Was the Civil War Actually About Slavery?

On 6 November 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party elected its first president. During the tense crisis months that followed – the “secession winter” of 1860–61 – practically all observers believed that Lincoln and the Republicans would begin attacking slavery as soon as they took power.

Democrats in the North blamed the Republican Party for the entire sectional crisis. They accused Republicans of plotting to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition against direct federal attacks on slavery. Republicans would instead allegedly try to squeeze slavery to death indirectly, by abolishing it in the territories and in Washington DC, suppressing it in the high seas, and refusing federal enforcement of the Slave Laws. The first to succumb to the Republican program of “ultimate extinction,” Democrats charged, would be the border states where slavery was most vulnerable. For Northern Democrats, this is what caused the crisis; the Republicans were to blame for trying to get around the Constitution.

Southern secessionists said almost exactly the same thing. The Republicans supposedly intended to bypass the Constitution’s protections for slavery by surrounding the South with free states, free territories, and free waters. What Republicans called a “cordon of freedom,” secessionists denounced as an inflammatory circle of fire.

An effort by Lincoln to keep the British out?

“The transition of the Civil war into a campaign to end (southern) slavery served as the end of overt British support for the confederacy; the mood of the British people would not have allowed for continuing support of the south with such an evident difference regarding the issue of slavery now implicated.”

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080421175752AAxZzsR

1. I think blackelk is on record as not supporting the next secession ... the one by the LIB states after the conservative shift in the next generation.

2. After the country is bankrupt, US politics won’t be seen as consequential.

3. The British and Europeans still have a hegenomy of sorts over Irish media. So these independence movements don’t mean much unless they ban foreign involvement in local media. Jamming of TV signals.

4. It is cold in Winnipeg. Very cold.

President Buchanan did, in fact, lead. He simply did not lead as the hotheads of the North wanted him to lead. He had been elected by the entire nation when last it included the 11 soon to be Confederate States. He was not running again. As I understand it, Buchanan (without much if any objection from his Attorney General Edwin Stanton who was later to be Lincoln's Secretary of War) voluntarily turned over many forts located in the south (save Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and Fort Pickens, Florida) to the states in which they were located, and also voluntarily turned over weapons, food supplies, uniforms and other military material to the southern state militias. Presumably that encompassed armories, barracks and arsenals. Were not customs houses also located on the soil of Confederate States??? If not turned over, they were seized. Ships of the "Union" found in Confederate ports and waters were eligible for similar treatment, especially if warships. The Dahlonega, Georgia mint, had been opened there in 1837 during a gold rush nearby. Always a tiny factor in production of US coins, it was seized as being on property of Georgia at the outbreak of the Civil War (this will be a recurring theme as to Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens and other facilities on land of the Confederate States), was apparently used briefly to mint Confederate coinage and was never re-opened after the war. Essentially, the "Union" abandoned Dahlonega Mint. New Orleans Mint opened in 1838 in the State of Louisiana, and remained a federal mint until seized by the Confederacy in 1861. It minted Confederate coins during the war but was not re-opened until 1879 (until 1909) when Rutherford B. Hayes was POTUS. Were federal officials ordered to leave the Confederate States? Did they leave voluntarily.

So to just get out of the way and let mobs and agitators do what they want and have what they want is "leading"? You must love Obama's Middle East policy nowadays.

Of course, to talk about "leading" you have to have policies and plans. You have to make decisions, carry them out, follow through, and deal with what results from them.

I don't see any sign that Buchanan made consistent policy decisions, let alone applied them. He didn't decide to hand over weapons to the rebels. He didn't decide not to. He fired a general in Texas who did just that. But he didn't stop his corrupt, treacherous, treasonous Secretary of War from sending weapons South where they could be put into service against the United States.

So far as I can tell, Buchanan didn't decide to turn over forts -- or mints or court houses or post offices -- to state governments. And he didn't decide not to. He simply let whatever happened happen. Whether he decided to strengthen US fortifications and resupply the troops there or promised not to are complicated questions whose answers depend on who he was talking to and when.

