Posted on 05/01/2024 4:07:52 PM PDT by TexasKamaAina
The Declaration of Secession was the result of a convention of the Mississippi Legislature in January of 1861. The convention adopted a formal Ordinance of Secession written by former Congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. While the ordinance served an official purpose, the declaration laid out the grievances Mississippi’s ruling class held against the federal government under the leadership of President-elect Abraham Lincoln...The convention really couldn’t be any more straightforward:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at mississippitoday.org ...
There is no doubt the Founding Fathers were embarrassed by the existence of slavery which ran directly contrary to their lofty rhetoric expressed in the Declaration of Independence. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
That was of no practical effect however. The fact is that they did provide for slavery in the US Constitution. They provided for expression of political power based on slavery - see 3/5ths compromise - its protection see Fugitive Slave Clause and even the 20 year continuance of the African Slave Trade.
That recognition and protection was not strictly at the behest of the Southern states either. All the states allowed slavery at the time the Constitution was ratified. The states of New England lobbied even harder than the states of South Carolina and Georgia for the continuance of the slave trade for a period of years - after all, they were the slave traders and thus stood most to profit.
Wrong. The Corwin Amendment was introduced on March 2 and was ratified by the Senate on March 4. The Confederate Constitution was not introduced until March 11. The Corwin Amendment preceded the Confederate Constitution.
In addition to getting the timeline wrong, you are also wrong on the facts. The Corwin Amendment would have provided all the protections for slavery that existed in the Confederate Constitution with its ban on the Confederate Government imposing abolition of slavery on any state.
Of course, the Corwin Amendment was just spelling out explicitly what already existed de facto. The US Federal government had no power to abolish slavery in any state even if there had been widespread support for abolition which there wasn't.
Not only does he just hurl epithets at Taney but he also tries to pretend Taney alone was the only one who decided what the Constitution meant and everybody had to just consult him - like the Oracle at Delphi - on matters constitutional.
Dred Scott was the majority opinion of the SCOTUS.
That's what he doesn't want to admit. A majority of the Supreme Court decided that case and its judgment was the law of the land. No, it wasn't just one crazy guy's opinion. It was a majority of the highest court in the country and its decisions were legally binding. The law was what it said it was. His or anybody else's personal distaste for that decision is IRRELEVANT. It. was. the. law.
The common phrase was "selling South". Pennsylvania IIRC set the maximum age for a slave born after a certain date at 27. That left the owner 27 years to sell his slave to an owner in a state that would allow that person to be enslaved for life. This had 2 benefits as far as Pennsylvania was concerned.
1) it fully compensated Pennsylvania slave owners for their property. They would get market value for all of their slaves. Thus they were not nearly as opposed as they would have been had their slave property simply been expropriated (emancipated).
2) It got rid of Black People. It got them out of state. Oh, I know that's a horrible, nasty, wicked and rude thing to say. Unfortunately, its also true. This was very much a concern of Northerners. They didn't just want to get rid of slavery. They wanted to get rid of Black People. That's why they passed the Black Codes - to make it extremely difficult for Free Blacks to live so as to drive them out too.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4235021/posts?page=112#112
I believe woodpusher has informed you, and it's up to you whether or not you wish to actually know the truth.
CW 5:534-35, President Lincoln, December 1, 1862, Annual Message to Congress
Heretofore colored people, to some extent, have fled north from bondage; and now, perhaps, from both bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted, they will have neither to flee from. Their old masters will give them wages at least until new laborers can be procured; and the freed men, in turn, will gladly give their labor for the wages, till new homes can be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race. This proposition can be trusted on the mutual interests involved. And, in any event, cannot the north decide for itself, whether to receive them?
Were those really “slave-catching” expeditions? Serious question. I always thought they purchased slaves from African slave markets.
Later in the same sentence he buttresses his claims with a mention of “Crazy Roger's alleged logic”.
In his next sentence, Brother Joe expands his argument with a reference to “Crazy Roger's Dred Scott insane rulings.”
In the next sentence Brother Joe slips into the comfortable “Crazy Roger.”
Next sentence: the all-new “Crazy Roger's insane opinions.”
Next up: “Crazy Roger's opinions.”
And then the surprising: “insanities of Crazy Roger.”
Then an auxiliary argument: “Crazy Roger's lunacies”.
