Doesn’t it follow then, that the actions of the South, succession, risk of war, were also about money? The wealthy planter class wanted to hold on to their money making property, the slaves, and foresaw the eventual end of slavery if they stayed in the union.
My own take:
States had the right to leave the union as an implicit principal of the nation’s founding.
It was not treason to leave the union. It was treason, against the founding principals, to force states to remain against the wishes of their citizens.
It was about money and power on both sides, the Southern planters’ wealth depending on slavery and the Northern industrialists’ wealth depending on Southern agricultural product.
It was also about morality. The implicit principals of the constitution gave the slaves the right to rise in rebellion, and arguably, the abolitionists the right to fight on behalf of the slaves.
The only thing that could have morally justified the war was freeing the slaves. Not keeping the Union. Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union was not going to be easy for the other states, that many held it indissoluble without previous exemption.
James Madison says otherwise. Madison said that people were both citizens of their state and citizens of the United States, and that a state government does not have the authority to strip its citizens of their citizenship in the United States.
Still, this comes down to one man's opinion, but he was the authority on the intent and meaning of the Constitution.
On March 15, 1833, James Madison wrote a letter to Daniel Webster:
Madison's argument here is that when the states ratified the Constitution, that conferred United States citizenship on the citizens of the several states with all the rights and powers laid out in the Constitution.Madison previously wrote that allowing a state to secede implicitly gives the others states the power to kick out an offending state, which cannot be allowed.Madison:
It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity. They might, by the same authority & by the same process have converted the Confederacy into a mere league or treaty; or continued it with enlarged or abridged powers; or have imbodied the people of their respective States into one people, nation or sovereignty; or as they did by a mixed form make them one people, nation, or sovereignty, for certain purposes, and not so for others.Madison asserts that once given, a governor or legislature does not have the right to strip its state citizens of their citizenship in the United States.Madison:
The only distinctive effect, between the two modes of forming a Constitution by the authority of the people, is that if formed by them as imbodied into separate communities, as in the case of the Constitution of the U.S. a dissolution of the Constitutional Compact would replace them in the condition of separate communities, that being the Condition in which they entered into the compact; whereas if formed by the people as one community, acting as such by a numerical majority, a dissolution of the compact would reduce them to a state of nature, as so many individual persons. But whilst the Constitutional compact remains undissolved, it must be executed according to the forms and provisions specified in the compact.In other words, the citizens of the several states are also citizens of the United States via the compact of the Constitution that was "ordained and established..." by "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union." Madison says that as long as the Constitution itself remains operative, it applies to all the citizens of the United States regardless of their state of residence and the status of that state.
Madison wrote about secession in a letter ca. 1832 to Mr. Alexander Rives, who later published it in the Virginia (Charlottesville) Advocate in 1833: LETTER FROM MR. MADISON ON THE RIGHT OF SECESSION:
Madison argues that the ratification of the Constitution was a compact between the states, and as such, each state has equal say in all matters. When one state declares itself to secede unilaterally, it says that its own decision is elevated above all the rest.Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union...Madison:
The case of a claim in a State to secede from its union with the others, is a question among the States themselves as parties to a compact...Madison then suggests that if a state declares its own desire supreme over the others, then that right extends to all the other states too. That means that if a state has a right to secede from the others, then the others have the right to secede from it. In other words, a body of states has the right to oust a state against its wishes, which is a dangerous precedent.It surely does not follow, from the fact of the States, or rather the people embodied in them, having as parties to the Constitutional compact no tribunal above them, that, in controverted meanings of the compact, a minority of the parties can rightfully decide against the majority; still less that a single party can decide against the rest; and as little that it can at will withdraw itself altogether from its compact with the rest.
Madison:
The characteristic distinction between free Governments and Governments not free is, that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved, than every other has to deny the fact, and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single State has a right to secede at will from the rest, is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them.
I think this is an urban legend not borne out by facts. A review of the Texas Annexation Founding Documents contains no mention of retaining a right to secede and return to independent nation status. It did, however, have the right to split into four smaller states.
-PJ
Yes! It does. Southerners saw themselves being taxed for others' benefit just as their fathers and grandfathers had been when they seceded from the British Empire. They also saw both the cost of goods they needed to import go up dramatically, as well as their sales to their key foreign markets shrink dramatically. They didn't need degrees in economics to see this either. They had already experienced it all a generation earlier during the Tariff of Abominations. That's what sparked the Nullification Crisis in 1832. They remembered it.
The wealthy planter class wanted to hold on to their money making property, the slaves, and foresaw the eventual end of slavery if they stayed in the union.
Why would they see the end of slavery if they stayed in the union? The union was offering to protect slavery effectively forever. If anything, slavery was more likely to come to an end much sooner if they left the union. The border from the Atlantic cost of South Carolina all the way to El Paso, Texas is about 1500 miles. The total White population of those 7 seceding states as of 1860 was only 2.1 million. There was no chance they could come even remotely close to securing that border. As soon as any slaves crossed that border, they were in a now foreign country which had no obligation to return their escaped slaves. Lincoln himself pointed this out. Nobody could really argue against it. Secession meant the rapid end of slavery, not its preservation.
States had the right to leave the union as an implicit principal of the nation’s founding.
Over and above that, 3 states including the two biggest and most important ones (Virginia and New York) expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession at the time that they ratified the US Constitution. Nobody at the time argued that a state did not have the right of unilateral secession.
