Posted on 01/11/2014 11:16:07 AM PST by Davy Buck
States don’t have “rights.” They have powers.
Of course, Marse Bob, you are correct. However, the spiritual impetus behind Abolition justified everything in the Yankee mind.
There were many southerners who were against slavery, too. Most on moral grounds, and a perceptive few on economic grounds.
General police powers, which have been patently ignored.
I shall forever remain, Unreconstructed.
Just a reminder. There were thousands of blacks who were slave owners.
Although the states had seceded the fort was still a sovereign territory of the US. This could have been negotiated but to block the supply of food to US soldiers was a provocative act. And the south paid with a horrible loss.
Of course till Lee’s worse than mediocre showing at Gettysburg, the south was winning. So it all looked good for Dixie till that time. And it could have easily have gone the souths way had they played it right. In the North McClellan was a fifth columnist and generals like Burnside were buffoons. Lincoln, a non military trained person, was doing a crummy job of being a general, via telegraph, from behind the lines.
Lee of course had his subordinates like J.E.B. Stuart who weren’t where they needed to be. But then Lee did not listen to superior tacticians like Longstreet who cautioned against Pickett’s charge.
Shoulda Woulda Coulda. But all over human bondage which still plagues us today(the aftermath not the bondage....think Holder, new Black Panthers, and the knockout game).
Cest la vie.
Another lawyer eh? That's the whole problem. Lawyers.
It should be noted that MD, MO, WV and various other states excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation freed their slaves by state action befoe the end of the War. The 13th Amendment freed slaves only in DE (a couple hundred) and KY (around 50k).
While this is all interesting history, all of the slave-holding Union States had emancipation plans, held in abeyance until after the war.
If you are going to make such an astonishing assertion, you need to be able to prove it.
For it to be true, one would have to assume southerners were all really, really stupid.
Any intelligent person of the time knew that the South's best hope for independence was foreign, particularly British, recognition. British public opinion was unaminously anti-slavery. As long as the War was between a pro-slave Union and a pro-slave CSA, British recognition was conceivable. Which was precisely why Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. At a single stroke, it ended the possibility of UK recognition.
Intelligent southerners knew that passing laws for emancipation, even very gradual emancipation, would immediately revive the chance for foreign assistance. Yet it was never seriously considered.
IOW, given the choice between slavery and independence, the South could not choose, since the reason they insisted on independence was to protect slavery.
I'll await your evidence of state plans to abolish slavery after the war. I suspect I'll be waiting a very long time.
It’s a great phrase.
We have one helluva war between the states of New York and New Jersey going on right now over Bridgegate.
Which will be the first to secede?
Quite true. Slavery in all likelihood goes back to Neolithic times.
But what made African slavery in America so intractable was its combination of the ancient institution of slavery with the newly invented ideology of racism. Slaves who could run away and just disappear into the general population would have quickly undermined the institution, just as slavery of whites disappeared in (western) Europe during the Middle Ages.
But the idea that this visually distinct group was somehow not fully human and therefore fair game to be enslaved was somehow more compatible with democracy, freedom, etc. In the minds of confused people, anyway.
Of course they had no legal right to declare independence.
They nowhere claimed they did. In colonial America, all Law flowed from the King in Parliament.
The Founders based their declaration not on Law, but on moral principles, overriding Law by Revolution, which is by definition the abandonment of Law for more direct action. (Hopefully with Law to be reinstated at some later date on a more sound footing.)
As Lee and other southern leaders recognized, the South had a similar moral right to revolution, although weakened by their revolution being for the purpose of denying independence to others.
But legality? Nonsense. When the southern states seceded, they rejected the legal procedures set up by the Constitution to settle differences. That's an act of Revolution, not one of Legality.
I eagerly await anybody who can prove the Founders ever claimed a Legal right for what they did, except insofar as they justified Revolution by an appeal to unwritten Natural Law.
Only if you focus exclusively on the VA front.
In the West the South was consistently in retreat mode, with immense tracts of the CSA having been conquered and occupied by the time of Gettysburg.
In fact, the USA won in the West just about as consistently as Lee did in the East.
BTW, just finished a darn good book about Gettysburg. I had no idea what a near thing it was. Pickett's Charge gets all the press, but there were half a dozen almost-disasters for the Union on Day 2 that were a much closer call.
exactly, I have seen somewhere that Roman slaves could actually own slaves.
Which seems strange now.
“Without Northern aggression, there would have been no war.”
Without Southern aggression, there would have been no Northern aggression. The South shot first. The North was looking for an excuse, yes, but nonetheless the South shot first.
Thanks for the link. No revelations there, and no relevance to my comment but (marginally) interesting nonetheless.
What’s the title? Do you recommend it?
The first secession war of 1861-1865. When the red states secede again and there is another war, that will be the second secession war.
Slavery is historically a very diverse institution.
Under the Ottoman Empire, most important political and military offices were held by slaves of the Sultan. This was VERY common in the Muslim world. In fact, one of the Delhi Muslim sultanates was called the Slave Dynasty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk_Sultanate_(Delhi)
In the early Roman Empire, freedmen and slaves formed the staff of the Emperor and essentially ran everything. Freedmen were still clients, not really free in the sense we would use the term.
Under the Persians and other Oriental Empires, all, even the nobles, referred to themselves as slaves of the King, and not just in a figurative sense.
For most of human history, there was a spectrum of human status and legal position. Various categories of slaves, serfs, freedmen, various levels of nobles, all the way up to the King. The difference between gradations on this spectrum were slight and therefore not that important.
Along comes the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, except of course for the slaves. Well then they must not really be men, creating probably a harsher separating line between slavery and freedom than had ever existed before.
This can be seen by the situation in Latin America, where nobody ever proclaimed all men were equal. Slavery declined and eventually disappeared, for the most part, more easily. Perhaps largely because there was less difference between a slave and a low-status “free” person in these countries, where class still reigned supreme.
He can claim it but that doesn’t mean it is true.
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