Posted on 07/05/2015 3:24:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”
Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.
“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”
True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”
Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.
Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have no Virginia roots whatsoever but my wife is a descendant of colonial Virginia governor Dudley Diggs.
Instead of heeding Washington's words, they instead heeded and followed his example. Washington was not only born a British citizen in Virginia but served with distinction as a colonel in the British army during the French and Indian War. Nevertheless, when the time came not too many years later when George III had become an intolerable burden, Washington asserted himself against the Crown as the military leader of our revolution for the purposes noted in the Declaration of Independence.
Robert Edward Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were both American citizens by birth as Washington was a British citizen by birth. Both served with distinction in the United States Army during the Mexican War. Lee served in war against native Americans in Texas and served as commandant of West Point. They personally disagreed with secession but, as citizens of Virginia first, they did as their state asked and refused to make war on their fellow Virginians. When the Union made war upon Virginia, they made war upon the Union.
The parallels should be obvious. The difference is that Lee lost and Stonewall Jackson was fatally wounded by his own men who did not recognize him in a darkened forest. If Washington had lost, we may easily imagine him hanging from a British gallows.
If Lee had been tried for treason, it is likely that Grant would have risen to his defense along with many other victorious Union officers. Even Sherman would have had trouble swallowing a trial of Lee. The Union did not try Jeff Davis and the probable reason was that no jury in the Southland (where all of his actions occurred) could have been chosen that would have convicted him. Although Lee had ventured into Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) and Maryland (Antietam), I doubt any jury even there would have convicted him. The alternative would have been a drum head military tribunal which would have been discredited before it convened.
If the trial of any major respected Confederate figure was fumbled or otherwise mishandled there would have been massive bloody guerrilla resistance as a result. Think a national resistance modeled on the James brothers, the Youngers, Quantrill and Anderson. The terms offered by Grant and Sherman were wise and designed to avoid such an outcome. Frank and Jesse, Cole and his brothers rode for a while but with little net effect. Nathan Bedford Forrest went home to run a railroad and an insurance company. Shelby went back to the practice of law. Lee went back to academia.
Surviving soldiers on both sides went home to their families, if any and lives of quiet frustration since their own interests on both sides were ignored by the sorry politicians on both sides. And, of course, 600,000 did not go home at all.
My earliest ancestors in the US were German Catholics who lived on farms in southern Indiana. They moved here in about 1850 to avoid a round of worthless warfare and revolutions in Germany and to avoid the pretensions of local poobahs known as Landgrafs who claimed the right to decide whom you might marry and whether you might marry at all. Why fight a revolution when you could emigrate bloodlessly to America?
One last point. Before the War of Northern Aggression, this nation was known as THESE United States but as THE United States thereafter. Also the oath of loyalty taken by cadets at West Point was an oath of loyalty to each cadet's native state and not to the nation, a practice which was promptly changed after the outbreak of the war. It was probably that time in American history that suffered most from spinmeisters before our own era.
Take it up with the Founding Fathers.
Those powers not delegated to the United States by this constitution nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, and to the people.
The power of secession was not granted by the constitution to the United States. The very idea of the whole nation being able to secede makes no sense whatsoever. The constitution does not prohibit states from seceding. Ergo, the states have the power respectively to secede and Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia did exactly that.
Fixed it.
Yes, that is the 10th Amendment but it does not apply here because the appropriate powers were enumerated to the legislative and judicial branches of government. This is the way the country was wired, first in 1777 with the Articles of Confederation, and again in 1788 with the ratification of the United States Constitution.
Article I (Article 1 - Legislative) of the Constitution spells out duties and responsibilities of Congress.
Section 10Thus no states may enter into independent confederacies - only Congress possesses that authority.1: No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Article II (Article 2 - Executive) establishes the role of the executive (president).
Article III (Article 3 - Judicial) defines the duties and responsibilities of the judicial branch - essentially the Supreme Court.
Section 21: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State —between Citizens of different States, —between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.
Thus the Constitution grants the Supreme Court (the collective states) authority and jurisdiction over disputes between states.