Not recognizing inaction, incompetence, indecisiveness, cowardice, failure, collapse when you see them (or making excuses for them) is a real problem -- fatal for countries and peoples. If Buchanan had decided that states had the right to secede he could have secured that right in his remaining days in office and saved the country (or whatever would be left of it) a lot of trouble.

If Buchanan believed that secession was unconstitutional it was his duty to see to it that the constitution and laws were upheld against the unlawful actions of state conventions, legislatures, governors, militias, and mobs. He could have pushed for a final divorce and comprehensive settlement or he could have taken action to preserve the union and the Constitution. It was either one alternative or the other.

To argue as Buchanan did that states could not legally secede and the federal government could not legally lift a finger to stop them was a recipe for disaster, a rationalization of weakness, incompetence, and indecisiveness, an abandonment of duty and responsibility and the oath he had taken. The idea that limited government means weak, vacillating, irresponsible, self-subverting government is disgusting and contemptible, and weakens the very idea of limited governance.

Ask the liberal New England Federalist dinosaur forebears of the radical abolitionist looney tunes who convened the Hartford Convention at Hartford, CT in 1814-1815 DURING the War of 1812 to discuss secession and re-establishing their ties (at least commercially: $, $ and $$$ being their primary concern like the Whigs and today's hereditary GOP-E who are their successors) with old Brittania.

The New England ruling class were "prompted" as always by $, $ and ever more $$$ and their utterly laughable sense of snobbery masquerading as faux moral superiority. They hallucinated that the Virginia Dynasty of Jefferson and Madison were somehow American Jacobins and a threat to their entrenched wealth.

Now, it is true that 1814-1815 is not precisely 1820 but it was close enough. Th upshot was the death of the Federalist Party, a death that very much benefited the United States generally and its people.

OK, what is the language of the constitution itself that prohibits secession??? If the federales were not specifically empowered by the constitution's own words, to prevent secession, then the 10th amendment reserves that right to the states and the people respectively.

The era in which Buchanan served as POTUS was also the era of Congressionally approved "squatter sovereignty" allowing territorial referenda to determine whether to apply to Congress as a proposed "slave" state or as a "proposed "free" state.

Mobs? Agitators? It was the eleven Confederate States and their elected officials (and sometimes their people at popular referenda as well) that seceded. South Carolina's hotheads at the time were easily matched by the abolitionist jihadists of Massachusetts although their perspectives were polar opposites.

I hear all the rhetoric and editorials about preserving the "Union" and the constitution, but never several other things necessary to such an argument. One would be the specific provisions of the constitution empowering the federales to exert force to bring the 11 departing states to heel. Another would be just how the constitution would be destroyed by the voluntary departure of 11 states, leaving the remaining states to continue as the "Union" under the very same constitution.

Government, whether weak or strong,is better able to govern IF and WHEN it has the CONSENT of the governed than when it is forcing unwilling states to remain when they choose, by popular vote or by vote of elected representatives to leave. Having the CONSENT of the governed has another name: FREEDOM!

Did James Buchanan have an argument against secession that was based upon the actual constitution or was that his unsupported whim of the week and, if he actually made such an argument, how did HE justify not enforcing it?

620,000 dead soldiers of both sides in the War Between the States. 50,000 dead civilians. Total casualties (including the injured who survived) 1,020,000. By contrast, the total American military dead in the Mexican War had been 1,733. A young Congressman Abraham Lincoln in those days took to the floor of the House (before being defeated for re-election after his one and only term) to complain that the blood of that war's dead cried out from the earth against President Polk. If that War Between the States which took over 1 million lives is an example of leadership, then 1 million families would have been quite justified in saying emphatically: No thanks!

Federal law -- in its delegated sphere -- is the law of the land.

The "Supremacy Clause" of the Constitution says as much.

