Posted on 06/12/2003 5:58:28 AM PDT by Aurelius
Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'
Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."
Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?
At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."
Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.
Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???
Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.
Only insofar as, in doing so, they also encounter my frequent adversaries and the vile servants of mammon that they quote.
Well that's the kind of politician I want to follow < /sarcasm>
As for following back on your commentary with 4CJ, your premise has always been that all Democrats are liars. If the Democrats you despise so much created the textbooks, and the 4th grade textbooks you read from praise lincoln as practically walking on water next to Jesus Christ (someone Ingersoll didn't believe in), ergo the textbooks lie about lincoln. However all they seem to do is praise him.
So is the deification unjustified? How do we know what we can and cannot take out of these books to argue your point (never mind there's not anything worth taking)? Or should we just ask you for what's acceptable and argue from that? That's it!! History 101 by Grand Old Partisan. Do you actually have a doctorate in English? Or is parroting Jimmy McPhernut good enough to take on all arguments?
The complete rejection of God is uncalled for even in response to the most hideously misguided of clergymen. Had Ingersoll truly objected to them, he needed only to direct his wrath upon them and point to the errors of their teachings. But Ingersoll did not do that. Instead he blamed God for what the worst of his professed adherents taught and then proceded to supplant the divine with a vile idolatry of the self.
So high taxes, centralized governments, and military suppression of civilian dissenters from the state is "Republican policy"?
You worship blindly at that government's feet and denounce those who object to it and the direction it is headed as "traitors." By contrast I prefer to employ my resources to changing those hideous policies that it currently practices. And unlike you, I will not supplant my worship of God with the state when the two conflict.
Honor is inherent in Southern tradition. Look up the origins of Memorial Day. Southerners offer respect and in some cases admiration for their fallen brothers across these United States.
It seems Southerners have respect for their comrades, but will not tolerate disrespect of their own from others. Why some conservatives attack the South (often here on FR) escapes me.
Because we're the last bastion of accepted bigotry. You'll get fired for making a racist comment such as Sherman or Grant did, however everybody laughs when they make fun of the hick
That's a great contradiction of many atheists. They express nothing but scorn, blame, and hatred against the very thing that they profess not to believe in. He does carry it too far at times, which is a fault of simplistic approach to the subject, but I rarely saw in Ingersoll's writing anything other than genuine belief and his foundations for it.
Genuine belief is not enough to vindicate an error. At most it only mitigates the circumstances. There are people who genuinely believe in abortion, welfare, affirmative action, racism, genocide, and any number of ill-conceived and hideous items. But that alone does not make them any less wrong in those particular beliefs.
I also saw in his works a love of life, freedom, for the American way of life without titles and nobility but opportunity to work one's way up.
What you are witnessing is loaded rhetoric. Look at Ingersoll's life and you will find the very opposite of a freedom-loving individual. You will find a person who devoted much of his political life pushing for higher taxes and redistributionary tariffs, interventionist government economic policy, and, of course, the political subjugation of the south. You will find an individual who surrounded himself with and participated in the careers of some of the most corrupt and dishonest individuals to ever hold political office in this country - the regular Bill Clintons of the day or, put differently, people who assembled their fortunes by defrauding honest hard working individuals, the public treasury that is collected from those individuals, or both.
Exactly where did I call him a "proto-marxist," Partisan? I called him corrupt, vile, wretched, a statist, an atheist, and an economic interventionist - and he was all of those things. But I don't believe I ever called him a proto-marxist.
"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce
The primary reason is that Merryman represents an opinion/ruling by a solitary member of the judiciary, aimed at the President (the President representing a co-equal branch of government with the Judicial Branch). Lincoln's ignoring the ruling falls into a class of acts called "Presidential Acts of Constitutional Interpretation." Lincoln was not the first President, nor the last, to ignor court rulings aimed at the Presidency. Besides Merryman, one could look at Andrew Jackson's refusal to enforce Worchester vs Georgia, 31 US 515 (1832). More recently, Richard Nixon refused to abide by lower court rulings, until threatened by the third branch of Government with impeachment.
There are several other factors that weigh against Merryman. (1) It has not been incorporated into statutory law. (2) It was not accepted by other branches of government. (3) It was the opinion of a lone judge and was unsupported by the US Supreme Court. (4) It was partisan in nature. (5) The act of ignoring the ruling has been supported by history and has itself been precedent setting. (6) It has been eclipsed by other rulings.
Unlike Ex parte Milligan (1866), which has established precedent, the Merryman case is usually only studied as part of history. Indeed, the case is recalled when discussing "the Merryman power of the Presidency." It has ramifications today. When a President commits US troops to conflict in an emergency, without having had time to consult the Congress, or obtain from the a declaration of War, the authority to enforce all aspects of US law is based on the principle of the President's power of constitutional interpretation.
I need to confess, that much of this post is not my own. I have been coached by a lawyer friend of mine who pulled out some of her old law school notes. I am also made aware of a recent book entitled the "Merryman Power and the Dilemma of Automous Executive Branch Interpretation." I'm going to try an find it, if it is still in print.
See my immediately preceeding post. When the Executive Branch refuses to enforce or comply with the ruling of an inferior court, that court may appeal to a higher court. Neither Taney, the offended judge, nor Merryman, appealed. Taney eventually sent his order to Lincon and Lincoln ignored it. Taney then published and distributed his decision to try and win in the court of public opinion. He lost there too. The people did not rise up to protest Lincoln's so-called "injustice," nor did the Congress try to codify the Taney decision. In fact, the Congress specifically supported Lincoln.
By way of history, why was Lt. Merryman arrested? Merryman was a member of the Maryland State militia. In early 1861, rioting occurred in Baltimore. Federal troops were committed to enforce the peace. In fact, the first Union deaths of the Civil War happened in that incident. The Army made an agreement with Baltimore and Maryland Civil authorities to remove the troops and "cool" the tense situation. Merryman led a group of fellow secessionist militia to scout and reconoiter the Federal troop withdrawal into Pennsylvania. He ordered a bridge burned so the Federals could not return to Baltimore the same way they had left. By taking up arms against the Federal government, Merryman earned his arrest and detainment.
Please cite the Article and Section where this "constitutional" duty exists.
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