Posted on 05/26/2022 5:05:14 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The war was fought with a strategy inside of Lincoln’s head and he was killed before memoirs were written. The strategy of the Union was schizophrenic to say the least.
agreed.
The left is on the verge of criminalizing being white.
Republican leader Abraham Lincoln disagrees with you.
(Citations provided by Woodpusher, post 120, thread styled “Liz Cheney replies to Ted Cruz”, Nov 29, 2021)
Lincoln at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, CW 2:248.
I wish to MAKE and to KEEP the distinction between the EXISTING institution, and the EXTENSION of it, so broad, and so clear, that no honest man can misunderstand me, and no dishonest one, successfully misrepresent me.
Lincoln, Greenville, Illinois, September 13, 1858, CW:3:96.
In a most able manner did Mr. Lincoln clear up and refute the charges that he was an Abolitionist, and an Amalgamationist, and in favor of placing negroes upon a social and political equality with the whites. He asserted positively, and proved conclusively by his former acts and speeches that he was not in favor of interfering with slavery in the States where it exists, nor ever had been. That he was not even in favor of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, unless a majority of the people of the District should be in favor of it, and remuneration should be made to masters who might be unwilling to give up their slaves without compensation; and even then he would want it done gradually.
Lincoln, Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858, CW 2:492, emphasis added.
I have said a hundred times and I have no no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States to enter into the slave States, and interfere with the question of slavery at all. I have said that always..
Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, June 23, 1858, CW 2:471.
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.
Lincoln at Bloomington, Illinois, on September 4, 1858, CW 3:87.
We have no right to interfere with slavery in the States. We only want to restrict it to where it is.
Lincoln at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, CW 3:16, italics added.
I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Lincoln at Quincy, Illinois, October 13, 1858 CW 3:277.
I expressly declared in my opening speech, that I had neither the inclination to exercise, nor the belief in the existence of the right to interfere with the States of Kentucky or Virginia in doing as they pleased with slavery or any other existing institution.
Lincoln, Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, CW 3:435.
We must not disturb slavery in the states where it exists, because the constitution, and the peace of the country, both forbid us. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive slave law, because the constitution demands it.
The main point Catton was making is that, while both the secessionist states and the United States said that the war was not about slavery (until the Emancipation Proclamation), they weren’t fooling anyone. The “declarations of causes” were more public relations than analyses. If your point is that the secessionist states claimed that they weren’t seceding over slavery, and claimed that they had a constitutional right to do so, those are fair points—but they weren’t being candid.
It is certainly true that there was much outrage against John Brown and his supporters in the South, while many in the North regarded him as a hero. This aggravated sectional divisions. But under what law could his backers have been prosecuted? I know of none. John Brown and his men were caught, and hanged, by the United States. (Captured by a task force of US Marines, under the command of one R. E. Lee, if I’m remembering it right.) So one can’t say that the federal government didn’t oppose him.
Although the secessionist states complained at length about economic policies more favorable to the industrialized states than to agricultural states, this is the sort of problem that’s unavoidable. Essentially every government rules a country in which different areas have different interests. The same can be said of each of the states individually; the Virginia tidewater region had different interests from the Appalachian communities, for example. While this sort of thing invariably produces tensions, that’s the sort of thing that is routinely dealt with by a legislature. The secessionist states would not have broken the union for that alone, and did not. Secession was specifically a response to the election of President Lincoln, in service to wild tales about him as an abolitionist, more than in response to anything he actually said or did. (Lincoln once described one of the editorial writers of the South as a “very madman”, because of the positions he ascribed to Lincoln.) When Lincoln was elected, neither the strength of fugitive slave laws, nor the effects of tariffs and construction policies, changed. What changed, was that the president was now an abolitionist. That change caused the “gulf squadron” to go from talking about secession, to attempting it.
Lincoln was an abolitionist in the usual sense, of someone who wanted to abolish slavery within the United States. He did not propose to use the federal power to do so. His stated position was the Federal Government did not have to power to abolish slavery within an existing state. Very contrary to popular belief, Lincoln always tried to follow the laws (although he faced a situation which the laws did not allow for, and was flying by the seat of his pants in many ways). In the Emancipation Proclamation, he specifically limited its effect to areas which were at war with the United States, where the president’s war power applied. He excluded states which were still in the Union, or under Union control, where that claim wouldn’t apply. He always advocated for the complete abolition of slavery, but by lawful means. He did later support an amendment to the Constitution banning slavery (since the Constitution did have the jurisdiction to do that).
The relative powers of the states and the United States had, indeed, been an issue for a long time (and still is, for that matter). When some of the states proclaimed the end of federal power in their states, that brought the issue to greater prominence. After that, large parts of the Confederacy’s support were motivated by loyalty to the states, and large parts of the United States’ support were motivated by loyalty to the United States. People who wouldn’t fight to preserve slavery, or even to prevent black equality, would fight for Virginia, and people who wouldn’t fight to abolish slavery, would fight for the United States of America.
There had been secession crises before. The last one I know of before Lincoln, had been addressed by Andrew Jackson. His stated policy of “I shall hang the first man of them I find, to the first tree I come to.” (as best I remember it) may have been important in keeping the lid on secession at that time. If President Buchanan had not let the ship drift, the secession crisis of 1860 might have been averted too; we will never know.
It is true that slavery’s survival depended on its contribution to the local economy. Slavery was widely regarded as immoral (even in the South), but it is a wonderous thing how much stronger moral arguments become when the person hearing them does not depend, for his livelihood, on rejecting the argument. Slavery was disapproved of even by many of its practitioners, but it was only banned in areas where being a slave-owner wasn’t the route to riches. This was not so much dependent on whether a region was agricultural; it depended on whether it grew cotton or tobacco. These were the crops which became hugely profitable under a slave system. Where the crop was wheat, slavery could still be abolished. Before the civil war, slavery was on the decline in Kentucky. In the New Mexico territories, I think there were only about 30 slaves, even though slavery was protected by law. It wasn’t really profitable there, so slavery didn’t establish itself.
