Posted on 12/24/2024 12:46:17 PM PST by Eleutheria5
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Secondly, they spelled it out explicitly so that there would be no question that each state had the right of unilateral secession.
LOL.
That itself begs the big question. If unilateral secession is such an unquestionable right, why wasn’t it spelled out in the Constitution itself in no uncertain terms. And don’t give me the Tenth Amendment. That is vague as they come.
“You’re not my dad anymore! I wanted to go to that rock concert with my girlfriend, and I don’t need no f@#$ing chaperone! How will I get my hands up her shirt with you standing over us! Now I hereby declare my room a free and independent nation. If Jessica wants to spend the night in there with me, it’s none of your business. I’m 14 for f@#$ sake!”
The Lost Cause theory of the Civil War dates from after the conflict was long over. The constitutional claims of the Lost Cause have neither legal merit nor any sound basis in the thinking of the country or the South before the Civil War. As it was, most Secessionists believed that there would not be a war, or that if it came, it would swiftly result in the defeat of the North and acceptance of the Confederacy as an accomplished fact.
If you rue the influence of Charles Beard, You might consult the work of Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips, most of which was published before Beard. In contradiction to the Lost Cause, Phillips saw race as being at the heart of the conflict, with a decisive core of Southerners determined to maintain slavery for the sake of white European civilization.
A progressive in his era, Phillips' work found plantation slavery as mostly unprofitable and doomed to failure before the advance of industrialization. Phillips also considered slavery wrong but often benign in application. Historians Eugene Genovese and C. Vann Woodward both considered Phillips' work as indispensable even if flawed.
I recommend Genovese's widely acclaimed Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1975. A Marxist at the time, Genovese pointed out the paternalistic, pre-capitalist aspects of slavery permitted the development of a distinct culture that humanized and improved the lives of the slaves.
Shifting to the right in the 1990s, Genovese published The Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism, an appreciative account of the Southern Agrarians from a traditionalist conservative perspective.
LOL
You have it exactly backwards. A right or power does not need to be spelled out for the states to have it. It needs to be spelled out for the federal government to have it.
“You’re not my dad anymore! I wanted to go to that rock concert with my girlfriend, and I don’t need no f@#$ing chaperone! How will I get my hands up her shirt with you standing over us! Now I hereby declare my room a free and independent nation. If Jessica wants to spend the night in there with me, it’s none of your business. I’m 14 for f@#$ sake!”
Do some reading and try to grasp the difference between a sovereign and an individual. Every example you cite is of individuals. If you wanted a more apt analogy it would be like the UN trying to tell the US it couldn't leave.......uhhhh....beg pardon? We're leaving and we will use deadly force to defend our right to do so if attacked. THAT would be an appropriate analogy. The US never delegated to the UN the power to prevent any sovereign country from leaving.
I didn't know you wanted grad school. I got my JD at Cal Western in San Diego in 1997 and my MBA from Thunderbird in 2000.
The Lost Cause theory of the Civil War dates from after the conflict was long over. The constitutional claims of the Lost Cause have neither legal merit nor any sound basis in the thinking of the country or the South before the Civil War.
Yes I'm aware of the Dunning school blah blah blah. You are wrong about the constitutional arguments though....and don't bother with Texas v White after the war decided by a majority Lincoln appointed SCOTUS. They were hardly going to rule against the federal government at that point.
We both know that 3 states expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession at the time of ratification. Every other state saw that example and understood it too had that right under the Comity principle. Nowhere in the Constitution did the states delegate the power to prevent secession to the federal government. The whole cut and thrust of the federalist papers was to the effect that the federal government was of strictly limited and specifically enumerated powers. Again, nowhere in the document was the power to prevent secession mentioned. Nobody at the time even claimed that ratification with the expressly reserved right to unilateral secession was in any way defective or inconsistent with the Constitution.
As it was, most Secessionists believed that there would not be a war, or that if it came, it would swiftly result in the defeat of the North and acceptance of the Confederacy as an accomplished fact.
True. And Lincoln and the Corporate Fatcats who bankrolled his campaign and who were screaming for ever higher tariffs believed the whole thing would be over very quickly and with almost no bloodshed. Remember Lincoln only called for 75,000 volunteers and only for 90 days.
If you rue the influence of Charles Beard,
I don't rue the influence of Charles Beard. In fact, I think he was right about the vast majority of his analysis.
You might consult the work of Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips, most of which was published before Beard. In contradiction to the Lost Cause, Phillips saw race as being at the heart of the conflict, with a decisive core of Southerners determined to maintain slavery for the sake of white European civilization.