Article IV (Article 4 - States' Relations) defines the relationship of the states to the whole.
Section 31: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
Thus it is up to Congress to admit or expel states. In the event of a circumstance such as happened with West Virginia, it is up to Congress plus the affected states to make such a division. Individual states do not possess the authority to do so - not legally at any rate.
To recap: yes it is a case of the federal government telling the states what they can and cannot do - that is the way the law was designed. In this case unilateral secession, that is, the secession of states without congressional approval, is explicitly forbidden. No, it doesn't go against the 10th amendment because the Constitution granted the appropriate powers to both the Congress to define and organize the states and to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes between the states.
As for rising up in revolt - if you do so you had best be able to prove your case against an alleged "dictatorial government" or you're likely going to have a rough go of it. The Colonialists did; the insurrectionists didn't.
How does Article IV, Section 4 square with the creation of West Virginia. Did I miss the news of the Virginia legislature approving the creation of West Virginia from Virginia’s territory? Or were the Radical Republicans ignoring the constitution out of ingrained habit?
I’ll ignore the pig-headed comment about the radical republicans. It is obvious that they cut corners and created a new state without participation of the rest of the state. There are still some who believe that West Virginia is a fraudulent state.
However flawed in execution the formation of W. Virginia was it stands as a fascinating “story within a story”. When Virginians voted for secession the vast majority of representatives from the western part of the state voted against seceding. The passage of the secession vote left them angry and alienated from their own state. There had always been stress between the east and the west and westerners thought this “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. West Virginians had no desire to leave the union and less desire to go to war against their neighbors.
Sound familiar?
The average westerner felt like they had no say in their destiny and had been abandoned by the insurrectionists. So they decided that, if the State of Virginia could quit the union then the western part of the state could quit Virginia.
The difference in circumstance and process was that Virginians created a process (secession) out of whole cloth. West Virginians applied to Congress for admission to the United States.
The story of how they decided on the new state boundary is complex. See: Link 2
Like I said I had no problem with the Louisiana Purchase, but it certainly went against Jefferson's own preaching. He would've excoriated Washington for it.
Kinda what is assumed about a lot of lost-causers.
The hypocrisy of your post is lost to you. Amazing.
Please explain (if you can) the hypocrisy.
I just discovered some interesting material in that first link I sent you in Post 487, the link to the map of the Virginia 1861 secession vote results. There are writeups in that web site that told me things I'd never realized before. For example, back then voting in Virginia and West Virginia was done by voice vote. There was no secret ballot. Secret balloting apparently didn't start in the US until about the 1880s, meaning that before that time, voters anywhere in the US could have been intimidated by those opposing them. That intimidation could have worked in favor of a political party or candidate or issue depending on the majority opinion where you lived.
Here is an excerpt from that map web site about disfranchisement in West Virginia:
Voting in Virginia in 1861 was by voice. This way of voting meant that your neighbors knew how you felt about issues and candidates, so in times of real controversy the only means one had to protect oneself against majority opinion or intimidation was not to vote at all. While historians have been very vocal themselves about intimidation in Virginia's vote on secession on May 23, 1861, they have been singularly silent on Wheeling's voting on statehood on October 24, 1861 and their other vote initiatives.
The Wheeling government routinely enforced a mandatory oath of allegiance. Then, as now, a mandatory oath did not sit well with a number of people. Not only did you have to swear allegiance to the United States, but included in that oath was an allegiance to the Wheeling government, which many Unionists, let alone secessionists, did not support. This oath in essence was designed to weed out any opposition to Wheeling. In a debate on the ballot or voice voting methods at the Constitutional Convention on Dec. 5, 1861, Chapman J. Stuart spoke in favor of voice, saying "Suppose, sir, we had cast our vote last May, on the ordinance of secession, by ballot; we never would have known who amongst us desired to break down and destroy our government. We could not point them out if it had not been for our mode of voting." Voice was the method used for the vote on statehood and all the Wheeling voting initiatives through 1863.
