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Other gods

2007-06-18T18:22:33Z

AllGoodThings: Added Biblical quotations relating to other gods.

As opposed to the true [[God]], other '''gods''' have been proposed throughout the history of mankind. The term god is applied in a general sense to any deity that is worshiped as part of a theistic belief system.

== Other Gods in the Bible ==

The Christian Bible contains references to more than just the Christian God(Hereafter referred to as God with a large G to avoid confusion).

== Genesis ==

Early translations of the opening text of Genesis use a distinctly different word to describe the being responsible for enacting Creation than God, who first appears in the Garden of Eden with Adam. Attempts to translate the word literally get little more than a word approximately meaning 'The Power'.

God in the Garden of Eden often uses the plural, (Genesis 1:26) 'And God said, let us make man in our image.', (Genesis 3:22) 'And the Lord God said, Behold, then man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.' (Genesis 11:7) 'Let us go down, and there confound their language.'. This is occasionally explained as use of the 'Royal We'.

== Exodus ==

The Eygptian gods are referred to several times, never as nonexistant. (Exodus 12:12) 'And against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment.' (Exodus 15:11) 'Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods?' (Exodus 18:11) 'Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods.'. The implication is that God is greater than any single member of the Eygptian pantheon, not that the gods worshipped by the ancient Eygptians don't exist. Furthermore, the Magi, empowered by those gods, are able to produce plagues of their own.

The Commandments are the clearest: (Exodus 20:3, 5) 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me. ... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.' God makes it clear while other gods exist, the Israelites are not to worship them before Him, or to serve them.

Other laws also make it clear that other gods exist, but the penalties for worshipping them are harsh: (Exodus 22:20) 'He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.' (Exodus 23:13) 'Make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth.' (Exodus 23:24) 'Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.' (Exodus 23:32) 'Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.' (Exodus 34:14) 'For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.'

The strangest section on multiple gods in Exodus is this law: (Exodus 22:28) 'Thou shalt not revile the gods.'. Despite strong prohibitions on the worship, naming, or serving of other gods, one is not to revile them.

== Psalms ==

(Psalm 82:1) 'God standeth in the congregation of the mighty, he judgeth among the gods.' (Psalm 86:8) 'Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord.' (Psalm 96:4) 'For the Lord ... is to be feared above all gods.' (Psalm 97:7) 'Worship him, all ye gods.'

== Gospel Of John ==

The most interesting account of more than one divine being comes from John: (John 10:33-34) 'The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?' This is a reference to Psalm 82, which includes God proclaiming Ye are Gods.

==Notes==
It is claimed that [[Christianity]], [[Islam]], and [[Judaism]] worship the same God in different ways. This claim is regarded by some as a way to convert Jews and Christians to Islam, since it supports the idea that [[Abrahamic religions|Abrahamic religion]] has "grown" from Judaism to Christianity to Islam.<ref>http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/moongod.htm</ref> However, many are skeptical of this idea.<ref>http://www.letusreason.org/Islam6.htm</ref>

Regardless of the lack of historical data regarding the origins of any of these three religions, the mythological links between them are clear. It is a tenet of the Jewish religion that all Jews descended from Abraham (indeed, in order to convert to Judaism one must complete an 'adoption' ritual for the house of Israel); as Jesus is regarded as Jewish, the growth of Christianity as an offshoot of the Jewish religion is clear. In a similar fashion, Muslims claim to be descended from Abraham by way of Ishmael.

==References==
<references/>

Deism

2007-06-18T05:47:00Z

AllGoodThings: Heavily expanded on the nature and history of Deism.

