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

The Patriotist ^ | 2003 | Al Benson, Jr.

[Aurelius]

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.

[GOPcapitalist]

I'm coming to the conclusion that you have a very dim view of higher education in this country.

Considering that, as is also true of the media, modern academia tends to vote some 90%+ for Democrat and/or further left parties in every election, such a view is not unfounded.

But your reasons for this viewpoint are weak and subjective. Your ability to dismiss the entire faculty of a school such as Rice University based on your observations of some students while driving by is well..amusing, but illogical an invalid.

Not really. I was simply making an observational description of the left wing filth that inhabits that block of otherwise prime Houston real estate. If you desire to know specifics of their faculty, you need only say so as I have plenty to say of them as well. Take one of their major political science profs for example. He's a left wing democrat whose spouse works for liberal Democrat mayor Lee P. Brown. And who else but him and his buddy Dick Murray over at U of H do you think gets asked to do all the statistical "analyses" of city hall's big spending projects? Then there's the school's president Malcolm Gillis - another left wing Democrat fat cat political donor who has helped lead the effort to get a misguided leftist "smart growth" boondoggle called Light Rail installed in Houston. The general faculty is even worse and includes a "gender studies" program that funds and promotes homosexual activism on campus including dorm rooming programs for fags etc. Not to long ago one of the school's football coaches made an un-PC comment about homos. The faculty membership organization responded to it by funding and printing pro-gay t-shirts condemning him and distributed them at football games. And I won't even go into the islamic stuff they got involved in post 9/11.

Your own source for the petition signers wasn't able to identify 99.9% as left-wingers, thats good enough for me.

It's a statistical fact that some 90% of the faculty at any given major university votes Democrat or further left. This has been proven by numerous surveys just as the same has been shown for journalists. Based on this fact it is not at all unreasonable to infer that an even higher percentage would be represented in the signers of a pro-Clinton petition during impeachment.

I disproved your silly hypothesis by showing you a so-called left-wing historian [Eric Foner]who didn't sign the petition.

That doesn't even make sense as an argument. The total number of left wingers in academia significantly exceeds 400 persons. Therefore to claim that the absence of one leftist academic from that petition proves it is not leftist is absurd. In the meantime one may easily find a heavy leftist leaning on it by simply observing some of the names on the list: NAACP president Julian Bond, Joseph Ellis (the leftist historian who got caught lying about service in vietnam), Arthur Schlesinger. According to the resumes on that site 4 or 5 of them also write for the leftist magazine New Republic and others write for a far left socialist magazine entitled In These Times. A large number of the resumes indicate that major publishing themes among the signatories include marxism and socialism, feminist and gender studies, african studies, gay and lesbian studies, labor movement history, and other similar exclusively leftist fields.

You have got to be kidding me.

Read it and weep:

"History professor James McPherson, who also signed Wilentz’s petition, declined an invitation from the White House to testify because of classroom commitments. He said the Constitution does not suggest that impeachment would be appropriate in the Clinton matter. “The Constitution is written such that an impeachable offense would be a public offense. The Constitution designates impeachment for treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors,” McPherson said. “They mean public offenses."" - Daily Princetonian, http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1998/12/08/news/seltzer.html

A man of McPherson's stature unable to find a grad student to cover his teaching schedule [if he even had one] for half a day, so he could take the two hour train ride to WDC to testify in front Congress!?

McPherson does indeed have (or at least at the time had) a teaching schedule. Apparently whatever was going on for that day required his presence. You can speculate all you desire as to something else being the cause, but the documented truth as he told it to the newspaper was that he had classroom commitments that prevented his attendance.

Do you also believe in the tooth fairy?

No, though I would not put it past you since you are dreaming up all sorts of unsubstantiated reasons for his non-attendence when in reality he publicly stated that reason to be a conflict with his classroom committments.

No... McPherson defended his own position [opposing the Clinton impeachment on constitutional grounds] to the school paper

Uh, mac. That is by every reasonable definition a PUBLIC STATEMENT. It appeared in print and was given to a reporter with full intention that it would appear. Thus it is public.

