Posted on 06/27/2004 12:37:31 PM PDT by VRWCer
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:16:50 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
That is hardly surprising. The Mexican War was a war of conquest by the South to seize new territories in order to permit slavery to expand. Southern adventurers similarly contemplated efforts to seize Cuba during the antebellum period for the same reason. To secure this new slave territory, the South threatened civil war until they got the Kansas-Nebraska Act. When the free soilers were outraged by these efforts to warp the Constitution, the Southerners beat on their high chair until war finally did break out.
Mr. Chan appears to believe in the 'quantity over quality' theory of discourse, which is all very well and good. He posted a substantial number of dispatches, reports, etc. which adds a substantial amount of bulk to the discussion, but does little to refute the idea that the United States, suddenly faced with a chaotic and hostile power on her southern frontier which was threatening to seize her possessions, manned and supplied her fortifications and put her navy to sea. Within a few days, her fears of Southern aggression were justified, as South Carolina began shelling one of those possessions.
Whether or not this mass of dispatches proves that Lincoln intended to do what he did has little bearing on the question which I have repeatedly asked, which is whether anyone can identify any particular cultural or political issue unrelated to slavery which caused the Southern states to secede in 1860.
Incidentally, it's 'germane'.
You would've made a great follower for Robespierre and Lenin.
I think that, on the whole, stand watie is the better candidate for a Jacobin or a Bolshevik, as he was the one who argued in post #73 that the Civil War was really a peasant uprising to slay the elites and establish a peoples' republic. I think that this theory of secession would likely have greatly alarmed Lee, Davis, or in fact anyone involved in the Confederate war effort.
The political institution of slavery was indeed recognized in the United States Constitution (in certain specific ways), and the last-minute Crittenden Amendment which attempted to prevent the Civil War would have made the institution inviolable to the extent that a Constitutional amendment itself could not emancipate.
The economic institution of slavery was another matter. The Southerners felt, with good reason, that without increased territory to the west, the slave-based economy and the way of life which it supported could not persist. This involved several different factors. One was the need for new markets for the slave laborers themselves. Another was decreasing yields as crops such as cotton and tobacco exhausted the soil. New land and a new slavery frontier were essential. The Free Soil (and later Republican) platform threatened to restore the Compromise of 1820 and cut off most of the western territory to slavery, or even to bar slavery from ever expanding into newly created states.
This state of affairs was intolerable to the South, which is why heavily slave-holding states pushed immediately for secession after a Free Soil sympathizer was elected President. Slavery had to expand or wither.
Yawn. And many Union prisoners were essentially tortured to death by the Confederate army at Andersonville. Bad things happen in time of war. The annuals of any conflict are full of disasters, mistakes, massacres, plague, sorrow, and despair.
Speaking of collateral damage: it might amuse you, IC, to know that when Morgan's Raiders went pillaging through my home town, they stopped only long enough to burn the local Republican newspaper offices to the ground. When the Union cavalry came roaring through a few hours later in hot pursuit, they stopped only long enough to burn down the Democratic newspaper.
You mean to tell me that the "South" attacked Fort Sumpter with the intent of expanding slavery there?
Sending the forces to REINFORCE Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens violated agreements previously made and constituted acts of war. The official records show the union forces themselves saying that it would be acts of war. General Meigs stated that it was the start of the war -- on April 10. The ship's log of the USS Supply show the reinforcement forces were being landed on the night of April 11-12, prior to the firing on Fort Sumter.
It is directly relevant to your statement, "The war began after a group of seven Southern states had already seceded (and thereafter attacked the United States)." If the North committed the first act of war, then your argument that the Southern states "attacked the United States" fails.
The issue of slavery in the territories had been settled in 1856 in DRED SCOTT v. SANDFORD, 60 U.S. 393 (7-2).
It was not the South that needed a war to change the status of the existing law.
In that time there was no mass movement of slavery into the territories. Slavery existed where it was profitable.
The Union troops were no doubt fighting to preserve their own aristocrat's sacred heritage.
YANKEE SEMI-SLAVE SYSTEM
The Yankee semi-slave system was clearly superior to the Southern slave system. A woman could be worked sixteen hours a day for one dollar a week, and the employer incurred no obligation to feed, clothe, or take care of her. When her body wore out and broke down, that was her problem, again the employed incurred no obligation. The men earned a couple dollars more per week.
