From Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals
Posted on 02/01/2017 4:52:50 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Stop making false accusations. I have a great deal of respect for Founders Original intent. That you and I understand it differently is not the same thing as my having no respect for it.
Here he claims that his own interpretations of "Natural Law" must trump Founders' Original Intent wherever some conflict appears evident to DiogenesLamp.
And what the H3ll are you talking about here? I don't even know where you are trying to go with this claim. My understanding of natural law and that of the founders appears to me to be exactly the same.
Read some James Otis for crying out loud.
No you jackass, I'm arguing that this *WAS* the founders Original Intent. The "Rule by the Divine Right of Kings" was rejected in favor of the notion that Men had a right to rule themselves.
Otis explains this clearly in his "The Rights of the British Colonies asserted and proved." As does Samuel Rutherford in his "Lex, Rex." As does Vattel in his "Le droit des gens; ou Principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains". "Law of nations and the principles of natural law applied in the conduct and affairs of nations and kings."
The foundational premise of all these works is the assertion that the King is unnecessary because men have a right to rule themselves.
DL claims, in effect, that since some Enlightenment philosophers said "X", our Founders must mean "X" even when they said "Y".
They did not say "Y". They said "X", "X", "X","X", "X". You keep trying to force them to say "Y", but they didn't say "Y." They said "X".
In this particular case -- the Declaration of Independence -- it was never an issue of "secession at pleasure",
It was an issue of secession because we had a *RIGHT* to secede. Because we had a *RIGHT* to rule ourselves. You keep using the word "pleasure" as if we are referring to a lark, but intolerable offenses are in the eyes of the beholder, and what may be tolerable for some, can be intolerable for another.
You just keep trying to subjectivize the matter by saying it must be intolerable in *YOUR* eyes before it is legitimate. You have no conception of the idea that people might disagree with you about how intolerable something is.
Yes, of course Founders recognized Natural Law, but we do not recognize DiogenesLamp's interpretations of Natural Law as superior to our Founders' Original Intent as they themselves expressed & acted on it.
It isn't superior, it is exactly the same. They recognized they had a right to self determination, and they seceded from their Union because they wanted to rule themselves.
They then declared that mankind has a natural law right to leave a government they abhor, and they gave the advice that it shouldn't be done for light or transient causes, but you and yours keep wanting to interpret the advice as an absolutely essential requirement and ignore the fact they clearly say it is the right of the people to abolish an existing government and form one to their liking.
Otis was the man who started the revolution. If you don't believe me, just read what John Adams said about him.
From Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals
Good book
He was. It’s a crying shame that he took a blow to the head, and pretty much lost it mentally before things really bore fruit.
A truly great man.
A truly great man.
And possibly divinely inspired. He said he wanted God to call him up in a flash of light, and lo and behold he dies by getting hit by lightning.
There were a lot of incredible things that happened in the Revolutionary era.
DiogenesLamp referring to a PA slave case: "It says as of 1802, Flora was a slave.
One does not need to do a lot of contemplation to grasp the significance of this ruling.
Again, slavery continued *in* Pennsylvania till at least 1840."
Of course, before the 13th Amendment, slavery was considered a matter for state laws to establish or abolish.
Most Northern states, like Pennsylvania, abolished their slavery gradually, over decades such that, for example, even in 1860 New Jersey recorded a handful of still slaves amongst their 25,000 freed blacks.
For comparison, a state like South Carolina had 400,000 slaves and about 10,000 freed blacks.
False. You have frequently claimed or implied that your own interpretations of "Natural Law" must trump whatever Founders expressed or did as to their Original Intentions.
DiogenesLamp: "My understanding of natural law and that of the founders appears to me to be exactly the same."
That's because you refuse to read what they actually said & did, insisting instead that your own understandings of "Natural Law" must be what they believed.
Jackass, is that you?
Sorry, but no Founder considered it their "right" to secede "at pleasure", meaning for light and transient causes.
Instead, they said: "...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government..."