This contributed to the panic level in the states that were attached to slavery. It was obvious that the United States was going to expand into the Great Plains, and obvious that these were not going to be slave areas. Slavery just didn’t make enough economic sense there, to be able to thrive, in the face of general disapproval. The United States would inevitably shift toward more free states; this threatened slavery’s long-term survival.
(At that time, almost everywhere was agricultural. About three-fourths of the total population were farm families. The North had relatively more industry, but was still mostly agricultural. But cotton and tobacco were pretty much limited to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Slavery didn’t work well enough anywhere else.)
The South did have a legitimate gripe about the North’s lax enforcement of the laws on runaway slaves, but there’s really no complete solution to such a thing, and I doubt that anyone expected there to be. No law is ever completely upheld. Any law is weakened when the population has more sympathy for those fleeing than for those trying to capture them. This caused friction, but it was the election of Lincoln, specifically, that sparked secession. The free states did, indeed, return runaway slaves when caught, as they were bound to do. The only complaint the South could legitimately have, was that the free states didn’t try hard enough to enforce that law. That’s a fair complaint, but the concept of “hard enough” is a murky one. This produced friction, but was not enough to produce secession, and, indeed, did not.
(The one general practice of the day that was simply beyond the pale, and should have been crushed by any functional government, was the slaving raids from the slave states into the free states. From time to time, bands of people from the slave states would invade a free state, seize any blacks they could find, and drag them into captivity, regardless of whether they were legally free or not. This made it unhealthy for free blacks, living in free states, to live too near the border with a slave state. There was never a legitimate excuse for this.)
President Lincoln was not only not yet in office when the war started, he was not in office when the shooting started. President Buchanan sent a supply ship, The Star of the West, to re-supply Fort Sumpter in January 1861. The Star was driven off by Confederate cannon fire.
When Lincoln did sent ships to Fort Sumpter, he specifically sent unarmed supply ships to the Federal territory of Fort Sumpter, to bring food to the garrison. He did this deliberately. He stated at the time that if the secessionists wanted to stop the re-supply of the garrison, they would have to go on record as “firing on bread”. Only after the Confederates fired on the unarmed ships, did he send warships in.
Also, the constitution does not allow a state to secede. Under the constitution, each state surrendered supreme sovereign power to the federal government, in the areas in which the federal government has authority. Each of the original thirteen states did this voluntarily; they did not have to join. In adopting the Constitution of the United States, each state surrendered elements of their previously complete sovereignty, gaining in return guarantees from the federal government, and from the other states. For a single state to unilaterally renege on its commitments, was not only unlawful, but dishonorable. To break an agreement honestly, requires the consent of the other parties to the agreement.
Lincoln consistently expressed his moral opposition to slavery, while simultaneously acknowledging the impracticality (legal and otherwise) of abolishing slavery in the states where it already existed.
Every one of the quotations you cite exemplifies this latter acknowledgement.
However, you chose not to include any of the countless quotations in which Lincoln expresses the former. Please refer to the Lincoln-Douglas debates to get a feel for Lincoln’s principled argument against slavery.
Many of the other posts on this thread, including post #25 and the link to the original Republican platform, provide helpful context.
Finally, note that my original statement was about the founding of the Republican Party, yet none of the many quotations you reference even mention the Republican Party!
I stand by my original statement.
The left are the slave holders. This dumb bi%#h is a slave of the DNC.
“Finally, note that my original statement was about the founding of the Republican Party, yet none of the many quotations you reference even mention the Republican Party!”
I quoted Lincoln; he was an early national leader of the Republican Party. Or will you deny that too?
Perhaps the best way for you to support your contention that the Republican Party was founded as an abolition party is to quote from the actual 1860 party platform text calling for the abolition of slavery.
Can you think of a reason why you will not do that?
My point is that I disagree with this claim. I agree that the original 7 seceding states weren't being candid as to why they were seceding. In the tradition of the "train of abuses" contained within the Declaration of Independence where they (let's be honest) heaped everything including the kitchen sink in there to throw at the king....and it was actually Parliament that enacted a lot of the laws they hated but it sounded a whole lot better to say it was the King. So they came from a tradition of being a bit disingenuous in making such claims.
They made what was a sound legal argument but it was not the real reason. That's why when the North offered to remedy the constitutional violations they complained of, they swiftly dismissed it. Both sides were really after the money - as in the vast majority of all wars. The South figured - rightly - that they would be much better off independent and making their own tariff and government expenditure policies. The North figured the same....and that consequently if that Southern money stopped flowing northward, they themselves would be considerably worse off. There are reams of newspaper editorials in the North, the South and Abroad which all agreed about that.
Under what law could John Brown's backers have been prosecuted? Hello? They were part of a criminal conspiracy. As the old common law principle goes, "in for a penny, in for a pound". They were just as guilty of terrorism and murder as Brown and his band of terrorists who fired the shots.
I agree with you that in every country that was industrializing, the costs of industrialization were borne by the agricultural sector. What was different in the US is that the economies of the regions were highly specialized. So in addition to political and cultural differences that had existed since colonial times, you now saw these bitter political differences added in and it was simply too much for the system to bear. The country broke apart as a result. Every government of a larger country at least does indeed rule over areas that have different interests but you just did not see it so regionally localized elsewhere as it was in the US.