The "Lowell system," in which young girls would go to work in the mills and live in dormitories supervised by matrons, at first seemed beneficent, sociable, a welcome escape from household drudgery or domestic service. Lowell, Massachusetts, was the first town created for the textile mill industry; it was named after the wealthy and influential Lowell family. But the dormitories became prisonlike, controlled by rules and regulations. The supper (served after the women had risen at four in the morning and worked until seven thirty in the evening) often consisted merely of bread and gravy.
So the Lowell girls organized. They started their own newspapers. They protested against the weaving rooms, which were poorly lit, badly ventilated, impossibly hot in the summer, damp and cold in the winter. In 1834, a cut in wages led the Lowell women to strike, proclaiming: "Union is power. Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our own unquestionable rights. . . ." But the threat of hiring others to replace them brought them back to work at reduced wages (the leaders were fired).
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The economic crisis of 1857 brought the shoe business to a halt, and the workers of Lynn lost their jobs. There was already anger at machine-stitching replacing shoemakers. Prices were up, wages were repeatedly cut, and by the fall of 1859 men were earning $3 a week and women were earning $1 a week, working sixteen hours a day.
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The war brought many women into shops and factories, often over the objections of men who saw them driving wage scales down. In New York City, girls sewed umbrellas from six in the morning to midnight, earning $3 a week, from which employers deducted the cost of needles and thread. Girls who made cotton shirts received twenty-four cents for a twelve-hour day. In late 1863, New York working women held a mass meeting to find a solution to their problems. A Working Women's
Protective Union was formed, and there was a strike of women umbrella workers in New York and Brooklyn. In Providence, Rhode Island, a Ladies Cigar Makers Union was organized.
All together, by 1864, about 200,000 workers, men and women, were in trade unions, forming national unions in some of the trades, putting out labor newspapers. Union troops were used to break strikes. Federal soldiers were sent to Cold Springs, New York, to end a strike at a gun works where workers wanted a wage increase. Striking machinists and tailors in St. Louis were forced back to work by the army. In Tennessee, a Union general arrested and sent out of the state two hundred striking mechanics. When engineers on the Reading Railroad struck, troops broke that strike, as they did with miners in Tioga County, Pennsylvania. White workers of the North were not enthusiastic about a war which seemed to be fought for the black slave, or for the capitalist, for anyone but them. They worked in semislave conditions themselves. They thought the war was profiting the new class of millionaires. They saw defective guns sold to the army by contractors, sand sold as sugar, rye sold as coffee, shop sweepings made into clothing and blankets, paper-soled shoes produced for soldiers at the front, navy ships made of rotting timbers, soldiers' uniforms that fell apart in the rain.
The Irish working people of New York, recent immigrants, poor, looked upon with contempt by native Americans, could hardly find sympathy for the black population of the city who competed with them for jobs as longshoremen, barbers, waiters, domestic servants. Blacks, pushed out of these jobs, often were used to break strikes. Then came the war, the draft, the chance of death. And the Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service: they could pay $300 or buy a substitute. In the summer of 1863, a "Song of the Conscripts" was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities.
One stanza:
We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.
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Under the deafening noise of the war, Congress was passing and Lincoln was signing into law a whole series of acts to give business interests what they wanted, and what the agrarian South had blocked before secession. The Republican platform of 1860 had been a clear appeal to businessmen. Now Congress in 1861 passed the Morrill Tariff. This made foreign goods more expensive, allowed American manufacturers to raise their prices, and forced American consumers to pay more.The following year a Homestead Act was passed. It gave 160 acres of western land, unoccupied and publicly owned, to anyone who would cultivate it for five years. Anyone willing to pay $1.25 an acre could buy a homestead. Few ordinary people had the $200 necessary to do this; speculators moved in and bought up much of the land. Homestead land added up to 50 million acres. But during the Civil War, over 100 million acres were given by Congress and the President to various railroads, free of charge. Congress also set up a national bank, putting the government into partnership with the banking interests, guaranteeing their profits.
With strikes spreading, employers pressed Congress for help. The Contract Labor Law of 1864 made it possible for companies to sign contracts with foreign workers whenever the workers pledged to give twelve months of their wages to pay the cost of emigration. This gave the employs during the Civil war not only very cheap labor, but strikebreakers.