The founder of '''Deism''' was [[Lord Herbert of Cherbury]]. <ref>http://www.theologicalstudies.org/what_is_deism.html</ref> He came up with 5 essentials of Deism which are "(1) a belief in the existence of the Deity, (2) the obligation to reverence such a power, (3) the identification of worship with practical morality, (4) the obligation to repent of sin and to abandon it, and, (5) divine recompense in this world and the next"<ref>http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deismeng.htm</ref>

Dictionaries' definitions of '''deism''' include:
:The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.<ref>American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition</ref>
and
:"a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe."<ref>Merriam-Webster online: [http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/deism deism]</ref>

The Catholic Church would denounce Deism as a Heresy in the 1500s, for it's rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ, the importance of the church, and eschewing the idea of Divine Intervention. While Lord Herbert would found the movement, by the 1800s his arguments were largely demolished by the philosopher Locke and his deconstruction of the concept of an 'Innate Truth'(Upon which much of Herbert's views on Deism were founded).

Matthew Tindal is generally credited with the modern incarnation of Deism and that practiced by the Founding Fathers who were Deists. "God designed all Mankind should at all times know, what he wills them to know, believe, profess, and practice; and has given them no other Means for this, but the Use of Reason."

Deism would enjoy a brief rise in the Western world through the 1800s, but by the early 20th century, it was on the decline. The Unitarian movement would absorb most of it's teachings and eventually produce the Unitarian Universalists. Deism today is a mixed bag without dogma or teachings beyond the idea that one should employ Reason to understand the universe. As a result, Deists who beleive in Divine Intervention, Intelligent Design, and many other ideas that would have been alien to the earlier Deists are now around.

==Deism and the Founding Fathers==
The beliefs of the Founding Fathers are a matter of debate. Those urging a larger role for religion in public life, or arguing that the United States is in essence a Christian nation, like to claim them as Christians; those in opposition are apt to say that some or many of them were deists. Varying definitions of the terms "Christian" (which can mean "derived from the teaching of Jesus's" or "Professing belief in the divinity of Jesus") and "deist" (as noted above) give scope for argument. Some of them were deists, according to some definitions of the term.

Among the Founding Fathers, [[Thomas Paine]] espoused deism and popularized the term in his book [[The Age of Reason]]. [[Benjamin Franklin]] wrote in his autobiography about an earlier period in his life,
:Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.

Benjamin Franklin believed in a God that "ought to be worshipped," and at the [[Constitutional Convention]] less than three years from his death [[Benjamin Franklin]] advocated public prayer. He praised Christianity, but his letter to Ezra Stiles was noncommittal as to the divinity of Jesus: "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and His Religion as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.. I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubt as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I need not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect Soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble. I see no harm in its being believed, if that belief has good consequences, as probably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed."

Another [[Founding Father]] described as a deist was [[Thomas Jefferson]]. Jefferson personally struggled with the divinity of Christ and produced an edited version of the Gospels, later known as the [[Jefferson Bible]], which contained only the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus and omitted third-person accounts of his life, particularly the accounts of the miracles.

Ten years from his death Jefferson stated that "[The Jefferson Bible] show that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel, and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its Author never said nor saw."<ref>Jefferson, Letter to Charles Thomson, January 9, 1815</ref>

The closer Jefferson approached his death, the more Christian he appeared. He read the Bible daily as the end grew near. His grandson described Jefferson as follows:<ref>Thomas Jefferson Randolph, undated letter to biographer Henry S. Randall, reprinted in Masfield et al., ''The Real Thomas Jefferson'', p. 321.</ref>

:He was regular in his attendance [at] church, taking his prayer book with him. He drew the plan of the Episcopal church in Charlottesville, was one of the largest contributors to its erection, and contributed regularly to the support of its minister. I paid, after his death, his subscription of $200 to the erection of the Presbyterian church in the same village. A gentleman of some distinction calling on him and expressing his disbelief in the truths of the Bible, his reply was, 'Then, sir, you have studied it to little purpose.'"

----

'''Sources:'''<references/>

==See Also==
:[http://thedcl.org/christia/s/stephwill/agodeieg/agodeieg.html An Account of the Growth of Deism in England] by William Stephens.

[[Category:Religion]]

Big Bang theory

2007-06-18T05:31:33Z

AllGoodThings: Clearing up a minor miconception of the 'Big Bang' theory and what it says.