Unfortunately, this was not dealt with by the US Congress. Obviously the Southern states should have received some kind of compensation to ameliorate the financial burden of paying for the North's industrialization but instead the larger population of the Northern states (and the nature of industrialization meant they would draw in more immigrants because they needed more labor) meant they had a majority in Congress. The temptation to vote themselves other people's money was just too great and they went too far with it.
Gobbling up all the corporate subsidies and the vast majority of federal infrastructure funds paid for by tariffs on Southern Export/Imports was an added slap in the face for Southerners. Secession was a response to the election of Lincoln yes, but it was much more a response to him as a protectionist and the certain concomitant passage of the Morrill Tariff that convinced the Southern states that it was time to leave.
As for abolition, Lincoln was no abolitionist. He took great pains to say so again and again. He even offered strengthened fugitive slave laws and the Corwin Amendment to show he was perfectly willing to live with slavery.
I agree with you that states rights vs federal power was a live issue then and is indeed still a live issue now. What kept the line on secession the time before....that would be the Nullification Crisis in 1832 was that the federal government agreed to repeal the Tariff of Abominations which is what South Carolina had objected to so strenuously. The lower Walker Tariff held until 1860 when the Morrill Tariff passed the House and was certain to pass the Senate. On top of all the other tensions, that was the last straw. Slavery they could have dealt with. The Northern states were perfectly willing to bend on that issue. The Southern states for their part were determined never again to suffer under a rerun of the Tariff of Abominations which had really grinded down their economies for the benefit of the Northern states.
I don't believe it was so much any threat to the long term survival of slavery that motivated the Southern states to get out when they did. They could see the effect industrialization had had on slavery elsewhere in various European colonial empires and in the Northern states. They knew....or at least many of them knew....slavery's days were numbered. What they needed was to reap the tremendous profits to be had from their very lucrative cash crops for a while so that they would then have the seed capital to industrialize and be competitive. They were only going to get that via independence.
As for the slaving raids....these did happen on rare occasion. More common was for professional slave catchers to round up free blacks in the North and claim they were escaped slaves even when they were not, grease the appropriate palms and then ship them South for a nice tidy profit. You say Lincoln was not in office when the war started. I would say he was. The real shooting was when Lincoln sent a fleet of warships laden with troops into South Carolina's territorial waters.
The Star of the West had been driven off with a warning shot across the bow.
You say Lincoln sent unarmed supply ships to South Carolina's sovereign territory of Charleston Harbor.
The steam sloop-of-war USS Pawnee, 181 officers and enlisted Armament: • 8 × 9 in guns, • 2 × 12-pounder guns USS Powhatan, 289 officers and enlisted Armament: • 1 × 11 in (280 mm) Dahlgren smoothbore gun, 10 × 9 in (230 mm) Dahlgren smoothbore guns • 5 × 12-pounder guns, also transporting steam launches and about 300 sailors (besides the crew, these to be used to augment Army troops)
Armed screw steamer USS Pocahontas, 150 officers and men (approx.) 4 × 32-pounder guns, 1 × 10-pounder gun, 1 × 20-pounder Parrot rifle
The Revenue Cutter USS Harriet Lane, 95 officers and men Armament: 1 x 4in gun, 1 x 9in gun, 2 x 8in guns, 2 x 24 lb brass howitzers
The steamer Baltic transporting about 200 troops, composed of companies C and D of the 2nd U.S. Artillery, and three hired tug boats with added protection against small arms fire to be used to tow troop and supply barges directly to Fort Sumter (or some other point since it is inconceivable that they would be taking small arms fire from a union held fortification)
Totals 4 war ships 4 transports 38 heavy guns 1200 military personnel (at least 500 of whom were to be used as a landing party)
Does this sound like "provisions" to you?
"Lincoln and the First Shot" (in Reassessing the Presidency, edited by John Denson), John Denson painstakingly shows how Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. As the Providence Daily Post wrote on April 13, 1861, "Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor" by reprovisioning Fort Sumter. On the day before that the Jersey City American Statesman wrote that "This unarmed vessel, it is well understood, is a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South." Lincoln's personal secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, clearly stated after the war that Lincoln successfully duped the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter. And as Shelby Foote wrote in The Civil War, "Lincoln had maneuvered [the Confederates] into the position of having either to back down on their threats or else to fire the first shot of the war."
Had they not fired, Lincoln would have only sent more and more expeditions to occupy more and more forts until he was able to control all ports and strategic locations. It was very obvious at the time even to Northerners that Lincoln was the one who really started it.
Here is the letter Lincoln sent to his naval commander, Fox congratulating him on getting a war started.
"May 1st, 1861. Washington Capt. G.V. Fox: My Dear Sir, I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumter should be the source of any annoyance to you. The practicability of your plan was not, in fact, brought to a test. By reason of a gale, well known in advance to be possible, and not improbable, the tugs, an essential part of the plan, never reached the ground ; while, by an accident, for which you were in nowise responsible, and possibly I, to some extent, was, you were deprived of a war-vessel, with her men, which you deemed of great importance to the enterprise.
I most cheerfully and truthfully declare that the failure of the undertaking has not lowered you a particle, while the qualities you developed in the effort have greatly heightened you in my estimation. For a daring and dangerous enterprise of a similar character, you would, to-day, be the man of all my acquaintances whom I would select. You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail ; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. Very truly your friend, A. LINCOLN."
He clearly wanted a war and deliberately started one without authorization from Congress.
Also the constitution is silent on a state's right to unilateral secession. Each state did not surrender supreme sovereign power to the federal government. Each sovereign state delegated (what a superior does with a subordinate) certain limited and enumerated powers to the newly created federal government. The states kept most of their sovereign powers for themselves. Under the 9th and 10th amendments, any power not delegated to the federal government was retained by the states. Again, nowhere was the power to prevent secession delegated by the states to the federal government. Furthermore at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, 3 states including the two sectional leaders New York and Virginia expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession. Under the Comity principle, every state understood itself to have that right.
