Posted on 11/28/2012 9:42:40 AM PST by Perseverando
For decades, it has been obvious that there are irreconcilable differences between Americans who want to control the lives of others and those who wish to be left alone. Which is the more peaceful solution: Americans using the brute force of government to beat liberty-minded people into submission, or simply parting company? In a marriage, where vows are ignored and broken, divorce is the most peaceful solution. Similarly, our constitutional and human rights have been increasingly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways.
Since Barack Obama’s re-election, hundreds of thousands of petitioners for secession have reached the White House. Some people have argued that secession is unconstitutional, but there’s absolutely nothing in the Constitution that prohibits it. What stops secession is the prospect of brute force by a mighty federal government, as witnessed by the costly War of 1861. Let’s look at the secession issue.
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, rejected it, saying: “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that said, “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Thanks.
Recently toured a state park antebellum mansion here in FL. Prior to the war it was a not very successful sugar plantation.
I wish I could remember the numbers, but one fact stuck in my mind. The value of the 100 or so slaves was about 10x the combined value of the land, the (very large) plantation house, the sugar mill and machinery, etc.
Extrapolate that out across the South, and you find the value of the slaves was equivalent to or perhaps larger than all other capital assets in the South combined.
The South had spent decades sinking its capital investment into slaves in preference to all other investments. Up through 1860 this made excellent financial sense. But during the war all that capital just vanished, which was quite beside all the physical destruction wreaked and the drop in value of land and other assets suddenly without a dedicated labor force to work it.
Our present financial tailspin represents something like a 10% drop in value of all American capital investment. What do you think would happen with a similar drop of 50% to 75%?
I don’t know what the actual numbers were, but they were horrific. The South went from a per capita (white) income of about 2x the rest of the country to an economic basket case, from which status it has climbed only in recent decades. It still lags behind much of the country in many economic indicators.
Precisely. Just as the perpetuity in a marriage contract to "love, honor and cherish . . . until death do us part" can be voided by abuse, adultery, or other causes for annulment or divorce, any claim to perpetuity in our union would have been voided by the massive breach of contract and systematic violations of our Constitution.
The Constitution has not been little changed. Instead, the Constitution has been disregardded and used under false color of law. There are some very simple means of remedying the problem, but conservatives are complicit with less conservative U.S.Citizens in neglecting the exercise of the powers they still possess and can still exercise.
Instead of trying to tear apart the Republic, everyone needs to restore the public power to convene a grand jury without the approval of the public prosecutors, conduct public committee meetings, recapture public education from the Marxists and their corrupt unions, and more.
Time and again at the elections, the only candidates on the ballot for the judicial offices are Democrats and Marxists. Conservatives cannot complain about the courts when they as a community so miseerably fail to produce qualified candidates to become elected to those judicial offices in numbers greater than the Democrats and Marxists.
I never said a treaty would trump the Constitution’s Bill of Rights Amendments. The Articles of Confederation is not a treaty. It is the foundation from which the Constitution is an extension to the agreement to Union.
“Perpetual union? Nothing is perpetual. Even the Third Reich was only guaranteed to last a thousand years and that guarantee turned out to be no good. Liberal bulls#it sometimes seems to be perpetual but it will end sooner or later, later if I have anything to say about it.”
Auggguh!! Sooner! Sooner! This is what I get for thinking way out ahead of my fingers.
“The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution explicitly made the Union perpetual until and unless the States ratify the secession of a State in exactly the same means by which the State secured accession to the perpetual Union.”
Prove it. Quote the section of the Constitution that explicitly states this.
For the most part, the USSR fell apart with not even a whimper. There was a documenary on RT that detailed the meeting where Belarus and Ukraine became independent. It was more like parents kicking the kids out of the house.
“I don’t think so. Just offer them citizenship, and a job in the new army.”
Or just turn off the water, gas, etc. that come in from outside the base.
You’re exactly right. It really doesn’t matter whether secession is “legal”, because it is always permitted by a higher law than the laws of men. The only thing that really matters is whether the people have the resolve and strength to exercise their rights in the face of opposition from the government.
LOL! 'A Sovereign must consent to the alienation of territory'? Please post chapter, verse and origin of this socialistic concept, because NOTHING I've read in 12 years of research supports such drek!
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If your theory was a fact, the Founders would not have DECLARED their Independence from England, they would have asked for it. Their Declaration was based on Vattel's Law of Nature and Nations, which states-
§ 266. 4th general maxim: what is sufficiently declared, is to be taken for true.
On every occasion when a person could and ought to have made known his intention, we assume for true against him what he has sufficiently declared. This is an incontestable principle, applied to treaties: for, if they are not a vain play of words, the contracting parties ought to express themselves in them with truth, and according to their real intentions. If the intention which is sufficiently declared were not to be taken of course as the true intention of him who speaks and enters into engagements, it would be perfectly useless to form contracts or treaties.
Law of Nations
In Law, this is known as the Rule of Exclusion. The Founders referred to it as Enumeration, and is restated in the treaty known as the Constitution as the 10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
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The implied concept that the created federal government somehow has any authority to require or coerce the States to do anything they have no desire to do is a total perversion of the concept of sovereignty, as one of the very tenants of natural Law is that the created can never be equal to the Creator.