People even at the time had differing opinions on both sides. I can tell you Jefferson Davis as well as many of the thought leaders in the Southern as well as Northern states as well as many international observers were of the opinion that it was about tariffs and federal expenditures and not slavery. Slavery was one issue Lincoln and the North were quite prepared to compromise over. He offered the Corwin Amendment and strengthened fugitive slave laws.
Over and above that, as Lincoln pointed out, secession surely meant the rapid end of slavery. With a 1500 mile border from the northern Atlantic border of South Carolina to El Paso Texas on the Rio Grande, only a few million White Southerners and no modern technology, there was no prospect of stopping slaves....especially the most young, fit and economically productive ones...from pouring over the border into what would now be a foreign country (the USA). A country which would have owed the CSA no benefits and protections of the Fugitive Slave Clause of the US Constitution. ie those escaped slaves would have been free. Lincoln was not the first to express this thought but nobody could really refute it. Secession meant the rapid end of slavery. Slavery was only safe for the time being within the US with its constitutional protection for it.
A progressive in his era, Phillips' work found plantation slavery as mostly unprofitable and doomed to failure before the advance of industrialization. Phillips also considered slavery wrong but often benign in application. Historians Eugene Genovese and C. Vann Woodward both considered Phillips' work as indispensable even if flawed.
Its clear from looking at events around the western world that slavery was doomed. Over the course of 75 years it ended in every western country and throughout the European colonial empires. Industrialization was killing it off. Slavery was incompatible with industrialization and was not profitable as a whole. It only "worked" to the extent that it did if you could privatize the profits and socialize the costs (ie policing and catching and returning escaped slaves). In only one place in the Western Hemisphere + Europe + the European colonial empires was the ending of slavery even associated with a major bloodbath in the 19th century.
I recommend Genovese's widely acclaimed Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1975. A Marxist at the time, Genovese pointed out the paternalistic, pre-capitalist aspects of slavery permitted the development of a distinct culture that humanized and improved the lives of the slaves. Shifting to the right in the 1990s, Genovese published The Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism, an appreciative account of the Southern Agrarians from a traditionalist conservative perspective.
Thx, I'll look this up.
“You have it exactly backwards. A right or power does not need to be spelled out for the states to have it. It needs to be spelled out for the federal government to have it.”
So if a state says it has the right to gang rape all tourists foolish enough to enter its domain a la Deliverance, that right is implicit in the Tenth Amendment? The fact that those few states that declared they had the right to secede felt compelled to state the existence of that right reserved as a condition for joining the “more perfect union” means that it is not an intrinsic right for all the other states who did not so state it. Otherwise, why state it? It’s a part of the bundle of state’s rights generally alluded to in the Tenth. Isn’t it?
The 13 original states that ratified the Constitution “in order to form a more perfect union” were not separate nations. They were separate chartered colonies of the British Empire, all of whom shared a language, a culture, and similar histories, as well as grievances against the Crown, and one of the big worries expounded on at length in the Federalist Papers was the fear that the loose confederation under which they had prosecuted the Revolution was too loose, and with so little power in the Federal government, they were liable to go to war with each other, if they were not severally united under a strong central authority with enumerated powers. A constitutional right to unilateral secession would have turned that concern on its head.
The southern states that seceded did so for light and transient causes, as is evidenced by the fact that several slave states refused to secede, and several regions in the secessionist states seceded from those states, which according to you would also be their right, and if Philadelphia and Pittsburgh decided to secede from Pennsylvania, because they were tired of being lumped in with those dumb hicks in Bucks County, they could do that, too.
The Spartans and Megarians seceded from the Athenian empire, which is exactly my point. Greek democracy degenerated into warring city states, because there was no central power to which they all owed allegiance, and the Athenians, when they tried to assert them, were violently rebuffed. So they ended up so intent on their regional strife that the Persians moved in and sacked Athens but good.
As it says in the Federalist Papers in reference to regional conflicts such as the War Between the States, or the Whiskey Rebellion or the Kansas-Missouri Border War, the Union would become “deadly to none but each other”. That is exactly WHY secession cannot be the unilateral right of any state.
“The US never delegated to the UN the power to prevent any sovereign country from leaving.”
The UN is a voluntary association of independent states, not a national union that has stood the test of centuries. What’s more important, their pathetic excuse for an armed enforcement force has no power whatever. They couldn’t make mud out of sand, just strongly worded letters. Supposing the US decided to leave the UN. How would they stop you?
When Shea rebelled against the Whiskey Tax, and more to the point, when John Brown went about murdering slave owners in their beds, the federal government stepped in, and in the latter case sent in General Robert E. Lee to stop him! The Confederacy was no different, except on a larger scale than John Brown’s raids. It was secession from the laws and norms of the United States for a light and transient cause, and the United States is (note the singular) “one nation under G-d with liberty and justice for all”.
