Posted on 07/11/2015 9:54:21 AM PDT by golux
It appears that it is very important to you that I weigh in on whether they think they had a right to secede. Let’s delve into the Constitution. Article III empowers to Courts to review efforts for their Constitutionality. This was detailed in Marbury vs. Madison in 1803.
Since there was obviously a difference of opinion as to whether States could secede, the US Supreme Court should be the one that determined if these actions were constitutional. I cannot remember a case by the Supreme Court declaring secession legal. If you can cite one, I am all ears
Failing the legal route, the secessionist states went the extralegal (or illegal) route. They declared independence, and then at least 5 of the secessionist states, in their various Articles of Secession, explained that they were forced to do this because the rest of the country wouldn’t return their slaves when they ran away, wouldn’t allow them to make slavery legal in the new Territories, and said mean things about them in the press. Also, at some time in the future those mean states MIGHT do something about slavery in the states where it was currently legal.
So, it appears that they did not have the right to secede, based on the reading of the US Constitution. Since they did not have the legal right, they went the military route, starting by an unprovoked attack on Fort Sumter. The rest is history. Since the South didn’t win the war, there is no CSA Constitution declaring their acts were legal to fall back on.
So, to summarize – Right to Secede: no. Reason for Secession: Defense of Slavery.
Which is implicitly creating a "new government." It wouldn't make any sense to keep using the old one, don't you think?
It wasn't the creation of government.
This is self refuting, and needs no further assistance from me.
The AOC (and later the USC) are the foundations for how our republic operates.
The rule books. Right. Still inferior in both moral and legal terms to the Declaration, under the Authority of which the government was actually created.
You seem to be the only one that thinks it is relevant to the issue in dispute which is whether or not they had a legal right to leave.
I do not grasp how it is relevant. If they Had a right to leave, it isn't conditional, and if they didn't have a right to leave, then their reasons don't matter anyway.
You are deluding yourself. Slapping chains on the South is exactly what the Union did. They caught that runaway slave, and they beat him mercilessly.
That would be my reaction too if I saw my beautiful theory being beaten to death by a gang of ruthless facts.
More like bored to death by the same old, same old.
More like bored to death by the same old, same old.
I would suggest that if you don't want your inherent bias pointed out, you don't mention the circumstances of how you obtained it.
YOU WROTE IT.
Don't twist the question. I want you to justify any reasoning for why you think they didn't. I've put forth the proof that they did. I've made my salient argument.
The ball is now in your court to top my legal argument.
Why did they not have the same right to leave as the colonies from Great Britain? It should have been even easier because the Precedent was established by our own government.
So, it appears that they did not have the right to secede, based on the reading of the US Constitution.
The Declaration is legally superior to the Constitution. The Declaration created the nation, and invokes the power of God for it's authority.
The Constitution, in contrast, is the second of two man-made documents outlining the "rules" of how such a government should operate, and is severely inferior to the Declaration in terms of moral and legal authority.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration creates governments. The Constitution merely operates them.
And as has been pointed out to you ad infinitum, The answer to that question makes the reasons irrelevant. Given your answer, who cares about their reasons? They don't have the right to leave anyways!
They are effectively bound by chains, like a slave.
Some people have difficulty grasping a concept the first dozen times you explain it. Some people take even longer.
So I've noticed.
Jefferson had his faults, but he did see clearly that there was a conflict between the principles of the Declaration and the institution of slavery. So did Adams and Franklin. You can't seriously claim that the signers were all slave owners who were okay with slavery. Some of those same signers went home and supported emancipation in their states. Others voted to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory. Jefferson had a hand in that himself.
The Declaration of Independence wasn't a legal document in the same sense that the Constitution or the Bill of Rights are. You can't go to court and demand the unhindered pursuit of happiness -- or at least you couldn't before the Supreme Court started getting involved with sex.
If we started a company we might put out a statement of purpose that wouldn't be as binding as the company by-laws, or our contracts, or the relevant legislation. You couldn't sue me if we're selling luxury goods rather than necessities for the masses as we agreed to do. But because the statement of purpose isn't legally binding in that sense, interpretation about what it means can be and is freer than a formal and binding legal agreement would be.