[[Image:Universe expansion.png|right|thumb|250px|According to the Big Bang theory, the universe emerged from an extremely dense and hot state called the ''original singularity''.]]
[[Image:End of universe.jpg|right|thumb|250px|According to the Big Bang theory, the 3 possible geometry of the universe depends on value of the ''[[cosmological constant]]''.]]
The '''Big Bang Theory''' is the current dominant scientific hypothesis explaining the acceleration of matter throughout the Universe. Big bang theories are actually a ''class'' of scientific models that describe the Universe as expanding from a very hot, dense state approximately 13.7 billion years ago. It was first proposed by [[Georges-Henri Lemaitre]] and evidence for the expansion was observed by [[Edwin Hubble]]<ref>Hubble, E. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173.</ref>. Later [[George Gamow]] predicted that the Big Bang would leave an observable microwave background radiation (or CMBR). This radiation was subsequently discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at [[Bell Labs]] and found to be close to that predicted by Gamow (Gamow predicted a background radiation level equivalent to a roughly 3K black body object, and the observed level is that of a 2.725K body). Pensiaz and Wilson were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1978 for their work.

The term "Big Bang" implies an explosion of matter into pre-existing space, but the theory actually indicates that space is dynamic and more space is constantly created in the interstices between particles as the density of the universe falls. Big Bang theorists state that the Hubble [[redshift]] is a consequence of this stretching of the fabric of space.

Observations of distant supernovae indicate that the Universe is actually undergoing accelerated expansion<ref>Riess, A. G., et al. The Astronomical Journal, Volume 116, Issue 3, pp. 1009-1038.</ref><ref>Perlmutter, S., et al. The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 517, Issue 2, pp. 565-586.</ref> and galaxy surveys<ref>[http://www.sdss.org/dr5/ Sloan Digital Sky Survey]</ref><ref>Tegmark, M., et al. Physical Review D, vol. 74, Issue 12.</ref> and recent observations of the microwave background<ref>[http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe]</ref><ref>See, for example, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0603449</ref> have corroborated these claims. Conventional wisdom is that the acceleration is caused by some sort of [[dark energy]], which has not yet been directly observed.

== Big Bang Theory Dissent Letter ==
The Big Bang Theory has had many dissenters including the British astronomer Sir [[Fred Hoyle]], the Nobel Prize winner [[Hannes Alfven]], and astronomers [[Geoffrey Burbidge]] and [[Halton Arp]]. <ref>http://www.icr.org/article/343/</ref> It was Hoyle who coined the term, although he used it disparagingly.

In 2004, a ‘Open Letter to the Scientific Community’ disputing the big bang theory was signed by 33 scientists and has been published on the internet and in the science journal [[New Scientist]]. <ref>http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0601skepticism.asp</ref> The dissent letter has subsequently been signed by hundreds of individuals around the world. <ref>http://www.cosmologystatement.org/</ref> Professional cosmologists are actively creating models (some of which contradict the Bing Bang scenario) and collecting data that probe the specific nature of the earliest observable aspects of the Universe.

==Creationist and Theistic Evolutionary Views==
Most [[Atheist]]s believe in the Big Bang theory. There is active research and speculation into what caused the Big Bang, but atheists agree it was not a deity.

Many scientists who believe in the Big Bang Theory are [[Evolutionist]]s, though not all are. One can believe that God both created the Universe AND laid out the plan for all life in the Big Bang, as opposed to the idea that life evolved randomly after the Big Bang.

