Were Confederate Generals Traitors?

Creators ^ | June 28, 2017 | Walter E. Williams

[bigdaddy45]

Pretty ironic that the slaveholding South had a battle cry of “Freedom”.... don’t you think?

Freedom for who?

[DoodleDawg]

The States formed the Union to begin with. The Union didn’t form the States.

It did from New Hampshire on.

[jeffersondem]

“It’s sad that you’re serious.”

Speaking of sad . . . slavery was enshrined in the USA constitution by the votes of historically slave states New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.

It seems there were others. Yes, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

[Sopater]

Interesting...

“United States” is still a plural description that can be used to describe a united group of sovereign countries, but the preamble does indeed say “between the two countries”. That is interesting.

[Sopater]

It was if they read Article IV, Section 3. The process for admission is right there.

The process for admission does not clearly stipulate the conditions for secession.

[Godebert]

"I won't argue the point, but as a Yankee I have no trouble stipulating that they were traitors. That said, they lost real bad and I am so-o-o-o-o-o over it. Not even a little bit of temptation to desecrate their graves. I'm just not that kind of guy. "

THat's big of you.... Maybe you realize if you tried it you would get your teeth knocked out and your head bashed-in.

[jeffersondem]

“My understanding is that the Confederate constitution did not allow secession. Interesting that.”

That is an interesting comment. Can you post the provision in the CSA constitution that “did not allow secession”?

[DoodleDawg]

The process for admission does not clearly stipulate the conditions for secession.

In your reply 31 you said exit should be no harder than entry. You were mistaken in your belief that entry is merely voluntary, but I agree with you that leaving should be no more difficult than entry. Same process, just in reverse.

[PeaRidge]

Lincoln's unconstitutional acts:

1. Coercion in 1861 at Charleston and Pensacola harbors, which was a violation of Article 4. And of course that’s where Lincoln tried to coerce the South into fighting and of course into surrendering to him.

2. Lincoln violated the Constitution's Laws of Neutrality, i.e. the Trent Affair, Article 6, Clause 2, which was a violation of international law. The Trent Affair is very interesting because the Confederate Government had sent representatives to England to define the cause before the English Parliament. The Confederate representatives were on an English ship named the Trent. The United States Government came and took the Confederate men off a British ship and imprisoned them. The War of 1812 was fought over the same issue because the English was doing that to our citizens. And what happened, the North was humiliated in this. Those men had to be released and William Seward had to write an apology to the English Government because the English Government would not even negotiate. They said you will either release those men or there is going to be war between you and England as well as the South and England. Lincoln openly, and without Congressional oversight, violated the Constitution.

3. He suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2.

4. He declared war with the announcement of the blockade and the call up of state militias without the consent of Congress in 1861, which is a violation of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 and 12.

5. The Emancipation Proclamation, which is a violation of Article 4, Section 3, Clause 2.

6. He made West Virginia a State in violation of Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1. He just separated Virginia and made West Virginia a State all by himself.

7. He denied the freedom of speech in the Valandeham Imprisonment, which was a violation of the first Amendment.

8. He blockaded Ports of the States that were held by the Federal Government to still be in the Union. You don't block your own Ports.

10. Violation of the Fugitive slave law, which was a violation of Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3.

[OIFVeteran]

Actually the most accurate name is the official name give by the US Army, the war of rebellion. The United States had a constitutionally mandated election for president of the United States. During this election there were no claims of malfeasance by anyone. However, some states attempted to influence the election by threatening to leave the Union if one candidate in particular was elected.
After the election was done, but even before the new president was inaugurated, some states decided to rebel and breakaway from the US. While breaking away they grabbed every piece of federal property they could. These states even sent envoys to other states to convince them to rebel. They also suppressed their own citizens that did not want to rebel.
They then, without provocation, fired on US forces and then declared war against the US. If that’s not rebellion and treason, I don’t know what is.

[ifinnegan]

“Have you never read of the “Sugar Triangle” about Slaves, Rum, Sugar, and money ?”

Are you serious?

You think people don’t know about the slave trade?

[Yosemitest]

Read this excerpt from NORTHERN PROFITS from SLAVERY:

... A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region's prominent families:
the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia.
To this day, it's difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn't tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale.
Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia.
Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon.
It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat -- and slaves.
And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling.
John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college's first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship.
Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family's candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown's University Hall.[4]

Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South.
Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08,
almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery.
Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806.
The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping.
And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.

Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War.
The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South.
But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands.
William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.

Long after the U.S. slave trade officially ended, the more extensive movement of Africans to Brazil and Cuba continued.
The U.S. Navy never was assiduous in hunting down slave traders.
The much larger British Navy was more aggressive, and it attempted a blockade of the slave coast of Africa,
but the U.S. was one of the few nations that did not permit British patrols to search its vessels,
so slave traders continuing to bring human cargo to Brazil and Cuba generally did so under the U.S. flag.
They also did so in ships built for the purpose by Northern shipyards, in ventures financed by Northern manufacturers.

