Posted on 07/22/2015 7:36:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?
Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his words. In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, "I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists." In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: "My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects." Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
What about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation? Here are his words: "I view the matter (of slaves' emancipation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." He also wrote: "I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." When Lincoln first drafted the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.
London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and assisting it in its war against the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration. It specifically detailed where slaves were to be freed: only in those states "in rebellion against the United States." Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion — such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln's own secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been heartily endorsed by the Confederacy: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. ... Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." Lincoln expressed that view in an 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporting the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.
Why didn't Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation's history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What "responsible" politician would let that much revenue go?
You already admitted that slavery is evil. So the One Who gave you a conscience is imposing moral truth on you, not me.
You are just like the Homosexuals who want to force acceptance of what they believe, and want to criminalize anyone who believes differently.
Complete hogwash.
If anyone is acting like them it's yourself. They can't discern the difference between real marriage and fake marriage, and you can't tell the difference between a morally-premised revolution and an immorally-premised attempt to strip the American people of their own territory and their God-given right to government by consent.
"Gay marriage" would have been wrong in 1776, and slavery would be wrong in 2015. If you don't think so, you, sir, are a loon.
A beautiful exposition of history.
You’re immune to reason or facts.
Lincoln was talking about rebellion.
Because he is speaking of the practicalities of the matter. He can’t be speaking of the principle of the matter, or his argument would undermine the very idea that the right he is advocating exists.
The right of rebellion is certainly an option to everyone, but it doesn't come with a right to win.
“Lincoln was talking about rebellion.”
You continue to miss the point. There’s no such thing as a “right to rebellion”. There is, however, a right to self-governance, and rebellion is simply one of the methods that a people can use to exercise that right.
“The right of rebellion is certainly an option to everyone, but it doesn’t come with a right to win.”
No it’s not, because such a right doesn’t actually exist, except in your imagination.
True. But that was meant to apply for goods which were landed and were destined for overseas consumers. If, for example, goods from London were purchased by a merchant who planned on sending them to a consumer in Cuba then they could be stored in a bonded warehouse for up to three years and no tariffs were owed. When those goods were taken from the warehouse and put on a ship for Havana then they left duty free. If they were taken out and sold for domestic use then tariffs were owed. I believe this was called the Warehouse Law or Warehouse Act.
So goods entering in New York might be paid much later after a buyer in another part of the country paid.
I don't see how that could have made up a large part of the business. I also am not familiar enough with the law to know that if the goods left the warehouse and were put on a ship for Charleston then would the tariff be paid in New York or South Carolina?
The US Treasury tariff data due to these rules is not a reliable data point for determining who actually paid the tariff.
But again, and I'm sorry but I don't think you adequately explained in in your other posts, if all those goods were destined for Southern consumers then why didn't they go to Southern ports? Why were there virtually no packet lines between Europe and the South? It makes no sense to send your goods to a port hundreds of miles away from your consumers if the vast majority is destined for Southern consumers anyway.
The entire overseas trade changed drastically in 1861. With no more cotton for northern mills, they began to import from China and India. Lincoln instituted expanded tariffs which included these goods.
But at that time the U.S. did not have the Southern consumers with their ravenous demand for imports. And tariffs are designed to discourage imports and not increase them.
Also massive food amounts formerly imported from the South stopped. Food was now imported.
What food was imported in massive quantities?
All sorts of war material was now being imported. Keep in mind that the government did not manufacture arms, and importers paid large tariffs.
I find it impossible to believe that the government would levy taxes on the very goods it needed to fight the war.
At the time of secession, there was not nearly enough specie on deposit in the Treasury or banks to maintain trade. Had it not been for war, the government would not have been able to finance much. Instead, once Europe saw that Lincoln was going to seize Southern assets, the lending began.
Do you have a source where I can read up more on this European lending?
We can debate that right to self government if we want, but that is not what Lincoln was talking about.
No it’s not, because such a right doesn’t actually exist, except in your imagination.
And Lincoln's apparently.
What's the line?
Collective right of how many people?
The Vermont Republic had a population of less than 80,000 and was fully prepared to hold out from joining the 13 colonies if the Federal government had upheld NY's land claims.
That's less people than live in my township today.
