Posted on 12/13/2002 4:04:26 PM PST by stainlessbanner
one of my old army buddies from that time/place, black BTW, thinks it is HYSTERICAL!
free dixie,sw
Turtledove has written several "alternative histories" that ARE EXCELLENT. How Few Remain for one.
the south HAS risen. NOW we need LIBERTY.
free dixie,sw
"But there is no way out of the Constitution except through the amendment process or revolution. And secession is just another word for revolution."
If that were the case (which I am quite clearly understanding the Founding Fathers' intent on) then when the Southern States wanted to secede the North (Lincoln et al) had no legal right to force them to stay. You must look at the difference between a revolution, or civil war which is for control of the same government ... and secession which is a breaking away from that government and forming a new one which suits one's needs. The former is quite clearly not what the constitution or Declaration of Independence is about ... the second one is specifically addressed as a God Given Right (or Natural Law) in the Declaration of Independence! The Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of American ideals and beliefs! Just because Lincoln didn't like the fact of losing the revenue of the Southern States, he had no legal recourse to try and force them to stay in the Union. Ft. Sumter was what Lincoln needed to force his war of subjugation on sovereign independent states. AT THAT POINT WE WERE NO LONGER A GOVERNMENT "OF THE PEOPLE", BUT WE BECAME THE ANTI-THESIS OF WHAT THE FOUNDERS STRUGGLED SO HARD FOR! We were no longer Man-over-Government, but rather we became Government-over-Man. The Founders never believed in a strong central government ... they knew that tyranny grew out of such a government. When the North won in 1865 they repudiated the Declaration of Independence, we all lost our sovereignty and became slaves to the tax system of the Federal Government.
Who controls the government now ... the common people? Or the big money people?
If that were the case (which I am quite clearly understanding the Founding Fathers' intent on) then when the Southern States wanted to secede the North (Lincoln et al) had no legal right to force them to stay.
There was a clear legal right to prevent secession. It is in the Militia Act of 1792 and the Judiciary Act of 1789, if nowhere else. And the federal government put the power in the field to prevent it.
But the question of moral right?
"It could of course, quote no direct warrant from the Constitution for secession, but sought to deduce one, by implication, from the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Xth amendment. It reasserts the absurd paradox of State supremacy-persistantly miscalled "State Rights" --which reverses the natural order of governmental existance; considers a State superior to the Union; makes a part greater than the whole; turns the pyramid of authority upon its apex; plants the tree of liberty with its branches in the ground and its roots in the air.
The fallacy has been has been a hundred times analysed, exposed, and refuted; but the cheap dogmatism of demagougues and the automatic machinery of faction perpetually conjures it up anew to astonish the sucklings and terrify the dotards of politiics. The notable point in the [South Carolina] eclaration of Causes is, that its complaint over grievances past and present is against certain states, and for these remedy was of course logically barred by its own theory of state supremacy. On the other hand, all its allegations against the Union are concerning dangers to come, before which admission the moral justification of disunion falls to the ground, In rejecting the rememdy of future elections for future wrongs, the conspiracy discarded the entire theory of republican government.
One might have thought that this might have exhausted their counterfeit philosophy--but not yet. Greatly as they groaned at unfriendly state laws--seriously as they pretended to fear damage or spoilation under future federal statutes, the burden of their anger rose at the sentient and belief of the North. "All hope of remedy," says the manifesto, "is rendered vain by the fact that the public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief." This is language one might expect from the Pope of Rome; but that an American convention should denounce the liberty of opinion, is not merely to recede from Jefferson, to Louis XIV; it is flying from the town-meeting to the Inquisition."
"With all their affectation of legality, formality, and present justification, some of the members were honest enough to acknowledge the true character of the event as the culmination of a chronic conspiracy, not a spontaneous revolution.
"The secession of South Carolina," said one of the chief actors, "is not an event of a day. It is not anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for thirty years." This with many similar avowals, crowns and completes the otherwise abundant proof that the revolt was not only aganist right, but that it was without cause."
--John G. Nicolay, 1881
Walt
Lincoln, as Allan Nevins indicates, cared little for the tariff.
Lincoln was a one issue man, and the issue was slavery.
"For Lincoln rejected the notion that the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness were confined to the white race. He was not the only American to challenge this dogma, of course. From the beginning of their movement, abolitionists had insisted that black people were equal to whites in the sight of God and equally entitled to liberty in this world. Indeed, the abolitionists and the radical wing of the Republican party went further than Lincoln in maintaining the principle of equal rights for ail people. But because of his prominence as a Republican party leader after 1858 and his power as president of the United States after 1860, Lincoln's were the opinions that mattered most and that are of most interest to us, Lincoln had always considered slavery an institution "founded on both injustice and bad policy," as he told the Illinois legislature in 1837. But he nevertheless indulged in the American habit of describing the United States as a "free country" that enjoyed more "civil and religious liberty' , more "human liberty, human right" than any other people in the history of the world. Even as late as 1861 Lincoln could refer to "the free institutions which we have unceasingly enjoyed for three-quarters of a century.'' But a decade earlier Lincoln had begun to question just how free those institutions were, so long as slavery existed in this otherwise free country. The "monstrous Injustice of slavery," he said in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." In the 1850s Lincoln began to insist, contrary to the belief of perhaps two-thirds of white Americans, that the Declaration of Independence was not merely "the white-man's charter of freedom." "The negro is included in the word 'men' used in the Declaration," he maintained. This "is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest," and "negro slavery is violative of that principle" because the black man is "entitled to . , . the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. i agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects'—here Lincoln stopped short of the abolitionist affirmation of full equality-but, Lincoln continued, "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Lincoln did not consider this a new definition of liberty. He believed that Thomas Jefferson and the other founders had meant to include the Negro in the phrase "all men are created equal," even though many of the founders owned slaves, for they were stating a principle that they hoped would eventually become a reality. Douglas maintained that, on the contrary, Jefferson had not meant "all men" to in- clude blacks-nor for that matter any race except Caucasians.
