Posted on 01/10/2011 8:57:06 AM PST by cowboyway
It was 150 years ago today that Florida declared itself sovereign from the United States.
Some Southern states have marked the anniversaries of secession with celebrations; in South Carolina, a secession gala was met with protests and controversy.
In Florida, a reenactment was quietly held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Tallahassee on Saturday, where about 40 volunteers dressed in period attire performed a condensed version of the convention. It was at that convention where a 62-7 vote led to secession in 1861, making Florida the third state to leave and later join the Confederate States of America.
(Excerpt) Read more at jacksonville.com ...
You could learn a lot from your great grandads. States rights died at Appomattox, and with it the republic. Now we live in a cartoon constitutional dictatorship, one the original founders would make cringe and hang their heads in shame.
PS: The south would not collapse without slavery. After the war the North tried to destroy the South, but most somehow barely survived reconstruction despite the freedman bureau's best efforts..
Succession was possibly the greatest and most unfortunate example of, “it seemed like a good idea at the time” in American history.
Speaking of Reconstruction, here's a good one:
Historians who are well aware of the corruption that followed the war . . . seem to imply that it mysteriously appeared after Lincoln's death, and somehow miss the obvious conclusion that it was implicit in the goals of the Lincoln war party. This is to abandon fact and reason for the mysticism of Union and emancipation, a pseudo-religious appeal inappropriate to the discourse of free men.
"War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic by Clyde N. Wilson in
The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories ed. John V. Denison, 2nd ed. p.160
Whether the South would have collapsed without slavery is not the issue-the South BELIEVED it would at the time and thus acted in their best interest at the time.
I respectfully disagree. Arkansas seceded due to Lincoln's demand for troops. It had nothing to with a belief that the South would collapse in the absence of slavery. Arkansas rejected the notion that the Federal government had the authority to use force to coerce the seceded states back into the Union.
That's right poetic.
The only difference is that I, like many others, believe that the 10th Amendment was de facto repealed at Appomattox. In the last couple of years a few states, mostly Southern, have passed resolutions declaring state sovereignty in an attempt to dampen the over reaching of the federal government. It is a futile, and mostly symbolic, gesture, in my opinion.
That's right poetic.
The only difference is that I, like many others, believe that the 10th Amendment was de facto repealed at Appomattox. In the last couple of years a few states, mostly Southern, have passed resolutions declaring state sovereignty in an attempt to dampen the over reaching of the federal government. It is a futile, and mostly symbolic, gesture, in my opinion.
Right -- I am so sick of the "A**holes" who affect superiority over Lincoln, Grant and other people who lived long ago, and go on and on about "states rights", ignoring the real issues of the time to validate their personal hatred of Northerners.
Sen. Stephen Douglas ("the Little Giant") owned slaves. His second wife inherited a plantation in Mississippi. Douglas of course acquired proprietorship when he married her in about 1855 (her property became his, under 19th century marriage laws), but he kept it at arm's length, hiring a manager and only visiting the plantation for some emergency or other that demanded his presence. But he enjoyed the income, which helped him in his political endeavors. I think he still owned it when he died in 1861, a couple of months after the war started.
Excerpting is a good way to lie -- you can't trust excerpts.
For example, if you read the entire Texas Declaration, you'll see there were three or four major issues leading Texans to secede, of which the preservation of slavery was only one.
Mind you, the expansion of slavery was a non-issue in Texas: New Mexico and Arizona were below the 36o 30' Missouri Compromise line of 1820, and so slavery was presumably legal to establish there under the Compromises of both 1820 and 1850. And so the extension of slavery to those Territories was a non-issue for Texans, but the preservation of slavery as the basis of their economy was a huge concern (the slaves alone, in 1860, were worth something like $160,000,000 in gold, or more than ALL the improved real estate in the State), because an uncompensated emancipation -- which was what eventually happened -- would ruin the State. Which it did.
Lincoln's platform was not an issue. Lincoln's elections was, because of what it meant to the South going forward. And all of that -- the implications of the installation of a monolithic anti-Southern political machine as the U.S. Government for as far as the eye could see -- WAS the cause of secession, and the Northern response to secession was the cause of the Civil War.
So you don't like historical revisionists? The revolution in constitutional law embraced by Webster and Lincoln must have genuinely upset you, then. And the massive revision of U.S. history after the Civil War. And Bill Clinton's revision (with Marxist help) of U.S. history 15 years ago, to help him do 'Rat politics at the expense of the South.
How about Pearl Harbor revisionism, under whose Klieg lights FDR suddenly doesn't look so hot -- and in fact looks like a downright skulking scoundrel and rotter? I'll bet Doris Kearns Goodrat doesn't like Pearl Harbor revisionists at all. She has such happy memories of growing up in the feelgood Golden Age of Uncle Joe -- er, Franklin.
This is, unfortunately, an anachronistic argument.
In 1787 it was absolutely correct, one reason the Founders were always careful to avoid giving the institution any explicit recognition in the Constitution, instead always using euphemisms. Washington (highly honorably), Jefferson (much less honorably), Madison and pretty much all the prominent southern Founders explicitly denounced the institution as evil.
Unfortunately, by 1860 this attitude had been stood on its head, and slavery was believed throughout the South not to be "intrinsically wicked" and "damned to end," but rather to be a positive good the blessing of which they fully intended to spread throughout Latin America if they couldn't force it on the northern states.
