Posted on 08/14/2018 5:54:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
I can and I do. Read Davis’ repeated statements on the subject.
That was the belief of the two men most responsible for writing the document - Hamilton and Madison.
There is no Union with the right of secession and the document becomes nothing more than a list of suggestions.
Secession from a Union makes no sense from a rational perspective.
Great. I’m from the South too. The 1950s and 1960s have nothing to do with the 1850s and 1860s.
There was no right to unilaterally destroy the Union. Not even for the protection of slavery.
In your view states could leave for any reason which illustrates the absurdity of the claim.
Who cares what their personal beliefs were? They were not parties to the contract. The states were. Its what the legislatures of the states thought that matters.
3 states including the two biggest and most important ones passed express provisos when they ratified the constitution explicitly reserving their right to take back the powers delegated to the federal government.
As for Madison, he did not say states could not secede until the 1820s - decades after the constitution was written. He did however pen the Virginia Resolution in 1798 setting out the state’s power to nullify federal laws.
Furthermore I disagree that the right of secession makes no sense. It makes perfect sense. It is the ultimate check on the power of the federal government or of other states to use their power to abuse one or a group of states to their own advantage. As such it forces them to rule by consent, to be far less exploitative and capricious.
It would not have destroyed the union. It simply would have made it smaller. If Wisconsin wished to maintain a relationship with Vermont, nobody ever proposed to interfere with that.
There’s nothing absurd about the principle that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. That was the very principle the 13 colonies asserted when they seceded from the British Empire.
Someone should have told Charleston about that.
The lack of respect by the Slavers was clear when one of their spokesman attacked a Representative IN the Congress.
I suppose the seizure of federal properties and firing on federal forts show how much the Union was respected by the Slavers.
if you’re talking about Brooks and Sumner, that was years before and the dispute was more do the fact that Sumner was a total A-hole who had personally attacked Brooks’ relative in Congress who had just had a stroke mocking the slur with which he spoke due to his stroke as well as making all sorts of other nasty allegations.
Nobody fired on Sumter until Lincoln sent a heavily armed flotilla to invade South Carolina’s territorial waters.
There was no significant growth of federal power prior to the war.
If you want to speak of a tyrannical government look no further than Richmond. It even had a draft prior to the Union.
How does a “tyrant” allow an election which even he thought he might well lose?
That wasn’t a wind, it was a fart.
What can a president who is a president allow federal arsenals and attacks on federal property?
He did not start the war from any perspective expect that of those attempting to justify the unjustifiable.
He was Commander-in-Chief which, in times of war, can stray temporarily from the Constitution.
What can be more absurd than claiming HE violated the constitution when a rebellion was trashing the whole thing?
When a country is at war, it tends to centralize power to defend itself. It was no different for the CSA.
Lincoln allowed elections in which several historians note there was ballot box stuffing by Republicans in multiple locations. He also had Nevada admitted without the requisite number of people as required under the constitution because it would provide reliable votes for his party. He also had the state of West Virginia unconstitutionally created again because it would provide votes for his party. He was a tyrant.
Those states had seceded. The federal property within their sovereign borders reverted to them when they seceded.
Davis refused until the last days of the insurrection to allow slaves to fight for the South.
Like almost all Slavers he feared arming the slaves because he knew what would happen.
You claiming he did not fight the insurrection to preserve slavery is not even good sophistry and needs no response. His words speak for themselves.
The intent was to provide a “more perfect union” different from the Confederation wherein secession might be legal.
Under the Confederation states were practically in rebellion in any case because they refused to do what the Congress needed done for the benefit of the whole.
The cover for the Jim Crow era is the same that you are using. Rather than slavery it protected those wishing to oppress the descendants of the slaves.
Jim Crow produced a situation wherein the Blacks were arguably worse off than under slavery.
They had no protection unlike the time they were someone’s property who had an incentive to protect that property. Excessive brutality would not get the work force to work harder or even as hard.
“stray temporarily from the constitution”. LOL! This is exactly the argument his sycophants made. Its the same argument tyrants always make. Its a recipe for perpetual war....so that deal leader can “stray temporarily” from whatever constrains his power.
It wasn’t a rebellion. It was states exercising their sovereign right to peacefully leave a voluntary union.
My comments on incivility, above, did not give the Southerners a pass for responding in kind, before seeking to retire from the Federal relationship. But that the working Federal relationship obviously depended on mutual respect, if the Constitutional purposes were to be served, is obvious. There is nothing in the Constitution--quite the contrary--that suggests an intent for any State or any group of States to impose its social will on any of its sister States.
This was about the common defense and Liberty of the posterity of comrades in arms; and converting it into preservation of a form based upon mutual trust at inception, at the expense of the future volition of the adhering families, is placing form over substance--a logical absurdity.
Now make no mistake. I am very grateful that we have the Southern Conservatives of today, back in the Union. God willing, we can restore the sense of purpose that has eluded us in most of the decades since, with some fortunate exceptions.
Slaves had been fighting for the South from early on. Davis had supported it. It was the Confederate Congress which opposed it until later in the war. Of course the Confederate Congress did not have the power to dictate to individual states who could serve in the units they sent and Confederate commanders in the field often accepted any Blacks be they slaves or freedmen who agreed to serve.
You claiming they were fighting to preserve slavery when Davis said they weren’t and when they were offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment just shows what a joke your argument is.
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