A dissolution of the bond of union is not impossible, but obviously it can't be done by one state (or some group claiming to represent a state and its people) entirely on its own.

Just as Congress admits states (with the consent of the people of a territory and at their request) so could it "deadmit" or "unadmit" or discharge a state, but a state couldn't do that on its own.

There also exists the possibility of legitimate rebellion against unbearable tyranny, but no one can legitimately assume that the "right" to break entirely with the union and the Constitution is a "right" "reserved" by a state to exercise at its will.

But say Buchanan believed your interpretation was right. His duty, then, was to make it a reality and tie up loose ends.

That he did not do. No "theory" of the Constitution is going to make his performance anything other than an abysmal failure.

Just read the constitution of the CSA. Here’s a link:
http://www.usconstitution.net/csa.html

Then search for “negro” and “slave”. You get bits such as:

1. The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.

3. No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs; or to whom such service or labor may be due.

QED.

Right you are. I would have voted against him and I must have been projecting my attitudes onto the Illinois electorate in his Springfield area congressional district when Lincoln himself deserved the credit for rejecting any attempt at re-election.

Lincoln himself cast the only vote in 1848 by refusing to seek re-nomination. Sincere self-criticism or whatever. Instead he sought an appointment to bureaucratic office, Commissioner of the General Land Office, by President Zachary Taylor who declined to appoint him to that position. He then resumed being an attorney including some lucrative work on condemnation of land for railroads.

Lincoln recovered his personal ambition and tried thereafter twice to become a U. S. Senator from Illinois in 1855 and 1858 but failed both times. His loss to Stephen Douglas in 1858 was particularly beneficial to the nation. Alas, the Illinois legislature of 1858 proved wiser than the Electoral College of 1860.

Someone else here has suggested that you have previously posted here under a different name and are a former Illinoisan who then moved to Kansas. Care to confirm or deny???

Yes, the Confederate Constitution did formally legalize slavery in the Confederacy.

It had been a question begging for an answer since the 1700s.

Most Northern states had made their decisions regarding the disposition of slavery by the mid-1800s under the authority of their own state legislators that led to their own laws.

The South had not adopted their thinking, and that is manifest in the Confederate Constitution. Decades of legislative failure on a national level were finally resolved in a manner to erect a stable system that reduced political sabotage so often seen in the prior sixty years. As Stephens said in 1861, the issue was put to rest. When necessary, the law could be changed by legislation rather than anarchy.

At that time, it was against the logic and wisdom of the period to consider a federal intervention that involved sufficient belligerent force to coerce the peoples of sovereign states to submit to the will of others. It must be remembered that government at that time was very limited and not designed to be involved in the lives of the citizenry other than the few stipulations of the US Constitution. Crusading federal armies riding about to install the laws of one section of states forcibly on other states was a vision beyond the imagination of all but a few that saw the possibility of just that.

Those visionary few have mistakenly become known as "fire eaters". They correctly foresaw that political leaders could and would push aside the Constitution that had been explicitly designed to guarantee the rights of the people as a whole, not of a section.

1. When a state, acting through its legislature (elected representatives) or by popular vote of its electorate, has voited to secede, that state is no longer part of the land and federal laws and treaties cease being its supreme law. That state reverts to the status of a sovereign independent entity---an independent nation. It may then join with other states which have similarly seceded to form whatever new constitution and laws or not as the legislature or people of such states may choose to adopt.

2. To the extent that the Tenth Amendment and the Supremacy Clause in the original Constitution of 1787 are incompatible on the subject of a state having the right to secede, and given that the right to secede is not specifically prohibited by the Supremacy Clause or any other clause in the constitution in any event, the Tenth Amendment (the later enactment) controls by well settled rules of jurisprudence.

