Posted on 12/02/2008 6:57:32 AM PST by prplhze2000
came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What was interesting was that it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan and concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far.....
U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nations number one economic problem" in 1938...
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
The federal government was the servant that was fired, having fallen into the hands of a partisan cabal that stirred up and used crude, raw sectional hatred to seize control of the federal government, to make it into a tool of the wealthy business minority based on the Eastern Seaboard port cities and mill towns.
It had always been a problem of federalism, how to prevent the very thing that happened with the 1860 election campaign: the triumph of a faction over the system carefully designed to contain factionalism by the Framers. That was the thing Madison feared most. I don't think Hamilton feared it much -- mainly because he knew it would be his own faction that did the overreaching.
The system broke down, and the States which well understood themselves to be the intended victims (and in some respects, they said, they had already become the victims) of the cabal, took responsible actions to separate their States from, and insulate them from, the rapacity and political avidity of the would-be receivers and undertakers of the Republic, who were led by Lincoln.
Of course, contemporary politicians in the National Democracy understood what the Republicans (and the Whigs, previously) intended to do, but they were powerless to do anything, especially after they were prostrated by the bolting of the Southern Breckinridge Democrats, who thought that the only way to be safe in a falling elevator was to get off the elevator. They were committed to secession as their States' only refuge and safety from what the Republicans intended to do to them.
My point is, whether they played their cards well or badly is beside the point. What is the point is, they had the right to play them, and Lincoln's kicking over the table and shooting everyone did not make him the "savior" he has subsequently, by arduous political cultivation, been made out to be.
Only in YOUR opinion. The facts, such as the election records speak otherwise.
Incorporated by reference.
I don't know what you mean by "stick to the document" unless it means "stick to the Constitution and what it means according to me, Colonel Kangaroo."
The sovereign power is not the states nor the general government. Again, we can limit ourselves to the document itself. it is in the preamble, "WE THE PEOPLE".
Partial credit, but points off for pointing to the Preamble as part of "the document". It isn't part of the document -- it is the Preamble.
It's also instructive to know from the Framers' writings -- oops, that's going outside the document, isn't it? we're supposed to do a blind reading here -- that the Preamble had been written by Hamilton before the Philadelphia Convention deliberated and changed much of what he had drafted.
We know from history -- but again, "context" by definition is outside the document, isn't it? -- that Hamilton wanted a nation-state with a powerful central government that would submerge the States, and that conception is what the unedited, unrevised Preamble reflects to this present day. (Funny that that's what we wound up with, too, after a million dead and Mr. Lincoln's War.)
Hence, "We the People" reflects, in one reading, Hamilton's conception of the amalgamated nation-state, of ONE nation, ONE State, and ONE People.
(The translation of that into German would be, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer, by the way.) But that isn't what the Constitution says we have.
Article II Section 1 shows how the Electors are chosen by the People in their States and the Electors vote for President in their States (the original language wasn't altered by Amendment XII, which changed the procedure of the Electoral College), just as Article V provides for a constitutional convention or constitutional amendments to be proposed by the legislatures of the States (as well as by the Congress) and ratified by the States.
The point that escapes you is that the People act in their States, and that the States are not their governments or legislatures, but instead the States are the People of the States, and the People in turn are the States themselves. The States are not real estate or architecture, they are the People who live there.
Likewise, Article VII calls for ratification of the Constitution "by States" -- not by "the People" or "the People of some States" or by a massive, amalgamated convention or plebiscite of all the People(s) of all the States. Read Article VII closely, and you will see that:
In other words, States = People = Sovereign.
Article VI, the Supremacy Clause, acts not on the States, but on the officers of State and federal governments, and on the judges of all the courts. Reread it closely: it does NOT enforce a fealty or loss of sovereignty on the People either implicit or explicit, and it does not name the States as respondents to Article VI. This means something -- it is the dog that didn't bark.
Article VI doesn't bind the People or the States as such, but acts on the officers and courts of all the state and federal governments, and makes the federal laws the "law of the land".
You cannot build a construction into Article VI that it forbids a State's or a People's secession from the Union, since it clearly does not, and neither do the enumerated cessions of sovereign power to the federal government by the People and their States listed in Article I Sections 8 and 10.
Lincoln did not act in behalf of the general government, he acted in behalf of the duties he was bequeathed by his political masters, the people of the United States.
No, he acted on behalf of a faction of bankers, businessmen, and railroad men, whom he had served previously as an attorney, as I describe above. He was a factional leader and spoil-champion, and the South was his prey.
The provision for amendment is within the document itself. The provision for dissolving is not yet there.
You must have gone to Catholic schools -- always looking for permission. You sound like you don't really have or understand the spirit of freedom.
