nation's resources were heading North, which was becoming industrial, and not to the South which had to remain agrarian. Plantation owners were like corporate heads looking for cheap labor to maximize profits, and were a small percentage of the overall population. The rest of the slave owners were upper middle-class, and may have just had a couple, so they could live the veneer of an English gentry life. The average working southerner had no slaves at all, but were competitors for jobs.

While there were other issues, the predominant disagreement fueling the Civil War was slavery, and the Civil War would not have been fought without the disagreement regarding slavery. The Cornerstone Speech, given by Alexander Stephens, the VP of the fledgling Confederacy, shows that he, like Lincoln, believed that slavery was the root cause of the impending war. According to Stephens, the "foundations [of our new Government] are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition...." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861.] That's the sum of his speech, and it is clear what he means. The "states' rights" to which you refer was the right of states to regulate individually the institution of slavery and the ownership of slaves.

See also:

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Justice and Civil War veteran, in a 1884 Memorial Day speech: "We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win. We believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluble;...that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred convictions that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every man with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief...."

Henry L. Benning, Georgia politician and future Confederate general, writing in the summer of 1849 to his fellow Georgian, Howell Cobb: "First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere -- in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections." Later in the same letter Benning says, "I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union."

Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, speaking with regard to the several filibuster expeditions to Central America: "I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason -- for the planting and spreading of slavery."

Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia: "There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery."

Richmond Enquirer, 1856: "Democratic liberty exists solely because we have slaves . . . freedom is not possible without slavery."

Atlanta Confederacy, 1860: "We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing."

Lawrence Keitt, Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House on January 25, 1860: "African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism." Later in the same speech he said, "The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States."

Keitt again, this time as delegate to the South Carolina secession convention, during the debates on the state's declaration of causes: "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." Taken from the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, dated Dec. 22, 1860. Keitt became a colonel in the Confederate army.

Methodist Rev. John T. Wightman, preaching at Yorkville, South Carolina: "The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . . This war is the servant of slavery." The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861).

From the Confederate Constitution: Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3: "The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government."

From the Georgia Constitution of 1861:"The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves." (This is the entire text of Article 2, Sec. VII, Paragraph 3.)

From the Alabama Constitution of 1861: "No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country." (This is the entire text of Article IV, Section 1 (on slavery).)

A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865.]

Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"

Alfred P. Aldrich, South Carolina legislator from Barnwell: "If the Republican party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule -- it is a question of political and social existence."

John C. Calhoun, Senator from South Carolina: "The defence of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail."

James H. Hammond, Congressman from South Carolina: "Sir, I do firmly believe that domestic slavery, regulated as ours is, produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth." Hammond again, from later in the same speech: "the moment this House undertakes to legislate upon this subject [slavery], it dissolves the Union. Should it be my fortune to have a seat upon this floor, I will abandon it the instant the first decisive step is taken looking towards legislation of this subject. I will go home to preach, and if I can, practice, disunion, and civil war, if needs be. A revolution must ensue, and this republic sink in blood."

Henry Wise, Congressman (and future governor) from Virginia: "The principle of slavery is a leveling principle; it is friendly to equality. Break down slavery and you would with the same blow break down the great democratic principle of equality among men."

Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, New York, New York, February 27, 1860: : When you [Southerners] make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication. Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

From the diary of James B. Lockney, 28th Wisconsin Infantry, writing near Arkadelphia, Arkansas (10/29/63): "Last night I talked awhile to those men who came in day before yesterday from the S.W. part of the state about 120 miles distant. Many of them wish Slavery abolished & slaves out of the country as they said it was the cause of the War, and the Curse of our Country & the foe of the body of the people--the poor whites. They knew the Slave masters got up the war expressly in the interests of the institution, & with no real cause from the Government or the North."

Georgia County Secession Resolutions: "Whereas, Several of the non-slaveholding States of this Confederacy have, by unfriendly aggressive legislation, nullified the Constitution framed and bequeathed to us by our fathers and in so doing, have virtually dissolved the Union; and whereas the abolition fanatics, assisted by the votes of free negroes, who according to the decision of the Supreme Court, are not citizens of the United States, and therefore have no right of suffrage, have succeeded in carrying in the late election every Northern State except New Jersey, and are about to elevate to the highest office in this government, men whose avowed purpose it is, and who are pledged to wage an irrepressible conflict with Southern rights and with that institution which is the foundation of Southern prosperity and Southern society..."

Letter to the Citizens of the Greenville District (by James C. Furman and others): "Give them the Presidency and its patronage; the millions of money it has to dispense; the control of the Post Office, &c. and in a few brief years the slave States bordering on the North will have to abandon slavery as the source to them of endless vexation and loss, through the interference of Abolition emmisaries, while no new States will be admitted but such as are free -- and then, by a vote of Congress, their great idea will be carried out -- universal emancipation will be declared.-- Then every negro in South Carolina, and in every other Southern States, will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you. If you are tame enough to submit, Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands!"

S.C. Gov. Pickens' Inaugural Message (Dec 1860) : "South Carolina...will, most assuredly, secede separately and alone."

From the South Carolina Secession Declaration Debates

Debate over the Declaration of Causes: "The Tariff is not the question which brought the people up to their present attitude. We are to give a summary of our causes to the world, but mainly to the other Southern States, whose co-action we wish, and we must not make a fight on the Tariff question.... Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question."

Debate over the Address to the Slaveholding States: "In the one Address we are speaking to those with whom we expect to confederate -- we are speaking to our sister Southern States. In the other we are speaking to the world at large, and informing them of the reasons which induced us to take the important steps we have adopted."

South Carolina Secession Declaration: "We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection."

From the New York Anti-Secession Debates

S.C. Address to the people of the Slaveholding States (Dec. 1860): "Experience has proved that slaveholding States cannot be safe in subjection to non-slaveholding States. Indeed, no people can ever expect to preserve its rights and liberties, unless these be in its own custody. To plunder and oppress, where plunder and oppression can be practiced with impunity, seems to be the natural order of things. The fairest portions of the world elsewhere, have been turned into wildernesses, and the most civilized and prosperous communities have been impoverished and ruined by anti-slavery fanaticism."

Alabama's Letter to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky: "Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions -- nothing less than an open declaration of war -- for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans."

Kentucky Gov. Magoffin's response: "The rights of African slavery in the United States and the relations of the Federal Government to it, as an institution in the States and Territories, most assuredly demand at this time explicit definition and final recognition by the North."

I could go on and on and on . . . but you get the point. The Civil War was all about slavery.

And, don't forget, this prison abuse scandal is nationwide, including the wrongful death of Kenneth Keith Kallenbach in Pennsylvania. By the way, the Civil War was all about Northern seaports having a hissy fit over the low tariffs charged by the Southern ports, especially New orleans, the gateway to the newly opened west. These same northern fatcats paid for and backed John Brown and other abolitionists, and not for love of the black man, more just to stir the pot against state's rights.

Don't ruin my wet dream L&L.

Knows all, tells all: http://sparklepony.blogspot.com/