The Declaration of Independence set the tone for all revolutions, the enforcement mechanism for a breach of the social contract by the central government. The process is preferably an Amendment to the Constitution ratified by the states permitting the proposed secession, or pursuant to the secession clauses provided by those states who had the foresight to enact them at the founding, or by force of arms. The South went straight to the force of arms route, which is meant to be a last resort, and they gambled and lost.
No as per the terms of the 14th amendment. The states are bound by Federal constitutional rights.
The fact that those few states that declared they had the right to secede felt compelled to state the existence of that right reserved as a condition for joining the “more perfect union” means that it is not an intrinsic right for all the other states who did not so state it. Otherwise, why state it? It’s a part of the bundle of state’s rights generally alluded to in the Tenth. Isn’t it?
Why explicitly state it? To prevent some unscrupulous politician later coming along and claiming they don't have that right. If the states did not delegate a right or power to the federal government, then they retained it. That was their understanding at the time of ratification. That's what was clearly stated in the federalist papers. Just to make sure everybody understood the point, they passed the 10th amendment which says exactly that.
The 13 original states that ratified the Constitution “in order to form a more perfect union” were not separate nations. They were separate chartered colonies of the British Empire, all of whom shared a language, a culture, and similar histories, as well as grievances against the Crown, and one of the big worries expounded on at length in the Federalist Papers was the fear that the loose confederation under which they had prosecuted the Revolution was too loose, and with so little power in the Federal government, they were liable to go to war with each other, if they were not severally united under a strong central authority with enumerated powers. A constitutional right to unilateral secession would have turned that concern on its head.
After the 1783 Treaty of Paris they were no longer crown colonies. They were sovereign states. Their sovereignty was recognized individually by name. Had they intended to delegate a power to the federal government to prevent secession, they would have done so. They did not. The Constitution was an experiment. Everybody called it that and understood it to be that. It was not a death pact. They were not shackling themselves to the newly created federal government forever.
The southern states that seceded did so for light and transient causes, as is evidenced by the fact that several slave states refused to secede,
The fact that some states chose not to secede in no way evidences that the states which did choose to secede did so for transient causes. They simply made a different choice.
and several regions in the secessionist states seceded from those states, which according to you would also be their right, ,/P>
False. I have told you over and over again that regions are not sovereign. Survivalists on a hilltop are not sovereign. Counties are not sovereign. Cities are not sovereign. States are sovereign.
and if Philadelphia and Pittsburgh decided to secede from Pennsylvania, because they were tired of being lumped in with those dumb hicks in Bucks County, they could do that, too.
No they could not - at least not legally. They are not sovereign. Pennsylvania is.
The Spartans and Megarians seceded from the Athenian empire, which is exactly my point. Greek democracy degenerated into warring city states, because there was no central power to which they all owed allegiance, and the Athenians, when they tried to assert them, were violently rebuffed. So they ended up so intent on their regional strife that the Persians moved in and sacked Athens but good.
Well actually the Delian League started out as a voluntary confederacy of city states. The Athenians cleverly arranged for the other city states to pay money and Athens would provide the muscle. Once their strength was sufficient, the league became no longer voluntary - it became an oppressive Athenian Empire. They they declared war on Sparta and touched off the Peloponnesian war....which Athens lost.
As it says in the Federalist Papers in reference to regional conflicts such as the War Between the States, or the Whiskey Rebellion or the Kansas-Missouri Border War, the Union would become “deadly to none but each other”. That is exactly WHY secession cannot be the unilateral right of any state.
The federalist papers make it clear that the union is VOLUNTARY and is based on CONSENT.
“...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.... 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” (Federalist 39).' James Madison
Hell, even Lincoln himself thought Secession was a great and wonderful thing....until the corporate donors who backed his campaign explained to him how much money the Northern states would be missing out on if their cash cows - the Southern states - left.
“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848 in a speech in the US House of Representatives.
“The US never delegated to the UN the power to prevent any sovereign country from leaving.” The UN is a voluntary association of independent states, not a national union that has stood the test of centuries.
LOL! That's exactly what the US is. A voluntary association of independent states.
What’s more important, their pathetic excuse for an armed enforcement force has no power whatever. They couldn’t make mud out of sand, just strongly worded letters. Supposing the US decided to leave the UN. How would they stop you?
They'd have to have other member states send their militias.....errrr...their national armies....to do the fighting.....kinda like the federal government had to do in 1861 because the US Army was tiny.
When Shea rebelled against the Whiskey Tax, and more to the point, when John Brown went about murdering slave owners in their beds, the federal government stepped in, and in the latter case sent in General Robert E. Lee to stop him!
