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 ...
It would seem to support your claim, to those who haven't bothered to read any of the applicable legislation. Read the Reconstruction acts, particularly the first one. Read the Texas v. White decision. The Southern states were not readmitted to the Union. There was no enabling act, no vote on admission. No need to admit them because the Southern states were not out of the Union for one minute. What those dates signify is the readmission of their delegations to Congress. The date when their Congressmen and Senators were allowed back into the chambers and take part in governmental affairs. Nothing more.
These were all factors, but I believe that it goes back to the shift of power between states and the federal gov’t when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the new Constitution after the con-con (interestingly, we are 2 states away from another con-con now).
And yet for the majority of the time between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the rebellion, the government was in the hands of Southerners. The South provided a disproportionate number of presidents, of vice-presidents, of cabinet members and leaders in Congress and Supreme Court judges. If power shifted between the government and the states as you claim, the South has nobody but itself to blame for the shift.
That's what you thought the first time.
[You] If that was so bad the southerners would have not abandoned Douglas and the northern Democrats to become a second sectional party.
There are a couple of things that need to be said here, and to say them all it's necessary to pull apart your statement and address its components piecemeal.
In the first part, your challenge to the Southerners' judgment, that "if that was so bad .... " seems to have the traces tangled up. In an attempt at moral equivalency or recriminatory balancing, you seem to argue that the Southerners' formation of a "sectional party" of their own somehow endorses, vindicates, or at least retroactively exculpates the Republicans' having purposefully done it first.
But you do not address on its merits the moral onus of the Republicans' having done so, which they did for the purpose of capturing the government and harnessing it to the agenda of a political machine. Which would have been bad enough, if the entailed consequences didn't include a body count so high that it still keeps Northerners from thinking straight about the Civil War.
That said, I agree with you that dividing the National Democracy was a tremendous mistake loaded with danger, and that the "bolters" incurred a moral onus of their own, an onus of shortsightedness and, ultimately, failure. That they failed was not in and of itself onerous, but they threw away assets and friends in an attempt to leverage their passion into results, and therefore their failure becomes charged. They took no identifiable steps to conserve their political assets in the face of mortal danger but instead discarded them (along with their fair share of the country's territorial patrimony), and so the failure to attempt conservation is chargeable.
That said, it must be argued in their defense that no modern historian or political scientist has assayed the potential cost to the South of remaining in the Union beyond Lincoln's inauguration date. Would he have choked all the Southern cities and ports with Yankee militiamen and ex-Wideawakes poured into federal uniforms and given power over the States they hated, had been educated to hate by Northern Republican newspapers and Harriet Beecher Stowe? What would a Lincoln occupation of the South, generaled by men like Ben Butler, have been like, absent secession? Who could have denied Lincoln the authority to do something like that -- to occupy, to use force against the States absent any sign of either secession or insurrection? Would Lincoln have done such a thing? I think he would, given John Nicolay's ruminations on what he historically did; because I think his real policy and purpose was to provoke open, armed conflict with the South -- which was Lincoln's way around the Constitution.
If the Republicans were so bad the southerners could have made common cause with northern Democrats to bl[o]ck the Republicans.
Not really. They'd done the math, and the Republicans were going to be the masters of the House, and, as soon as another freesoil State came into the Union (Kansas), the Senate as well. The filibuster hadn't been invented yet, and wouldn't be for another generation. Once in control of the Executive and the Congress, the Black Republicans would have proceeded to turn the federal government into the machine of their dreams, and the Southerners would have been spectators. And they knew it. There were still moves to make and pieces to play, but the endgame was in hand.
Southerners had thought about these things; the Georgia secession convention debate between Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs is the best evidence. Personally, I tend to agree with Stephens, while conceding to Toombs that I am a century late to the party and cannot be as cognizant as most of the participants of all the deliberations and calculations that led the leaders in that debate to their positions, except insofar as they propound their reasons, first to one another and now to us.