Reasserting the same argument after it has been disproven doesn't change the outcome. It just makes you look foolish.

You better save that one for your next trip to the mirror, mac, as you are asserting absurd and disproven arguments in repetition as well as making yourself look like a fool. Heck, you've already (a) defended and excused away political activism in support of BILL CLINTON, (b) defended and excused away political affiliations with a marxist political party, (c) downplayed and excused away the avowedly terrorist and revolutionary doctrines inherent to marxism and espoused by the communist figures on whom that party was based, and (d) attempted to portray Bill Bradley as a non-leftist over an alleged tax proposal be once made. You are literally making apologisms for the left of the left, mac, and you look like a fool while doing it.

No honest person would assert that signing the petititon makes them a left-winger, much less a communist.

Once again, can you name me a person on that petition who is anything but a left winger? Didn't think so.

No honest person would assert that opposing the Clinton impeachment on constitutional grounds was a left-wing or communist position.

Sure it is. The so-called "constitutional" defense of Clinton's impeachment is a direct endorsement of the loose constructionist position of the constitution and that is an inherently liberal position.

The World Socialist Website (WSWS) is a legitimate political organization along the same lines as the League of the South (LOS).

I'm admittedly not well versed in the LOS and cannot speak for their views, so I do not know if they are advocating international workers revolutions. I highly doubt it though. By contrast, that marxist party definately is and that marxist party embraces the doctrines of Lenin and Trotsky that murdered millions of innocents.

The World Socialist Web Site is the Internet center of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It provides analysis of major world events, comments on political, cultural, historical and philosophical issues, and valuable documents and studies from the heritage of the socialist movement.

Yeah, and it also supports the contents of those so-called valuable documents, which advocate and in some cases have enacted bloody terrorist-supported communist revolutions that have been responsible for the deaths of millions. They are every bit as offensive as Hamas, Al Qaeda, or any other similar murder cult with an agenda of world domination.

The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media.

Good grief, mac. Please tell me you aren't becoming an apologist for a marxist political party by posting their self-descriptive crap on FR!

One might vehemently diagree with their political viewpoint, but that does not put them in the same catagory as Hamas or Ayran Nation.

What puts them in the same category as Hamas and the Aryan Nation is their endorsement and historical enacting of doctrines including political murder and communist revolution. If I am reading their site correctly, they claim to be the DIRECT organizational descendants of Marx and Lenin by way of Trotsky. As such they are no better than any other group that is the direct organizational descendant of a murderous terrorist thug be it Hitler (Aryan Nation/neo nazi groups), Lenin (the WSWS), or Mohammed (Hamas, Al Qaeda).

Consider the facts, mac. We know for a fact that McPherson is politically active on the left as (a) an advisor to Bill Bradley, (b) an active opponent of Bill Clinton's impeachment, and (c) an active proponent of affirmative action. From this puny evidence you created the fiction that McPherson was a political advisor to Bradley. What a joke. [BTW, the Bradley 2000 campaign folded one month later]

Wrong group, mac. The one McPherson was involved in was called his "Futures Group." It had only 6 members - McPherson, Cornel West, Richard Rorty and three others.

You seem wedded to this hyperbole.

There's nothing hyperbolous about it. The fact is that McPherson has an extensive relationship with a marxist political party that entails their publication of his articles and interviews in a period of over 5 years. If you disagree with any of those facts prove me wrong. Otherwise you have no grounds to complain.

[GOPcapitalist]

Robert Lincoln was indeed a protected son, but with a difference -- he wanted to enlist but the Commander in Chief would not let him.

Sounds quite Lincolnian. Send everybody else's kid off to carry on your murder, plundering, and invasion but prevent your own from doing the same.

[mac_truck]

The so-called "constitutional" defense of Clinton's impeachment is a direct endorsement of the loose constructionist position of the constitution and that is an inherently liberal position.