3. I have not considered whether the Congress would have the authority to expel a state from the "Union." I suspect not since such a power is not specifically granted to Congress and would therefore be prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

4. Further "Union" lawlessness during the late unpleasantness included the admission of "West Virginia" to the "Union," carving territory out of the pre-existing state or Commonwealth of Virginia without Virginia's consent. Of course, if the secession of Virginia were to have been recognized by the Lincoln Regime and the Radical Congress, then a petition for admission to the "Union" by the citizens of that region of the former state of Virginia to be admitted to the "Union" as "West Virginia" would stand on far firmer ground.

5. Another instance of Lincoln wanting to have his cake and eat it too was the imposition of the naval blockade of Confederate ports. A naval blockade is an act of war and may be undertaken only against a sovereign nation not against a domestic rebellion. A naval blockade affects the shipping of other nations peacefully engaged in commerce. Therefore naval blockades of ports on the Atlantic Ocean and on the Gulf of Mexico are subject to traditional principles of international law. The Lincoln Regime and the Radical Congress were unwilling to concede the sovereign nation status of the Confederacy but, nonetheless, in fact imposed the naval blockade.

6. I legitimately recognize that the right to secede or break entirely free of the "Union" and its constitution was in fact a right reserved by each state to exercise at its will. The immediate pre-war governor of Wisconsin seems to have agreed when he proposed in 1860 (before Lincoln's election) that Wisconsin should secede from the "Union" because the "Union" insisted that Wisconsin return fugitive slaves to their owners under the federal Fugitive Slave Act as such compliance by returning slaves was repugnant to his morality and that of many Wisconsin citizens.

7. You are certainly free to question the political decision-making of James Buchanan as POTUS but I note that you are not expounding any theory that he was lawless in his exercise of his powers or any alleged failure to exercise his obligations. There is a distinction in the law of what is called "mandamus" (seeking orders of courts to compel the positive actions of public officials as opposed to injunctions which may restrain such actions) between ministerial actions and discretionary actions. A court may order an official to exercise his discretion as to those matters that are his to decide. A court may order the official to perform specific actions (ministerial actions and not subject to his exercise of discretionary judgment) which are required of him by relevant and applicable law (ordering a tax collector to accept a legal payment of taxes, for example).

8. There may have been a few casualties as a result of Buchanan's governance but nothing comparable to more than 600,000 dead Americans and a total, including the injured in excess of 1,000,000. To serve s POTUS, give me Buchanan any time over Lincoln. So many fewer American widows and orphans.

When a state, acting through its legislature (elected representatives) or by popular vote of its electorate, has voited to secede, that state is no longer part of the land and federal laws and treaties cease being its supreme law. That state reverts to the status of a sovereign independent entity---an independent nation. It may then join with other states which have similarly seceded to form whatever new constitution and laws or not as the legislature or people of such states may choose to adopt.

That was a theory. It was by no means the only one or a universally accepted one. This was something that should have been decided in the courts.

In any case, if you want to sever the bonds that make you part of the country, you don't get to do it simply on your own demand. You don't simply get to have everything your own way and take over all federal in your territory.

You don't get to walk out on the national debt that you've helped to borrow over decades simply because you want to. Act without consideration and respect and of course, there will be a crisis. We learned that from history. Why forget it?

I have not considered whether the Congress would have the authority to expel a state from the "Union." I suspect not since such a power is not specifically granted to Congress and would therefore be prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

By that standard, we could never have acquired the Louisiana Territory (as indeed Thomas Jefferson believed we couldn't -- before he went ahead and did just that). A state can't simply leave the country either according to another part of the Constitution (not your favorite one, maybe not even one you pay attention to), so we're at an impasse. Mutual consent, involving a petition by a state and agreement by Congress (or a Constitutional Convention) would be a reasonable way to resolve the conflict. Unilateral action by either party would not be.

You are certainly free to question the political decision-making of James Buchanan as POTUS but I note that you are not expounding any theory that he was lawless in his exercise of his powers or any alleged failure to exercise his obligations.