In other words, just because "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were written by adult, White, propertied men of British Protestant heritage, perhaps with those like themselves in mind. It doesn't follow that the phrase is restricted to people like that and doesn't have a broader meaning applicable to other classes of people. With the Declaration (more so than with the Constitution, I'd say) what you're setting into motion is as important as what your words meant at the time the document was written.
But say, I'm wrong and the Declaration only applies to the conditions of the time and the classes of persons who were involved. Alright, then, but let's interpret the document narrowly all the way around, and not assume that it proposes a right of anyone anywhere to sever relations with an existing government just because they are unhappy.
If you want to argue that the Declaration doesn't provide an argument, say, for slaves to rebel against those who deprive them of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, don't automatically assume that the document justifies slave owners in secession or rebellion or revolution for grievances that are a lot less pressing -- especially when those slave owners have the vote and representation in the legislature that was denied to the colonists of the 1770s or the slaves later on.
To consolidate their political support, the Republicans had used the method of attacking
an outside group, the South, and using slavery as the rationalization.
By its explicit guarantee of property rights against governmental interference, and therefore its implicit guarantees of the right to property in slaves, the constitution ruled out the possibility of a direct attack on the institution of slavery on its home ground.
If a direct confrontation was ruled out, then indirect means had to be found by abolitionists and Republicans. Over the years the slavery issue searched out the weak spots in the work of the Founding fathers. One such spot was found in the provisions for the return of fugitive slaves, but by far the most important lay in the uncertainty of the constitution on the question of slavery in the territories.
This proved to be the fatal point of sectional controversy: it mattered not just in its own right but because it stood for greater and wider issues.
Or so the politicians and newspapers said.
For Southerners, constitutional theory and political reality became one. As more non slave holding states were about to be admitted to the Union, their section became more doomed to a minority position in the Union. Southerners feared being ruled by a hostile majority. No longer would they have the option of compromise with the North.
Many in the press and government gave factual status to the concept that westward expansion was the complicating factor, the one which threatened the survival of slavery. They relegated the increasing division of the two economic and political worlds as secondary factors. The opposite was, in fact, true.
The feigned apprehension of the Northern Abolitionists and their allies, such as Lincoln, that Southern slaveholders would begin to flock northward and westward with their slaves ignored the clear historical fact that slavery had died out in the Northern States and that the slave population had shifted almost entirely to the Gulf States primarily because of the inability of the Negro to acclimatize to the harsh Northern climate and his natural affinity for the near-tropical climate of the deep South.
There was absolutely no reason at all for Southern plantation owners to move North with their slaves, and they had no inclination to do so. There was also no real inclination for most slaveholders to migrate into the Territories: They demanded a right which they could not actively use — the legal right to carry slaves where few would or could be taken. The one side fought rancorously for what it was bound to get without fighting; the other, with equal rancor, contended for what in the nature of things it could never use.
Consequently, the whole controversy over the expansion of slavery into the territories was rapidly becoming a phony issue.
Slavery was dying in the rest of the world. It had little chance of spreading further into new territories of the continent. If slavery spread, then it would take the slaves out of the United States.
Slavery had reached the limits imposed on its expansion by geography and climate, as Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah amply showed. The census of 1860 revealed that there were precisely two slaves in Kansas, and only a handful more in all the remaining territories. Even the Congressional Republicans had recognized that slavery posed no real threat in the territories, when, early in 1861, they provided for the organization of the new territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without any ban on slavery.
North and South were not divided by their mutual racism. Slavery was not a genuine issue and there was no need to go to war over it. The men of 1860-1 allowed an academic argument about an imaginary negro in an impossible place to end in a bloody civil war.
If the question was merely one of slavery in the territories, then competent political leadership would have been able to cope with it.
Instead, the Northern political class, seeing that the South was steadily becoming a minority in the United States, remained frustrated at the South's ability to cling to power. Not merely was the Northern stand against the threat of slavery in the territories a straw man argument and designed to inflame passions, but Northern expressions of moral repugnance towards slavery were nonsense, arising more out of totalitarian excess than logic.
“The Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State.” James Buchanan
So you would disagree with this also?
I'm sure it kept them up late at night, and took all the fun out of their parties.