In a notorious case, the famous schooner-yacht Wanderer, pride of the New York Yacht Club, put in to Port Jefferson Harbor in April 1858 to be fitted out for the slave trade.
Everyone looked the other way -- which suggests this kind of thing was not unusual -- except the surveyor of the port, who reported his suspicions to the federal officials.
The ship was seized and towed to New York, but her captain talked (and possibly bought) his way out and was allowed to sail for Charleston, S.C.

Fitting out was completed there, the Wanderer was cleared by Customs, and she sailed to Africa where she took aboard some 600 blacks.
On Nov. 28, 1858, she reached Jekyll Island, Georgia, where she illegally unloaded the 465 survivors of what is generally called the last shipment of slaves to arrive in the United States.

It is all the Northerners fault and, more so, their successors who implemented the Big Government policies, that protected those ships

[TigersEye]

Yep, the Founding Fathers knew that they were traitors to the Crown of England and that there were only two options...

"We must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately"? - Ben Franklin

[OIFVeteran]

There is so much wrong with your post I don’t know where to begin. I’ll start with this, war was never declared by congress because there was no war between two countries. There was a rebellion, or insurrection, if you will, which the constitution gives the President broad powers to suppress.

[morphing libertarian]

aid and comfort to the enemies of the US in fact he led the enemy army.

[BlueLancer]

My only question to the forum is this and it pertains only to those Confederate officers and enlisted who were ex-US military:

Is their oath that each made to the United States upon commissioning or enlisting in the US Army/US Navy erased with their resignation or voluntary termination of service?

If it is, where does that leave those of us now who have retired/resigned from the military? Some of us .. most of us? .. believe that our oath still applies, even though we're no longer on active service.

If it does not, then a violation of that oath is something that must be faced. I'm reasonably sure that most, if not all, of the ex-US Army/US Navy officers and enlisted believed that the circumstances facing them required their "violation" of that oath, but, as such, they should be willing to face the consequences of that act in the event that their rebellion failed.

So, to me, that is the main question: what is the effect of their prior oath to the United States that they made when commissioned or enlisted in the US Army or US Navy?

All I can say is that I'm very happy that it's not something that I've had to face yet. If it reaches the stage where I have to consider that sustaining my oath is effectively violating it, it's not going to be an easy decision.

[BlueLancer]

A few votes in a different direction and you would have had this ...

[DoodleDawg]

Coercion in 1861 at Charleston and Pensacola harbors, which was a violation of Article 4. And of course that’s where Lincoln tried to coerce the South into fighting and of course into surrendering to him.

Your interpretation of which is generally agreed by reputable historians to be nonsense.

Lincoln violated the Constitution's Laws of Neutrality, i.e. the Trent Affair, Article 6, Clause 2, which was a violation of international law.

Not a wise move on the part of the captain of the USS San Jacinto, but not a violation of the Constitution. And the U.S. admitted they were in the wrong and made compensation agreed to by the UK.

He suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2.

The constitutionality or unconstitutionality of which has never been decided by the Supreme Court.

He declared war with the announcement of the blockade and the call up of state militias without the consent of Congress in 1861, which is a violation of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 and 12.

But legal under the various Militia Acts passed by Congress beginning in 1792.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which is a violation of Article 4, Section 3, Clause 2.

But legal under the authority granted by the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862. The constitutionality of which were upheld by the Supreme Court in the Prize Cases decision in 1863.

He made West Virginia a State in violation of Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1. He just separated Virginia and made West Virginia a State all by himself.

Well no, it was the Virginia legislature that remained loyal to the U.S. which approved partition and Congress which admitted West Virginia. The constitutionality of which was confirmed by the Supreme Court in the Virginia v. West Virginia decision of 1871.

He denied the freedom of speech in the Valandeham Imprisonment, which was a violation of the first Amendment.

The legality of which may have been resolved by the Ex Parte Milligan decision of 1865, but at the time General Burnside was acting under the authority granted by Congress and the constitutionality of that power had not been determined by the courts.

He blockaded Ports of the States that were held by the Federal Government to still be in the Union. You don't block your own Ports.

What clause of the Constitution says you can't if said ports are in rebellion?

Violation of the Fugitive slave law, which was a violation of Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3.

Depending on what you are referring to, Lincoln's actions were legal under the Confiscation Acts or the Emancipation Proclamation.

[central_va]

destroy the union

There was still a Union after the war started. A really powerful one with 11 less states but still there and functioning. Nothing was destroyed when the South seceded.

[central_va]

11. Arrest of the Maryland Legislature, 1861