Posted on 06/12/2003 5:58:28 AM PDT by 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.
I've read about the struggle between Hamilton and Gov. DeWitt Clinton and the Antifederalists, too, and about the bareknuckle politics -- including a very serious threat of secession -- that Jay and Hamilton and their allies used to browbeat upstate New York Antifederalists into voting for ratification. In fact, that threat of secession was the major factor behind New York's ratification, in the views of most of the people who were following New York's convention, including George Mason and, in Canada, Lord Dorchester, who received his intelligence from American correspondents: and John Jay mentioned it in letters to George Washington.
Madison may have counseled Hamilton that, in Madison's opinion, ratification should be a threshold event, a single liminal event that would bind all the ratifiers and their progeny for all time. But by the terms of the document itself, whose drafting the Antifederalists had influenced as well, there is no such language and no such provision in the Constitution, and the provision instead for amendment gives Madison the lie. Therefore, ratification of the Constitution was not a threshold, but rather a "perpetual" and concurrent event, in the Lockean sense (though Locke himself uses slightly different language), that requires the continuing consent of the People, generation after generation, for its currency and validity.
If you assert that ratification of the Constitution meant that it could never be unratified by the same States that ratified it, you must point to the language in the Constitution that says so. You can't. It isn't there.
Madison may have intended, and Hamilton too, that ratification and membership in the Union be carved in stone. They forgot to include the language in the document, however, if that was their intention.
Jackson Turner Main, in his history of the Antifederalists, wrote of the Federalists' intentions with regard to the national Union,
A fundamental conviction of nearly all Antifederalists was that the Constitution established a national, not a federal, government, a consolidation of previously independent states into one, a transfer of sovereignty in which the states, once sovereign, would retain but a shadow of their former power. Whether this was actually the case is, of course, still warmly debated, too frequently with reference to what the Constitution has become [i.e., teleology], or what the debaters wish it were. The Federalists met this attack by an attempt to deny the accusation in public, but it seems from their private statements that they intended to create a national government, although prevailing opinion obliged them to compromise. The records of the debates in the Philadelphia Convention are convincing evidence of this intention; the real convictions of the Federalist delegates can also be discovered in letters and journals.-- Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution -- 1781-1788, p. 120 [emphasis added]
That was what the Federalists intended, and, even though they lied their faces off, they didn't get it. The Antifederalists insisted on, and got, Amendments IX and X, which amended and changed forever the real meaning of the Constitution, and nullified the mischievous intentions of the Federalists who deliberately wrote the opening words of the Preamble, "We the People...."
The Federalists tried for the amalgamation you refer to.....but the Antifederalists smelled them out, and they failed.
That's why John Jay handed down Federalist fiction from the Supreme Court bench: he was trying to crib one back. It doesn't matter. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments break his teeth: he couldn't repeal them by dicta, and neither could Marshall.
Oh, really? I'm from Missouri: show me.
Cite and quote the Constitution giving the Supreme Court the authority to deny the People their sovereignty.
Show me, in the Constitution, the instrument by which the People conveyed the last of their sovereignty to the Supreme Court, or to the United States, or agreed to amalgamation. Go ahead.
Not at all. But then, why don't you tell me what you think would have been a procedurally adequate method for the Southern States to have dissolved their bonds to the Union?
When Texas and all the other states joined the Union they agreed to abide by the Constitution. And the Constitution gave the court jurisdiction in the matter as per Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction."
I think that the Constitution provides a guideline for that. The most logical method for states leaving the Union would be the same manner in which states joined the Union, through a majority vote in both houses of Congress.
I'm really glad you brought this up. Gives me something to think about. I do some historic preservation work with a group that seeks to preserve an historic slave cabin and also does research on the Underground Railroad as it appears in our area; next week I will be portraying an abolitionist lady at a reenactment at that cabin. Your remarks will give me some additional insight, and I thank you for them.
Then why doesn't it say 'In all Civil proceedings..."? It says in all cases, civil, criminal, whatever.
Besides, Texas v White was a civil case.
It did declare unilateral secession as practiced by the southern states to be illegal. No supposedly to it.
Gee, they're all Yankees, with the exception of Field from California. Kind of makes you wonder, eh?
And that's all the evidence you have? An entirely Yankee court, but a 5 to 3 decision. So what was it? Did Justice Grier, Justice Miller, and Justice Swayne have a rebel in their woodpiles somewhere? And BTW, California remained in the Union, it WAS a Yankee state.
You know that is not true.
See Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and McCullough v. Maryland.
The sovereigns of the country are the people, not the states.
And you know that.
Walt
Yeah, the whole spectrum of jurisprudence, from A to E.
And California was a Unionist and freesoiler state; they just didn't participate much in the War because of physical remoteness, though there were one or two deep-raiding incidents mounted by the Confederates (one into Arizona) that might have involved California garrisons.
Some States were recognized and joined the Union under Article IV, as you say, through admission by Congress, but the original 13 are, it seems to me, the acid test: they came in under Article VII, by conventions of the People assembled.
We obviously are NOT going to agree about the nature of the People. You, fully realizing what is at stake polemically, will never agree that the People are the States are the Sovereigns. This is dishonest, and IMHO, a loser's scheming. You want the Government to be sovereign "for" you......which works as long as the side you favor has working majorities in the Congress, and as long as the Executive and the Judiciary are still listening to the Congress, which is nowadays a debatable proposition.
You've decided to stand with Lincoln on his fictions, and take your chances that his successors will be nice to you. Good luck -- but meanwhile, you are threatening by your supinity before Hamiltonian duckspeakers to ruin all our freedoms. So I hope you'll understand why I'll be staying mad at you. Unions can't maintain a living wage if members break ranks and knuckle under, and dealing with tyrants is just like dealing with gold-plated SOBs -- and for exactly the same reasons. The servility of a few condemns all the rest. Hope you're happy -- not.
They're talking about causes at law, not Sovereignty.
Most states joined the Union under Article IV not some. And the original 13 ratified the Constitution and agreed to abide by its provisions.
So I hope you'll understand why I'll be staying mad at you.
I'll just have to learn to live with the disappointment, I guess.
Now let's make friends among the other Sunbelters, and go get our government back. Out with the Neocons and other East Coasters!
If it was me, I'd call Newt out of retirement and send him up to Congress with orders to make the New Englanders howl, and the New Yorkers wish they could join Canada so they could hide from us. I'd show those hot-stove-stealing Yankees what the ass-end of a Hamiltonian government really looks like!
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