Give me time and maybe I will. Or maybe I won't since I'm so tired of years of this sh#t. My point was he was a failure as President in pragmatic terms. He was passive. He was inactive. He did neglect his responsibilities to the country and the Constitution. You could call that a violation of his oath and the laws if you like, but that's not the main point here.

If a President fails to make an appointment or spend money you may be able to take him to court. If he fails completely at more complicated tasks, if, say, he lets a foreign power or insurrection take over part of the country and does nothing, there's not much that a court case could do to fix that. You can't give someone a will, a resolve, a backbone by court decree and it's foolish to suggest that anyone could.

You may believe that the federal government is the locus of all evil and that state governments are good and vested with some magical sovereignty that persists even when they don't use it. You may believe that the Confederate government was composed of victims, a bunch of good ol' boys who got together in their garages to talk about guns when the evil feds busted down the doors. I don't. History's more complex than that.

An interesting find but the Richmond Enquirer and the Commonwealth of Virginia were not identical--- the first was a private newspaper (I gather) and the latter an actual government which reclaimed its sovereignty by secession under quite different circumstances.

In the War of 1812, the USA was invaded by Great Britain which, apparently, had not gotten over its loss of "the colonies" and wanted a re-run of the previous war (and got a re-run of the result), sacked our Capitol, burned the White House, but had to agree to peace (Treaty of Ghent signed by the Brits but not yet ratified by our Congress) even before learning of Andrew Jackson's massacre of the Brit Army under General Edward Pakenham (Wellington's brother-in-law) at the Battle of New Orleans. Pakenham's grape shot-riddled corpse stuffed into a whiskey barrel and preserved by being packed in the remaining whiskey, had not yet arrived at the home of the widow Pakenham.

There may have been a few casualties as a result of Buchanan's governance but nothing comparable to more than 600,000 dead Americans and a total, including the injured in excess of 1,000,000. To serve s POTUS, give me Buchanan any time over Lincoln. So many fewer American widows and orphans.

Of course, you charge Lincoln with all those deaths. Yet Davis started the war.

You can try to lawyer the old devil out of it, but it was his war and his gang's war. Whether or not it was what Lincoln wanted, it certainly was what they wanted, and what they gave us.

Now, if you were confronted with a situation like what we had in 1941 or 2001, would you really want someone like James Buchanan in the White House?

1. Having re-established sovereignty, South Carolina, for instance, would have to take over such federal properties as Fort Moultrie on the mainland at Charleston and, IIRC, nine other federal forts on the mainland at Charleston, as well as the newly constructed Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It is reasonable that the federales assert peacefully claims for reimbursement (by South Carolina or by the Confederate States of America) for the value if forts seized. It would make no sense for SC or CSA to tolerate the continued existence of "union" military facilities on its turf or attempts by vessels such as the Star of the West to re-provision the federal garrison at Sumter. Like wise Florida, the CSA, and Fort Pickens.

2. A claims process for the share of federal debt attributable to the individual Confederate states or the CSA generally would likewise have been a reasonable resolution. If necessary, the disputes could have been resolved by independent, i.e., non-"Union" and non-CSA judicial authorities or arbitrators.

3. As to the national debt, it was not that great since Andrew Jackson had caused the payoff of almost all of it in his first term and did not add any in his second. If the "Union" was so concerned about the national debt, it was rather counterproductive financially to invade the South. To say nothing of the mountain of casualties and the military medical care and pensions and gravestones.

4. Indeed the Louisiana Purchase was an ultra vires act (beyond the federales' authority) by Jefferson but I think most of us recognize that action as a desirable one in a fallen world and one that produced a considerable lot fewer dead Americans and other casualties than the invasion of the South.

5. As you observe, we are at an impasse as to much of the rest of your assertions and that is OK since we really don't have to agree.

One final observation. I lived under the evil governorship of one Lowell Palmer Weicker, Jr., in Connecticut and now under the People's Revolutionary Government of Dunces and Thieves known as Illinois. Trust me I can spot evil in state governments much more easily than you give me credit for.

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