Great but one was a violent tax protest against a state (Mass.) The other was a terrorist attack on a federal armory.
The Confederacy was no different, except on a larger scale than John Brown’s raids.
Au Contraire as our French Friends would say. Secession was the right of each sovereign state and was lawfully carried out by 7 states until Lincoln chose to start a war over it. That eventually caused 5 more states to secede.
It was secession from the laws and norms of the United States for a light and transient cause, and the United States is (note the singular) “one nation under G-d with liberty and justice for all”.
It was lawful secession from the US for a cause sovereign states deemed sufficient which is all the justification they needed to exercise their sovereign right. BTW, the pledge of allegiance was invented by a socialist in the late 19th century. Nobody was saying that at the time the constitution was ratified.
The Declaration of Independence set the tone for all revolutions, the enforcement mechanism for a breach of the social contract by the central government. The process is preferably an Amendment to the Constitution ratified by the states permitting the proposed secession, or pursuant to the secession clauses provided by those states who had the foresight to enact them at the founding, or by force of arms.
No. The Colonies were not sovereign and their secession in 1776 was clearly illegal. Their cause won, their sovereignty was recognized in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. There is no need for a constitutional amendment to allow states to secede. That is a right they have always retained from the start since they nowhere granted the power to prevent it to the federal government. Under the Comity Principle if one state has that right, all states have that right since they were all equal parties to the contract.
The South went straight to the force of arms route, which is meant to be a last resort, and they gambled and lost.
Wrong again. The South democratically and lawfully seceded. Lincoln chose war. He did so to prevent the North's cash cows from leaving - not for any moral or constitutional principle. That war like the vast majority of all wars, was simply about money and power.
The funny thing with the Beards is that later editions and elaborations of their work were less driven by economics and more traditional and ideological in their interpretation of American history. Moreover, the conservative historian Forrest McDonald demolished Beardian progressivism in his Ph.D. thesis in the mid-1950s.
Sometimes sleeping in his car as an impecunious grad student student, McDonald went to archives and libraries finding obscure letters and diaries that recorded the innermost thoughts of the South's delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He showed convincingly that their thinking and advocacy were rooted in ideas, not economics. By the early 1970s, the Beardian interpretation was in ruins due to the work of McDonald and other mostly conservative historians.
In any event, the notion of an implicit unspoken right to secession in the Constitution is insupportable. No credible historian believes it. Nor do any believe that the Civil War was about tariffs instead of slavery. If I am mistaken, please show me which historians in what published works hold to such views.
I'd say the problem with PC Revisionism is that its just a rehash of wartime propaganda ie the all about slavery myth pushed by Leftists because it suits their politics. (ie America is a racist country, the most conservative part - ie the South - is especially racist, everything about America's and especially the South's history and culture is terrible, wicked, racist, awful blah blah blah...in short an effort to demoralize in order to pave the way to global socialism).
Granted, there was bickering in Congress over tariffs and adjustments before the Civil War, but the issue was minor compared to that of enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Acts and the secessionist desire for a new nation founded on slavery and race.
Oh I disagree. Fights over tariffs and government expenditures went hand in hand with fights over slavery. Slavery was for many a proxy for this power struggle over economics. After all, slavery was the thing the Northern states were quite prepared to compromise over. What they most wanted was for the cash to keep flowing northward. For many if not most Southerners, it was the same. What they opposed was what they rightly perceived to be their economic exploitation by the Northern states. Remember only 5.67% of the total White population in the Southern states even owned slaves. Of those, half owned fewer than 5. The large slaveowners on big plantations were truly the exception, not the rule as far as Southern society goes - though much attention has been focused on them.
The funny thing with the Beards is that later editions and elaborations of their work were less driven by economics and more traditional and ideological in their interpretation of American history. Moreover, the conservative historian Forrest McDonald demolished Beardian progressivism in his Ph.D. thesis in the mid-1950s.
LOL! My favorite historian beat up your favorite historian! C'mon. That's laughable. I'd point you to tax expert Charles Adams book When in the Course of Human Events for a detailed examination of the tariffs, who paid them and what the effects were in antebellum America.
Sometimes sleeping in his car as an impecunious grad student student, McDonald went to archives and libraries finding obscure letters and diaries that recorded the innermost thoughts of the South's delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He showed convincingly that their thinking and advocacy were rooted in ideas, not economics. By the early 1970s, the Beardian interpretation was in ruins due to the work of McDonald and other mostly conservative historians.
What those at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were thinking doesn't even begin to address what Southerners especially were thinking 30-50-60 years later. The Beardian interpretation was largely correct as a number of libertarian authors have shown since the 1990s.