"This government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should never be administered by any except white meh," insisted Douglas over and over again. "The signers of the Declaration had no reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They . . . [meant] white men, men of European birth and European descent and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race." If a national referendum could have been held on these two definitions of liberty—Lincoln's inclusive one and Douglas's definition exclusive of all but white men—Douglas's position would have won.
But Lincoln persisted against the odds, denouncing Douglas's argument as representing a disastrous declension from the faith of the fathers, a declension that if it went much further would extinguish the light of liberty in America. The Know-Nothings, for example, were trying to deny to white immigrants the liberties of free-born Americans. Here was the danger, warned Lincoln in 1855.
Once a nation decided that its constitutional rights applied only to some and not to all men equally, the torch of liberty would go out. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," lamented Lincoln with reference to the Know-Nothings. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal" We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know- Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of'hypocrisy."" To dehumanize the Negro—to insist that he was not a man—would boomerang on all of us, said Lincoln on many occasions in the 1850s. "Our reliance must be in the love of liberty...
. . . the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of al! men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. . . . He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve It not for themselves. . . . Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
The Democratic party of 1859, said Lincoln in that year, had departed so far from the ideas of its founder Thomas Jefferson that it "hold[s] the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property." The only liberty that many whites seemed to believe in was "the liberty of making slaves of other people."
"That is the real issue," said Lincoln in the peroration of his last debate with Douglas. "That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong . . . from the beginning of time. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an aplogy for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." To prevent this principle from "eradicating the light of liberty in this American people," Lincoln pleaded, "let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it, . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, for- ever worthy of the saving."
--"Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, pp.50-54 by James McPherson.
Note that Lincoln was taking in the 1850's a position at odds with 2/3 of the voters. That is why he is the greatest American.
Walt
It WAS about taxes ... and for that writer to say there was "no right to secede" shows that he had his head up his ass about history. The Founders did the very same thing for the very same reason! Once more you opt for empire and nullify individual liberty. This just proves how obtuse you are! If you would try to study it for once, you might just find out what Southerners were saying WAS TRUE! But you have to get out of the die hard Yankee texts and look at both sides with an open mind.
'"It could of course, quote no direct warrant from the Constitution for secession, but sought to deduce one, by implication, from the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Xth amendment. It reasserts the absurd paradox of State supremacy-persistantly miscalled "State Rights" --which reverses the natural order of governmental existance; considers a State superior to the Union; makes a part greater than the whole; turns the pyramid of authority upon its apex; plants the tree of liberty with its branches in the ground and its roots in the air.'
This goes to the heart of what a "Republican Government" is ... " What is the constitution? It is the form of government delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental law are established. The constitition is certain and fixed: it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the will of the legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it (i.e. the people). The life-giving principle and the death-dealing stroke must proceed from the same hand. What are legislatures? Creatures of the constitution; they owe their existence to the constitution; they derive their powers from the constitution. It is their commission; and, therefore, all their acts must be conformable to it, or else they will be void. The constitution is the work of the people themselves, in their original, sovereign, and unlimited capacity. Law is the work of legislature in their derivative and subordinate capacity. The one is the work of the creator, and the other of the creature. In short, gentlemen, the constitution is the sun of the political system, around which all legislative, executive, and judicial bodies must revolve" - Vanhorne's Lessee v. Dorrance, 2 Dallas 304 at 308 (U.S. Cir. Ct. Pa. 1795) Justice William Patterson's instructions to the jury.
" It appears, on the one hand, that the [United States] Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for a special purpose; but on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing the entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, -- the authority of the people themselves." - James Madison, 39th Federalist
'The ultimate authority of the society was distibuted, in all its attributes, among each and every one of the several States: - as such, it could make and unmake any constitution, and create or destroy any Union.' - A Constitutional History of Secession. - John Remington Graham (2002)
By saying the Federal Government had the right to prevent a secession is to say that this is not a government of the people. And the States did have more power than the Federal Government in this matter as it was the people who decided upon secession!
Your former author is a empiristic socialist who only believes that power comes from the government, and it is a separate entity which acts on its own ... without consent of the governed! It doesn't matter whether you agree with the Southern States' decision or not ... they were right and the North was wrong!
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