"We, the delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation from the general assembly, and now met in convention, having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal Convention, and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us to decide thereon, Do, in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will...."
"We, the delegates of the people of New York... do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the department of the government thereof, remains to the people of the several States, or to their respective State governments, to whom they may have granted the same; and that those clauses in the said Constitution, which declare that Congress shall not have or exercise certain powers, do not imply that Congress is entitled to any powers not given by the said Constitution; but such clauses are to be construed either as exceptions in certain specified powers or as inserted merely for greater caution."
"We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected... do declare and make known... that the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the department of the government thereof, remains to the people of the several States, or to their respective State governments, to whom they may have granted the same; that Congress shall guarantee to each State its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Constitution expressly delegated to the United States."
On March 2, 1861 a constitutional amendment was proposed that would have outlawed secession (See H. Newcomb Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson Law Review, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 419—36). This is very telling, for it proves that Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional under the Tenth Amendment. It would not have proposed an amendment outlawing secession if the Constitution already prohibited it. Nor would the Republican Party, which enjoyed a political monopoly after the war, have insisted that the Southern states rewrite their state constitutions to outlaw secession as a condition of being readmitted to the Union. If secession was really unconstitutional there would have been no need to do so.
Even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Lincoln's treasury secretary Salmon P Chase recognized this fact. “If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, July 1867 (Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3, p. 765)
“If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not a rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis] capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.” [as quoted by Herman S. Frey, in Jefferson Davis, Frey Enterprises, 1977, pp. 69-72]
I honestly don’t know where you’re coming from, other than wanting to be disagreeable.
Are you drawing a distinction between slavery and enslavement?
“I honestly don’t know where you’re coming from, other than wanting to be disagreeable.”
You repeated a historical falsehood, probably innocently, and I corrected the record. There is no shame there.
After doubling down, your rational answer tank ran out of fuel. No shame there either as far as I’m concerned.
That's why the universal answer to a trendy social ill is: "Take the guns away from those mean old white people!"
"Historians are clear that the Republican Party was founded, in large part, as an anti-slavery party."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/05/29/fact-check-republican-party-founding-rooted-geography-more-than-slavery/5278166002/
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Excerpt from Politico article on founding of the Republican Party:
"On this day in 1854, Alvan E. Bovay (1818-1903) called an anti-slavery meeting at the Congregational Church in Ripon, the Wisconsin town where he practiced law. [...] A similar meeting had taken place a week earlier in Jackson, Mich. Both groups dubbed themselves 'Republicans' "
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/02/republican-party-founded-on-february-28-1854-008726
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Excerpt from Wikipedia entry on "Republican Party of Wisconsin:"
"The meeting held in Ripon, Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is commonly cited as the birth of the Republican Party in the United States due to it being the first publicized anti-slavery meeting to propose a new party with its name being Republican."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_of_Wisconsin
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Excerpt from Birthplace of the Republican Party NHS:
"This little white schoolhouse is also where a meeting was held to oppose slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and also where Alvan E. Bovay gave the name “Republican” to a new political party."
https://ripon1854.com/about-us/
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I made a statement about the founding of the Republican Party. Here I offer multiple references from mainstream / left-leaning sources to support my statement. You have offered claims (without evidence) of white supremacy, and non sequitur evidence involving Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment.
Why do I say non sequitur? Abraham Lincoln was not involved in the founding of the Republican Party, and the Corwin Amendment was considered after the founding of the Republican Party. Do you deny these facts? Or do you acknowledge these facts and admit that you just don't understand how logic works?
Let's set aside for a moment your need to use USA Today to support your claim.
Also, let's remember what your controversial claim was: “The Republican Party was founded to end slavery.”
Best evidence of the Republican Party's slavery platform would be the Republican Party's platform. Would it be beneficial for you to cite the platform?
Instead we see argument drift: you now cite multiple sources that the Republican Party was “anti-slavery.” Opposing the expansion of slavery can fairly be described as being anti-slavery but it is not the same thing as calling for the end of slavery in Delaware.
To be clear: I'm anti-Red China and avoid buying their stuff, but I am not calling for someone to put an end to Red China.
Looks like we're finally making some progress here. Your response is what I was going for when I asked:
Are you drawing a distinction between slavery and enslavement?
It's fair to draw a distinction between "enslavement" (i.e. expansion of slavery) and "slavery" itself. The first Republican platform clearly opposed the expansion of slavery, and included language indicating a moral opposition to the institution of slavery, but didn't explicitly advocate for the abolition of slavery where it already existed.
To be clear, the argument that anti-slavery is different from the abolition of slavery is quite different from your earlier arguments. This new argument is one that has some teeth, because it will be difficult for either of us to find documentation of the intent of those who founded the Republican Party. That said, I find it difficult to believe that a group of anti-slavery people had anything other than an intention to end slavery. It requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics to ascribe any other common intent of this group of like-minded individuals.
Finally, your analogy to Communist China is imperfect. Being "anti-slavery" in not the same as being "anti-China," as the former is a moral position whereas the latter is a political one. A better analogy would be to being "anti-communism," in which case an individual would be morally opposed to communism universally, whereas a political party would practically start with a platform of preventing the expansion of communism.
Thank you for the paragraphs.
The warships that went into Charleston Harbor don’t sound like provisions. They also don’t sound like the ships that went in first. By design, the first naval group that entered Charleston Harbor included only unarmed transport ships, carrying provisions. After the confederates opened fire on them, they fled. This was not a surprise, since the confederates had fired on the last supply ship. (A warning shot is still a shot.) In specific response to the confederate attack on the supply ships, the gunboats then went in to the harbor (and accomplished very little).