SOURCE: Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Perennial Classics paperback edition, pp. 228-9; 231; 234-5; 238.
The officers did not turn against any nation. At the time, the union was considered a Republic of Republics, and the sovereign states were sovereign. As they had acceded to the Union, states seceded from the Union. The sovereign state, of which they were citizens, withdrew from the Union and no longer considered itself part of the United States of America. Their allegiance was to their sovereign state, not to the union of states.
The soldier could have fought honorably for North or South, just as a soldier in WW2 could have fought honorably for Germany or Japan. The soldiers are not the aristocrats and politicians who create the wars. Professional fighters, after beating on each other, often wind up displaying respect for each other. Soldiers fighting on opposite sides can also respect each other.
During the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, an unlikely truce took place. Lt. Colonel William Martin, commander of the 1st and 15th Arkansas, saw that flames were roasting many Federal wounded. Placing his handkerchief on a ramrod, Martin jumped onto the parapet to offer a truce. "Come and remove your wounded; they are burning to death, we won't fire a gun until you get them away. Be quick!"Then, while gunfire raged over the rest of the battlefield, a merciful quiet came over this little part of the mountain. Men in gray helped men in blue to save the wounded.
After the burned area was cleared and the fire put out, a Federal major brought Colonel Martin a gift of appreciation -- matched Colt revolvers. And then both sides went back to killing each other!
Source: A Civil War Pocket Reader, Compiled by John Zwemer, p. 107; attributed to Ronald H. Bailey, Battles for Atlanta, Alexandria: Time Life Books, 1985, p. 71.
The first paragraph I disagree with. From the founders on, the principles were of an American nation, not 13 nations. While I would argue also that the civil war was actually the last conflict of the revolutionary war, the Mexican war was a war fought not on the behalf of Virginia or Maine, but the United States.
The rest of your post sounds good to me. The real tragedy was the Civil War was a war of Americans vs. Americans.
I like to provide documentation with links so all can see for themselves whose argument is documented and fact-based and whose argument is free-based.
That is commendable. Do you have any comment on the Mississippi Causes of Secession which I linked to in post #50, and which states that injury to slavery is injury to civilization?
Within the context of my post, it is mainly important what the soldiers and the fellow citizens of their state believed. In general, we do not condemn those who decline to take up arms upon a good faith belief as a conscientious objector. I dont think we can condemn those who had, (or have), a good faith belief in the right of state sovereignty.
Article 1 of the Paris Peace treaty of 1783 reads as follows:
His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
Article 1, 2, and 3 of the Articles of Confederation read as follows:
I. The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America".II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
III. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretense whatever.
Amendments 9 and 10 of the Constitution read as follows:
Amendment 9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.Amendment 10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
State sovereignty is explicity found in the Paris Peace treaty and in the Articles of Confederation. Amendment 10 of the Constitution reserves to the states what is not delegated to the Federal government. It does not appear possible to find sovereignty being delegated.
Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation read:
XIII. Every State shall abide by the determination of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.
Any change to the Articles had to be by unanimous consent of the member states. The framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia and wrote that the Constitution would go into effect when adopted by any 9 of the 13 states. When George Washington took office, only 11 states had ratified. North Carolina held out for a while and Rhode Island held out for quite a while.
The only authority to leave the Union formed under the Articles of Confederation in direct conflict with said Articles, was the people, holding sovereignty, and organized as states, deciding to form a new union with a new form of government.
Article 7 of the Constitution reads:
"The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same."
The Constitution was ratified by States, not by a popular vote. It is an agreement "between the States so ratifying," and excludes any states not ratifying. Although states not ratifying were excluded, the Constitution still became effective. When George Washington was sworn in, there were only eleven united states.
One of the more recent attempts to "explain" sovereignty was by Daniel Farber in Lincoln's Constitution.