Young earth creationist scientists contest the Big Bang Theory stating that it is scientifically unsound
<ref name="BB Critique">Thompson, Bert, Harrub, Brad, and May, Branyon [http://www.apologeticspress.org/modules.php?name=Read&cat=1&itemid=22 The Big Bang Theory—A Scientific Critique] ''Apologetics Press'', May 2003 - 23[5]:32-34,36-47.</ref>
<ref>Brown, Walt, 2001, [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences16.html Big Bang?]</ref><ref>http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/309</ref><ref>http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2047</ref><ref>http://www.icr.org/article/343/</ref>, though few creationist criticisms are found in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Some Old Earth Creationists and Theistic Evolutionists argue that the Big Bang is in fact mentioned in the Bible. <ref>[http://www.reasons.org/resources/fff/2000issue03/index.shtml#big_bang_the_bible_taught_it_first http://www.reasons.org/resources/fff/2000issue03/index.shtml#big_bang_the_bible_taught_it_first]</ref> Some Christian apologists who believe in an old earth, such as [[William Craig]] use the Big Bang as an apologetic, arguing that it proves that the universe had a beginning. <ref>Strobel, Lee. ''The Case for a Creator''. Zondervan, 2004. </ref>

== Common Misconceptions ==

It is a commonly held misconception that the 'Big Bang' theory discusses how, why, or what started the universe. The theory states nothing more than that all matter is expanding outwards from some moment where it was all tightly bundled, and then rushed outwards as space expanded and light formed, followed by matter of all kinds. The origins of the universe are currently under debate under the constroversial 'M-Theory'.

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Astronomy]]

Confederate States of America

2007-06-18T05:13:54Z

AllGoodThings: Economics of the pre-War situation in brief added. Probably spelling mistakes.

{{stub}}

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|align="center" colspan="2"|[[Image:Cwlogo.png|200px]]
|-
!colspan="2" align="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: gray no-repeat scroll top left;"|The Civil War
1861 - 1865
|-
!colspan="2" align="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: gray no-repeat scroll top left;"|Confederate States of America
|-
|Created
|February 4, 1861
|-
|Ended
|April 9, 1865
|-
|President
|[[Jefferson Davis]]
|-
|Secretary of War
|Leroy Pope Walker, Judah P. Benjamin, George W. Randolph, James Seddon, John C. Breckinridge
|-
|Secretary of the Navy
|Stephan Mallory
|-
|Secretary of State
|Robert Toombs, Robert M.T. Hunter, Judah P. Benjamin
|}
The '''Confederate States of America''' (commonly referred to as The Confederacy, The South, the CSA, or simply as the Rebel States) were an alliance of 11 southern [[America]]n states who fought against the Union states in the [[American Civil War]] (1861 to 1865) (commonly called "The War Between The States" by Southerners).

The various southern states seceded from the [[United States of America]], and joined together as the "Confederate States of America" for a number of reasons, including a Northern state favored balance of power in Congress, Free Trade, and, after Lincoln's triumph in the [[1860 Presidential election]], the threat of radical [[abolitionism|abolitionists]] to end [[slavery]], which Southerners viewed as a matter of [[states' rights]] that should not be enforced at the federal level.

Only four states where slavery was legal at that time failed to secede -- [[Delaware]], [[Kentucky]], [[Maryland]] and [[Missouri]]. It was a near thing in the latter three states, which all wound up raising [[regiment|regiments]] for the Confederacy as well as the [[Union]], although not as an official act of their governments.

The president of the Confederate States of America was [[Jefferson Davis]], a former [[Secretary of War]] under [[President]] [[Franklin Pierce]] and later [[Senator]] from [[Mississippi]]. [[Richmond, Virginia]] was the capital of the Confederacy after that state seceded in mid-April of 1861 following the surrender of [[Fort Sumter]] and [[Lincoln's call for volunteers]], and one day before the [[Pratt Street riot]] in [[Baltimore, Maryland]], the first battle of the Civil War to kill Americans on both sides.

General [[Robert E. Lee]] led the Confederate forces into battle against the Union armies, led by various generals appointed by [[Abraham Lincoln]], with the last, and most successful being General Ulysses S. Grant. .