And as I argue above, your construction of the nature of the People is historically and, even in your reading of the wording of the Constitution, defective, Hamiltonian, and totalitarian.
Election records do not turn an illegal act into a legal one. And rebellion is not a legal act, not by anyone's definition.
Since all power is inherent in the people, it wasn’t illegal. But of course, you know that since Lentulus has “busted your chops” on that issue more than once.
All power isn't inherent in the people. Only those powers not reserved to the United States by the Constitution or prohibited by it are reserved to the states and the people. And secession without the consent of the other states wasn't one of them.
But of course, you know that since Lentulus has “busted your chops” on that issue more than once.
Lentulusgracchus couldn't "bust the chops" of the village idiot. He just spouts the same crap you do, and like you expects the world to accept it without question.
Well, I for one am not going to just swallow your facist garbage. If you don’t think that power is inherent in the people, you are no better than Hitler, or Stalin. You have some nerve calling LG an “idiot”. Just because some people don’t care to be bamboozled by your smoke & mirror show doesn’t make them idiots.
I will continue to cry “TRIPE”, when “Tripe” is served!
But you expect me to swallow your's?
If you don’t think that power is inherent in the people, you are no better than Hitler, or Stalin.
Sothron Desperation Act #702 - if calling your opponent liberal doesn't work, connect him with Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Mussolini or any other communist or fascist dictator you can think of.
You have some nerve calling LG an “idiot”. Just because some people don’t care to be bamboozled by your smoke & mirror show doesn’t make them idiots.
If you'll look back you'll see that I didn't call Lentulusgracchus an idiot. I said he couldn't "bust the chops" of a village idiot. There is a difference.
But then again accuracy is not a trait of the typical Southron supporter.
I will continue to cry “TRIPE”, when “Tripe” is served!
And I'll continue to call "bullshit" whenever you offer it up.
You argue with an obvious scatologist? Got GermX?
You are right. :)
Well you certainly know Bullsh*t.....you dish enough of it around. A Typical Yankee trait.
Dealing with you and your buddies gives us an above average ability to detect BS. Though lately it's gotten easier since virtually every Southron response is packed with it.
Ah another voice heard from. What part of the great Southron myth are you spreading today?
I do have a question about something I'm curious about. If the rebs thought the states sovereign and believed in states rights, how come under the reb constituion, Confederate states could not outlaw slavery within their borders? States rights indeed!
Compliments on a good expression of the view of Lincoln from the land of cotton and rice. To give a fair and equal examination of both executives, who do you think Jeff Davis acted in behalf of?
It doesn't have to. The key is what isn't there. That silence is what guarantees the powers of the States to ratify, to elect, and to secede, just as the Constitution's silences, reinforced by the Ninth Amendment, guarantee your right to walk down the street or address your fellow citizens on any subject you want, no (constitutional) municipal law intervening.
Ping me when you diss me, troll.
He just spouts the same crap you do, and like you expects the world to accept it without question.
Ping to my #303 above.
So, on what clause of the Constitution do you rest your hero's rape of the South, and of the Constitution?
Can you point me to the clause authorizing the President to make war on his own motion, without reference to the Congress, and treat the People like a pustule? To suppress the rights of the People in their States, to exercise their right to secede from political abuse and the ascendancy of a violently (as in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry) hostile political faction?
What's your constitutional remedy, your redress, for hostile, violent, and punitive political measures inflicted on a State or States just because of animus among the majority? What is going to stop a factional polemarch from ascending to the Presidency, in your system of government, using the war powers (washed clean by Congress of course, after the fact) to burn, pillage, and genocidally destroy the hated States and their People?
What is your remedy? Sue? LOL!! Dead people can't afford lawyers.
Show me that, under Lincoln's administration and in his administrative practices, sovereignty did not reside on his desk. Show me that Lincoln did not make himself into a tyrant. Show me where Congress or the Courts successfully checked him, and where Lincoln altered or abandoned a major initiative because of a constitutional or institutional check on his power.
Show me that Lincoln was not precisely the phenomenon that the Framers specifically intended the American political system they instituted to be able to resist, contain, and defeat.
Show me.
Oh, really? The People can't unmake their government? What an interesting concept.
So, who does have all power, N-S? Who has the power to tell the People, "no"?
Who pwns the People? Who's our Daddy?
Please tell us what 'violent and punitive" measures were inflicted on the States in 1860-61 that caused them to unilaterally secede?
They can try, that's what the South did and that's what's called rebellion. As it turns out they were unsuccessful.
So, who does have all power, N-S? Who has the power to tell the People, "no"?
The Constitution and the rule of law.
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