Hunt or be Hunted

Heck yeah I do! I even had a dreams last week of a bunch of Yeti's jumping out in front of me and my dad while hunting and they started dancing..............

High is gonna be 80 today and all week. We have had robins here for a while. Easter is like 2 months away still and all the Easter flowers are bloomed already, We skipped winter and went straight to spring!

LOL! What do you mean?? http://www.realtree.com/forums/lounge/86209-what-heck-nasty-beware.html Picture ain't there anymore But yes, I love seeing new members post! Just be sure and stick around as well!

:clap::clown:

Welcome back Cole!! Congrats on the degree and engagement!

I am not sure if this thread as been done before, But what is the use of your user name on Realtree? Mine. Hunt or be hunted... Says for itself, You better hunt, Or you will be hunted!

Loved the videos Mike! I LOVE watching all ur videos!

http://blogs.sparenot.com/godsmacks/2012/02/29/whirlwind-sent-to-illinois/ This is getting under my skin! PEOPLE ARE DYING HERE! WBC is pushing this too far.......

I am sorry, Media told me wrong, Dead count is 6. They said the tornado was a EF4. We had an EF2 cut through part of my county. But no one was hurt.

Dead count is up to 10 now. Fixing to head up and start cutting trees.

Harrisburg Illinois. Early this morning storms came rolling through MO, KY, IL and left a bad aftermath, A town about a hour from me got slammed by a bad twister early this morning about 5:30. So far 4 dead. Many wounded. Pictures are right here Illinois storm images and damage Feb. 29, 2012 | WPSD Local 6 - News, Sports, Weather - Paducah KY | Local I have some friends up there that I have yet to hear from that I hope are OK. If you guys get a chance, Send up a prayer or 2 to the town and the families. They are talking about sending the ESDA group that I'm in up there if they need more man power to help look for people.. I have been up since 9 yesterday morning, And haven't been to bed yet, My town dodged the bullet this time. They are talking about the same thing Friday..

Realtree is adding a fee now. Sorry, Forgot to tell ya, Send all the money to my address and ill get ya back up and running

I want one!!

150.

Hmmm, Haven't heard about it Ruth! Thanks for posting! Gonna be interesting!!