== Ideology ==

Professor [[Emory Thomas]] of [[Virginia]] found it instructive to compare the correspondence sent by the Confederate government in the first year of its existence to different governments. He writes, "The Southern nation was by turns a guileless people attacked by a voracious neighbor, an 'established' nation in some temporary difficulty, a collection of bucolic [[aristocrats]] making a romantic stand against the banalities of [[industry|industrial]] [[democracy]], a [[cabal]] of commercial farmers seeking to make a pawn of [[King Cotton]], an [[apotheosis]] of nineteenth-century [[nationalism]] and revolutionary [[liberalism]], or the ultimate statement of social and economic [[reaction]]." <ref> [Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 83-84.] </ref> Certainly some of the leaders of the Confederacy could be found to believe in any one of these incarnations of their country, but probably none to believe in all at once. The aspect of resistance to [[industrialization]] has most captured the imagination of future generations of Southerners.

The example of the [[U. S. Constitution]] clearly guided the drafters of the Confederate Constitution, enabling the latter group to complete their work in less than half as much time. <ref> [Thomas, p. 63.] </ref> The predictable provision banning efforts to end de jure slavery is found at Article I, Section 9, clause 4, lumped in with the provisions banning [[ex post facto laws]] and [[bills of attainder]]. It is three clauses down from a most unexpected clause banning the [[Atlantic Ocean|Atlantic]] [[slave trade]], but permitting the importation of slaves from the Union. The wording of this clause demonstrates that the drafters clearly anticipated that not all slave states would secede, although they also included a provision for accepting new states into the Confederacy, which proved essential when [[Virginia]], [[Arkansas]], [[Tennessee]] and [[North Carolina]] seceded from the United States after the Constitution was in effect. Although the Confederate document includes no [[bill of rights]] as such, the [[Ninth Amendment]] and [[Tenth Amendment]] are reproduced in Article VI as Sections 5 and 6. The Confederate ban on a [[religious test for office]] is Section 4, notwithstanding the fact that the preamble invokes the blessing of almighty [[God]] on the Confederate experiment. <ref> [Thomas, Appendix, pp. 306-322.] </ref> Perhaps the most significant differences had to do with the [[appropriations]] process in Congress. Not only was a [[line-item veto]] expressly included, but Congress required a two-thirds [[supermajority]] to appropriate any funds not specifically requested by the President, giving Jefferson Davis in a real sense more Constitutional power than Abraham Lincoln possessed.

== Economics - The Inevitable Clash ==

While idealogy would provide much of the motivation to go to war, the economics of the Northern and Southern states made it impossible for anything but a clash to come to a head. While the Northern States had modernized and embraced the industrial revolution, incorporating new technology and rebuilding infrastructure to support it, the South had relied on the farming that had sustained it since the founding of America. The problem came with the liquidity of capital.

When a businessman in the North wanted to build a factory, he would obtain a loan from the bank or from a group of investors, pay the labour and material costs to erect it, and thereafter be almost assured of some level of income as his products were produced, put on trains, and shipped to markets. The capital was constantly liquid, changing hands from one individual to another, and in almost all cases, stood to increase.

When a plantation or farm owner in the South wanted to expand, his capital remained highly illiquid, because it remained tied down in slaves, land, and the equipment he needed. And while new goods from Northern factories were in increasing demand, the South found itself having to compete with goods from overseas, including British cotton. While the Northern businessman grew wealthier, the Southern businessman had a very limited chance. With the scarcity of liquid capital, no banks in the South offered the loans that they did in the North, further miring the economy in stagnation.

== Legacy - Physical/Military ==

The principal physical legacy of the Confederacy was mass fratricidal destruction. Four years of Civil War killed at least 620,000 soldiers (counting deaths from disease as well as in battle), of whom approximately 260,000 were from the Confederacy. This represented a much larger fraction (slightly over one quarter) of the Confederacy's military age white men than was lost by the Union.