If you have countervailing evidence, I'd love to see it, but in all the Declarations of Secession I've read, I don't recall a single statement about slavery being evil and to be brought to and end. On the contrary, they normally list the protection of the institution as the primary or only reason for their secession.
In fact, I doubt there is much discussion of slavery as an evil by prominent southerners during the whole decade of the '50s.
Lincoln, quite accurately, declared his attitude towards slavery to be that of the Founders, and that of the slaveocracy to be the perversion of their ideals. The secessionists quite openly proclaimed our founding ideal, "all men are created equal," to be false.
Don’t bring facts and historical quotations to a Wannabe thread....they can’t handle it when their worship of the CSA is shown to be a false God....
For example, if you read the entire Texas Declaration, you'll see there were three or four major issues leading Texans to secede, of which the preservation of slavery was only one.
But when you read it,the Texans make it overwhelmingly about slavery, and even the issues that they mention that might not be directly related to the peculiar institution, THEY THEMSELVES relate to it.
When the issue of tariffs is mentioned (without using that word), it isn't as with "the agricultural product exporting states" that Texas identifies itself. No, it's
They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substanceEven when they complain about the lack of military support against the Indians (ironically, by the way, seeming to demand a larger federal presence) what they say is:
They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.The fact is that the word slave (or slavery, or slave-holding) appears 21 TIMES in the Texas declaration, and in fact is one of the most frequently appearing words in that document
I believe that you are right on this point. I have not specifically researched this topic, but I have read many original ante bellum documents, especially wills and probate documents. I have a letter, written by a North Carolina ancestor in 1784 to his cousins in Ireland. He lamented the survival of slavery into the New Republic and predicted its end in due course. He also predicted that if the country could not craft a solution, a civil war would ensue. He was a slave holder and Revolutionary War officer. I have read many other contemporary accounts by the political and social elites debating how to end the institution.
But, by the 1850's, this talk had disappeared. I think in part this was just a hardened political stance in response to external attacks by the abolitionist movements in the North and in England. They took the stance that abolition was easy in England and the North where Industrialization provided the only economic engine required. The South, they contended, could not survive economically without slaves. It was a rationalization in my opinion, but it was one that was wildly held.
The other factor was the cotton gin. Before its invention, slave based plantation agriculture was a low country activity. In the Piedmont and Western states, the Scots Irish and German settlers held few slaves and operated small subsistence family farms. The cotton gin changed this. The upland farmers, with slave labor, could grow abundant crops of cotton and many of these poor Southerners became very wealthy men. Prosperity changes attitudes, and many who held moral objections to slavery adjusted their stance. Of course, when the vote to secede came, many of those upland dwellers voted against it, but they had become the minority.
BTW, all of my ancestors were Southerners, including some well known slave holders like Thomas Jefferson. With the exception of a very small group who left Tennessee and went to Illinois in protest of slavery, all of the rest supported slavery either explicitly, or implicitly through their service to the Confederate cause.
The southern belief that they were utterly dependent economically on slavery was absolutely correct.
For more than 50 years most southern capital had been poured into investments in slaves, to the point where the value of the slaves (human capital in the literal sense) was considerably greater than the value of all the land and buildings in the South. Emancipation would have, and indeed did, make all that wealth just disappear, the primary reason for southern poverty after the war, not carpetbagger oppression.
Think of the turmoil here when we have had a disappearance of perhaps 20% to 25% of real estate values. Then extrapolate that to 100%. No wonder they were scared to death.
I haven’t seen much discussion of the topic, but I suspect slavery in 1860 was nearing the end of a classic bubble. There is no way the amount of money a slave could bring in could justify the huge prices being paid for a slave.
People invested in slaves because they expected the price to go up. It was believed that restriction of slavery to its present bounds would bring the price down, bursting the bubble.
In actual fact, of course, the slave price bubble was doomed, anyway. The high price of cotton on which it was based was encouraging cotton growing in other areas like Egypt and India, and thus an expansion of supply, which would have eventually brought down the price. The War just accelerated this process.
Southerners were under the delusion they could keep the bubble expanding indefinitely by building a great slave empire in Latin America and the Caribbean. In actual fact the Royal Navy would never have allowed them to do so. Not to mention the rump of the USA.
The evil of the South’s position came not from recognition of their total dependence on the institution, but rather from their determination to proclaim an evil institution to be a positive good. Along with Lincoln, I have no idea how the evil could be gotten rid of. But I know calling evil good is always wrong.
The end of the war greatly reduced the wealth of the slave holding class. the more slaves that they held, the greater the loss. However, both former slave holders and farmers who had never held any slaves lost more of their wealth with the imposition of excessive property taxes by Recostructionist governments. Land fell out of production and the economy collapsed. Many families never recovered.
I have seen a number of slave sale receipts. The prices recorded in the late 1850’s was unbelievable and could not have been sustained. Its a tragedy that the bubble did not burst or that the South did not come to its collective senses before shots were fired.
Yea, "states rights" to keep slaves, "unfair tariffs" on the importation of slaves and "overall economic issues" of slavery. Unless you happened to be a "darkie" living below the Mason-Dixon line that lie will fly.
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