You've grown a bit tiresome with your childish rants about McPherson. Here is some information for everyone else interested about the so-called "loose" contructionist interpretation.

Brigham Young University Law Review Archive

I'll exerpt a couple of sections so you'll get the idea.

Impeachment under English law

Proponents of the view that “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” implied some abuse of executive power also relied on the understanding of that phrase in founding-era England. Although warning of the hazard of the inference that the framers “meant to transport [English practice] unreformed into their new republic,”25 Sunstein asserted that “the term ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ ” under English law was generally understood to represent “a category of political crimes against the state.”26

Put differently, the English practice of impeachment leading up to the founding era suggests that impeachable conduct included “the kind of misconduct that someone could engage in only by virtue of holding public office,” such as unlawful use of public funds, “preventing a political enemy from standing for election,” or “stopping writs of appeal.”27

Joseph Isenbergh reached a similar conclusion, asserting that “[i]n the 18th Century the word ‘high,’ when attached to the word ‘crime’ or ‘misdemeanor,’ describes a crime aiming at the state or the sovereign rather than a private person.”28 In support of this view, Isenbergh asserted that Coke distinguished “high” treason from “petit” treason in that the former was “against the sovereign,” and that Blackstone defined other “high” offenses as those committed “against the king and government.” 29

One assumes here that BYU is not on your black list of left-wing institutes of higher learning, that English Common Law is servicable as a historical legal leit motif to this discussion of American constitutional constructs, and that Wiliam Blackstone might be accepted as an adequate spokesperson for the affirmative, untainted by subversive proletariat leanings.

Given your penchant for santimonious puffery, I doubt you will acknowlege that opposition to the Clinton impeachment on constitutional grounds does not make someone a communist, or a left-winger, or even a Democrat.

However they could be a Marxist, you never know...

[GOPcapitalist]

You've grown a bit tiresome with your childish rants about McPherson.

Surely it is no less tiresome or childish than you have become in your slothful and foolish attempts to deny the gravity and relevance of McPherson's indisputable, extensive, and many connections to the political left and far left.

Here is some information for everyone else interested about the so-called "loose" contructionist interpretation.

Interesting, but inconclusive to the extent that Clinton is concerned. Let's look in particular at what Blackstone himself said on the matter:

"Of Offenses Against Public Justice:

THE order of our distribution will next lead us to take into consideration such crimes and misdemeanors as more especially affect the common-wealth, or public polity of the kingdom: which however, as well as those which are peculiarly pointed against the lives and security of private subjects, are also offenses against the king, as the pater-familias of the nation; to whom it appertains by his regal office to protect the community, and each individual therein, from every degree of injurious violence, by executing those laws, which the people themselves in conjunction with him have enacted; or at least have consented to, by an agreement either expressly made in the persons of their representatives, or by a tacit and implied consent perfumed and proved by immemorial usage.

THE species of crimes, which we have now before us, is subdivided into such a number of inferior and subordinate classes, that it would much exceed the bounds of an elementary treatise, and be insupportably tedious to the reader, were I to examine them all minutely, or with any degree of critical accuracy. I shall therefore confine myself principally to general definitions or descriptions of this great variety of offenses, and to the punishments inflicted by law for each particular offense; with now and then a few incidental observations: referring the student for more particulars to other voluminous authors; who have treated of these subjects with greater precision and more in detail, than is consistent with the plan of these commentaries.

THE crimes and misdemeanors, that more especially affect the common-wealth, may be divided into five species; viz. offenses against public justice, against the public peace, against public trade, against the public health, and against the public police or economy: of each of which we will take a cursory view in their order...

...THE next offense against public justice is when the suit is past its commencement, and come to trial. And that is the crime of willful and corrupt perjury; which is defined by Sir Edward Coke,30 to be a crime committed when a lawful oath is administered, in some judicial proceeding, to a person who swears willfully, absolutely and falsely, in a matter material to the issue or point in question."

