Posted on 07/22/2015 7:36:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?
Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his words. In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, "I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists." In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: "My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects." Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
What about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation? Here are his words: "I view the matter (of slaves' emancipation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." He also wrote: "I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." When Lincoln first drafted the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.
London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and assisting it in its war against the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration. It specifically detailed where slaves were to be freed: only in those states "in rebellion against the United States." Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion — such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln's own secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been heartily endorsed by the Confederacy: "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. ... 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." Lincoln expressed that view in an 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporting the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.
Why didn't Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation's history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What "responsible" politician would let that much revenue go?
Ft Sumter was attacked ONLY after every means of peaceful negotiation was exhausted. Peace Commissioners were rebuffed by Lincoln, who attempted to re-supply the Fort. No Sovereign nation can allow control of their major port by a foreign power.
Lincoln didn't ship supplies only; he put men into the ships he sent Fort Sumter, and a mental midget could figure out that he meant to land those men in Sumter just like he did at Fort Pickens in Florida.
He meant to reinforce and hold the principal harbor of another country, and pretend to collect taxes under duress from noncitizens.
Sounds like casus belli to me, very like Bismarck's rejection of a French ambassador's credentials (his gimmick for commencing the Franco-Prussian War).
What, only the guy who fires the first shot is the aggressor? Not when Caesar crossed the Rubicon it wasn't -- not a shot fired, nor a slingstone slung, nor a spear tossed. But it was war, red war.
Under Lincoln's much-professed theory that South Carolina was still in the Union, his blockade was an embarrassment to his claim a) that SC was not a sovereign State, since he was waging war on it, and b) that he was merely enforcing the laws of the Union, when in fact he was violating Article I of the Constitution by favoring (by main force) the commerce of some ports, in the North, over that of others in the South.
Either he was fighting a war with a foreign country or he was violating the Constitution to reorganize by violence the affairs of the southern States (an idea floated by John Quincy Adams when Lincoln was a freshman congressman).
And last but not least, we have the candid admission of Lincoln's own private secretary, John Nicolai, that Lincoln did, indeed, begin the Civil War on his own initiative and timing, just days after Congress left town and would be out of session for weeks, giving Lincoln a free hand to act as a military dictator, thanks to an oversight by the Framers.
Suh, Gennul Porter Alexander's train is right behind me. Where do you wish his batteries disposed?
The main articulate complaint against Lee has been that he was too focused on the Eastern Theater and that he was spendthrift with the lives of his troops in the two critical years of 1862 and 1863. After that, his army was substantially depleted and unable to meet Grant's relentless hammer-blows.
By "spendthrift" his critics mean, too ready to put them into the attack and incur higher casualties.
That and the fact that the very next day Vicksburg fell to the North, splitting the Confederacy in two and giving the North control of the vital Mississippi River. At that point if Lee had any brains or decency he would have known the jig was up ....
Lee was nothing if not decent. Again, he focused on Virginia and Lincoln's determination to take Richmond and sit in Jeff Davis's chair (which he did).
For your information, in 1870 Robert E. Lee told the ex-lieutenant governor of Texas and another man (a reverend also from Texas) that if he'd known at Appomattox what Thad Stevens and the other Northern politicians were going to do to the South, he'd have rallied on his hilltop and fought to the death. Think about that one for a while.
Three stars!
And he would have been dead and the South would have lost the war any. Hell, the South lost the war the moment it decided to begin it.. While Gettysburg was a major Union victory the real end to the Confederacy came on July 4,1863 when the city of Vicksburg fell. It geographically split the South in two and it gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi River. At that point Davis and Lee should have realized the jig was up but they continued the slaughter for another two years. Think about that for a while chump.
Hey Peabrain, here’s a question for you”If the South had won the Civil War would they have ended slavery or preserved it?
[jeffersondem]: You don't cite any founding fathers supporting your position [basically that states cannot secede without approval from Congress]. I think we both know why.
[Partisan Guslinger]: They certainly didn't want to encourage it. lol
Partisan, perhaps you are not aware that Alexander Hamilton and John Jay (two of the authors of the Federalist Papers that explained to Americans what the Constitution meant) voted for the following statement in the New York ratification of the Constitution as did the majority of the New York ratifiers.
... That the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary to their Happiness; ...
They followed that statement and other statements of what the Constitution meant with the following statement in the New York ratification:
... Under these impressions and declaring that the rights aforesaid cannot be abridged or violated, and that the Explanations aforesaid are consistent with the said Constitution, And in confidence that the Amendments which shall have been proposed to the said Constitution will receive an early and mature Consideration: We the said Delegates, in the Name and in the behalf of the People of the State of New York Do by these presents Assent to and Ratify the said Constitution.
That 'reassume powers' statement is a clear indication of original intent by two of the most authoritative and knowledgeable Founders on what the Constitution meant. Jay later became the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. As far as I know, none of the other states objected to that statement in the New York ratification.
For my own part, I don't think it made sense for states that might be taking advantage of another state to be able to say whether that injured state could secede or not. The Constitution did not delegate the power to stop secession to the central government or to other states. I doubt if the Constitution would have been ratified if such secession-blocking powers had been delegated to the central government or other states.
You can doubt all you want, Article IV says states must prove their acts through general rules from the Congress. Secession is a state act. They should have ran their secession through the Congress and avoided Fort Sumter. They didn’t and so Lincoln had every right to respond to Fort Sumter by treating it like rebellion, which it was.
Secession is supraconstitutional, i.e, not subject to the Constitution. Secession was an act by entities that made the Constitution and can reassume the powers of governance if they so choose, as Hamilton and Jay indicated. All states have the same rights under the Constitution as the original 13 states.