To claim that “Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter” is as absurd as “look what you made me do” usually is in other connections. The confederates had the option of simply allowing the status quo to continue. If they had not fired, there would have been no fight. (At least, not then and there. Given events elsewhere, the chance of avoiding the Civil War entirely, at that point, appears nil.) It is because the confederates were determined to capture the fort, by starving out its garrison, that the confederates were placed in a situation of either giving up on capturing the fort, or shooting at the supply ships. The confederates were the aggressors on this one. For Lincoln to have allowed the garrison to starve, without even trying to send food, would have been badly done.
You can say that the major battles started with the assault on Fort Sumpter, but the shooting started during Buchanan’s term, and the war actually did start when South Carolina enacted her Ordnance of Secession. To remove a slice of a sovereign power’s territory, by force, is war. The fact that, under the Constitution, both the Federal Government and the states are sovereign, requires each to respect the (commonly overlapping) territories and laws of the other. (The Federal Government takes precedence, but only when exercising its enumerated powers. In a manner of speaking, the Constitution creates a two-tier division of powers. The sovereign power is first divided between the Federal Government, the states, and the people, each having privileges which the other two are not allowed to infringe, then it divides the federal power between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.)
Lincoln was indeed an abolitionist, in the usual sense of someone who advocated the abolition of slavery. He wanted to do so lawfully, in a manner that would avoid sudden shocks to the societies, and to get the support of local people for any major change. This distinguished him from those who wanted to free the slaves by gunfire, immediately, and without regard for whether there were any buildings left standing. But he always supported the abolition of slavery. He could not have issued the emancipation proclamation had the nation not been at war, he issued it specifically as a military measure, and it only covered the areas where the United States was at war, but it was not an accident that some of his major military measures did take slices out of slavery. He was instrumental in pushing through the amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery.
The states did not grant powers to the Federal Government in the sense of a Power of Attorney, which the granter may revoke whenever he likes. The states specifically yielded power to the Federal Government, specifically making federal law supreme over their own (. . . and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.). Each state agreed that, under the Constitution, some powers would be taken from it, and granted to the new Federal Government, and that some things which the states could still do, would require Federal permission. Under the Anti-Commandeering doctrine, the Federal Government may not require any state to enforce Federal law, but may send its own forces into any state, to enforce Federal law. The states have the power to enforce their laws, and the Federal Government has to power to enforce its laws. (The Anti-Commandeering doctrine is from the judicial world; it is not stated in the Constitution. As far as I know, it is accepted by everyone.)
You did specifically state that “3 states including the two sectional leaders New York and Virginia expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession.” From the quotes you supplied, they didn’t.
All three states specifically distinguish between “the people” and the state governments. The Virginia statement specifically mentions that the powers of the United States Government are derived from the people of the United States (not from the people of Virginia, which the same statement specifically references elsewhere), and that the people of the United States have the right to resume those powers- -essentially to overthrow the Federal Government.
The other states also distinguish between the people of their states, and the governments of their states. They do not specifically say whether it is the people of a particular state, or the people of the United States, that have the power to break the Federal Government. Each of them does say that the “powers of government” may be reassumed by the people. Unless part of the passage not included here modifies that, each would place both the Federal Government and their state governments at the mercy of “the people” (although their statements were chiefly focused on the Constitution of the United States). Far from asserting a state power, these asserts a state vulnerability- -that the state, like the Federal Government, exists on the sufferance of the people. This may have been deliberate; it was an accepted principle that the people are the font of governmental power, and that would apply at all levels.
Since the Declaration of Independence, it was an accepted principle that when any government goes off the rails, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” To restate this right is not novel, it was already accepted. Virginia specifically ascribes that right to “the people of the United States”; the other two do not say whether they are ascribing the right to overthrow the Federal Government to the people of the United States as a whole, or to some part of it. None claims that any or all of the state governments may remove any or all of the powers of the Federal Government.
(All three states also express the principle later made explicit by the 10th Amendment, that the Federal Government has only the powers specifically granted it, and can’t act outside them. This was already accepted [even before the 10th was ratified], and seems to have been universally accepted until about the 1930s. It is still supposedly in force, though it seems to have sprung a lot of leaks.)
You also said “Under the Comity principle, every state understood itself to have that right.” I’m not familiar with the Comity principle, please explain.
A proposed amendment banning secession does not indicate that “Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional”, any more than proposing the 10th amendment meant that Congress believed that it was not previously limited to the enumerated powers. In both cases, the amendment was to make explicit what was already implicit, and was already generally accepted. (Although the belief that secession was unconstitutional was not as universally accepted as the belief that the Federal Government was a government of enumerated powers, it was accepted by many even in the South, and was generally accepted.)
I have seen elsewhere that one reason the United States did not try Mr. Davis, is that you never know what a jury will do, and if the jury decided that secession was constitutional, wouldn’t that be a bit of an embarrassment? I don’t know what was Justice Chase’s logic for deciding that secession was not rebellion. This may turn on the technical definition of the terms. Certainly, secession did propose to abolish the laws of the United States over an entire area, so it would have included an impressive list of crimes.
To speak of the “costs of industrialization” is likely to cause confusion. Industrialization was not, on balance, a cost. People didn’t build factories and machine shops because they wanted to expend money, they built them because they wanted to make money, and they did. Industry was a source of wealth, not a drain on it. What I was referring to was that the whole United States was mostly an agricultural nation. Even the most industrialized states were still mostly farms; I don’t know of an exception. I think the distinction you were mainly reaching for was not between agricultural and industrial states, so much as between export farmers, and everyone else. The cotton and tobacco growers exported their produce; other types of farmers, not so much. While agriculture was everywhere, cotton and tobacco were mostly on the Gulf coast, and the Southern Atlantic coast.
