Posted on 08/11/2015 1:11:21 PM PDT by iowamark
What caused the Civil War? That seems like the sort of simple, straightforward question that any elementary school child should be able to answer. Yet many Americans—including, mostly, my fellow Southerners—claim that that the cause was economic or state’s rights or just about anything other than slavery.
But slavery was indisputably the primary cause, explains Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The abolition of slavery was the single greatest act of liberty-promotion in the history of America. Because of that fact, it’s natural for people who love freedom, love tradition, and love the South to want to believe that the continued enslavement of our neighbors could not have possibly been the motivation for succession. But we should love truth even more than liberty and heritage, which is why we should not only acknowledge the truth about the cause of the war but be thankful that the Confederacy lost and that freedom won.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.acton.org ...
From what I can read of Article IV, section 2, it would appear that the US Constitution requires all states to embrace slavery.
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
You can't tell citizens of the United States which state they may visit or live in, and according to the article excerpt above, you can't free their slaves no matter what law you pass saying otherwise.
Unless I am missing something, this makes every state in the Union a defacto Slave State, whether they like it or not. If you see a way around this legal conundrum, by all means, point it out.
You keep forgetting, I used to see things your way. I learned that I had been misled. As John Maynard Keynes explained:
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
In fact, after Fort Sumter's surrender, and Lincoln's call for troops, Virginia's secession convention immediately changed its vote from Union to Secession, on April 17, with final voter ratification on May 23.
Only after Virginia's voters ratified secession, Confederacy and it's formally declared war on the United States, did Federal troops move to occupy any part of any Confederate state.
Even then, no Confederate troops were killed directly in battle with any Union force until Big Bethel on June 10, 1861.
PeaRidge quoting Jefferson Davis: "4/29/1861 “We feel that our cause is just and holy;
we protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honour and independence;
we ask no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated;
all we ask is to be let alone;
that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms.”
President Jefferson Davis"
In fact, none of Davis' words here were true.
By April 29, 1861, Confederate forces had spent four months seizing dozens of major Federal properties (forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc.), threatening and even firing on Union officials and ships.
The Confederacy also encouraged and sent military aid to pro-Confederates, notably in Union Missouri.
Where Davis claims they wish no conquests, in fact the Confederate approach to the Union states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri was attempted military conquest, as well as Union territories of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, not to mention non-seceding regions of Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas.
So Davis did not speak truthfully here, or any time later when he loudly proclaimed his innocence of starting Civil War.
Nor do pro-Confederate posters here.
But, as ditto said, Tanney's decision went far beyond what the Constitution recognized & authorized.
In effect, Tanney made slavery lawful in every state & territory, regardless of states' rights or Congress' authority over territories, and Tanney outlawed citizenship for African-Americans, regardless of their status, free or slave.
No Founder intended such laws, and everyone north of the Mason-Dixon line understood that, as well as many in the South.
In fact, before Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation there were no "anti-slavery edicts" -- none.
And the reason is simple: the US Constitution recognized slavery as lawful and did not allow Federal "anti-slavery edicts" in states where slavery was lawful, period.
Yes, President Jefferson did get Congress to outlaw slavery in the Northwest Territories (Ohio to Wisconsin), and the later Missouri Compromise set other limits on slavery's expansion, but the Compromise of 1850, far from seriously limiting slavery, made Federal Government responsible for enforcing its own Fugitive Slave Laws.
So, in 1861, when Confederate states provoked and declared war on the United States, there were no "anti-slavery edicts".
The reason Lincoln's 1862 Emancipation Proclamation applied only to rebel regions under Union Army control, was: because that's all the Constitution allowed Lincoln to emancipate.
Further emancipations required Constitutional amendment, which Radical Republicans in Congress submitted in 1863 and were ratified in 1865.
So your argument is based solely on the fact that some people don't understand Lincoln was limited by the Constitution in who he could emancipate.
Once they understand that, your argument has no appeal, or validity, FRiend.
Let us see if we can at least agree on what the Constitution itself says.
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
I understand this to mean that no state can pass a law depriving a man "from such service or labour" as he is legally due.
Meaning that going to another state will not free a slave from the labor he owes to whomever has the legal right to his labor.
Do you understand this to mean something different?
There I think he went too far. That assertion is a non-sequitur. There were free Blacks who participated in and fought for the Revolution. Tanney is right that the Declaration of Independence was never comprehended to refer to slaves, but this cannot be argued in regards to black men who were free and living in the country at the time, though their numbers be relatively small compared to the rest.
Those facts alone help explain why the Deep South was so eager to secede completely, the Upper South less eager and never completely, and the Border South refused to formally secede, sending more troops to the Union than Confederacy.
As for the effects of Lincoln's 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, at the time it originally effected only about 50,000 slaves, but by war's end, in 1865, around three million were freed by the Union Army.
By the year-end of 1865 the 13th Amendment freed all remaining slaves, North and South.