I am reminded of the words of John Taylor:
In the creation of the federal government, the states exercised the highest act of sovereignty, and they may, if they please, repeat the proof of their sovereignty, by its annihilation. But the union possesses no innate sovereignty, like the states; it was not self-constituted; it is conventional, and of course subordinate to the sovereignties by which it was formed.
The sovereignties which imposed the limitations upon the federal government, far from supposing that they perished by the exercise of a part of their faculties, were vindicated, by reserving powers in which their deputy, the federal government, could not participate; and the usual right of sovereigns to alter or revoke its commissions.
Some other quotes:
Madison, defending the Constitution in the Virginia ratification convention: "If we be dissatisfied with the national government, if we choose to renounce it, this is an additional safeguard to our defence." (Patrick Henry pointed out in the convention that there were seven northern states and six southern states and was concerned what that might mean for Virginia.)
Madison in Congress, June 8, 1789, page 451 of Gales and Seaton's History of Debates in Congress: "That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefensible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadiquate to the purposes of its institution."
John Marshall, later Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court: "[w]e are threatened with the loss of our liberties by the possible abuse of power, notwithstanding the maxim, that those who give may take away. It is the people that give power, and can take it back. What shall restrain them? They are the masters who give it, and of whom their servants hold it."
In many of the southern states, secession was approved by the highest sovereign authority in the state, the voters. That was a step beyond what was done in the ratification of the Constitution. In fact, the only time that ratification of the Constitution was put before the voters of a state, they rejected it by a ten to one margin. It was later ratified by a small convention.
Ah, but it would have transformed the war and the entire postwar period in ways you cannot begin to grasp, Deepthink. Kill our beloved Marse Bobby, and you'd never have had a peace, much less the era of national reconciliation that Bill Clinton has now terminated for political advantage with his "break the [Finkelstein] box" strategy to which demonization of Southern whites is key, capitalizing on and "leveraging" earlier periods of demonization in the civil-rights and00000antebellum periods and going all the way back to the 17th century, when Congregationalist ministers' pens dripped venom and ice as they described the luxurious living and dining of the prelacy-ridden Episcopalian Tidewater planters.
You'd have had to occupy, literally occupy, the South for 150 years, getting shot at the entire time. What World Wars? Your federal heavies would have been so preoccupied with "security operations" in the South, you'd have had to beg off two world wars and Korea to see to them. And you'd still have been getting shot from behind every big rock, gully, or tree. Gun control? Make me laugh.
Think about it yourself.
Article IV says:
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State; And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
That's not what you wrote.
Caught you dealing off the bottom of the deck .... but then, we've come to expect that over the years around here.
"the Congress may" does not give Congress a general veto over every single act, measure, and recordation of the several States. That is not what the Full Faith and Credit Clause means, never did, never will.
If anything, Article IV requires Congress and the remaining States of the Union to recognize and honor the sovereign Acts of Secession of the departing States, whose People were entirely within their rights a) to secede from the Union and b) to enjoy their future liberty in peace.
The States are their People, the People are the States. The People are sovereign, not the United States Government, which is a creature of the Constitution, which is a creature of the People. See the impermissible superordinating loop? Not if you're a Yankee banker determined to keep the South's business with gunpowder and cannon.
;)
Good to see you again, PR. And yes, I saw your post about our former acquaintance.
Really? Which State was that? I don't remember reading about that. Sounds like something like Tidewater South Carolina would do. Big Bob gets what Big Bob wants, and Big Bob's holding a stack of federal paper valued at sixty cents on the dollar. Power to tax makes Big Bob good, yum-yum. There were some people who were motivated by that consideration.
Quote non-constitutional lines all you want, Article IV says Congress has the right to impose general rules for a state to prove it’s acts. Secession is an act of a state.
"And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof."
That's clear as a bell to me. Congress may decide how a states proves it's acts. Secession is a state act. Congress would certainly exercise it's right have a state prove secession under it's laws.
Rhode Island. See: Link
No they would not, because a secession ordnance, being ratified by the People of that State, would never be sent to the Congress of a Government of which they were no longer part. See your difficulty?
No, the ratification of amendments and other sovereign acts is above Congress's pay grade, and for that matter above the pay grade of the United States Government. The only time Congress got involved in the Electoral College's vote for a President, was to fix the outcome corruptly: that was the "election" of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, when the presidency was the subject of a crooked backroom deal between the two political parties.
In 2000, we had something very similar happen, only this time (in accordance with the spirit of our own age) the venue for the competing fixers was the court system: the Florida Supreme Court for the 'Rats and the U.S. Supreme Court for the Republicans, who fortunately got the right answer. (Even the MSM had to agree after a while: they counted the disputed ballots themselves six different ways, and only one of the six gave the election to the Gore/Loser ticket.)
But as a rule, the deliberations of the Electoral College are ultra vires the United States Government, which only arranges a place to meet and brings ice water. USG cannot, does not, correct or prove or in any way screw with the acts of the Electoral College. It can't. Ultra vires, get it? Same thing with constitutional conventions and amendments; USG is a subject of such, but has no power to interfere or reverse an Act of the People as Sovereign.
“if he could stop the humiliation of being the man who broke the country. “
I propose it wasn’t humiliation but money. He was the attorney to the railroads and they needed the union to stay together.
You seem to be under the delusion that Article IV imposes a dictatorship.
Virginia: "The speed limit shall be 60 miles per hour."
You: "No it won't."
You seem to be (without peeking) from some blue-flag State where people can't figure out why we fought the Second World War.
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.