Then, "...it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."
DiogenesLamp: "The foundational premise of all these works is the assertion that the King is unnecessary because men have a right to rule themselves."
Sure, but it was never our Founders' original intention in, say 1770 or 1773, to "secede" from Britain "at pleasure".
Instead they tried first to secure their rights as Englishmen to charters of self government and representation in Parliament.
Only long after these failed and after Brits launched & declared war on them did they finally assert independence.
DiogenesLamp: "They did not say "Y". They said "X", "X", "X","X", "X". You keep trying to force them to say "Y", but they didn't say "Y." They said "X". "
Rubbish & nonsense. It's DiogenesLamp who consistently misrepresents their ideas & actions.
DiogenesLamp: "It was an issue of secession because we had a *RIGHT* to secede.
Because we had a *RIGHT* to rule ourselves.
You keep using the word "pleasure" as if we are referring to a lark, but intolerable offenses are in the eyes of the beholder, and what may be tolerable for some, can be intolerable for another. "
"At pleasure" refers to light & transient causes which our Founders said were not justification for secession.
Rather, they said, "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another" when "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government..."
Our Founders never claimed an unlimited "right of secession" at pleasure.
DiogenesLamp: "You just keep trying to subjectivize the matter by saying it must be intolerable in *YOUR* eyes before it is legitimate."
Not at all, our Founders gave us a perfect example of what was intolerable in **THEIR** eyes, in their Declaration list of grievances against the king.
No such listing existed in 1860.
DiogenesLamp: "It isn't superior, it is exactly the same.
They recognized they had a right to self determination, and they seceded from their Union because they wanted to rule themselves."
They recognized no "right" to secede "at pleasure", but only for "a long train of abuses and usurpations", which they obliged: "To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DiogenesLamp: "...they gave the advice that it shouldn't be done for light or transient causes, but you and yours keep wanting to interpret the advice as an absolutely essential requirement and ignore the fact they clearly say it is the right of the people to abolish an existing government and form one to their liking."
They clearly state their "right" is a matter of necessity driven by a long train of abuses & usurpations.
Any other interpretation is not Founders' Original Intent.
Otis' ideas were driven by British misbehaviors, not some philosophically removed "right of secession" at pleasure.
Indeed, it was Otis around 1760 who first said, "Taxation without representation is tyranny".
His idea was the colonies deserved good representative government, not that they must declare Independence for light & transient reasons.
Regardless, by 1770 health reasons put Otis pretty much out of the picture, though he lived to age 58 in 1783.
So the Founders who wrote & signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were reformers by choice first, and only revolutionaries by absolute necessity of British abuses & usurpations.
In natural law theory, people had the right to rebel against a government that had become abusive and tyrannical. They didn't have the right to overthrow governments because they didn't like them.
Consider: the Founding Fathers (and most people who participated in and thought about politics in those days) were property owners. They weren't going to take kindly to someone arguing that a propertyless majority could overthrow property owners and confiscate their belongings just because the felt like it. So clearly, they believed that the right to self-determination was not absolute.
Of course some may have gotten carried away in the heat of argument, but Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Jay and others didn't believe that they had an absolute right to overthrow governments if they didn't like them.
It's a confusion that continues. If you look at the Wikipedia page for John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, they write: [U]nder the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens.
Then they quote him:
Locke affirmed an explicit right to revolution in Two Treatises of Government: “whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.”
Obviously, the right of revolution required much more than people thinking that their interests weren't being served.
But the problem is this: if you've come to think slavery is essential to society and you think slavery is threatened, is that a just cause for revolution?
I think that's a good example of why you don't want people making such decisions subjectively based solely on their own will or whim.
You don't want people deciding to opt out of the political system whenever they feel like it for whatever reason they feel like it.
Your attempt to make a point reminds me of that old joke about a woman who would sleep with a man for a million bucks, but wouldn't do it for a couple of hundred. The punchline goes:
"We've already determined what sort of girl you are, now we are just haggling over the price."