Ending with the valediction: “Crazy Roger's insane opinions”.
Though rather incoherent, Professor Joe's skinny arguments are stylistically consistent.
Does it say it was a fake, ginned up drama to create a political win for the Republicans?
No, not for the Republicans. For the abolitionists, who may or may not have been Republicans. Dr. Chaffee was a Know Nothing.
After the fact, people propose theories to shoehorn the observed facts into their ideology.
Is that what Abe Lincoln did?
Etheldred Scott was never the property of John Sanford of New York. He had been the property of Dr. John Emerson until the doctor died. Then he became the property of Irene Emerson, his widow. When Irene remarried to abolitionist Congressman Calvin Chaffee of Massachusetts, the law of femes covert applied. A married woman could not own personal property. In marriage, the property went to the husband. And so, Congressman Chaffee became a slave owner.
John Sanford spent the trial in an insane asylum. He died shortly before the Scotus decision finding it had no jurisdiction to rule on the merits of the case. The Chaffee ownership became public knowledge as it splashed across the newspapers and Chaffee executed a quitclaim deed in favor of Taylor Blow in Missouri. There is a very public record that Chaffee dispossesed himself of Dred Scott.
While the proceedings were ongoing for years, Scott was loaned out by the Sheriff and the earnings were kept in escrow. Those earnings were claimed by Irene Emerson Chaffee, confirmed by another court record.
This embarrassment was brought up to some laughter in the Lincoln-Douglass debates. Sixth Debate, October 13, 1858. By then, even Honest Abe had to concede it was a made up moot case, with no actual case or controversy.
[DOUGLAS - CW 3:260]
I have since asked him who the Democratic owners of Dred Scott were, but he could not tell, and why? Because there were no such Democratic owners in existence. Dred Scott at the time was owned by the Rev. Dr. Chaffee, an Abolition member of Congress, of Springfield, Massachusetts, in right of his wife. He was owned by one of Lincoln's friends, and not by Democrats at all; (immense cheers, "give it to him,'' &c.) his case was conducted in court by Abolition lawyers, so that both the prosecution and the defense were in the hands of the Abolition political friends of Mr. Lincoln. (Renewed cheering.)
[LINCOLN - CW 6:282-283]
I have asked Judge Douglas' attention to certain matters of fact tending to prove the charge of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery, and he says he convinces me that this is all untrue because Buchanan was not in the country at that time, and because the Dred Scott case had not then got into the Supreme Court; and he says that I say the Democratic owners of Dred Scott got up the case. I never did say that. [Applause.] I defy Judge Douglas to show that I ever said so for I never uttered it. [One of Mr. Douglas' reporters gesticulated affirmatively at Mr. Lincoln.] I don't care if your hireling does say I did, I tell you myself that I never said the "Democratic'' owners of Dred Scott got up the case. [Tremendous enthusiasm.] I have never pretended to know whether Dred Scott's owners were Democrats or Abolitionists, or Free Soilers or Border Ruffians. I have said that there is evidence about the case tending to show that it was a made up case, for the purpose of getting that decision. I have said that that evidence was very strong in the fact that when Dred Scott was declared to be a slave, the owner of him made him free, showing that he had had the case tried and the question settled for such use as could be made of that decision; he cared nothing about the property thus declared to be his by that decision. [Enthusiastic applause.] But my time is out and I can say no more.
You’re just denying things to preserve your dogma. Postmasters were appointed by the president in those days. That was a massive number of political appointments It’s why presidents were besieged by office seekers. Under the Democrats postmasters could forbid the spreading of abolitionist materials through the mails. That policy could have been changed by Lincoln, and since the mails were the main means of spreading opinion beyond the immediate area, this would be a major change. You say that the post office was the only way most people experienced government, but then conjure up some powerful government strangling the South. There’s a contradiction there. In any case, control of the post office was important in the arguments over slavery.
You set up a straw man of “it was all about slavery” to prop up your “it was about tariffs” doll or puppet, but totally ignore the emotions of the time. John Brown’s actions had raised the possibility of a slave uprising. Texans were convinced that prairie wildfires had been set by abolitionists. Secessionists in the Deep South were convinced that Republicans would find a way to take away their slaves or inspire them to revolt. There were many slaveowning families in the Cotton States and they controlled the governments of those states.
