It's irrelevant what the FR-late Non-Sequitur may have believed.
What matters is, that's what historical figures such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, amongst many others, all believed.
lentulusgracchus: "This, by the way, is a case of "you're just saying that!" Of people "making stuff up" and "changing the rules as they go along". "
I am not in the least confused about the difference between opinions and facts, but don't just assume that what may look like nothing more than my opinion is not also a fact.
Nearly everything I say as "opinion" I have in the past, and can again if requested, support by citing the facts they are based on.
You are, of course, free at any point to challenge my opinions, and ask me to show the facts.
Yes, it can be long work, and that's the reason I don't cite everything on every post.
But in all good faith, I will if you specifically ask.
lentulusgracchus: "IF the South had "applied" to the other States for "permission" to leave the Union, it would not have been granted in any case (see below); so the argument about the South's secession being procedurally deficient is a smoke screen, and a fraudulent one at that."
Not in the least.
I'll remind you again that the South effectively controlled the Federal Government from its founding all the way up until it walked out in secession in 1861.
So nothing the South adamantly opposed could pass.
And anything the South most wanted, it could eventually get.
A great example is tariffs, which at the South's insistence declined drastically from a peak of over 50% before 1830, to a low around 17% in the 1850s.
Yes, much is made of the new Morrill Tariff law of 1861, but the key point is: that could never have passed, had the South stood in united opposition to it.
And because Southern states effectively controlled Congress, those states could have seceded peacefully, with "mutual consent" had they wished to.
But they didn't.
lentusgracchus: "No, of course not. They wanted the cotton trade, they wanted the South in the Union and paying their high tariffs and making them rich."
In fact, tariffs in the 1850s were at historic low levels, precisely because that's what the South insisted on.
Nor could they have risen in 1861 had the South stood solid in opposition.
And I'll repeat: many defenders of the Southern Cause insist on these threads that the South was actually, on average, far more prosperous than the North.
I think that's debatable, but it does make it hard to claim the South was somehow being economically "oppressed", doesn't it?
lentulusgracchus: ""Insurrection" wasn't Lincoln's call. Read the Constitution: it falls to the States to certify insurrection to the Congress, or the President."
No it doesn't.
Article One, Section Eight, Congress shall have the power:
lentulusgracchus: "In the case of Virginia, it was Lincoln who acted first, ordering Irvin McDowell to invade the State with 40,000 men as soon as the secession convention voted, and before the State plebiscite ratified the secession act.
Lincoln also blockaded the State -- an act of war, and unconstitutional under Lincoln's theory that the States were still in the Union "
So far as I know of, except to defend Federal property (i.e., Fort Sumter), not a single Federal soldier crossed a single Confederate state border for any unfriendly purpose in the days, weeks and months prior to the South's Declaration of War on the United States, May 6, 1861.
At the same time, before their Declaration of War, the Confederacy was offering to send Confederate forces into Union states (i.e., Missouri) and holding Union military officers as prisoners of war (Texas).
lentulusgracchus: "unconstitutional under Lincoln's theory that the States were still in the Union (Article I forbids the federal government to imposed preferences on ocean traffic to American ports)."
The Constitution enumerates the Federal Government's power to suppress insurrections.
[Me, correcting you] You've been reading Non-Sequitur; that's his theory. For which there is no historical or constitutional support. He also agrees with Adolf Hitler, that the States are mere creatures of the Congress, and in no way sovereign.
[You, refusing correction] It's irrelevant what the FR-late Non-Sequiturs may have believed.
No, it isn't, not when his position agreed 100% with yours. And was shown to be fascist.
What matters is, that's what historical figures such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, amongst many others, all believed.
No, they didn't. Lincoln said he believed it -- to oppose the Southern States, which were right, and within their rights.
Madison's opinion about the problem of factional abuse of the federal government, of using the General Welfare clause to enact repressive and tyrannical legislation, varied. He never solved the problem of faction, by the way, and neither did his student, John Calhoun.
Madison advocated against secession for "light and transient" causes -- but his political sentiment never was written into the Constitution,
because the other Framers disagreed with his position and wanted to leave the secession option open.
That is why the Constitution contains no language on secession.
[You] Not in the least.
Actually, yes, in the most.
I'll remind you again that the South effectively controlled the Federal Government from its founding all the way up until it walked out in secession in 1861.
Not true. The South didn't stop the "Tariff of Abominations" from being passed by John Quincy Adams's Federalists in 1828.
In 1860, the divided Buchanan "unity" National Democracy cabinet was taken over by Northern factionalists, who ginned up prosecutions of two Southern cabinet members. One of the Northern cabinet men was a stalwart Abolitionist, former seminary student with the Beechers in Ohio, a future Black Republican, and Lincoln's future Secretary of War: Edwin Stanton.
That is not the South "controlling" the U.S. Government.
Neither was building the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or the Erie Canal. Neither was the Northwest Ordinance, which excluded slavery from the old Northwest Territories. Neither, in the end, did the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Popular Sovereignty work for them: John Brown and his supporters simply killed slave owners who moved to Kansas.
Moreover, the South was looking at complete loss of any influence on the national agenda with the election of Lincoln, because the Northern States, adeptly polarized into white-hot South-hatred by the Abolitionists and the Interests, held a majority in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the house was evenly divided between North and South -- but with the installation of Lincoln's man, Hannibal Hamlin, in the Vice President's chair, Lincoln was assured of winning everything he wanted -- and the first thing he'd want was the Morrill Tariff, followed by Kansas statehood, dominated by John Brown's fellow-factional Jayhawkers.