Economy in the civil war. Seen some talking about it, Let me clear things up a little. Economically, the Civil War was not a contest between equals. The South had no factories to produce guns or ammunition, and its railroads were small and not interconnected, meaning that it was hard for the South to move food, weapons and men quickly and over long distances. In addition, though agriculture thrived in the South, planters focused on cash crops like tobacco and cotton and did not produce enough food to feed the southern population. The North, on the other hand, had enough food and enough factories to make weapons for all of its soldiers. It also had an extensive rail network that could transport men and weapons rapidly and cheaply. At first, this superiority of the North didn't seem to make much of a difference; like many wars in history, those involved thought it would be over quickly. But northern advantages would prove crucial as the war dragged on. The differences in manpower and industrial capacity were so profound that the fact that the South almost won the war was a shock to observers all over the world. On paper, there was no way that the South could possibly have stood up to the North, which had all of the material and financial advantages, and which did an excellent job of closing off the only advantage the South did have: cotton. Since most of the South's money came from exporting cotton the North aimed to shut this trade down. One of the very first things the Union government did was to blockade southern ports. The blockade took some time to become operational, but after the capture of New Orleans the amount of southern cotton exported to England plummeted. With it went the South's only consistent form of income, something it desperately needed to defeat the North. With the loss of its cotton exports, the South was in big trouble. It had lost its banking system which had been headquartered in New York and held no gold or silver reserves. There were various forms of paper money printed by the states and even by some private banks, but overall people did not trust paper money, unless it was explicitly backed by gold. Without gold and without banks, the Confederacy did the only thing it could: it printed money. Lots and lots of money. However, it could not do much to collect taxes to support this huge printing effort because the Confederate Constitution forbade the central government from imposing taxes on the states, and left it up to each individual state to tax its citizens. As in the American Revolution decades before, states collected little money and, thus, the Confederacy was left nearly broke. The Confederate government levied taxes in 1864, but by that time it was too late to do much good. With money flooding the market, its value fell dramatically, and horrendous inflation dogged the Confederate war effort from beginning to end. With so many family heads away in fighting the war, much of the southern agricultural land was left idle or insufficiently farmed. The South, then, could not manage to feed both the civilian and military populations. Food was scarce throughout the war and, by the end, parts of the South suffered from starvation. The final dissolution of the Confederate army came when men realized that their families were starving to death and they left the army to try to help. Arms and ammunition were also chronically in short supply in the South. Men had to bring their own guns, and soldiers scavenged the battlefields to take Union weapons and ammunition. Soldiers also lacked simple necessities such as shoes. In fact, the quest for shoes brought both the North and the South together at the town of Gettysburg which housed a shoe factory. Uniforms, tents, wagons and horses were also rare in the South, and these problems only increased toward the end of the war. In the end, the South lost the war primarily because it ran out of men, money, and supplies. That's the southerner economy. Now to the north. The picture was much rosier north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In addition to having a population that was more than twice that of the South, the North had enough food to feed all of its people, including its armies. Plus, it boasted many factories that produced much of what those armies needed. The federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts alone produced over one million rifles for the army, and countless rounds of ammunition. The Union armies had wagons, tents, and its factory-produced blue uniforms. (Southern uniforms were generally of a brownish grey homespun color.) The North enjoyed 69% of the railroad capacity compared to only 31% in the South, and held all of the currency reserves of the federal government. The Midwest and Northeast were the most industrialized areas of the country, and those factories quickly turned to making war supplies that kept the massive Union armies relatively well-equipped. Despite these advantages, the government needed money, and it went to great lengths to get it. First, it issued a massive bond measure in which citizens and financial institutions were asked to buy bonds to fund the war. When this failed to yield enough money for the war, the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, decided to print paper money. The "greenbacks," as paper money became known, were initially backed by gold, and then later by the bonds that the government sold. In a complicated scheme, the government sold bonds for greenbacks but repaid the interest in gold, making them attractive investments. The value of the paper money varied according to the fortunes of the Union Army, and at times they were worth almost one-third less than face value. In contrast to the economic plan in the Confederacy, the Union made the greenbacks "legal tender for all debts public and private," which helped lower inflation since, by law, everyone had to accept them for goods and services. Still searching for ways to gather more money, the federal government introduced the first income tax in 1862, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, later known as the IRS, was established. All of this worked relatively well, and the Union dealt with a rate of inflation that never topped 80% per year, while the South suffered a rate that reached 9,000% by the end of the war.

Fingers got tired...... This has been VERY interesting so far!

Alright, I'm going to be all over the place, But here it goes, Southern slave owners held that such a restriction on slavery would violate the principle of states' rights. In 1860, the election of Abraham Lincoln, who won the national election without receiving a single electoral vote from any of the Southern states, triggered declarations of secession from the United States by slave states of the Deep South, and their formation of the Confederate States of America. Nationalists (in the North and elsewhere) refused to recognize secession, nor did any foreign government. War began in April 1861 when Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, a major fortress held by the U.S. in lands claimed by the Confederacy. As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war. States' rights and the tariff issue became entangled in the slavery issue, and were intensified by it. Other important factors were party politics, Abolitionism, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, sectionalism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum Period. The United States had become a nation of two distinct regions. The free states in New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest had a rapidly-growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population. Their growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially Irish, British and German. Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to continue to influence the national government. By the time of the 1860 election, the heavily agricultural southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing northern states. Lincoln was able to win the 1860 Presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states. Southerners felt a loss of federal concern for Southern pro-slavery political demands, and continued domination of the Federal government by "Slaveocracy" was on the wane. This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output. William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, was motivated by a belief in the growth of democracy. Because the Constitution had a three-fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause and a 20-year extension of the Atlantic slave trade, Garrison once publicly burned a copy of the U. S. Constitution and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with ****". In 1854, he said: "I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form—and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing—with indignation and abhorrence." Thomas Jefferson's ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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 normal condition Lincoln's war goals were reactions to the war, as opposed to causes. Abraham Lincoln explained the nationalist goal as the preservation of the Union on August 22, 1862, one month before his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: “ I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." ... My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.... I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