They saw how slavery was fading away in Delaware and Maryland and feared that anti-slavery feeling might spread southward. Even if emancipation was far down the road, the rise of an anti-slavery or non-slavery party like the Republicans in the slave states, built up around federal judges, marshalls, customs officials, and postmasters, terrified those in power in the South. They weren’t in the mood for a two party system if slavery was to be the dividing issue. They had convinced themselves that if Republicans held the White House and Congress, it would threaten their “institutions” and their way of life.
Lincoln was absent and relatively inexperienced. Seward, Stanton and other members of his cabinet assumed that they were more qualified than he was. Similarly, Trump was the “leader of his party” in 2017, but McConnell and Ryan definitely didn’t take direction from him. Lincoln did have a role in the formation of the Corwin Amendment, but that amendment was hashed out in committee meetings behind closed doors in a variety of compromises that he didn’t have any role in making.
Lincoln had a lot on his hands after being inaugurated. Goodwin relates that he was uncertain about whether to even mention the amendment in his inaugural address. He did so, but distanced himself from it. I don’t see anything in Goodwin’s book proving lobbying efforts behind the scenes. It’s doubtful that Lincoln was campaigning even secretly for the amendment when he had Sumter and so many other things to worry about.
There’s a lot more to be said, but you aren’t likely to be convinced by facts, so what’s the point?
It is impeccable scholarship. He is able to pin down motives by diary entries from people who were in the room when the issue was being discussed.
I believe Taney and others had good intentions. They wanted to use a Supreme Court decision as a way to take the issue of slavery "off the table".
It did not work that way, and it likely backfired.
Sure, there were abolitionists involved. They did not get the decision they wanted from the case.
You will find a lot to like in the book.
You may have a point; depends on the definition of “catching.”
If "catching" is limited to going into the interior and using pit traps, net traps, cage traps, body grips, deadfalls, and snare wires - then no.
On the other hand, a baseball catcher is said to make a “catch” simply by moving his glove into the line of trajectory - and holding on.
If Northern slave profiteers were not on slave-catching expeditions, and merely slave-acquisition expeditions, that changes everything. Perhaps Brown University can claim compete exoneration and even argue they did not receive the benefit of the bargain.
Postmasters were appointed by the president in those days. That was a massive number of political appointments It’s why presidents were besieged by office seekers. Under the Democrats postmasters could forbid the spreading of abolitionist materials through the mails. That policy could have been changed by Lincoln, and since the mails were the main means of spreading opinion beyond the immediate area, this would be a major change. You say that the post office was the only way most people experienced government, but then conjure up some powerful government strangling the South. There’s a contradiction there. In any case, control of the post office was important in the arguments over slavery.
I'm well aware of the spoils system. There weren't enough postmaster jobs for anybody to build a political machine that would have influence in an entire region base on that relatively small number of jobs. The post office was the only direct interaction most people had with the federal government. They did not see the tariff collectors at the ports of entry. They didn't travel more than 20 miles from their homes in most cases. They therefore did not see a federal official who was making them get less from the wholesaler for their goods or who saw them be able to sell less of their cotton or tobacco or other crop. They did not see the official who made all the manufactured goods they needed become more expensive. Yet it was the federal government making that happen via its tariff and trade policy as they well knew. So no, there was no contradiction.
You set up a straw man of “it was all about slavery” to prop up your “it was about tariffs” doll or puppet, but totally ignore the emotions of the time.
The "all about slavery" myth is no strawman. That is literally what the PC Revisionists argue.
John Brown’s actions had raised the possibility of a slave uprising.
Had it? No slaves rose up to join him. What it showed was not only that there were bloodthirsty Northern fanatics who literally wanted them dead. It also showed Southerners that these terrorists enjoyed widespread sympathy and support in places like Massachusetts and the government there refused to bring them to justice. Imagine if we found that prominent Saudis had openly financed the 911 terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia refused to bring them to justice or extradite them. That was how Southerners now viewed New England in particular.....not that there would be an imminent slave uprising but that these people were not merely political opponents but actual enemies who were trying to do them harm.
Texans were convinced that prairie wildfires had been set by abolitionists. Secessionists in the Deep South were convinced that Republicans would find a way to take away their slaves or inspire them to revolt. There were many slaveowning families in the Cotton States and they controlled the governments of those states.