In any event, the notion of an implicit unspoken right to secession in the Constitution is insupportable. No credible historian believes it. Nor do any believe that the Civil War was about tariffs instead of slavery.
That is simply false. It would be closer to the truth to say there are precious few in the leftist dominated history faculty today who will differ from PC Revisionist dogma on these issues. Then again, if they did differ, if they had a different historical interpretation, they never would have been hired in the first place and if one slipped through, he would have been denied tenure. This is how Leftists came to utterly dominate Academia today.
If I am mistaken, please show me which historians in what published works hold to such views.
I don't find most within Academia today to be credible historians. The best analysis has come from outside the Academy as well as from earlier historians before Leftists took over Academia.
“No as per the terms of the 14th amendment. The states are bound by Federal constitutional rights.”
Oh. You mean the ante-Bellum 14th Amendment./s
And your point is????
We are talking about the state of rights prior to the War Between the States. You maintain that the right to unilaterally secede was implicit in the 10th Amendment. I maintain that there was no such animal, unless provided for in the individual states’ case as a condition of their entry into the Union, or specifically ratified like an amendment to the Constitution, or by force of arms.
Prior to the ratification of the 14th Amendment, there was no constitutional provision for civil rights in the states, just the 14th Amendment, and whatever the individual state had in its constitution, so your reference to the 14th Amendment is out of place.
If New Hampshire had enshrined in its constitution, prior to the 14th’s ratification, a right to gang rape tourists, well, then, by gum they’d live free or die to get a piece of any tourist who had purty eyes. 10th Amendment said so, per your line of reasoning, just like the right to unilaterally secede. This despite the very clear concern about wars between states discussed in the Federalist at length. The 10th Amendment was not meant to be a catch-all for every notion of a right that occurs to an individual state or to the people, and not mentioned in the federal constitution.
“Why explicitly state it? To prevent some unscrupulous politician later coming along and claiming they don’t have that right. If the states did not delegate a right or power to the federal government, then they retained it. That was their understanding at the time of ratification. That’s what was clearly stated in the federalist papers. Just to make sure everybody understood the point, they passed the 10th amendment which says exactly that.”
Yes, rights reserved to the states or the people. And if Philadelphia wanted to secede, that’s a right not stated in the Constitution, and reserved to the people of Philadelphia, though the state of Pennsylvania might object.
“After the 1783 Treaty of Paris they were no longer crown colonies. They were sovereign states. “
What part of time lines don’t you comprehend. You believe there was a 14th Amendment before there was a 14th Amendment. You believe that the 13 colonies prior to the Revolution became sovereign states because of the 1783 treaty signed after the Revolution. Originally, before the Stamp Act and the Tea Party and all that jazz, they were part of one unified nation, colonies of England. Afterwards, there was a treaty recognizing they were no longer colonies of England, but that does not change their origin. At the Constitutional Convention, the former colonies decided to organize themselves under a federalist system, with matters of local concern, such as taxation, marriage, transfer of real estate, under the jurisdiction of the state and local government, and federal matters, such as interstate commerce, printing of money and diplomacy the province of the federal goverrnment. But that didn’t change their essential nature as fellow countrymen.
“False. I have told you over and over again that regions are not sovereign. Survivalists on a hilltop are not sovereign. Counties are not sovereign. Cities are not sovereign. States are sovereign.”
Oh, so allegiance by states to a federal government is optional, but states have a stranglehold on counties and municipalities? Seems to me that what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander, and a state shouldn’t be held together by rifles and bayonets. If Philadelphia wants to form its own state, it should be allowed to. That’s a right reserved to the people, since it’s not a specifically enumerated power of the federal government. Don’t be two-tiered FLT, now. 10th amendment. 10th amendment.
In practice, that’s exactly what has happened. North and South Dakota split off from each other. West Virginia split off from Virginia. A few counties in eastern California want to secede and join their neighboring state. During the lead up to the War Between the States, New York City wanted to become a neutral open city, trading with both North and South, the conflict notwithstanding, and that was a near thing.
At any rate, slavery was problematic, because of necessity it involved the federal government. Fugitive slaves had to be returned to their masters, who had the right to enter a free state to apprehend them, and local law enforcement had to cooperate with this. Thus, the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Slaves were trafficked from state to state due to the industrialization of king cotton, which made it big business, not just a “peculiar institution” that bothered no one outside of the states in which it existed. This all led to the Dredd Scott decision, and the Kansas/Missouri border war, sparked by the election fraud practiced by Missourians on Kansas to make it a slave state. The Kansans objected to the “claim jumping”. The bushwhackers, such as Frank and Jesse James and the Youngers burnt down Lawrence, Kansas and generally committed mass murder, earning the title Bloody Kansas, and the jayhawkers, such as John Brown, retaliated by killing and maiming in Kansas and Missouri. That is where the Civil War really started getting hot, before Lincoln was even elected. House divided against itself, and all that.