But the Southern Democrats lacked political maturity and common sense.
Stipulated to. But then, I said I agreed with Alexander Stephens.
Common sense was surely lacking in their secession.
Political common sense, perhaps, but they still had the right.
Secession was a judgment call, and it was their right to make that call, or not.
If they feared a North and West shackled by the Constitution, how did they expect to compete as separate nation with the North unrestrained by the Constitution?
Lincoln's game plan is fully evident in the measures he took during the war. His plan was to admit a great number of small States carved from the Western Territories and use them to achieve his constitutional-amendment threshold to force an uncompensated emancipation on the South and destroy the South politically, and all the States, for that matter -- remember, that is one of the outcomes of the Civil War that we well know about that isn't taught in school -- thus converting the country into a centripetal nation-state, an empire if you will, organized on something like the modern French model (the French abolished all the old provinces and replaced them with nothingburger "departments"), thus making the federal government omnipotent and its "owners" free of the nuisance of competing interests and popular resistance.
Remember, the 19th-century GOP platform was about empowering millionaires to become billionaires without hindrance or check, and making all levels of government their toys, and the People their barely-human servitors, their Morlocks. The same People who, by the way, had once elected Andrew Jackson and impressed Alexis DeTocqueville with the way in which popular sentiment had become enshrined and empowered in national politics. The Civil War was truly a revolution, in which the successors of Hamilton's business-class supporters returned to his work and finished the job of obtaining what they had wanted in 1787, by overthrowing the People and making themselves their masters -- a master class.
Which is how Non-Sequitur thinks of himself, and why no argument laid on this board will ever change his opinion about anything. He is truly, in his own mind, a superior individual and member of the master class who understands how things really work, and that we are all objects of no consequence in the nonsequiturian scheme of things. Lincoln intended that we be nobodies, and that is how this fellow means to treat us -- as Lincoln would have wished. Hell, Lincoln never paid any attention to Bill Seward, did he? So much for his estimation of his fellowman, and for his respect for the great Republic that DeTocqueville found.
As for the idea that Lincoln would ever have been "restrained" by the Constitution in his dealings with the South .... well, let's just say that history is my witness. He would not. He would have done whatever it took, including tearing up the Constitution completely, to have his way on slavery -- and reorganizing the national compact. And then he'd have argued things round or flat, like the railroad lawyer he was, to convince people that he had in fact been very moderate in the administration of his mass-bushwhacking to all parties concerned. This man came into office, and a million people died in four years and two months -- and then the North erected white marble temples and statues to him all over the country, to thank him for the million dead. I think you Northerners still underestimate Lincoln.
Which does not contradict my point in the least, that the Confederate States began in 1860 with zero (0) troops. Whatever the United States government had, it was infinitely larger than zero.
And you cleverly omit the troops the Yankee States were getting up. Massachusetts had what, three or four regiments ready to go a month after Lincoln's inaugural? New York and Pennsylvania were calling up troops, too. And Lincoln was having the Governor of Illinois and Nathaniel Lyons arm Wideawakes from the Illinois state armory, and recruiting and equipping fresh troops under Lyons's command even before Lincoln was inaugurated, to cross over from Illinois to Missouri in order to mount a coup d'etat against the lawful government of Missouri and its People in arms, the Missouri Militia.
Their intentions were clear from the outset.
Yeah? You mean Lincoln and Ben Butler and the governor of Illinois? And the Blair family and Nathaniel Lyons?
Resupplying troops in their post is not a hostile act. Reinforcing them might have been. Landing arms and munitions might have been. But Lincoln had made it clear that his intent was to maintain the status quo by landing food and supplies only.
But he didn't do that, did he? He sent one ship with troops in it that was driven off, and then he sent the reinforcing expedition under Gustavus Fox that was the trigger for Davis's decision to reduce Sumter. He also reinforced Ft. Pickens.
