Agreed.
I think Jackson was the brains of Lee’s operation.
People don’t realize that the United States was a much different place back then. The states and the people granted power to the federal government, not the other way around. In essence, each state was a separate country and their first loyalty was to their state.
Another thing lost in the shuffle is the fact that states voluntarily entered the union. Why can’t they just as voluntarily secede from it? Otherwise involuntarily forcing a state to remain in the union against its will is a form of slavery itself.
It’s also my understanding that:
-The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time rendered an opinion stating that very thing, that states can just as voluntarily secede from the union as they can join the union, and Lincoln threatened to imprison him.
-Lincoln also imprisoned 20,000 newspaper reporters and editors during the war, for writing stories he didn’t like.
-Lincoln also imprisoned the entire Maryland legislature during the war because he feared they’d vote to secede.
-Lincoln’s much heralded Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the Confederacy, an area he didn’t control. The northern slaves weren’t freed until the end of the war. His Emancipation Proclamation was only an effort to create a slave revolt in the Confederacy.
-Lincoln is on record repeatedly calling for all the slaves to be rounded up and returned to Africa.
-Before the war, the states had the powers the Constitution prescribed. Lincoln ended that, creating the foundation for the federal behemoth that we now have.
-His original war aim was to preserve the union. He eventually changed the war aim to free the slaves, and at that point he had wholesale desertions from his army.
When Jackson was wounded in his left arm (by his own troops) General Lee sent word through his minister to tell Jackson that, "though he had lost his left arm, He (Lee) had lost his right"
Amazing. None of your understanding is true.
Actually your wrong. As early as 1793 the supreme court ruled against the compact theory (i.e. the states made the federal government) and supported the nationalist theory is that the people as a whole created the federal government and therefor bound the states to it.
Later in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 14 U.S. (1 Wheat.) 304 (1816), the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the idea that the Constitution is a compact among the states, stating: “The Constitution of the United States was ordained and established not by the States in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the Constitution declares, by ‘the people of the United States.’” The Court contrasted the earlier Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, characterizing the Articles of Confederation as a compact among states, while stating that the Constitution was established not by the states, but by the people.
Therefore states do not have the authority to just leave. The only way to legally leave the United states is to pass a constitutional amendment creating such a process. That is not what the southern states did, they started war.