Assassinating Lincoln earlier would not have prevented the war, anymore than assassinating Trump would have kept the Democrats in power. There were fundamental issues that had to be resolved back then, just as there are fundamental issues to be resolved now. It was not about Lincoln then, any more than it is about Trump now, returning to the start of this sub-thread. Assassinating him prior to his election would have precipitated an even worse war. Assassinating him after a long, bloody war instead resulted in three constitutional amendments emancipating slaves and enfranchising them, and another century of confusion and violence resulting in part from those amendments.
BTW, it’s been loads of fun, though time consuming. I thank you for the challenge.
Not quite. I maintain the states nowhere delegated to the federal government the power to prevent a state from seceding (which they clearly didn't). The 10th amendment was passed as part of the bill of rights to make it explicit that any powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved by the states.
I maintain that there was no such animal, unless provided for in the individual states’ case as a condition of their entry into the Union, or specifically ratified like an amendment to the Constitution, or by force of arms.
Yes. You have it backwards. You seem to think all powers not granted to the states like gifts by the federal government belong to the all powerful federal government.
Prior to the ratification of the 14th Amendment, there was no constitutional provision for civil rights in the states, just the 14th Amendment, and whatever the individual state had in its constitution, so your reference to the 14th Amendment is out of place.
I disagree. Prior to the 14th amendment a state could say that a right granted under the US Constitution did not apply in that state if at odds with the state constitution. The 14th made it clear that the US Constitution applies to both the federal government and the states.
If New Hampshire had enshrined in its constitution, prior to the 14th’s ratification, a right to gang rape tourists, well, then, by gum they’d live free or die to get a piece of any tourist who had purty eyes. 10th Amendment said so, per your line of reasoning, just like the right to unilaterally secede. This despite the very clear concern about wars between states discussed in the Federalist at length.
The right of a state to unilaterally secede does not conflict with any right under the bill of rights such as denial of due process of law, a ban on cruel and unusual punishment, etc which your example certainly would.
The 10th Amendment was not meant to be a catch-all for every notion of a right that occurs to an individual state or to the people, and not mentioned in the federal constitution.
Wrong. That's exactly what the 10th amendment is.
No. Cities are not sovereign. States are. Cities are not recognized under the constitution and are not parties to it - States are. A state derives its power from no other source. It exercises power in its own right. A city derives its power from the state. The state can take away a city or counties' power any time it chooses to. eg law enforcement power. There are examples of states having done so. For example one little town in Florida was a notorious speed trap. They wrote an outrageous amount of tickets for even going one mile over the speed limit and they altered the speed limit multiple times to try to catch people....because they could pocket the money from those tickets and they were using it as a revenue raising device. The state government found out about this and stripped the town's police of their ability to write traffic tickets entirely. No more. From now on, the state troopers would have to do so, not the town cops. Can they do that? Absolutely! The town's powers are entirely derived from the state. The state is sovereign. The town is not.
What part of time lines don’t you comprehend. You believe there was a 14th Amendment before there was a 14th Amendment.
No I don't. I don't argue a state was bound by the 14th amendment before its passage.
You believe that the 13 colonies prior to the Revolution became sovereign states because of the 1783 treaty signed after the Revolution.
Again, no I don't. Please read more carefully or show me where I said that.
Originally, before the Stamp Act and the Tea Party and all that jazz, they were part of one unified nation, colonies of England. Afterwards, there was a treaty recognizing they were no longer colonies of England, but that does not change their origin.
It did not change their origin. It did change their legal status.
At the Constitutional Convention, the former colonies decided to organize themselves under a federalist system, with matters of local concern, such as taxation, marriage, transfer of real estate, under the jurisdiction of the state and local government, and federal matters, such as interstate commerce, printing of money and diplomacy the province of the federal goverrnment. But that didn’t change their essential nature as fellow countrymen.
They did not meet to determine matters like marriage or transfer of real estate. Those were and remained exclusively under the powers of each state. They were citizens of 13 independent countries only loosely allied under the Articles of Confederation. They had a common origin but they weren't really countrymen at that point.
Oh, so allegiance by states to a federal government is optional, but states have a stranglehold on counties and municipalities? Seems to me that what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander, and a state shouldn’t be held together by rifles and bayonets.
but it is. There is no treaty or agreement under which Akron is united with Ohio. Akron is simply part of Ohio and exercises no power in its own right. All powers exercised by Akron are powers on loan from the state of Ohio which is sovereign. The state may strip Akron of any or all of the powers it exercises any time the state chooses to do so.