The nature of government finances did make the burden fall more on cotton growers. By design, The United States originally got its revenue mostly from tariffs. As far as I know, this remained the main source of federal revenue until the implementation of the income tax. Tariffs necessarily fall on importers. The cotton growers were the main source of exports, and imports tend to be greater in communities that export. When the US government was funded by tariffs, it was close to impossible for the burden of them not to fall most heavily on exporting communities.
The tariff walls- -tariffs placed for the specific purpose of reducing imports, to promote internal production of the imported goods- -were even more favorable to the manufacturing communities, at the expense of everyone else. Areas that had little manufacture, were harmed by them. Of the confederate states, Virginia was the only one I know of that had significant industry; the others were not purely agricultural, but pretty close. This was deliberately done, for the (at least, intended) purpose of benefitting the nation, but it tended to harm areas with less industry.
But, while the South could fairly complain that they were mostly funding the Federal Government, we know that this would not drive secession, because it didn’t. This had been a long brewing problem area, and did not change with Lincoln’s election (for all that he was a tariff supporter). What changed was who was president. Secession was launched specifically for fear that, with Lincoln in the White House, slavery would be imperiled. It is fair to say that anyone who looked could see that slavery was going to dwindle as an element of the United States, but that only made slavery supporters more frantic. Many in the South who would not fight for slavery specifically, would fight against black equality; they were more afraid of what would happen when slavery ended, that they were enthusiastic about it continuing.
By the way, what leads you to say that John Brown’s backers were part of a criminal conspiracy? John Brown’s strike force committed crimes (and were hanged for them), but that doesn’t mean that the people he collected money from were party to those crimes. Is everyone who donates money to a politician a conspirator to the crimes that politician commits? Given the shooting war in Kansas at the time, even supplying rifles to anti-slavery fanatics was not necessarily in the wrong, or illegal. What did they do that they could be prosecuted for?
I wouldn't characterize a shot across the bow as an "attack". They weren't trying to harm anyone. They were just warning them to stop invading their territorial waters and turn around.
To claim that “Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter” is as absurd as “look what you made me do” usually is in other connections. The confederates had the option of simply allowing the status quo to continue. If they had not fired, there would have been no fight. (At least, not then and there. Given events elsewhere, the chance of avoiding the Civil War entirely, at that point, appears nil.) It is because the confederates were determined to capture the fort, by starving out its garrison, that the confederates were placed in a situation of either giving up on capturing the fort, or shooting at the supply ships. The confederates were the aggressors on this one. For Lincoln to have allowed the garrison to starve, without even trying to send food, would have been badly done.
We fundamentally disagree here. An aggressor is one who invades the land of another - not one who fires to drive an invader away. Had the Confederates done nothing and allowed their land to be invaded, Lincoln would have invaded time and time again in place after place until he had complete control. Sure that would have "avoided a fight"...at the cost of losing their country. No deal. Lincoln could have simply agreed to evacuate the garrison occupying territory that was in the sovereign state of South Carolina, and war would have been avoided. Instead he chose war. He chose war to impose a government upon people who did not consent to it even though we had said in the Declaration of Independence that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
You can say that the major battles started with the assault on Fort Sumpter, but the shooting started during Buchanan’s term, and the war actually did start when South Carolina enacted her Ordnance of Secession. To remove a slice of a sovereign power’s territory, by force, is war.
Again we disagree. South Carolina as a sovereign state had the right to unilateral secession. They lawfully and democratically did so as did the other seceding states.
The fact that, under the Constitution, both the Federal Government and the states are sovereign, requires each to respect the (commonly overlapping) territories and laws of the other. (The Federal Government takes precedence, but only when exercising its enumerated powers. In a manner of speaking, the Constitution creates a two-tier division of powers. The sovereign power is first divided between the Federal Government, the states, and the people, each having privileges which the other two are not allowed to infringe, then it divides the federal power between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.)
Yes, but states retained the power to unilaterally secede.
Lincoln was indeed an abolitionist, in the usual sense of someone who advocated the abolition of slavery. He wanted to do so lawfully, in a manner that would avoid sudden shocks to the societies, and to get the support of local people for any major change. This distinguished him from those who wanted to free the slaves by gunfire, immediately, and without regard for whether there were any buildings left standing. But he always supported the abolition of slavery.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist and said so many times. He supported strengthened fugitive slave laws and the Corwin Amendment which would have provided express protections for slavery in the constitution effectively forever. He, like the other Republicans, merely wanted to stop the spread of slavery. That was as far as their anti slavery sentiment ran. They believed that in time slavery would die out if confined to the states where it existed. But they were not in favor of doing anything other than preventing it from spreading.
The states did not grant powers to the Federal Government in the sense of a Power of Attorney, which the granter may revoke whenever he likes. The states specifically yielded power to the Federal Government, specifically making federal law supreme over their own (. . . and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.). Each state agreed that, under the Constitution, some powers would be taken from it, and granted to the new Federal Government, and that some things which the states could still do, would require Federal permission. Under the Anti-Commandeering doctrine, the Federal Government may not require any state to enforce Federal law, but may send its own forces into any state, to enforce Federal law. The states have the power to enforce their laws, and the Federal Government has to power to enforce its laws. (The Anti-Commandeering doctrine is from the judicial world; it is not stated in the Constitution. As far as I know, it is accepted by everyone.)
The Supremacy Clause you are referring to ONLY applied to those powers the states delegated to the federal government. It is true that they could not revoke such powers while they were in, but the states retained the ultimate power which was the power to unilaterally secede if they felt the operation of the national government had become injurious or oppressive towards them. They were quite clear about this when they ratified the Constitution. Its hardly surprising given that the Constitution was ratified only about 8 years after the states gained their Independence after a hard fought war for that purpose. They were not about to bind themselves forever or require a permission slip from others to do what they had just done in seceding from the British Empire.
