If Secession Was Illegal - then How Come...?

Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'

Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."

Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?

At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."

Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.

Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???

Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.

My interpretation of the supremacy clause is at 1073 and GOPcapitalist's reply is at 1075.

The Supreme Court seems to agree. For example, "The supremacy of the Constitution as law is thus declared without qualification. That supremacy is absolute; the supremacy of a statute enacted by Congress is not absolute but conditioned upon its being made in pursuance of the Constitution. Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238 (1936)

Or "...the Tenth [452 U.S. 264, 287] Amendment requires recognition that 'there are attributes of sovereignty attaching to every state government which may not be impaired by Congress, not because Congress may lack an affirmative grant of legislative authority to reach the matter, but because the Constitution prohibits it from exercising the authority in that manner." See Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Recl. Assn., 452 U.S. 264 (1981) and Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 262 (1964)

You are setting yourself up as the authority which decides such questions.

Not really. I don't believe I have professed any posession of authority here and unlike you, that object is not what I prefer to build my arguments around due to its inherent weakness. By contrast, I am simply asserting a logically inescapable set of conclusions drawn from factually sound premises about the constitution itself. Broken down they are as follows. If you dispute any of this, please say so:

P1. The Constitution is supreme to federal law and supersedes any federal law that conflicts with it.

P2. Amendment 10 is part of the Constitution.

C1. Since the Constitution is always supreme to federal law, amendment 10, which is part of the Constitution, must be supreme to federal law.

C2. Since federal laws that violate the Constitution are unconstitutional, federal laws that violate amendment 10 must be unconstitutional.

Speak up if you dispute any of this. Wlat-speak attempts to turn this into a battle of appeals to authority will earn you no points as they are inherently fallacious.

[nc]Please provide a quote from before 1863, i.e., before military and political necessity and expediency turned him into a race pimp.

[Walt] That is easy to do.

[Walt] President Lincoln wasn't a race pimp.

[Walt} "I confess that I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes and unwarranted toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet. In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no such interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."

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Just the thought of how miserable this all made Abe feel brought tears to my eyes.

Why, I do declare, the very thought of Old Abe biting his lip brought visions of Clinton to mind. And then I heard Barbra Streisand singing in the background. Could it be? Could it be? Could this just be a Clinton-like bullcrap story?

Let us read the rebuttal of Lerone Bennett, Jr., to this Lincoln legerdemain.

What about ... the famous letter Lincoln wrote in 1855 recalling his anguish at the sight of shackled slaves during a steamboat trip in 1841? "You may remember, as I well do," he wrote to his intimate friend Joshua Speed fourteen years after the event, "that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border" (CW 2:320). This is strong testimony, indicating what seems to be repugnance over "a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable."

But:
In a letter Lincoln wrote to Speed's sister Mary immediately after the event he expressed neither repugnance nor anguish. On the contrary, he invoked the usual racist argument about happy slaves, saying that "nothing of interest happened during the passage" except "vexatious" delays. Almost as an afterthought, he wrote in the next sentence: "By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition [his emphasis] upon human happiness. A gentleman [sic] had purchased twelve Negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together .... In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other were; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparantly [sic] happy creatures on board .... How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, the He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative ..." (CW I:259-60).

Here, to borrow Lincoln's language, is a fine example for contemplating the effect of racial conditioning on perception. And one should note, before passing on quickly, Lincoln's revealing slip in referring to the slavedriver as a gentleman. As we have indicated, and as we shall see repeatedly in the following pages, Lincoln never got over the poor White reflex of genuflecting mentally to "gentlemen" who separated mothers and fathers from children and deposited them in the deep South where the lash of the gentleman and his overseer was heard all day and all night long. Notice also the direction of Lincoln's concern. He was moved to speculate on the moral condition of the slaves; he was not moved to speculate on the moral condition of gentlemen who bought and sold men, women, and children.

Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p.255-7

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