If Philadelphia wants to form its own state, it should be allowed to. That’s a right reserved to the people, since it’s not a specifically enumerated power of the federal government. Don’t be two-tiered FLT, now. 10th amendment. 10th amendment.
See again, cities are not sovereign. States are.
In practice, that’s exactly what has happened.
You could argue that's what happened prior to 1783. After that however, the 13 original states were recognized as being free and independent by Treaty.
North and South Dakota split off from each other.
They were territories and not states. Congress had the power to organize territories into new states as it saw fit.
West Virginia split off from Virginia.
Not legally. See Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1; The "Admissions Clause" which states that "No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State" without the consent of the affected state legislatures and Congress."
Did they obtain the consent of the Virginia legislature? No they did not. Thus unconstitutional.
A few counties in eastern California want to secede and join their neighboring state. And Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington want to join the state of Idaho. Also Northern California north of Oakland wants to split off and become the state of Jefferson. The 3 westernmost counties of Maryland want to split off and join West Virginia. The rest of Virginia would love expel the 3 counties of Occupied Northern Virginia I think the rest of Illinois would nuke Chicago if they could. I'm sympathetic to all of them but they are not sovereign and would need to obtain the consent of the state legislature in each case and that's never going to be forthcoming.
At any rate, slavery was problematic, because of necessity it involved the federal government. Fugitive slaves had to be returned to their masters, who had the right to enter a free state to apprehend them, and local law enforcement had to cooperate with this. Thus, the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Slaves were trafficked from state to state due to the industrialization of king cotton, which made it big business, not just a “peculiar institution” that bothered no one outside of the states in which it existed. This all led to the Dredd Scott decision,
All true.
and the Kansas/Missouri border war, sparked by the election fraud practiced by Missourians on Kansas to make it a slave state.
"bleeding Kansas" involved some very nasty election fraud and crimes against people - including murder - on both sides, not just one side. Where do you think the terrorist and lunatic John Brown got his start? Look up the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre.
The bushwhackers, such as Frank and Jesse James and the Youngers burnt down Lawrence, Kansas and generally committed mass murder, earning the title Bloody Kansas, and the jayhawkers, such as John Brown, retaliated by killing and maiming in Kansas and Missouri. That is where the Civil War really started getting hot, before Lincoln was even elected. House divided against itself, and all that.
True but look up Osceola Missouri. James Lane and his Kansas redlegs burned it to the ground and committed all kinds of atrocities against civilians in Missouri BEFORE Lawrence Kansas was burned to the ground. The Bushwackers struck at Lawrence because it was used as a base by the Redlegs to carry out their terroristic attacks against Missouri civilians. Let's get the timeline right here....it was the Kansans who committed these kinds of atrocities first.
Assassinating Lincoln earlier would not have prevented the war,
I disagree. It might have. Plenty of people did not want a war nor think the federal government had the power under the constitution to force states to remain in the union against their will. President Buchanan was one such example. Had the president been someone other than Lincoln, war might well have been averted. Lincoln's views were far from universal.
There were fundamental issues that had to be resolved back then, just as there are fundamental issues to be resolved now. It was not about Lincoln then
A different president could well have chosen to let the seceding states depart in peace and affirmed that the union was voluntary and was based on the consent of the governed.
Assassinating him prior to his election would have precipitated an even worse war.
Its impossible to say what would have happened because Lincoln's views as president...which were diametrically the opposite of the view he expressed as a US Representative, were far from universal. A different president might have simply let the original 7 seceding states depart in peace. That's what most Northerners wanted actually. It was the money men who pressured Lincoln to start a war to prevent it.
Assassinating him after a long, bloody war instead resulted in three constitutional amendments emancipating slaves and enfranchising them, and another century of confusion and violence resulting in part from those amendments.
I don't think there was any doubt about the passage of the 13th amendment emancipating the slaves. That was passed by the original elected representatives of the Southern states when sent back to Washington DC. It was their rejection of the 14th Amendment with its denials of state sovereignty by insisting states could not elect whomever they chose and the direct application of federal government authority over states for the first time which caused the radical Republicans at the time to take the unconstitutional step of claiming the states they had just fought a war with based on the claim that they never legally left the US were now somehow "out" of the US, unseating their elected representatives, disenfranchising the vast majority of the voters in those states, military occupation of those states setting up massively corrupt carpetbagger governments in those states and setting conditions which the states would have to meet in order to get back "in" the US...which they supposedly never legally left.