Or in summary:

Blackstone defines what we now know as "high crimes and misdemeanors" to include "offenses against public justice," or those against the public polity. One of the foremost among these types of offenses is that of perjury (interestingly enough Blackstone also includes on the list the crimes of obstructing justice and subornation of perjury - two other offenses alleged against Clinton). Since the legal system behind the Constitution as understood by the founders was literally centered around Blackstone's commentaries it is a necessary conclusion that the strict construction of the term "high crimes and misdemeanors" (which means reading it as the founders knew it, and that is through Blackstone) includes the crime of perjury.

[capitan_refugio]

"Traditional scholarship when I was in grad school in the '60s was PRO-southern and the damnyankees got mauled in the classrooms of the US ..."

Watie - you are a hoot. Here you are, sounding like a southern renegade, when you are actually a studied man of letters - a graduate student no less!

"... as badly as the rebels mauled the federals in every theatre until mid-63."

Dang man, what did they teach you?

Camp Wildcat, KY, Oct 21, 1861
Ivy Mountain, KY, Nov 8-9, 1861
Mill Springs, KY, Jan 19, 1862
Fort Henry, TN, Feb 8, 1862
Fort Donelson, TN Feb 12-16, 1862
New Madrid, MO, Mar 13, 1862
Shiloh, TN, April 6-7, 1862
Island No. 10, MO, April 8, 1862
Memphis, TN, June 6, 1862
Chattanooga, TN June 7-8, 1862
Murfreesboro, TN, July 13, 1862 N.B. Forrest and J.H. Morgan raid
Munfordville, KY, Sep 14, 1862 Chalk one up for Simon B. Buckner
Iuka, MS, Sep 19, 1862
Corinth, MS, Oct 3-4, 1862
Perryville, KY, Oct 8, 1862
Hartsville, TN, Dec 7, 1862 Morgan cavalry raid
Jackson, TN, Dec 19, 1862 Forrest cavalry raid
Chickasaw Bayou, MS, Dec 26, 1862 Sherman's failed assault on Vickburg
Stones River, TN, Dec 31, 1862- Jan 2, 1863
Port Gibson, MS, May 1, 1863
Raymond, MS, May 12, 1863
Jackson, MS, May 14, 1863
Champion Hill, MS May 16, 1863
Big Black River Bridge, MS, May 17, 1863
Seige of Vicksburg, MS, May 18 - July 4, 1863

Confederate victories are shown in italics. This list represents the significant battles in the Western Theater of operations, up to the fall of Vicksburg (July 4, 1863). Included are a couple of Missouri battles that took place adjacent to the Mississippi River, but not the "Trans-Mississippi" actions. Not included are skimishes which resulted in fewer than 100 casualties.

No one in their right mind can look at this list and conclude that the Confederate "mauled" the Union troops, quite the opposite! Particularly brilliant was was Grant's manuevers around Vicksburg, where he pummeled Joseph Johnston and John Pemberton.

I can give you the casualty figure too, and they aren't pretty for the South.

[nolu chan]

[nc] the refusal to insist upon the exchange of colored prisoners when colored prisoners have been slaughtered in cold blood...

[Wlat] Douglass seeems ill-informed.

It is indeed unfortunate that you were not there at the time to keep Frederick Douglass up to date.

[capitan_refugio]

SW - "Our side could have held the southland AND the trans-mississippi for a VERY long time had Marse Robert fought a defensive/guerrilla war on OUR soil, rather than making attacks in PA & MD. sooner or later the north would have given up trying to re-conquer the CSA."

Since this is pure conjecture, you're welcome to your opinion. Let me throw this into the mix ...

The South's best chance to "win the war" militarily was when Stonewall Jackson proposed a strike into Maryland , aimed at the manufacturing centers around Philadelphia. Jackson proposed his plan to the CSA government in June of 1862, while the bulk of the Federal armies (McClelland)around Washington DC were engaged to the south of the city.

With 40,000 additional men (not entirely impossible for the south at that time), Jackson could have caused the same havoc Sherman caused in Georgia in 1864. Neither Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee had the strategic vision that Stonewall Jackson had. Lee was a battlefield genius, but I don't think he was capable of fighting a guerilla-style war. It would have cut against his grain.