So, while clearly you think you have an important argument here, once understood, your claims make no sense.
In fact, it was the most "civil" Civil War in human history, in terms of the death and destruction to civilian populations.
Compare, for example, with World War Two: massive destruction and total deaths around 75 million, of whom two thirds were civilians.
By contrast, our Civil War was a walk in the park, a day at the beach...
I'd like to see more of the evidence. Lemme just say that I tend to interpret things like this in terms of the passions and emotions of the moment, rather than in terms of well-thought out plots or plans. I'm not saying that there wasn't a plot or plotting, just that I haven't seen the evidence and am giving the Southern Democrats the same benefit of the doubt that I've given unionists or abolitionists on other occasions.
Also, I'm struck by just how seriously people earlier in our history took the idea of presidential elections decided in the House of Representatives. They wouldn't have looked at the election they were going through in the same way that we look at it now. It wouldn't necessarily have looked like the Republicans would sweep the North and carry the Electoral College.
Your idea of the word ‘civil” is, like all your other arguments so totally blind and one sided that you can’t as I’ve mentioned before, open your eyes to anything else beyond your narrow perception which is known as “Tunnel Vision.”
Your use of “Total population is a sly way of avoiding and altering the overall effect of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which was dated in JANUARY 1863, well after the beginning of the war.
Your sources and mine do not agree. I’ll leave it at that.
Certainly many blacks served the Confederate army -- cooking, cleaning, carrying water & firewood, setting up camps, moving, digging entrenchments, clearing roads, etc., etc.
We even have occasional reports of, seemingly, servants reloading their masters' weapons...
But despite several recommendations, there were no Confederate black units trained and used in combat.
By stark contrast, the Union Army had 175 colored regiments (178,000 troops, about 10% of the Union Army) trained, with many used in combat.
Some served with special distinction and suffered high rates of casualties.
Losses from all causes came to nearly 70,000.
About half of Union colored troops were escaped slaves, the other half freed African Americans.
The largest numbers of US Colored Troops came from Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.
So, obviously, not all the Confederacy's slaves were dancing with joy just to be slaves!
During the “recent unpleasantness” there were three areas of the war effort where the CSA was almost on or indeed on par with the USA. Those areas were the cavalry, medical care, and ammunition. Without slaves none of those three areas would have been anywhere near as good as they were for the CSA.
Reminds me of the German guy who told a high school acquaintance of mine, "It vass not a fair fight! Ze whole vorlt vass against us!"
Emancipation Proclamation should have been named the Yankee Race Riot Act.
That term, "Fire Eaters" is just one of many used by people at the time to refer to themselves and others.
Those are all I can think of off the top of my head, but there were doubtless others.
They are all historical terms, used at the time by both the people themselves sometimes, and more often by their political enemies.
Well... first of all Aaron Burr was not acting alone, and may easily have held elections to declare secession "in the name of" whatever "citizens" then lived in the United States territory of Louisiana.
Second, those "millions" you refer to were led by a small group of Deep South Fire Eaters, which have now been defined and listed for you, above.
Fire Eaters both engineered the Democrat party split at the 1860 convention in Charleston, and then pushed for secession when their now split Democrats lost to Abraham Lincoln's Black Republicans.
DiogenesLamp: "The Refusal of states to return escaped slaves is a breach of this clause in the constitution.
The efforts of the Government to ban slavery in future states would also be regarded in this light."
But state responsibilities for capturing and returning Fugitive Slaves were eliminated by the Compromise of 1850 Law, which transferred the job from states to Federal Government.
That means your complaint is bogus regarding the states, though potentially valid in the sense, if Federal Government did not do enough to suppress Northern states-rights to abolish slavery within their own territories.
But even that much is bogus to the max, since those Deep South states which complained most loudly about it, and then declared their secession allegedly from it: those states suffered least from it.
Yes, Deep South states, despite protestations, did not suffer serious Fugitive Slave problems, precisely because they were, after all, Deep South.
To pick an example: a slave wishing to runaway from Georgia had to escape slave-catchers not only in his own state, but in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland before he/she could hope to see freedom in Pennsylvania or states further north.
The result was, all through the 1850s, Deep South slave populations grew rapidly.
By contrast, slaves in Maryland or Kentucky could relatively easily run to freedom in, say, New Jersey or Ohio.
Therefore, Deep South Fire Eater complaints about non-enforcement of Fugitive Slave laws cannot have been serious, must only have been further propaganda, intended to inflame an otherwise Unionist Southern constituency.
So you are telling me that you do not use the term because you intend it to be derogatory? I think this is a lot like the “N-Word” where people can call themselves that, yet it takes on entirely different connotations when done by others.
Only your delusions, not the Declaration of Independence, support your position.
No legal authority -- none, zero, zip, nada -- flows from your delusions, FRiend.
The Declaration is a foundation for our Constitution, and the Constitution is "the Supreme Law of the Land", regardless of whatever you may fantasize about the Declaration.
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