This is why Republicans could not win a race for so much as county dog catcher anywhere in the South once sovereignty was restored after 1877 once it became clear the corrupt carpetbagger state governments could not be sustained (a new crop of White Southerners came of age every year and voted pretty much 100% against them...it was only a matter of time before they were able to outvote the Blacks, Carpetbaggers and Scalawags who kept those governments in power).
BTW, it’s been loads of fun, though time consuming. I thank you for the challenge.
Likewise. I enjoy a good debate and I thank you for being able to carry one out without resorting to childish/petty name calling unlike many others.
What would it take to convince you that slavery, not tariffs, was the fundamental cause of the Civil War? If no such proof is possible for you, then I submit that for you, the tariff thesis is more in the nature of an article of faith than a proposition subject to reasoned examination and possible disproof.
What would it take to convince you that tariffs and unequal federal expenditures and not slavery was the cause of Secession. I'd say yours is much more in the realm of being an article of faith rather than reasoned examination. After all, the federal government offered the Corwin Amendment which would have expressly protected slavery effectively forever. They offered no such blandishment wrt tariff relief nor did they promise to start spending more on infrastructure in the Southern states. I can provide any of a number of direct quotes from key political leaders at the time to the effect that it was tariffs and not slavery which they saw as the principle issue.
For example, no matter what the Corwin Amendment offered in its text, unless the Fugitive Slave Acts were strongly enforced, slavery was doomed by runaways and the readiness of the public in the North to protect them. Northern assurances as to the continuation of slavery were widely disbelieved in the South.
I already gave you Charles Beard. There were plenty of others in the pre PC era. As for the modern era, we've already gone over the Leftist long march through the Academy. It really came out of the closet with Howard Zinn's "People's history of the United States" in 1980 and built throughout the 80s. By the 90s, PC Revisionism had clearly taken over the history faculty. It only got worse from there until now there is no dissent from the Leftist dogma allowed within the Academy.
For example, no matter what the Corwin Amendment offered in its text, unless the Fugitive Slave Acts were strongly enforced, slavery was doomed by runaways and the readiness of the public in the North to protect them. Northern assurances as to the continuation of slavery were widely disbelieved in the South.
Lincoln publicly offered strengthened fugitive slave laws/enforcement.
“When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists, and it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would possibly be to free all slaves and send them to Liberia to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me that this would not be best for them. If they were all landed there in a day they would all perish in the next ten days, and there is not surplus money enough to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings. Is it quite certain that this would alter their conditions? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not. We cannot make them our equals. A system of gradual emancipation might well be adopted, and I will not undertake to judge our Southern friends for tardiness in this matter. I acknowledge the constitutional rights of the States — not grudgingly, but fairly and fully, and I will give them any legislation for reclaiming their fugitive slaves.” Abraham Lincoln
As for anybody in the South disbelieving northern politicians wrt the Corwin Amendment, belief was not required. It was a constitutional amendment. 15 states still allowed slavery at the time. To pass a new amendment overturning the Corwin Amendment against the wishes of the 15 states that still allowed it, would have required 45 states to satisfy the 3/4s of the states requirement. 45+15 = 60. That's 10 more states than we have even today. That's why I say the Corwin Amendment would have been irrevocable without the consent of the states that still allowed slavery.
So slavery was an issue the Northern states and Lincoln administration were perfectly ready to compromise over. What they were not prepared to compromise over were the economic issues.....the very thing that caused the Nullification Crisis a generation earlier. Why do I say the slavery issue and the tariffs/federal expenditures were intricately linked? Jefferson Davis explained it well while serving in the US Senate:
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
I can cite others who expressed similar thoughts. Yes, you can find some like the powerless VP Alexander Stephens who thought slavery a morally just institution for its own sake, but there are even more who would have backed Davis' opinion - ie that slavery was being used as what we would today call a "wedge issue" to prevent Midwestern farmers from uniting with Southerners against the sky high tariffs Northeastern manufacturing interests wanted to line their pockets. Remember, only 5.67% of White Southerners owned any slaves at all. Even if you count their families, the conclusion that the vast majority of White Southerners did not own slaves is inescapable. The economic issues touched their pockets directly.
I do not know of any such work. Even when picked over for comments useful to your views, Zinn and Beard do not qualify. Zinn is a notorious Leftist kook, while Beard is long out of date -- and neither one of them is an established writer expert in antebellum Southern history. And, again, what evidence would you accept to make a null case that refutes your views? What would cause you to think that you might be wrong?
I do not hope to convince you to repudiate your long held and vigorously argued views. I only hope to get you to think things through. For example, if protectionist tariffs were the cause of secession and the Civil War, why did the South's candidate in 1860, Breckenridge, not have them as an issue in his Democratic Party platform, while the platform referred repeatedly to slavery?
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