[rustbucket]

In the War for Southern Independence, revisionist history start with Alexander H. Stephens book, "A Constitutional View of the War Between the States" (1868) and Jefferson Davis's book "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" (1881).

I've seen the Stephens book but not the Davis one. In what way were these books revisionist?

[capitan_refugio]

Believe it or not, the Davis book is in print! Paperback edition with a forward my James McPherson, of all people!

[capitan_refugio]

In comparing the pre-secession rhetoric, as quoted in southern newspapers, speeches made by the principle politicians responsible for secession, comments on the floor of the House and the Senate, comments made in the CSA legislatures, and in the private correspondence of notable confederates (Jefferson Davis has some 50,000 documents which survive him), you will perceive a shift in the explanations for secession and war.

This is nothing unusual. Hindsight is 20-20 they say. You always try to put your best foot forward, especially if you were on the losing side.

Let me give you a case in point. Davis wrote afterward that the CSA had no aims at expansion or ambitions beyond their borders. Yet, documentation shows that they clearly had their eyes on New Mexico and Arizona Territory, the Indian lands later known as Oklahoma, as well as Kansas, Nebraska, and other plains states. After all, the CSA did accept representative from Missouri and Kentucky - states that did not formally secede.

[capitan_refugio]

I also looked up a quote I had saved from an essay by M. T. Owens:

"The most comprehensive articulation of the view that Southern secession was a legitimate constitutional act is found in A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, written by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, published shortly after the war. A Constitutional View purports to be a comprehensive treatment of American constitutional history. But its comprehensiveness is illusory. It soon dissolves into a hash of selective evidence and sleight of hand whereby the natural right to revolution embodied in the Declaration of Independence is transformed into a constitutional right to destroy the Constitution. A Constitutional View is, alas, another refrain in a song composed and performed by John C. Calhoun and the South Carolina nullifiers."

[rustbucket]

Thanks. I'll have to look into adding it to my small collection of WBTS books.

As I remember, Stephens said at the start of the war that the war was being fought over slavery. But after the war and upon further reflection, he said that that was too simple an answer, that slavery was the occasion of the war. The North and South differed greatly over philosophy of government right from the start and that this had led to many conflicts over the years, slavery being the latest. Of course, they also differed in more important things, like grits, but that wasn't quite enough to precipitate war.

IMO the war would not have come about at that point in time except for the slavery issue. The Morrill tariff might have also precipitated the rupture had it occurred earlier, but it passed after states had already seceded. As the New Orleans paper said about the tariff when it passed, "The South was to be fleeced that the North might be enriched." The paper fumed about sectional aggrandizement, which it felt was the policy of the Black Republicans.

Certainly the Constitutional issues and the sharp disagreements in the philosophy of government that Stephens mentions were discussed before the war. They were laid out on the floor of the Senate by Jefferson Davis.

[capitan_refugio]

http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/compare/isbn/0306804182/isrc/Google-b-compare-author

[nolu chan]

[Wlat] President Lincoln --never-- suggested that anyone be forced out of the country.

[Wlat] He would have been glad to see relocation, but he never insisted on it.

You must believe in the tooth fairy as well. It ranks right up there with 40 acres and a mule.

On August 14, 1862 Lincoln invited five Blacks to the White House and explained it to them: "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us." "It is better for us both, to be separated."

April 1865, Lincoln to General Butler:
But what shall we do with the negroes after they are free? I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes. Certainly they cannot if we don’t get rid of the negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us. . . . I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves.
Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler: A Review of His Legal, Political, and Military Career (or, Butler’s Book) (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co. Book Publishers, 1892), p. 903.

[rustbucket]

Thanks for the quote from Owens. I think he is wrong.

Before the war, Davis contrasted the two philosphies of government in the following way:

If a federalist, if believing this to be a Government of force, if believing it to be a consolidated mass and not a confederation of States, he [Buchanan] should have said: no state has a right to secede; every State is subordinate to the Federal Government, and the Federal Government must empower me with physical means to reduce to subjugation the State asserting such a right.