Seriously, I don't know how to respond to this. The fact that they kept slaves places them overwhelmingly in the practicality over principle category.
Some of those same signers went home and supported emancipation in their states. Others voted to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory.Others voted to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory. Jefferson had a hand in that himself.
You give him too little credit. Jefferson gave a massive boost to the whole movement. The insertion of those five words, unnecessary to the main point of the document, were the impetus that propelled Abolition into the majority. Jefferson was the midwife of abolition.
The Declaration of Independence wasn't a legal document in the same sense that the Constitution or the Bill of Rights are.
No, it wasn't. It was the mother of the other two governing documents. It was on a different, higher plane of authority. If the Declaration had not been true, the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution would not exist. If it be not true, then the nation's very existence is illegitimate.
You can't go to court and demand the unhindered pursuit of happiness -
It first mentions the more tangible rights of "Life" and "Liberty".
But because the statement of purpose isn't legally binding in that sense, interpretation about what it means can be and is freer than a formal and binding legal agreement would be.
The Declaration is nothing like that. It is a foundational statement. It is a "cognito ergo sum" of legal documents. It is the principle under which all subsequent and inferior legal documents acquire their authority. It is the creation of the US Legal system. It is the "let there be light" of a nation's existence.
In other words, just because "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were written by adult, White, propertied men of British Protestant heritage, perhaps with those like themselves in mind. It doesn't follow that the phrase is restricted to people like that and doesn't have a broader meaning applicable to other classes of people.
It doesn't follow from the specific words, but it axiomatically follows from their subsequent deeds and concurrent behavior.
As Jefferson said of the US Constitution:
"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Should we not apply his own dictum to his own creation?
.
Alright, then, but let's interpret the document narrowly all the way around, and not assume that it proposes a right of anyone anywhere to sever relations with an existing government just because they are unhappy.
.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
"Legitimate Reasons" are in the eye of the beholder. What may appear legitimate to one person may not appear legitimate to another, but it stands to reason that it should be the opinions of the people who wish to leave, rather than the opinions of those who want to force them to stay, that carry the weightier position. The British didn't think much of the Colonists reasons either, but we adhere to the precedent they established in not concerning ourselves with what the larger body felt were good reasons, and accepting the Colonists opinions as the stronger argument.
If you want to argue that the Declaration doesn't provide an argument, say, for slaves to rebel against those who deprive them of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, don't automatically assume that the document justifies slave owners in secession or rebellion or revolution for grievances that are a lot less pressing -- especially when those slave owners have the vote and representation in the legislature that was denied to the colonists of the 1770s or the slaves later on.
The Declaration, as a statement of principle, very much supports the slaves right to throw off their masters. I think this is why it was so effective in spurring the Abolition movement to greater popularity.
But your argument is a tu quoque. That one person in doing evil, does not justify another person in doing evil.
But you are rushing off in two opposite directions. You're praising the Declaration as the "let there be light" of a nation's existence" and arguing that its meaning is circumscribed by its origins as a narrow, shallow document signed by slave owners.
You're admitting the great impetus that the Declaration of Independence gave to emancipation movement, yet somehow arguing that it was illegitimate or irrelevant. But clearly, if the Declaration did encourage anti-slavery movement, one can't argue that whatever it was that encouraged opposition to slavery somehow wasn't a part of its meaning.
You're admitting that the Declaration gives support to slaves who would seek freedom. You're not making reference to any support secessionist slaveowners would derive from the Declaration. And you're assuming that this leaves you with of an argument, because you can throw out a Latin phrase like "tu quoque."
I don't know if I missed the beginning of the argument and don't know just what it is that you're talking about, or if you're irrational and just talking in circles.
Since only some wanted to KEEEP it , lets just limit the number of states
You state that “the Declaration is legally superior to the Constitution”. Exactly which orifice or your body did you pull this legal doctrine out of? If you could show me where (anywhere) the US Supreme Court made this ruling, I would be really (really) appreciative.
I will tell you why the colonies had the right to leave Great Britain. They won. In an earlier age it would have been said that, by winning, they had God’s grace. The CSA, on the other hand, lost.
You say “They are effectively bound by chains, like a slave.”
You say that like it was a bad thing. The states that seceded obviously did not agree, as that was why they seceded.
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