Your argument is flatly disingenuous and misleading. You have known forever that Lincoln moved to reinforce all the southern forts, even while telling Southern governors that he would not do so.
And had the South not attacked then that's what would have happened.
Garbage. Lincoln was determined to go on pushing buttons until he got his shooting war. War let him get around the Constitution. It was the escape hatch on the conundrum he found himself in, in 1855, when he confessed to a correspondent that as mightily as he had struggled with the problem, he could find no constitutional way to abolish slavery or force the South to give it up. In 1860, he had found the way. Start a war.
That is a very contestable contention. There were many, many expressions of popular and editorial support in the North for John Brown's raid, and of regret for his punishment. Tolling bells, that sort of thing.
In addition, the "Secret Six" demonstrated that Brown's essential support -- as I just pointed out to you but you seem to be reluctant to accept -- was in the professional class. In addition, Yankee intellectuals like the poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Longfellow expressed support for Brown and contumely for the South and its fears for the public safety.
This was all noticed and reported on in Southern papers.
Look, you can't go on the record with a mass expression of support for the proposition that I hope you all die, without tearing the social fabric in two.
That's what happened. It happened, it's in the historical record, historians do not debate this point. Why do you?
Lincoln .... not only loudly condemned John Brown, once elected he guaranteed the south that he would not disturb their "institution."
Yes, he condemned Brown. Some did -- but not nearly enough. He had given money to the freesoilers in Kansas, again with the proviso that his contribution be used for peaceable politicking instead -- but Henry Ward Beecher sent Sharps carbines to Kansas, hence "Beecher's Bibles".
Considering how closely Lincoln played his cards to the vest, and considering moreover that "somehow" all the slaves were emancipated without compensation, and that "somehow" all the Southern States' governments were "reorganized" by the United States Army and their white citizens disenfranchised ... considering everything that actually happened at Lincoln's orders, how can you for a minute maintain the fairy story that Lincoln's real objective was merely exclusion of slavery from the Territories, and not its abolition and the political neutering and helotization of the South?
See my reply to our friend Colonel Kangaroo above. I thought Alexander Stephens was "more right" than the secessionists; but they also had to think, and were thinking, about the future and what might befall the Southern States under a government whose Executive and deliberative branches were controlled by a hostile party united against them.
As to the abolition of slavery which required an amendment to the constitution, it could not have passed the 2/3 requirement in Congress or the 3/4 requirement of states had the south not withdrawn from the union. In fact even today, with the opposition of 15 states, it could not be ratified. That is just a damn silly argument.
Again, see my post above about the "small states" idea (lower-case 's' -- dwarf states under a wholly new political dispensation like we have today) above, and Lincoln's plan to create a host of Nevada-like states to rubber-stamp his political party's program, when time came to carve it in the granite of constitutional amendments.
All the States, and all the People, lost the Civil War. The slaves turned out for the better, but they have never been free citizens of a free Republic the way the citizens of Jacksonian America were. They've never tasted the whole loaf, and neither has anyone else born since 1865, who didn't have a net worth north of a million dollars, gold (for our purposes, 50,000 Troy oz.).
Abolition was not in the realm of possibility in 1860-61.
What an unfortunate statement, assassinated in embryo by brutal history.
Abolition was exactly what happened -- accompanied by the degradation and impoverishment of everyone who had fought to oppose it, and the deaths of many, many thousands of those.
As a prefatory remark, Madison's career as a constitutional authority is divided into three parts: the Philadelphia and ratification convention period, when he collaborated with Hamilton and Jay on the Federalist project; the Virginia (Kentucky) Resolutions period ten years later, when he and Jefferson defended the rights of the States against the Federalists' Alien and Sedition Acts (written iirc by Hamilton, or his friends); and the Nullification Crisis period, to which the letter you quote belongs, when Madison agreed more with Andrew Jackson's position and became again the Federalist of the first period.