An unknown number of [[civilians]] also died, in part as a result of the campaign of organized plunder in late 1864 and early 1865 by the troops of [[Union]] [[General]] [[William Tecumseh Sherman]] which helped not only to destroy the will of the Confederacy to fight, but literally to destroy the [[infrastructure]] of the Confederacy. Severe damage was inflicted on both urban and rural communities in the South, and hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. The exigencies of [[total war]] had led to the destruction of Southern infrastructure, in particular [[railroads]], long before 1864, but never on such a scale.

[[Total war]] based on modern technology was confirmed as the mode in which [[nation-states]] would fight each other throughout the industrial age. Simultaneously with the Union, the Confederacy launched the first seagoing [[ironclad]] warships. With the possible exception of the [[Prussia|Prussians]] and [[Great Britain|British]], it is unlikely that any country of comparable population and technology in the 1860's could have resisted the Union onslaught for as long as the Confederacy did. This is considered by some historians to represent a major moral victory for the Confederacy. An equally impressive moral victory was the decision by General Lee on April 9, 1865 to rule out continuing to fight as [[insurgents]]; although it can be argued that this only delayed the inevitable failure of [[Reconstruction]], it also made physical rebuilding possible in a way it would not be in the latter stages of civil wars in other countries in the [[20th century]]. Notional or real, its superiority man for man (and especially general for general) was permanently impressed on the South, which today remains more pro-military than any other region of the United States as measured by percentage of voluntary [[enlistment|enlistments]].

== Legacy - Political/Ideological ==

The Confederacy is the primary reason that it became possible in the 1860's to abolish slavery. Given [[Article Five]] of the [[U. S. Constitution]], it would have been impossible to abolish slavery without secession in the 15 established states with the 35 free states which later existed. As it actually happened, the [[Thirteenth Amendment]] was ratified by a 26-state [[Union]] containing only four slave states. The most likely solution in the absence of secession would have been to admit smaller Western states, possibly even turning what became [[Indian reservations]] into states. However, the continuing political focus on slavery would have made expansion of the U. S. to [[Alaska]] and [[Hawaii]] unlikely in the nineteenth century, if at all.

While the Confederacy lost the Civil War, it can be seen to have won the peace. [[Radical Republicans]] were forced in the [[Compromise of 1877]] to concede the failure of Reconstruction and withdraw the U. S. Army from the South, or at least from its mission of guaranteeing the rights of African-Americans. In a process known as [[Redemption]], the [[Republican Party]] was crushed out of existence across the South and black people stripped of their voting and other rights by a system which came to be known as [[Jim Crow]]. Northern Republicans encouraged a [[narrative]] of the Civil War which sought to make it about anything other than slavery. They were able to use the phrase "rum, Romanism and rebellion" and other means of [[waving the bloody shirt]] to generally dominate national politics through both the [[Third Party System]] and the [[Fourth Party System]].

The association of the [[Democratic Party]] with the South was entirely accurate as that region was totally dominated by Democrats by 1900. However, only with the election of [[Woodrow Wilson]] in 1912 was a Southerner able to return to the [[White House]]. Whenever Democrats held a majority of either house of [[Congress]], Southerners would immediately become the chairmen of all committees, giving that region a disproportionate influence on national politics. Ironically, because of their [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] roots, Southern Democrats were a party of [[small government]] and lower [[taxes]] (radically cutting back spending on [[public schools]] among other things during [[Redemption]]), and were hostile to organized labor.

[[American politics]] have been defined in part by the conflict between the [[Alexander Hamilton|Hamiltonian]] and Jeffersonian schools of the role of government, particularly the [[Federal government]]. The Confederacy can be seen as the [[last stand]] of the Jeffersonians, who favored a system in which state policy and sovereignty would trump that of the Federal government. To this way of thinking, subsequent American politics have actually been a competition between more and less radical Hamiltonians.

== See also ==

[[American Civil War: 1861]]
[[American Civil War: 1862]]
[[American Civil War: 1863]]
[[American Civil War: 1864]]
[[American Civil War: 1865]]
[[American Civil War: Aftermath]]
[[Category:American Civil War]]
[[Category:United States History]]