What was the civil war fought over? Many historians seek to justify the federal government's invasion of the South by claiming that the war was fought over slavery, and that Union forces were fighting to free the slaves while the South was fighting to keep them in bondage. But is that really tree guys? A number of critics say that the South only fought in order to ensure the continuation of slavery. BUT! a detailed refutation of these assertions would require a separate paper. But for now, I will say the following points in response to them.... Oh boy... Where shall I start?? The war was fought over secession, NOT I repeat NOT over slavery. If the South had not declared its independence, Lincoln would not have launched an invasion, and there would have been no war at all. The only slave states that were charged with insurrection and then invaded were those that belonged to the Confederacy!!. Would Lincoln and his Republicans have accepted secession if the Confederacy had announced it was abolishing slavery as the first official act of its existence??? Would the Republicans have allowed a peaceful separation if the Confederacy had started an emancipation program right after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run)?! Any serious student of the Civil War will agree that the answer to both of these questions is NO! I don't think anyone who has studied the subject believes the Republicans would have allowed the South to go in peace no matter when the Confederacy would have started to abolish slavery! Look...In July 1861, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution, by a unanimous vote, that affirmed that the North was not waging the war to overthrow slavery but to preserve the Union (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation! When Lincoln assumed office, he was willing to allow slavery to continue. Lincoln even supported a constitutional amendment that would have given additional legal protection to slavery. When Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation about two years later, he did so largely because he was under intense pressure from Republicans in Congress, who were threatening to cut off funds from the army if Lincoln didn't issue some kind of emancipation statement!! Will type more tomorrow, But Its late and I am off to bed!

And see, The thing is, Nothing was really settled during the Civil War. Some say it was fought over slavery, Some say it was because people could not get along. Some say it was "The war between the states" It depends how you look at it guys. Was anything really even won during the civil war?? Anything lost? You bet there was! 620,000 deaths, over 400,000 were from diseases when they got wounded. Many historians seek to justify the federal government's invasion of the South by claiming that the war was fought over slavery, and that Union were fighting to free the slaves while the South was fighting to keep them in bondage. A number of critics say the South only fought to ensure the continuation of slavery. A detailed refutation of these assertions would require a separate paper. The war was fought over secession, not over slavery. If the South had not declared its independence, Lincoln wouldn't have launched an invasion, and there would have been no war at all.. The only slave states that were charged with insurrection and then invaded were those that belonged to the Confederacy. Would Lincoln and the Republicans have accepted secession if the Confederacy had announced it was abolishing slavery as the first official act of its existence? Would the Republicans have allowed a peaceful separation if the Confederacy had started an emancipation program right after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run)? Any serious student of the Civil War will agree that the answer to both of these questions is no. I don't think anyone who has studied the subject believes the Republicans would have allowed the South to go in peace no matter when the Confederacy would have started to abolish slavery..... I am done. (For right now) I am very touchy on this subject..

I'm glad I did! Just looked through them again! Thanks for posting them Anthony ! Will be heading down to Tennessee in 2 weeks to do the 150th Anniversary of the battle of Fort Donelson! Can't wait!

I will apologize for saying once a cheater always a cheater. That's my view for what I have went through. Yes they can change, But like they said above its their own choice if they wanna or not. Again, I apologize.

I'm a HUGE civil war geek! That's why I reenact. Those pictures are AMAZING! I think I have seen them before, But I still love looking at em!!

I'm with Kyle. Once a cheater, Always a cheater. Found that one out the hard way...

Huh, An old Massey Harris! I love it!