Because of Jefferson Davis' (admittedly terrible) leadership, Georgia was considering seceding from the Confederacy.
Jones County, MS effectively did secede from the Confederacy, which secession the state of MS did not recognize.
That was a population of less than 10,000.
The "political problem" was that the South was losing its ability to keep enough votes in the Senate to permanently preserve slavery.
The Confederate constitution specifically removed one right that the US Constitution's Bill of Rights reserved to the states and their people: the right to decide if their state was a free state or a slave state.
The Confederate constitution mandated that all states be slave states without exception.
By free state statutes do you mean the personal liberty laws of the northern states?
Many of those personal liberty laws were clearly unconstitutional. Lincoln's two secretaries Nicolay and Hay in Volume 3 of their book "Abraham Lincoln, A History" noted that a careful 1860 study of the personal liberty laws by the National Intelligencer found that the personal liberty laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan and Wisconsin were clearly unconstitutional.
Then there is this from some distinguished jurists [Source: Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper of December 20, 1860, my bold below]:
THE CITIZENS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE PERSONAL LIBERTY BILLS
Chief Justice Shaw, B. R. Curtis, Joel Parker, and other citizens of Massachusetts equally distinguished, have addressed a letter to the people of that State on the Personal Liberty Bills, which they declare to be unconstitutional. They urge strongly the repeal of them and say:
We know it is doubted by some whether the present is an opportune moment to abrogate them. It is said -- We grant these laws are wrong, but will you repeal them under a threat? We answer no. We would do nothing under a threat. We would repeal them under our own love of right; under our own sense of sacredness of compacts; under our own convictions of the inestimable importance of social order and domestic peace; under our feeling of responsibility to the memory of our fathers and the welfare of our children, and not under any threat. We would not be prevented from repealing them by any conduct of others, if such repeal were in accordance with our own sense of right.
He who refuses to do a right thing merely because he is threatened with evil consequences, acts in subjection to the threat. His false pride may enable him to disregard the threat, but he lacks the courage to despise the wrong estimate of his own conduct, which conduct he knows would spring from his own love of duty. If every right-minded man must admit that he ought to govern his own conduct by these principles, are they applicable to the conduct of a great and populous State? On what ground can it be maintained that hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens are to be subjected to suffering, because the false pride of their rulers refuses to do right? Mankind have been afflicted long enough and grievously enough by commotions and strifes and wars springing from such causes. We had hoped that the nature of our government would protect us from swelling the great sum of human misery, produced by the evil passions of rulers. We had hoped that, inasmuch as the masses of people can have no interest but to do right, they would have the discernment to perceive and the manliness to do it, and would be too calm, too wise, too magnanimous intentionally to persevere in any wrong, and we hope so still.
But what is meant by the exhortation not to repeal these laws under a threat? Who threatens us if they should not be repealed?
Whatever may have been true in the past, whatever faults of speech and action may have been committed on the one side or the other, we firmly believe that the men from whom the worst consequences to our country and ourselves are likely to proceed, have no wish that these laws should be repealed, and no disposition to use any threats in reference to them. On the contrary, they desire to have them stand as conspicuous and palpable breaches of the national compact by ourselves; and as affording justification to themselves, to the world and to posterity, for the destruction of the most perfect and prosperous government which the Providence of God has ever permitted the wisdom of man to devise.
By the way, Shaw was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1830 to 1860. Curtis had been an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court who had resigned from the Court in 1857 in protest of Taney's Dred Scott decision. Parker had been the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and he taught law at Harvard.
Perhaps you misunderstand the term "States Rights." It does not mean that a state can use unconstitutional laws to thwart the Constitution, and then object that someone or the federal government was violating their unconstitutional state statutes.
I think you're very wrong on that.
If 75% of exports were Southern agriculture products, it would seem that 75% of imports must be in payment of those products in one form or another.
So you're honestly saying it was a barter economy? Trade X bales of cotton for x pieces of machinery? I think you're hundreds of years behind the times. Brokers bought cotton for cash which they then exported to Europe and sold. Other merchants bought goods in Europe which they then imported and sold to U.S. consumers. The two transactions were not connected and one was not dependent on the other.