If your position is that slavery is immoral, you shouldn't tolerate it at all. New Jersey tolerating any is a violation of their alleged principle. South Carolina having 400,000 is not a violation of theirs, because they didn't regard it as immoral.
But what of the territories? As a Federal matter, slavery was recognized as legal, and slaves were recognized as the legal property of their owners.
By what legitimate Federal authority could they assert that the territories must be "free?" By what application of constitutional law could they deprive a man of what the Constitution recognized as a right?
The territories had no state government to gain say them, even if you argue (as do you) that states could abolish this particular "property" right. How can a Federally governed territory speak to this issue at all?
The answer is simpler than you may imagine: how threatened?
Was it threatened by tyrannical acts of an unrepresentative government, or merely by loud voices & radical actions of a few individuals?
In 1860 the answer was, only the latter, not the former and therefore Fire Eaters' declarations of secession were not for just cause, but rather "at pleasure".
Do you disagree?
So let's see if I "get" this: DiogenesLamp wishes us to excuse slavery in South Carolina because it was lawful there, but condemn abolition in New Jersey because it didn't happen fast enough to suit DiogenesLamp??
Sorry, but I'm not certain if even "wackadoodle" is adequate to describe the level of nonsense coming from our FRiend DiogenesLamp.
Substitute Coal in a Coal producing region, and ask yourself the same question. If the Federal government decided to ban coal, and if coal is essential to the economics of your society, your choices are to obey and become impoverished, or to defy them in an effort to maintain your economic system.
As I've said many times, abuse and tyranny is in the eye of the beholder, not in the eye of people who have no stake in the society that feels it is being abused.
I said nothing regarding you. I merely pointed out that New Jersey was being a hypocrite, while South Carolina was not. New Jersey saw it as wrong, yet did not end it completely, while South Carolina didn't see it as wrong.
The answer is simpler than you may imagine: how threatened?
The fact that you are skipping right over an answer to "x's" question, and going straight to your argument that it wasn't being threaten implies that you agree with the premise that "x" has put forth. (That threatening slavery would be regarded as a tyrannical act on the part of people who's thought it was essential to their society.)
So you give us an implicit "yes", to the question, else you would not try to immediately defend the claim that it wasn't being threatened.
Apparently it was, because when Lincoln had the chance, he ended it. Now you may argue that was because he wanted to put the screws to people with whom he had just fought a war, but can it be doubted that absent a war he would have thrown up every sort of "executive order" restriction on it that he could have managed?
He would have used his power of the "Pen and Telegraph" to interfere with it in every manner that he could possibly could, and I expect this was exactly what the people of the South perceived about him.
Would he have interfered with it in all manners possible? The People of the South thought he would, and when he had the chance, he did in fact do this. So were their fears of him unfounded? Should they have ignored their own impression of the man and simply trusted him?
I think they accurately perceived him as a serious threat to their institution, and therefore they perceived him as a threat to something they considered essential to their society.
So to go back to "x's" point, someone threatening what you regard as essential to your society creates a just cause for revolution.
If it's purely subjective whether a right to revolution exists, it's subjective all the way around. Your subjective assertion that your rights are being violated conflicts with my assertion that they aren't and the result is war. That's the result of radical subjectivism in politics.
But it's not even that your "rights" were being violated, it's that you think that they might possibly be violated some day. That doesn't sound like a real rationale for revolution or rebellion. There was something opportunistic about secession: the leaders were trying to exploit a momentary panic. They weren't committed to working within the nation, but were using the emotionalism of the moment to enhance their own power.
Moreover, Lincoln knew and was friends with Alexander Stephens. He was in Congress with Stephens, Toombs, Cobb, and Rhett. They knew him. They knew what he was like. They knew that the hysteria about Lincoln's election didn't reflect what the man was actually like. They knew he wasn't a true abolitionist. But they chose -- for whatever reasons of their own -- to go along with the hysteria and promote it, rather than discourage it.
No he didn't.
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