Thanks for specifying the date of the letter, which is important to understanding what Madison wrote; because over a period of 40+ years, small differences and inconsistencies in emphasis can be found on which an entire argument can swing either way.
Continued below.
You look at the end of the story and in true conspiratial fashion assume that all events were planned in detail years before those events took place.
That is not the way history works. The bottom line is that without unilateral secession, history would have been quite different.
Here in Alabama it has. Our auto industry is putting the yankee auto rust industry of Michigan look silly. If the south was, is, soooooo danged bad, why the heck are all those northern yankees running south too get out of the hell hole of the north and the cold, and the taxes, and the high cost of living???????? Nope, the dopes move here to avoid the high taxes the liberals put on them, only to vote for stinking liberals here and move their garbage of the north into election positions here. VA and NC are two examples of what is happening to us. Florida has more NY and NJ movers in it than it has real home grown Florida folks. Throw in the illegals and a natural born Floridian is rare.
Excellent thread BkMrk for return
The Nullifiers' resistance to the Tariff of Abominations of 1828 (amended 1830) revolved around one simple thought found in the resolutions: that the federal government, as a creature of the People in their States, could not have been and had not been empowered to be the just and reliable arbiter of the extent of its own powers. The wisdom of their reasoning (and the gaminess of John Marshall's) is obvious 180 years later, after numerous encroachments and contumacious decrees about penumbras, interstices, and the infinitely-expanding Commerce Clause; but it isn't constitutional. Articles V and VI of the Constitution apply here, and the "exceptions" clause of Article III, Section 2, which gives the Congress power to curtail the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, as the People's safeguards and guarantees against federal overreaching.
Lastly, if a better and more thorough exposition of the defects of the Nullification Doctrine is wanted, the inaugural speech of Jefferson Davis as president of the provisional government of the Confederacy in 1861 is dispositive. Davis condemns Nullification as unconstitutional under Article VI, the Supremacy Clause, which applies to all States and People in the Union.
Secession is another matter entirely.
Again, I will repeat Mr. Madison's most significant statment in that letter.
-----------------------------------------------------
But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.
------------------------------------------------
Show me what 'Intolerable Oppression' was being committed in 1860-61, and I will agree that the South had a legitimate right to revolution. Absent that, their secession can only be viewed as "a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged."
Didn't you quite rightly take me to task for slamming you and not copying you on the distribution? Hypocrisy thy name is lentulusgracchus.
And considerably smaller than the army that the Davis regime called up.
And you cleverly omit the troops the Yankee States were getting up. Massachusetts had what, three or four regiments ready to go a month after Lincoln's inaugural?
Even if true, that would make the Union army one-sixth the size that the confederate army was authorized to be - plus some militia on state service.
Yeah? You mean Lincoln and Ben Butler and the governor of Illinois? And the Blair family and Nathaniel Lyons?
No, Jeff Davis and his intention to wage war. Which included shipping arms to the rebellious parts of Missouri after the state convention had voted down secession. A hostile act if ever there was one.
But he didn't do that, did he? He sent one ship with troops in it that was driven off...
You're thinking of Buchanan. But your knowledge of the history of the time has always been spotty at best.
...and then he sent the reinforcing expedition under Gustavus Fox that was the trigger for Davis's decision to reduce Sumter.
Lincoln made it clear in his letter to Governor Pickens that his intention was to land food and supplies only, and that men and munitions would be landed only if the supply effort was opposed.
...He also reinforced Ft. Pickens.
Only after Sumter was fired on.
Your argument is flatly disingenuous and misleading. You have known forever that Lincoln moved to reinforce all the southern forts, even while telling Southern governors that he would not do so.
I know that's what you claim. Without foundation.
Lincoln was determined to go on pushing buttons until he got his shooting war.
And yet it was Davis who fired at everything that moved, tried to smuggle arms into disputed states, and called up an army for offensive purposes. If anyone wanted the war it was Davis.