You did specifically state that “3 states including the two sectional leaders New York and Virginia expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession.” From the quotes you supplied, they didn’t.
Oh but from the quotes I supplied, they very much did.
All three states specifically distinguish between “the people” and the state governments.
The states and the state governments were the people in their highest sovereign capacity. This is how the term was used in the federalist papers they had all read prior to ratification of the Constitution.
The Virginia statement specifically mentions that the powers of the United States Government are derived from the people of the United States (not from the people of Virginia, which the same statement specifically references elsewhere), and that the people of the United States have the right to resume those powers- -essentially to overthrow the Federal Government.
"...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
The people did not mean the people of all 13 states collectively. It mean the people of each state. That is the sense in which the express reservations of the right of "the people" was cited by the state legislatures of each of the 3 states that specifically reserved the right to "resume the powers of government" ie secede. "the people" was the people of their state.
The other states also distinguish between the people of their states, and the governments of their states. They do not specifically say whether it is the people of a particular state, or the people of the United States, that have the power to break the Federal Government. Each of them does say that the “powers of government” may be reassumed by the people. Unless part of the passage not included here modifies that, each would place both the Federal Government and their state governments at the mercy of “the people” (although their statements were chiefly focused on the Constitution of the United States). Far from asserting a state power, these asserts a state vulnerability- -that the state, like the Federal Government, exists on the sufferance of the people. This may have been deliberate; it was an accepted principle that the people are the font of governmental power, and that would apply at all levels.
See above. The people were the people of each state. There was no whole collective national people as we would conceive of it today.
Since the Declaration of Independence, it was an accepted principle that when any government goes off the rails, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” To restate this right is not novel, it was already accepted. Virginia specifically ascribes that right to “the people of the United States”; the other two do not say whether they are ascribing the right to overthrow the Federal Government to the people of the United States as a whole, or to some part of it. None claims that any or all of the state governments may remove any or all of the powers of the Federal Government.
No the people of each state may not remove powers delegated to the federal government by the states. They can however remove their state from the United States.
(All three states also express the principle later made explicit by the 10th Amendment, that the Federal Government has only the powers specifically granted it, and can’t act outside them. This was already accepted [even before the 10th was ratified], and seems to have been universally accepted until about the 1930s. It is still supposedly in force, though it seems to have sprung a lot of leaks.)The federal courts....another branch of the federal government....has been ignoring the 10th amendment since 1861.
You also said “Under the Comity principle, every state understood itself to have that right.” I’m not familiar with the Comity principle, please explain.
Comity. One state does not have rights that are superior to that of another state. All states are equal. Ergo if Virginia, New York and Rhode Island have the right to secede, every other state has the right to secede. They all understood this to be the case. Virginia and New York were the two biggest, richest and most powerful states. Each was the leader of its section of the country. So when these two big dogs laid down that marker, everybody else said "oh OK then...those two are making it clear we can get out of this thing if it turns to shit. We're not stuck in a bad situation like we just were with the British Empire that we had to fight our way out of. OK, we'll ratify the Constitution then."
A proposed amendment banning secession does not indicate that “Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional”, any more than proposing the 10th amendment meant that Congress believed that it was not previously limited to the enumerated powers. In both cases, the amendment was to make explicit what was already implicit, and was already generally accepted. (Although the belief that secession was unconstitutional was not as universally accepted as the belief that the Federal Government was a government of enumerated powers, it was accepted by many even in the South, and was generally accepted.)
Obviously they thought unilateral secession was the right of each state. Otherwise there is no reason to pass a law or try to force anybody to say that it is not the right of each state. This is what lawyers would call a "statement against interest"....ie an admission on their part that secession was perfectly constitutional.
I have seen elsewhere that one reason the United States did not try Mr. Davis, is that you never know what a jury will do, and if the jury decided that secession was constitutional, wouldn’t that be a bit of an embarrassment? I don’t know what was Justice Chase’s logic for deciding that secession was not rebellion. This may turn on the technical definition of the terms. Certainly, secession did propose to abolish the laws of the United States over an entire area, so it would have included an impressive list of crimes.
Bingo. You've hit on it. Jeff Davis had a damn good case. Did you know that after Mississippi seceded he hung around Washington DC for a while hoping to be arrested? He wanted to try the issue in the courts. They refused to arrest him because they were worried he had a very strong legal argument. Chase obviously thought secession perfectly constitutional as well. Think how embarrassing it would have been had the court had to rule right after such a costly and bloody war that the Confederates had been in the right all along! Chase did not want to risk that. Even if the courts - for reasons of political bias (like we see in Washington DC today) had ruled against Davis and ruled secession were not constitutional, if Davis were allowed to present his case, the facts and evidence he could have introduced into the official record would be....embarrassing at the very least. Chase just wanted to bury this quietly and not discuss the legality of the whole thing.
To speak of the “costs of industrialization” is likely to cause confusion. Industrialization was not, on balance, a cost. People didn’t build factories and machine shops because they wanted to expend money, they built them because they wanted to make money, and they did. Industry was a source of wealth, not a drain on it. What I was referring to was that the whole United States was mostly an agricultural nation. Even the most industrialized states were still mostly farms; I don’t know of an exception. I think the distinction you were mainly reaching for was not between agricultural and industrial states, so much as between export farmers, and everyone else. The cotton and tobacco growers exported their produce; other types of farmers, not so much. While agriculture was everywhere, cotton and tobacco were mostly on the Gulf coast, and the Southern Atlantic coast.