If not, if a State-rights man and a Democrat – as for many years it has been my pride to acknowledge our venerable Chief Magistrate to be – then another line of policy should have been taken. The Constitution gave no power to the Federal Government to coerce a State; the Constitution gave an army for the purpose of common defense, and to preserve the domestic tranquility; but the Constitution never contemplated using that army against a State. A State exercising the sovereign function of secession is beyond the reach of the Federal Government, unless we woo her back with the voice of fraternity, and bring her back with enticements of affection.

If the Federalist view was right, why wasn't there a clear statement in the Constitution that thou shalt not secede? Why wasn't it made clear that the states were subservient to the central government? Why didn't the Constitution give the central government the right to coerce dissenting states?

Davis certainly invoked Constitutional arguments, such as the 10th Amendment, on the floor of the Senate in supporting the right to secede. Davis' argument is virtually identical to that of Chief Justice Marshall himself talking about powers that remained with states. From the 1787 ratification debates, here is a summation of a Marshall argument:

The state governments did not derive their powers from the general government; but each government derived its powers from the people, and each was to act according to the powers given it. Would any gentleman deny this? He demanded if powers not given were retained by implication. Could any man say so? Could any man say that this power was not retained by the states, as they had not given it away? For, says he, does not a power remain till it is given away? The state legislatures had power to command and govern their militia before, and have it still, undeniably, unless there be something in this Constitution that takes it away.

[WhiskeyPapa]

But what shall we do with the negroes after they are free? I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes. Certainly they cannot if we don’t get rid of the negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us. . . . I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves.

Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler: A Review of His Legal, Political, and Military Career (or, Butler’s Book) (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co. Book Publishers, 1892), p. 903.

Thsis has no corroboration, and it is inconsistent with what both men said in the 1860s.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

"There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us." "It is better for us both, to be separated."

President Lincoln imdicated that the blacks were selfish in wanting to stay in the U.S. but he never insisted that anyone be forced out of the country.

The solution he -clearly- settled upon was to give blacks equal rights.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

The Constitution gave no power to the Federal Government to coerce a State; the Constitution gave an army for the purpose of common defense, and to preserve the domestic tranquility; but the Constitution never contemplated using that army against a State.

There is no power in the laws or Constitution to coerce a state. However, the Militia Act of 1792 gives the president the power to put down insurrection. The Supreme Court ruled in 1862 that he was properly applying this power and this opinion is present in both the majority and dissenting opinions in The Prize Cases.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

Before the war, Davis contrasted the two philosphies of government in the following way:

If a federalist, if believing this to be a Government of force, if believing it to be a consolidated mass and not a confederation of States, he [Buchanan] should have said: no state has a right to secede; every State is subordinate to the Federal Government, and the Federal Government must empower me with physical means to reduce to subjugation the State asserting such a right.

Buchanan said there was no right to secede unilaterally.

"In his final message to Congress, on December 3, 1860, James Buchanan surprised some of his southern allies with a firm denial of the right of secession. The Union was not "a mere voluntary association of states, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties," said Buchanan. "We the People" had adopted the Constitution to form "a more perfect Union" than the one existing under the Articles of Confederation, which had stated that "the Union shall be perpetual." The framers of the National Government "never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution." State Sovereignty was NOT superior to national sovereignty, Buchanan insisted. The Constitution bestowed the highest attributes of sovereignty exclusively on the federal government: national defense; foreign policy; regulation of foreign and interstate commerece; coinage of money. "This Constitution," stated the document, and the laws of the United States...shall be the supreme law of the land...anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." (McPherson, p. 246)

Walt

[Non-Sequitur]

That is strictly a matter of your limited vision.

You seem fixed on believing that Abraham Lincoln was the only man in America who believed that blacks were not the equal of whites and that Robert Lincoln was the only man who didn't serve in the army during the Civil War and you call my vision limited?