It was not treason to leave the union. It was treason, against the founding principals, to force states to remain against the wishes of their citizens.
Exactly. Read the Declaration of Independence. Government derives its legitimacy from the Consent of the Governed. If people no longer consent to be ruled over by a far off government, they have the right to leave....to declare independence. That's exactly what the Founding Fathers did.
It was about money and power on both sides, the Southern planters’ wealth depending on slavery and the Northern industrialists’ wealth depending on Southern agricultural product.
Agree that it was about money and power on both sides. I disagree that it was about the Planter class being worried about losing their slaves. Remember, higher prices for manufactured goods was money out of the pocket of everyone in the South from Planter to town tradesman to yeoman farmer who owned no slaves. Reduces sales of their cash crops abroad as a result of a dramatic tariff increase and subsequent loss of sales for foreign trade partners was once again, money out of the pockets of family farmers (who usually devoted a share of their acreage to cash crops to generate the money to buy things they could not produce themselves) just as it touched the pockets of wealthy planters.
and of course people of all classes did not like the idea that they were being taxed to benefit others like Northern corporations. Just look at the bitter fights today over which states are net donors and net recipients to the federal budget/expenditures.
It was also about morality. The implicit principals of the constitution gave the slaves the right to rise in rebellion, and arguably, the abolitionists the right to fight on behalf of the slaves.
It might be comforting to think it was about morality, but sadly, very very few people of that era were abolitionists. They couldn't get more than single digit percentages of the vote anywhere....and usually low single digit percentages. Even some abolitionists were flaming racists who wanted Blacks deported or who at the very least, were horrified by the idea of Blacks (or Indians) having political or social equality and who were horrified by the idea that people would intermarry. Society had very different standards of morality in the mid 19th century than we have today......no women's rights, no child labor laws, no social safety net, etc etc etc.
Neither secession nor the war were about morality.
The only thing that could have morally justified the war was freeing the slaves. Not keeping the Union. Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union was not going to be easy for the other states, that many held it indissoluble without previous exemption.
Others have recognized this as well:
"It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war against states fighting for the independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery." Woodrow Wilson
I'm not fond of the guy either, but ole Woodrow hit on the truth here. Slavery and it being a "war against slavery" was the fig leaf....ie the propaganda....used by the federal government after the fact to explain to their own voters why so many of their loved ones had gotten maimed and killed fighting to subdue the Southern states and was used by the federal government to justify their massive power grab/destruction of the limits placed on federal power by the US Constitution.
It was really all about money and power - not morality.
Of course it was. It's always about money, but here is the difference.
Firstly, it was their money, and secondly, they had a right to be independent if they wanted independence.
What right did the North have to their money, and what right did the North have to stop them from being independent as the Declaration of Independence says they have the right to be?
The wealthy planter class wanted to hold on to their money making property, the slaves, and foresaw the eventual end of slavery if they stayed in the union.
As ugly as it was, this was their legal right at the time, and the people who coveted their money recognized that this was their legal right and even went so far as to offer further protection for that legal right by passing the Corwin Amendment through Congress.
And how would there be an "eventual end to slavery" with the Northern states passing the Corwin Amendment, which the evidence indicates would have happened if the seceded states had ratified it?
I have come to realize that making slavery the focus of the war is just propaganda and misdirection to take people's attention off of the money issues between the powerful Northern corporate titans, their pet representatives and senators in Congress, and their motivation in keeping that money stream from the South flowing into their pockets.
It's like saying we drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait because they were tossing babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. (Which was part of our propaganda justifying the war.) It is a argument meant to distract with an appeal to emotion.
Ignored is the serious economic reason why the war was prosecuted.
States had the right to leave the union as an implicit principal of the nation’s founding.
It was not treason to leave the union. It was treason, against the founding principals, to force states to remain against the wishes of their citizens.
It was also about morality. The implicit principals of the constitution gave the slaves the right to rise in rebellion, and arguably, the abolitionists the right to fight on behalf of the slaves.
John Brown tried to provoke a slave rebellion. Had he been successful, those same troops from Massachusetts that fought the confederates in the 1860s would have willingly marched down into the south to kill the rebellious slaves, and probably a lot of innocent ones too.
Something I learned which I did not know for most of my life is that the abolitionists were a tiny minority of people, and were considered "kooks" in that era. Most Northern people opposed slavery, but not for the moral reasons we are led to believe. Most of them opposed it because they saw slaves, as in people who would do work without pay, as a threat to their own economic well being. They had to trade their work for pay, and to them, slaves represented a threat to their income. Another reason why most people opposed slavery is because they hated blacks and didn't want them in their society. They wanted their society to have only white people and they saw slavery as a dangerous mixing of the races.
The only thing that could have morally justified the war was freeing the slaves.
Which is exactly how they presented it to the public. They killed 750,000 people to keep the wealthy and powerful robber barons and their pet congress in control of the economic output of the South, and they dared not let people focus on that.
Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union was not going to be easy for the other states, that many held it indissoluble without previous exemption.
But this is not an evidence based view, this is an emotionally based view. I have learned what I could of the arguments from both sides, and the people who argue for the right to independence have a lot more proof and better proof than those who argue that it is forbidden.
To my knowledge, the only supporting evidence from the founding era that the founders considered secession to be illegal are two statements by James Madison, and one of those is made 40 years after the fact.
All the other evidence argues the founders recognized the right of people to become independent of a central government they felt no longer represented their interests.