To make industrialization work, you need expensive infrastructure like Canals and Railroads and dredging harbors, etc. In a world in which the British and French have industrialized first and thus have economies of scale that you do not have, you can't compete with them on price. So in order to compete you need a protected market. You need tariffs to drive the price of their goods up. These are the costs of industrialization.
At that time, the exporters were the importers. The exporters had to hire the ships and pay the crew's wages and pay for the insurance etc. This was quite expensive. To defray that massive shipping cost, they needed to try to fill the ships' holds with something for the return journey across the Atlantic. What was most economical by far were manufactured goods which Britain and France produced. So that's what they did....except that meant they were then stuck paying the tariff. Who was doing all the exporting? The South with their Cotton, Tobacco, Indigo, Rice, Sugar, etc. When the price of all manufactured goods was driven up thanks to the tariff, Southerners had to pay more for those manufactured goods so it hit them there too. It was one thing if these tariffs were a more modest 17%. It was quite another if that rate was doubled or tripled.
The nature of government finances did make the burden fall more on cotton growers. By design, The United States originally got its revenue mostly from tariffs. As far as I know, this remained the main source of federal revenue until the implementation of the income tax. Tariffs necessarily fall on importers. The cotton growers were the main source of exports, and imports tend to be greater in communities that export. When the US government was funded by tariffs, it was close to impossible for the burden of them not to fall most heavily on exporting communities.
Correct. The South - thanks to its climate and soil - was well suited to very lucrative cash crops like Tobacco and Cotton. This made it by far the wealthiest portion of the country at the time of the revolution and in the early years of the Republic. They were willing to bear some cost to build up the shipping industry and help domestic manufacturers and mines get on their feet. These were overwhelmingly in the North where they couldn't grow such lucrative crops. As time went on though, the demands for higher and higher tariffs grew. Also as the North industrialized its wealthy grew. By the mid 19th century, the North was as wealthy as the South and still the South was stuck paying for everything and on top of that the demands for higher tariffs which had proven so harmful to the South's economy a generation earlier (the Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis) grew again. The Morrill tariff passed the House in 1860 and was sure to pass the Senate in 1861. The Republicans championed high protective tariffs. The Morrill tariff went on to TRIPLE tariff rates from 17% to over 50%. Upon seeing this, the states of the Deep South had had enough.
The tariff walls- -tariffs placed for the specific purpose of reducing imports, to promote internal production of the imported goods- -were even more favorable to the manufacturing communities, at the expense of everyone else. Areas that had little manufacture, were harmed by them. Of the confederate states, Virginia was the only one I know of that had significant industry; the others were not purely agricultural, but pretty close. This was deliberately done, for the (at least, intended) purpose of benefitting the nation, but it tended to harm areas with less industry.
Exactly. At the federal level, a lot more care should have been taken to try to counter balance this. That is especially so as time went on, and the North's wealth caught up to the South's by the mid 19th century. Instead of reducing the burden then or distributing it more evenly, the special interests and the politicians from the Northern states proposed to pile on even more tariffs and screw over the Southern states even harder. THAT is what really set things off. People are motivated by money. This touched everybody's pockets in the South - even the 94.63% who did not own slaves.
But, while the South could fairly complain that they were mostly funding the Federal Government, we know that this would not drive secession, because it didn’t. This had been a long brewing problem area, and did not change with Lincoln’s election (for all that he was a tariff supporter). What changed was who was president. Secession was launched specifically for fear that, with Lincoln in the White House, slavery would be imperiled. It is fair to say that anyone who looked could see that slavery was going to dwindle as an element of the United States, but that only made slavery supporters more frantic. Many in the South who would not fight for slavery specifically, would fight against black equality; they were more afraid of what would happen when slavery ended, that they were enthusiastic about it continuing.
Here we disagree. That is exactly what drove secession and war, not slavery. Not just the majority but the vast majority of White Southerners did not participate in slavery. Less than 6% of the total White population owned slaves. Of those half owned less than 5. The large slave owners were only 3% of the White population. Influential though they were, they could not have gotten the other 94+ percent to fight and die over slavery. It was the fact that they were being screwed over economically and it was on the cusp of being much much worse as soon as the Morrill Tariff passed.
No matter how much Southerners hated all of this though, it was not unconstitutional. So....how to claim that it was the Northern states who acted in bad faith and really broke the deal? AHA! The Northern states refused to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution. That clearly did happen and clearly was unconstitutional. So they Southern states could legitimately say the other side broke the deal, not them. That wasn't what was really motivating them, but that was an excellent legal argument which had the virtue of being true. It was a wonderful pretext to do what was in their interest anyway - go independent and set a very low tariff.
By the way, what leads you to say that John Brown’s backers were part of a criminal conspiracy? John Brown’s strike force committed crimes (and were hanged for them), but that doesn’t mean that the people he collected money from were party to those crimes. Is everyone who donates money to a politician a conspirator to the crimes that politician commits? Given the shooting war in Kansas at the time, even supplying rifles to anti-slavery fanatics was not necessarily in the wrong, or illegal. What did they do that they could be prosecuted for?
They specifically provided money for supplies including expensive Sharp's Rifles for John Brown's group to launch a violent attack in the Southern states. They knew what he had planned. That's how Brown and his group raised money for it. That is a criminal conspiracy....Those who financed the 9/11 attack for example are guilty of a criminal conspiracy in exactly the same way.....same as those who plot a bank robbery are guilty of a criminal conspiracy.
When Northern states refused to prosecute them despite their public announcement of their complicity in the plot, Southerners were.....well......how would Americans have reacted had we found out several prominent Saudi Citizens financed the 9/11 attack AND the Saudi government refused to prosecute them or hand them over? People would have lost their everloving minds. A large percentage probably would have wanted us to go to war with Saudi Arabia over that. That's how Southerners felt.
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