Woah! That last point is one the PCers have always claimed and it was always false. Certainly the landed elites had a lot of influence. They did not however control the governments of those states by themselves. They could not get elected nor act without popular support. The vast majority of White Southerners did not own any slaves. And no, they weren't shoeless, toothless, illiterates easily led around by their noses either. That is another ridiculous trope the PCers trot out in support of their bogus claims that the Southern states were some kind of slaveocracy.
They saw how slavery was fading away in Delaware and Maryland and feared that anti-slavery feeling might spread southward.
You repeat this claim yet I haven't seen this thought widely expressed in all my readings of the the events and the politics leading up to the war.
Even if emancipation was far down the road, the rise of an anti-slavery or non-slavery party like the Republicans in the slave states, built up around federal judges, marshalls, customs officials, and postmasters, terrified those in power in the South. They weren’t in the mood for a two party system if slavery was to be the dividing issue. They had convinced themselves that if Republicans held the White House and Congress, it would threaten their “institutions” and their way of life.
No it was more like what both Robert Tombs in the Georgia Declaration of Causes and Robert Barnwell Rhett described in his address. They were concerned that the Republicans were successfully using slavery as a wedge issue to get the Midwest to go along with New England in pushing for extremely high tariffs which would both fatten the profit margins of Northern industrialists as well as allow them to gain market share BUT which at the same time would be economically ruinous to the Southern States They had already been down that road before. As Rhett said:
"To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things."
Get it? They weren't worried slavery would be abolished. They were worried this new sectional political party would be able to use the slavery issue to unite the North and push through huge tariffs.
Lincoln was absent and relatively inexperienced. Seward, Stanton and other members of his cabinet assumed that they were more qualified than he was. Similarly, Trump was the “leader of his party” in 2017, but McConnell and Ryan definitely didn’t take direction from him. Lincoln did have a role in the formation of the Corwin Amendment, but that amendment was hashed out in committee meetings behind closed doors in a variety of compromises that he didn’t have any role in making.
You are massively underselling Lincoln's role in the formulation of the Corwin Amendment, in whipping votes for it among Republicans and in getting the whole party machinery behind it to get it ratified in multiple Northern states.
Lincoln had a lot on his hands after being inaugurated. Goodwin relates that he was uncertain about whether to even mention the amendment in his inaugural address. He did so, but distanced himself from it. I don’t see anything in Goodwin’s book proving lobbying efforts behind the scenes. It’s doubtful that Lincoln was campaigning even secretly for the amendment when he had Sumter and so many other things to worry about.
LOL! That is not at all what Goodwin said. There were plenty of others who also discussed Lincoln's key role in getting the Corwin Amendment drafted and passed.
There’s a lot more to be said, but you aren’t likely to be convinced by facts, so what’s the point?
There you go projecting again.
:)
I would say "no."
"You broke it, you bought it. "
I would say "no."
I would also say "no." But Lincoln was a salesman and that is how he went about salesmanship. I find it useful to know what he said, even if it was pure crap.
Not just the South. Look at my earlier post about how President Lincoln blabbed about slavery being in the Constitution to his national audience on inauguration day.
But your point about northern hypocrisy stands. At the time Lincoln was speaking frankly about corralling and returning runaway sla*es he was also dangling the northern Corwin amendment carrot which used the euphemisms you find objectionable; all to protect tender Yankee sensibilities.
You have a right to be rankled.
Lowcountry secessionists agreed that Republicans would immediately attempt no overt antislavery laws. Such an effort would scare Southerners out of the Union and out of Yankees’ clutches. In contrast, Republicans’ deployment of southern patronage would leave the region enfeebled. John Townsend spread a spooky metaphor for nonovert enfeeblement, as chilling as a caged rat: a spider’s web. Imagine, wrote Townsend, “some insect, strong in itself, but which has sillily entangled itself in the meshes of a spider. With moderate exertions at first, it could … free itself. … But it prefers to be quiescent for awhile. Fatal hesitation!” The “artful” spider “dashes forth from his hiding place and fastens a cord around the wing,” then retreats, pauses, rushes forth, retreats, pauses, assaults, until the prey can barely move.
Republicans will creep southward “stealthily, cautiously at first, lest we break through their meshes, and form a government for ourselves.” By appointing southern turncoats to federal stations in the South, including custom houses, post offices, and court houses, Lincoln would spread his meshes inside the South. After we become “unable to resist,” we will have to “submit to…the mercy of the spider.”