The prickly question of who would be able to vote in the new state came up quickly in the Constitutional Convention. On Dec 4, 1861, Mr. Brown of Kanawha said "When this Constitution will be in operation and a man is convicted of treason, then he is within the prohibition and must be excluded from the right of suffrage. But we will find the number to exclude will be almost legion." Under wartime conditions voting was easily controlled with military assistance, but at wars' end this would not be a real option.
When Union soldiers entered Ripley, Ravenswood and Belleville in Jackson County in June 1861, mass arrests occurred and oaths of loyalty extracted. The Ripley postmaster was replaced with a Wheeling appointee.(OR, Series 1, Vol. 2, pg. 214)
Refusal to take the oath could have serious consequences, arrest, fines and bonds, or even a long prison stay. Judge George W. Thompson of Wheeling was a Unionist who did not support the Wheeling regime and refused to take their oath of office and was removed. ...
In 1863 the National Intelligencer spoke of the lack of free speech in western Virginia. Sherrard Clemens, a prominent Unionist and former delegate to the Richmond Convention, where he voted against secession, stated to the Wheeling Press that he could not address the people on the new-state question because he was threated by violence, "force and riot", by Federal soldiers and "certain officials connected with the administration or convention at Wheeling..."(Ault, Wheeling, West Virginia, During the Civil War, pg. 10)
Thanks for the links Rusty - I’ve been poring over them all morning ;’)
The 2nd one was way more comprehensive than the resource I was using.
Let's assume that I accept the factual basis of your second paragraph. It may even sound familiar, especially today when our institutions have perfected the science of absolutely ignoring the public's priorities in favor of those of the interests.
Your problem lies in your last paragraph. Facts are stubborn things. Virginia seceded from the Union based upon the tradition embodied in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as to the justification for dissolving the bonds tying Virginia to the Union as the original thirteen colonies had dissolved their bonds with Great Britain. In doing so, Virginia was further justified by the Tenth Amendment which, since the Constitution did not delegate to the United States any power to restrain or resist or prevent the voluntary exit of any state from the Union for whatever reason that state saw fit to use as its reason for secession and therefore that the right of secession was reserved to the states respectively. Finally, I believe that Virginia approved secession by an actual referendum of the voting public.
West Virginia OTOH did petition Congress to violate the Constitution by admitting West Virginia as a state without Virginia's permission. This situation depends on whether Virginia was still regarded as a state. Lincoln claimed that none of the eleven states of the Confederacy COULD leave the Union without the Union's permission, if at al. Therefore in his and Congress's view, Virginia was still a state and, by Article IV, section 4 had to agree to its partition to truncate its territory and create West Virginia out of the part lopped off.
If Virginia was no longer a state, then Lincoln had no business claiming any right to "suppress the insurrection there." If South Carolina and Louisiana were still states, he had no right to blockade Charleston or New Orleans harbors or the Mississippi River since a nation cannot blockade its own ports. If all eleven Confederate states were still states, why did they need to be "re-admitted" after the end of the War of Northern Aggression much less with conditions attached to "re-admission?"
I spent most of my life in Connecticut. All of New England was once heavily dominated by the Congregational church and its illegitimate cousin the Unitarian church. The leadership of the region was in the hands of snooty elitists of those churches who were as absolutely convinced of their own rectitude and of the need for their opinions to be crammed down the unwilling throats of the peasants as are today's trendy leftists (their social heirs). They were insufferable and they were the breeding ground of the abolitionist movement. If you doubt that they were truly radical, read their self-righteous screeds. Consider such lunatics as John Brown (born in Torrington, CT) who was in his time Charles Manson with a "moral" edge, slaughtering with machetes peaceful Southern farmers in Kansas in their own barns. Would you agree that John Brown was a radical? If not, what WAS a radical in those days?
Abolition of slavery was historically inevitable and always a desirable goal but the devil was in the details. In 1841 in his very last days in the White House, a thoroughly spent Andrew Jackson told Sam Houston, his youngest protege, that, if he lived to see proposals to divide the Union over the question of slavery, Houston must run for POTUS (he was then president of the Republic of Texas but Jackson assumed that Texas would join the Union) and, if victorious, declare war on all of Europe before allowing a civil war. Then slavery could be allowed to die a natural economic death and leave far less in the way of a permanent rupture of the American experiment.