In the American context, sovereignty often seems to function as an almost metaphysical concept -- some secret essence of legal potency that cannot be detected directly, but only as a kind of normative aura. One hotly debated question, for example, is whether the populations of the various states existed (or still exist) as separate entities acting together as a conglomeration, or rather as a single entity acting through the agency of multiple subgroups. This is reminiscent of medieval disputes about the nature of the Trinity. It is not in any real sense a question of fact or even one of law. [Farber, p. 29]
Sovereignty is thus not unlike the concept of ownership. In a naive view, every tract of land must have a single identifiable "owner." In the Middle Ages, lawyers used the concenpt of "seisin" to refer to the person who truly "owned" the land, as opposed to others who had various other rights regarding the land. With the end of feudalism, seisin became something of a metaphysical idea and lost any utility as an operation concept. Instead, we now think of ownership as a "bundle of sticks" -- a collection of different kinds of authority over property, potentially distributed among many different people. Similarly, lawmaking authority is distributed among different sets of officials. [Farber, p. 29]
Thus, the concept of sovereignty (whether state or federal) has modest intellectual content. It is at best an organizing concept, providing a framework for debating other issues. [Farber, p. 30]
Thus, the key issue is how to characterize "We the People of the United States" -- as fifty state peoples tied together in one Union or one American people divided among fifty states. This is a rather elusive distinction, which is further obscured by another terminological problem. The term compact is used by all of the theories but in different ways. A contract between the peoples of the separate states might well be termed a compact. The critical question was whether a national social compact arose at some point, binding all Americans together into one people, or whether the only real social compacts were at the state level, with those political societies then forming a second-level compact. The "compact theory" of sovereignty refers to this second-level compact, which is considered to have a less fundamental status than the social compacts establishing each state. If this all seems rather aridly metaphysical, that's because it is. [Farber, p.32]
Because of its virtually metaphysical nature, it is hard to answer the theoretical question of whether the state peoples wholly retained their separate identity, or whether adoption of the Constitution signified the existence of unified "People of the United States." [Farber, p. 82]
Ideas about sovereignty may also color the understanding of particular constitutional issues. Thus, while it may not be useful to ask who really had sovereignty in 1776 or 1789, it is potentially useful to ask who was believed to have sovereignty then. [Farber, p. 30]
I just do not believe that "sovereignty often seems to function as an almost metaphysical concept -- some secret essence of legal potency that cannot be detected directly, but only as a kind of normative aura." That sounds like Berkeley-speak for snowjob. However, it is the sort of academic [il]logic being employed to justify historical happenings.
I would note that Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a staunch defender of Jefferson Davis, in Is Davis a Traitor? (1866), wrote in his preface,
It is not the design of this book to open the subject of secession. The subjugation of the Southern States, and their acceptance of the terms dictated by the North, may, if the reader please, be considered as having shifted the Federal Government from the basis of compact to that of conquest; and thereby extinguished every claim to the right of secession for the future."
The debate about whether secession was lawful in 1861 is not the same as a debate about whether secession is lawful in 2004. There have been changes to the U.S. Constitution, and to State constitutions.
If that were the case, why did we need a rewrite of document tying the states together? And the Declaration of Independence states "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."
Thanks to SedVictaCatoni whose link in post #50 gives the South Carolina argument for secession.(post #64 has the Mississippi justification)
i never knew that a person could be both a freeper & so arrogantly ignorant. you are the exception that proves the rule.
free dixie,sw
There are children going to bed in India without paragraphs. You should be ashamed.
fyi, i served the USA for 20 years as a commissioned officer & was retired due to a physical disability.
how many years did YOU serve??? NONE is my guess. (in my expierience,MODERN damnyankees are all mouth & no service. at least the union soldier of the WBTS era served valiantly in what southrons would describe as a POOR CAUSE.)
free dixie,sw
OR are you just another in a long line of TROLLS that periodically come to the WBTS threads to "stir the pot" & flee when their IGNORANCE is revealed for all to see???
warning: you are swimming with sharks. trolls do NOT last long here, as there are far too many freepers with one or more earned doctorates in history/political science that LOVE to "out" trolls.
ONE of the marks of a troll is posting FOOLISHNESS about the WBTS being totally or mainly a crusade against chattel slavery.
free dixie,sw
our family lost every aged man, all the women & all but 2 of the children to a 4-day orgy of looting, rape,arson, robbery, torture & murder at the hands of the union cavalry.
the ONLY survivors were 2 children, who were visiting neighbors & the men/boys/women who were away with the CS army.
as far as i can find out, the ONLY reasons for the slaughter was that the victims were NOT white AND that the "ghouls in blue" KNEW that they would NOT be punished for their crimes.
free dixie,sw
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