That is an equation that must balance. Fake or misleading history does not suspend the laws of economics.
Then how do you explain $102 million in tariff revenue in FY1863 without the Southern agricultural goods to trade for it?
No. The one thing does not mean the same as the other. The end user pays the tariffs, even if the tariff is collected in New York.
True. But if 75% of your demand is in the south then what sense does it make to deliver it hundreds of miles from your customers?
Which ought to be an immediate head scratching moment for anyone contemplating that 75% of the exports were Southern Agriculture products.
That would tend to cast doubt on your theories.
Are you suggesting they are shipping out 75%, but collecting only 5% of the total goods and services in return?
They were shipping out upwards of 90% of all cotton, tobacco, and sugar exports and yes, were importing about 5% of the imports, based on tariff collections.
Show me your math, cause this I gotta see.
Tariff collection information was given in reply 25. The math is there.
“What’s the line?
Collective right of how many people?”
Well, you can’t have a “government of one” because one person is not a society, so one person cannot form a government. So such a right requires a minimum of two people before it can be asserted.
Of course, in practice, two people would find it impossible to declare their independence and maintain it, but that is merely a practical restriction, not one that can be cited on principle.
“We can debate that right to self government if we want, but that is not what Lincoln was talking about.”
It was, you just can’t seem to fathom it.
“You have no God-given right to violate the God-given right to government by consent of the whole body of the American people.”
Ugh, this logic is horrible. There is only a right to self-governance, there is no right to force a government on others.
Social contract, consent of the governed, go do some basic, high school-level research on these topics.
“By any name it was an illegal war over slavery.”
Ha! Who decides which wars are “legal”?
Some court in the Hague?
Southern plantation owners got rich selling the cotton their slaves grew to Englishmen. They invested the money they got in the North and used it to buy things like manufactured goods from Northerners or foreigners. Then Americans -- Southern plantation owners, but also Northern manufacturers and merchants and bankers, and everybody else -- could use the money buy things from foreign manufacturers.
It was at least a triangular exchange involving the South, the North, and Europe/Britain. The money that Southern plantation owners got from Britain didn't remain in their pockets to buy an equal dollar/pound amount of European goods. Some of it was used to buy things from Northerners, who were then also able to buy things from foreigners.
Stephen Colwell's 1861 pamphlet The Five Cotton States and New York is available at Google Books and archive.org to explain the details.
It certainly might have looked that way after the war, when the South was devastated and impoverished, but in the 1850s Cotton was King and the Deep South was riding high. It had been a time of great prosperity for cotton growers, and Confederate overconfidence was based on the great increase in Southern wealth in the years leading up to the war.
Slaveowners certainly foresaw that if slavery didn't spread to the territories new free states would be admitted that would eventually threaten the continued existence of slavery, but if they really thought Northern industry and finance were a threat, wouldn't they have developed their own finance companies and factories?
Very few people in 1860 could have predicted just how powerful American industry would become at the end of the 20th century. That's something we should understand from our own experience. Even if you say the world is going to change and they do change, you may still be astounded by just exactly how and how much things do change.
You’re not getting it.
A fraction of the people in the United States decided that they were going to strip the United States of a large proportion of its territory. They decided to do so without the consent of the sovereign people of the United States as a whole.
And ultimately, they decided to try to effect that division by military force.
That was immoral, unconstitutional, unlawful, and thankfully, unsuccessful.
It was Lincoln who made the argument and Williams who ratified it. But, it's really just common sense. Anyone who tries to replace an existing government should expect a fight. Our Founding Fathers, all of them grownups, understood that fact of life and that is why they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. They expected a fight and they got one. In the end, they prevailed. But, each of them understood what was at stake. None of them were shocked to learn that the British sent more troops.
The Southern secessionists were just very lucky that it was Lincoln and not Andrew Jackson (a Southerner) who was president. Jackson probably would have hung all of the secessionist leaders after very brief trials. That's the usual price one pays for failing at the game of revolution, secession, rebellion, coup d'etat or whatever other label you want to use to describe this kind of power play. It's always been risky to try to replace an existing government.
I don't know how you can rationally think about replacing governments without confronting questions of power. Greater power is what the Southern secessionists were seeking. I want to think that you understand that reality.
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