Jackson was far wiser than Lincoln as might be expected of an ideological heir of Jefferson vs. an ideological heir of Hamilton and Clay. Slavery flourished for a long time throughout the Americas but the worst heritage was left by British, race-based, slavery which made no provision for the ultimate freedom of the slaves or their progeny or their integration into society. This is the heritage of American slavery left us by the Brits. The slavery practiced in Spanish and Portuguese possessions encouraged intermarriage and always conceded the humanity of the slaves and the importance of their salvation. Few Mexicans, for example, are pure blooded Indians. Fewer still are pure blooded Spaniards. They just don't care about such distinctions and the US has spent 150 years since Appomatox being obsessed with race.
600,000 combatants died to feed Lincoln's id and the ids of the abolitionist pecksniff warmongers.
600,000 combatants died to feed davis’s id and the ids of the slaver pecksniff warmongers.
Fixed it.
Article 10 of the Constitution explicitly prohibits states from raising their own armies, negotiating treaties/alliances/trade agreements with foreign nations. If they are prohibited from having the powers of a sovereign nation, the clear implication is that they are not potential sovereign nations. If they can't negotiate their own treaties and trade agreements, the implication that they can't secede at will seems pretty strong.
Agree. Slavery would have eventually faded on its own in the American south much as it faded in the north and in much of the British Empire. It was not an economically viable model with the advent of industrialized agriculture. There was no need to agitate for war to end an institution that would probably have disappeared within a few decades on its own. Only a fanatic would think that the institution of slavery is worse than a bloody war among countrymen.
Andrew Jackson told Sam Houston, his youngest protege, that, if he lived to see proposals to divide the Union over the question of slavery, Houston must run for POTUS (he was then president of the Republic of Texas but Jackson assumed that Texas would join the Union) and, if victorious, declare war on all of Europe before allowing a civil war. Then slavery could be allowed to die a natural economic death and leave far less in the way of a permanent rupture of the American experiment.
Sam Houston was no admirer of Lincoln, but he opposed the secession of Texas to his last days.
Slavery flourished for a long time throughout the Americas but the worst heritage was left by British, race-based, slavery which made no provision for the ultimate freedom of the slaves or their progeny or their integration into society. This is the heritage of American slavery left us by the Brits. The slavery practiced in Spanish and Portuguese possessions encouraged intermarriage and always conceded the humanity of the slaves and the importance of their salvation. Few Mexicans, for example, are pure blooded Indians. Fewer still are pure blooded Spaniards.
In most of Latin America, the social hierarchy is very much based on race, probably more so than in the US: the ruling elites of Mexico and most other Latin American countries have more European blood while the underclass is largely Amerindindian (or of mixed African/Indian ancestry in the case of Brazil). The difference is that unlike the US, Latin American countries don't have a binary classification with a "one drop rule" - it's not a question of whether you're Blanco or Indio, it's a question of how much more Blanco you are than the Indio who mows your lawn.
I carry no brief for Jefferson Davis. The man was a rigid imbecile and a terrible wartime leader.
AND, you may disagree with me but you aren't fixing anything.
I don’t need to “fix anything”.
I know that yours is a jaundiced view of the truth. I know that it is you who has a problem because recent events have amply illustrated how threadbare the patience most people can muster is for your POV. I know that in order to float your lost cause mythology you need to demonize the union and I know that most people are repelled by that.
I know that I like the WBTS threads because there’s always a chance to learn something new, but I know that I’ll likely not learn anything new from you.
Whatever Thomas Jefferson may or may not have been doing with Sally Hemmings who was his late wife's half sister but also half black having had a slave mother, marriage was not encouraged between the two because the racial difference would have been a scandal in Virginia which had Brit roots.
Indeed, as to Sam Houston, he left public life rather than accept secession after he tried unsuccessfully for the Democrat nomination for POTUS in 1860.
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.