I return my thanks for the copy of your late very powerful Speech in the Senate of the United S. It crushes "nullification" and must hasten the abandonment of "Secession." But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.Madison is in the first place reviewing Webster's speech, which Webster sent him, quite obviously for comment. "[T]his dodges the blow" refers to the speech, about which Madison is complaining gently that Webster has oversimplified the subject of secession in an act of rhetorical overreaching. He is cautioning Webster that secession is a very real remedy, when applied to real wrongs; and therefore Madison is issuing Webster a check or caution on the subject of secession, against lumping it with Nullification. Madison tactfully leaves open the question of whether the Tariff of Abominations and the bitter political wrangle surrounding it constituted a sufficient wrong to justify secession. He is glad, however, that Webster has put down Nullification.
I have a quibble with Madison himself here, in that he is maddeningly inexplicit and because there is no discussion of secession in the Constitution and no guideline, therefore, on what would constitute a proper cause for secession, or a proper procedure. In fact, both the Constitution itself and "Publius" in The Federalist leave the question completely open, leaving constitutional scholars to surmise, as we have discussed on various threads from time to time, quoting them and their quotes of the Framers and other Federal Period leaders, that the founding generation and the Framers themselves always considered secession a live possibility, and legal, and a remedy for abuse.
The dissenting view did not appear until forty years had elapsed, and Andrew Jackson had assumed the Presidency. And it was Jackson, and Webster, who dissented from the received consensus for reasons that are transparently political and attacked the very meaning of the Union in order to enforce their political vision.
But here is Madison again as you quote him, reviewing Webster's speech and its attack on the Carolinians:
Its [i.e., Webster's speech -- LG] double aspect, nevertheless, with the countenance recd from certain quarters, is giving it a popular currency here which may influence the approaching elections both for Congress & for the State Legislature. It has gained some advantage also, by mixing itself with the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partizans. [Emphasis supplied]It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity.
How is this different from what I said, where you quoted me in your own posted reply?
When the Constitution refers to the People, it refers to the People in their States. But the States are not just real estate -- the States ARE the People who live in them, politically and legally speaking, and that is how the Constitution and the Framers constructed the meaning of "the People".
Here is the proof quote from Madison's Federalist No. 39:
First. In order to ascertain the real character of the government, it may be considered in relation to the foundation on which it is to be established; to the sources from which its ordinary powers are to be drawn; to the operation of those powers; to the extent of them; and to the authority by which future changes in the government are to be introduced.
On examining the first relation, it appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a NATIONAL, but a FEDERAL act.
That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a MAJORITY of the people of the Union, nor from that of a MAJORITY of the States. It must result from the UNANIMOUS assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution.
This is the money quote. This is granite. It's bedrock.
Friends of Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln will please note the number of times Madison emphasizes that this is a federal and not a national Act, and a federal not a national constitution and government.
Notice also Madison's assertion of the counterfactual case:
Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority......
This is EXACTLY the case that the apologists for Lincoln assert, counterfactually, that the seceding States would have had to satisfy, in order to secede "legally". That statement is shown here to be very precisely and completely untrue.
You never admitted I was right. Or apologized, or amended your remarks. You never do, unless it serves another of your attacks.
Talibus talis talio. Come and get it, snark boy. We aren't friends.
And lentulusgracchus would do well to note that Mr. Madison is explicitly discussing the ratification of the Constitution, and that he is not pre-emptively justifying secession from the national union created thereby.
Wrong. The first filibusters were in the 1830s, and at least nine are recorded prior to the Civil War. There'd even been an attempt to reform the practice in 1850, which failed.
Well when you're finally right about something I'll be sure to admit it.
Or apologized, or amended your remarks.
Nothing to apolgize for or to amend. You are a legend in your own mind, and could bust nobodies chops.
You never do, unless it serves another of your attacks.
But I did concede that I should have pinged you out of politeness, also noting that it would have been wasted on you. And as it turns out I was right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.