Posted on 08/05/2010 6:01:30 AM PDT by Michael Zak
[by Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine, CA), re-published with his permission]
For years I have admired Congressman Ron Paul’s principled stance on spending and the Constitution. That said, he really damaged himself when he blamed President Lincoln for the Civil War, saying, “Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war… [President Abraham Lincoln] did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic.”
This is historical revisionism of the worst order, and it must be addressed.
For Congressman Paul’s benefit – and for his supporters who may not know – seven states illegally declared their “independence” from the United States before Lincoln was sworn in as President. After South Carolina fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, four additional states declared independence...
(Excerpt) Read more at grandoldpartisan.typepad.com ...
Which part of my post do you consider a fairy tale?
Do you have a substantive criticism, or do you just object to my conclusions?
That is my argument. That law and legitimacy is ultimately determined by force of arms. The South lost on both counts. They were (and would remain) in violation of the law and the Constitution, and because of their military losses they will remain subject to the Constitution.
A state has no power to declare themselves independent.
My copy of the Constsution begins’We The People of the UNITED STATES in order to form a more pefect Union......
Can’t be clearer to me that the Founders called the new Nation the UNITED STATES right up front, as such no need to quibble about what they meant.
I'd agree if we were discussing a bank robbery, kidnapping, or slavery today. But secession was not defined as either thing until after the fact - when the winning side defined it as such.
Today, with just short of half the states in the union currently suing the feds or being sued by them precisely over 21 century interpretations of the Constitution, and with secession creeping back into the debate - it is again a subject for consideration.
How many here who insist that Lee and all his forces were traitors are being called just that today because they oppose Obamacare, bowing to foreign potentates, government by fiat, and a metastasizing deficit?
And...
I wonder how many southerners thought that "the army would never turn its guns on the people" - or on the people's militia??
I've seen both in the news, sort of depends on the level it's discussed at.
But at a level that most of us might experience such a schism, I don't think that the precise term used makes much of a difference.
Not quite correct. It would be more accurate to say that Unionists defined secession as evil from day one and secessionists obviously disagreed. Some still do, as can be seen by many comments in this thread. What was settled by the war was not whether secession was evil, that is something that can still be reasonably debated, but which side of the disagreement would prevail in practical terms.
While in my opinion secession was an evil and stupid policy, I'm not (quite) arrogant enough to classify my opinion as fact.
I wonder how many southerners thought that "the army would never turn its guns on the people" - or on the people's militia??
You should recognize the fact that the initial stages of the war were not "the southern militia" versus the "Federal army," in the sense we might view a similar conflict today.
For all practical purposes, there was no federal army in 1865. The Virginia militia alone had 185 regiments and dramatically outnumbered the federal army of 15,000 men, which was scattered all over the continent anyway. And of course, a disproportionate percentage of the best and brightest leaders of the federal army deserted to fight for the rebels. The conflict in its initial stages was almost entirely between rebel and loyal formations of "the people's militia."
Of course, by the next year the volunteer federal army had become a thoroughly professional force, but then the same was true of the Confederate army.
I believe that if the seceding states held referenda, and by majority vote of all of their residents, both slave and free, voted to secede, the union would have let them go their own way. Of course the states with few slaves, like Virginia, only had a slight white majority for secession, and states where whites were strongly desirous of secession, like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, whites were a minority of the population.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic lyrics were written by Julia Ward Howe, to the melody of John Brown’s Body, obviously written after John Brown’s hanging in December, 1859. Harriet Beecher Snowe had nothing to do with it.
It was both. Check you facts.
Dont' let my memory disparage Dr. McWhiney. However, I have run across several others saying the same as I was trying to research the issue. Regardless, Dr. McWhiney and Dr. Williams are great sources of objective history on the subject. If you want to know the truth, no matter what I say, I recommend them to you.
Thank you for the correction. I was a little uneasy about my facts when I posted that. However, the emotional effects on the issue remain the same.
‘Are you claiming that the state governments did not represent the will of the people?’
Since slaves were people, I doubt that any of the seceding states represented the will of their people.
OK. Nope, Fort Sumter was never used as a tariff collection point (although curiously the Mises and Marxist websites claim otherwise).
I live to nit pick.
Well, let's let everyone know what was really going on here. Rhode Island law was that only landowners could vote, which was fine when almost everyone owned land, but as industrialization began, you ended up with a huge population that was disenfranchised. Not surprisingly, the landowning voters rather liked their system and refused to change it. Dorr then declared his own constitutional convention, created a new constitution and announced themselves to be the new government of the state. When the existing state government didn't simply roll over for them, they resorted to armed force, attempted to seize an arsenal and failing. Dorr went on the run.
What Tyler did was refuse to intervene on either side, despite the existing government's call for federal troops. You, apparently, are of the opinion that the federal government should have stepped in, overthrown the state constitution and government that had been in place since the days of the Founders, and installed a different government.
Tariffs at Charleston were collected at the the Exchange and Customs House, located at 122 E. Bay Street in Charleston. Amazingly, it's usually considered a better idea to collect tariffs at a location near the docks where ships are actually unloading, rather than at a remote island with only a small dock in the middle of the bay.
Well,our supreme law is not the Articles of Confederation,although I do not think secession is a good idea.
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