A person will be equal to all other People, but man cannot be equal to God. The States are equal to the other States, but they can never be equal to the People. The federal government is equal to other nations, but but no branch of the federal government can ever be equal to the States.
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.
James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
“As far as cotton becoming uneconomical, that is no doubt why slave prices reached their all-time high in 1860.”
The high slave prices were probably simply a result of it being illegal to import any new slaves. So, the ones that were here already should have constantly gained value. Like the grandfathered-in fully automatic AK-47’s, their scarcity would keep the price artificially high.
Right on!
LLS
St. George Tucker is one of the jurists the Confederacy relied upon heavily to threaten the Republic with secession throughout the early 19th Century to intimidate anti-slavery states and proponents. He erred in his treatise by wrongly interpreting the Constitutional Convention as an unauthorized exercise of the delegated powers under the authority of the Articles of Confederation. Among the many indicators of his fallacious argument is the way in which the States had to ratify the new Constitution before it took effect in the State and the provisions of the Constitution did not take effect in a State until its ratification of the Constitution. The States demonstrably never seceded from the United States of america upon the adoption of the Constitution. The public laws stemming from the Articles of Confederation remained in effect until repealed despite the adoption of the Constitution to extend the Articles of Confederation. The States of the Union did not revert to the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain upon the adoption of the Constitution.In other words, his argument had no basis in reality, the customary practice of the laws, and conflict with the principles of law he knew full well recognized the Articles of Confederation were never repealed and were instead extended by the additional provisions of the Constitution. So, St. George Tucker’s arguments lack credibiioty and were overruled by the Supreme Court of the United States in Texas v. White.
Evideently you did not read my earlier post, 92 I think.
The income generated by the cotton “export sector” was a major impetus for growth not only in the South, but in the rest of the economy as well. Douglass North, in his pioneering study of the antebellum U.S. economy, examined the flows of trade within the United States to demonstrate how all regions benefited from the South’s concentration on cotton production (North 1961). Northern merchants gained from Southern demands for shipping cotton to markets abroad, and from the demand by Southerners for Northern and imported consumption goods. The low price of raw cotton produced by slave labor in the American South enabled textile manufacturers — both in the United States and in Britain — to expand production and provide benefits to consumers through a declining cost of textile products. As manufacturing of all kinds expanded at home and abroad, the need for food in cities created markets for foodstuffs that could be produced in the areas north of the Ohio River. And the primary force at work was the economic stimulus from the export of Southern Cotton.
“What stops secession is the prospect of brute force by a mighty federal government, as witnessed by the costly War of 1861.”
Seems to me that the Federal Government is not so mighty without the backing or at least the acquiescence of the States. Lincoln couldn’t have done much without the Northern States.
Synopsis
The opening portion of the declaration outlines the historical background of South Carolina and offers a legal justification for its secession. It asserts that the right of states to secede is implicit in the Constitution and this right was explicitly reaffirmed by South Carolina in 1852. The declaration states that the agreement between South Carolina and the United States is subject to the law of compact, which creates obligations on both parties and which revokes the agreement if either party fails to uphold its obligations.
The next section asserts that the government of the United States and of states within that government had failed to uphold their obligations to South Carolina. The specific issue stated was the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and clauses in the US Constitution protecting slavery and the federal government's perceived role in attempting to abolish slavery.
The next section states that while these problems have existed for twenty-five years, the situation had recently become unacceptable due to the election of a President (this was Abraham Lincoln although he is not mentioned by name) who was planning to outlaw slavery.
The final section concludes with a statement that South Carolina had therefore seceded from the United States.
“In most of the states that later seceded Lincoln did not receive a single vote.”
It has occurred to me that maybe the Democrats lost the election of 1860, had a hissy fit, and decided to take their marbles and leave. Were any of the governments of the seceding States not run by Democrats?
“In even the most conservative parts of the country there is a large and active liberal minority that would, understandably, resist secession.”
I haven’t seen any election maps from 2012, but from the 2004 and 2008 elections I noticed that making the red vs blue divide at the county level and then stirring would result in a lot of purple states rather than red or blue states. A war of secession is liable to be fought at the neighborhood level rather than the State level.
Now you are misrepresenting what was written:
This is why under the principles of law thousands of years old and the principles embraced by the Congress in the American Revolution the sovereign/s must consent to the alienation of territory and citizens to avoid such an alienation becoming an insurrection and/or rebellion forbidden by law.as written.
In other words, sovereigns have the power and authority to alienate the domain and citizens of the domain, and only sovereigns of the domain. Since the sovereign/s of the United States of America are its Citizens, the domain and sovereign Citizens of the domain have the sole authority to alienate the territory, property, and citizens of the domain. Anyone who advocates and attempts to alienate territory, property, and Citizens of the domain without obtaining the consent of the sovereign/s of the domain are in rebellion against the sovereign/s and subject to punishment and penalties for such acts.
The Constitution implemented some of these legal principles by requiring the agreement of the States of the Congress, the States and the alien State for accession to the Union, and likewise for seccession from the Union.In this manner, the sovereign Citizens are deemed to exercise their sovereign powers to dispose of territory and Citizens belonging to the sovereign domain.
Grotius, Locke, Strabo, Aristotle, and others are among the many contributors to these legal principles. For now I would suggest reading Hugo Grotius and the many things he had to say about sovereignty. In the meantime, I have to get to work now. I’ll have to discuss this more at a later time.
Later
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