Presidential patronage as creepy as a monster spider—and more spooky than the master image for territorial confinement, a rat in a poisoned cage?! Absolutely, for Republican office would supposedly be the poison inside the jailed South. The patronage bait would attract allegedly traitorous southern politicians to make agitation against slavery as democratically normal as arguments against tariffs and banks. It would be as if gag rules had been lifted not only inside Congress but also throughout the South, as if English abolitionists had been allowed to spread their ideology across the Texas Republic, as if Kansas free soilers had been permitted unrestricted access to western Missouri slaves and nonslaveholders, as if Border Northerners had been invited to perfect their Liberty Line inside the Border South— with all of this Jacobinical disruption now contaminating hidebound South Carolina.
You can’t just ignore or dismiss the real fears that people had at the time. The Blair family, whose patriarch had been a confidant and strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, was building the Republican Party in Missouri and Maryland. Germans in those states were also voting Republican. Politicians in South Carolina and other Deep South States looked at the Border States with alarm and could imagine Republicans building up their party in Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama.
Slave uprisings were a major fear in the slave states: Gabriel’s rebellion, the German Coast uprising, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner. Patrols for runaways were a major part of life, and they were vigilant about slave gatherings that they thought might spark a rebellion. Some slaveowners might believe that slaves were contented until abolitionists got to them, but they were terrified of abolitionists getting to them, even from a distance (hence the desire to keep slaves illiterate when possible).
In contrast, tariffs weren’t a major burden on most Southerners. If the slave states had stayed in the union, tariffs wouldn’t have gone up as high as they did. Lincoln would have lost control of Congress in the next election and tariffs would have gone down again. The militancy against the 1828 tariff was largely confined to South Carolina, the state where slave owning families were most powerful and had control of the government. Other states probably recognized that tariffs went up and down with the political climate. Later secessionists adopted talk about the tariff and fishing bounties because they were large slaveowners themselves, or because they wanted their revolt to be about more than worries about slavery. It wasn’t the main issue until after the war when no one who had supported the rebellion wanted to acknowledge the importance of slavey.
The percentage of slaveowning families in the Deep South States was rather high, estimated at 49% in Mississippi and 46% in South Carolina, at 36.7% in the first seven seceding states and at around 25.3% in the last four states to secede. Those numbers aren’t exact, but even if one lowers them they still reflect the place of slavery in the slave states. Those who didn’t own slaves were often dependent on the slaveowners — and of course they were concerned about what a post-slavery future would look like.
“Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest” — sure, until Southern states tried to overturn the Missouri Compromise and even the Northwest Ordinance. Slaveowners brought their problems upon themselves. Eventually, unless more territory were annexed, slave states would become a minority. Wouldn’t we have hoped that would be the case? The leading founders certainly wished for an eventual end to slavery. Slaveowners couldn’t face that so they engineered the situation that brought Northeast and Midwest together — just as their splitting the Democratic party created the situation where a Republican’s election would be inevitable.
Lincoln’s first draft of his inaugural address didn’t mention the Corwin Amendment. The amendment hadn’t been passed by Congress then, but still, he didn’t see fit to mention it. Several historians have suggested that Seward, who had put a lot of effort into crafting the amendment and spiriting it through the Congress, prevailed upon Lincoln to the mention amendment in his inaugural address. I haven’t been able to find out if that is true, but historians who have been suspicious of Lincoln in this matter have made that suggestion when it would benefit their cause not to.
Republican votes had to be “whipped” for the Corwin Amendment because more Republicans voted against it than voted for it, but Lincoln wasn’t the one doing the whipping, nor did he bring the “whole party machinery” behind it for ratification. I asked you to provide evidence for your claims, and you haven’t.
Pushing the amendment would have broken the Republican Party in two. A substantial part of the “party machinery” didn’t and wouldn’t support the amendment, which was quickly overtaken by events and became a dead letter. The amendment wasn’t going to be ratified by the necessary 3/4ths of states.
Interesting. Not at all a realistic fear IMO but interesting. Slavery was already dying in the upper South as it steadily industrialized. Slavery wasn't the big issue though. The South knew it would be much better off outside the union and able to set lower tariff rates that better suited its economy and free to spend whatever revenues were generated on its own infrastructure. Absent some grand bargain on the economics, the regions were always likely to splinter.
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