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 ...
Possibly in the Upper South and Border States, where white farms were typically small and owned few -- if any -- slaves.
So a family of runaway slaves in those states might make a big difference to the farmer they ran from.
We might also presume there were more runaway slaves from the Border States (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri) simply because there it was easier to do.
But none of this has anything to do with secession of Deep South states -- where Southern plantations were typically very large and used the services of dozens, even hundreds and sometimes thousands of slaves.
So precisely in those states where the number of runaway slaves was smallest, its effects would have been the least damaging to the large plantation owners.
What this all means is that Deep South complaints about Fugitive Slave Laws in the North were bogus to the max.
I'll say it again: they were just an excuse, not the real reason.
Now you are making my argument for me -- or perhaps I should say "our arguments for us."
Deep South slave-holding states secession was all about, indeed was only really about protecting the future, the expansion and most especially the market prices of slavery.
rustbucket: "And worse was to come in that regard if the South stayed in the Union.
The South (Texas Senator Wigfall actually) calculated they could no longer prevent a big increase in the transfer of money to the North that would result from the passage of the Morrill Tariff, given the makeup of the new Congress coming to power with Lincoln."
As I've pointed out before, the South's historic 1860 electoral defeat was engineered by it's own "fire eaters", who split their own Democrat party in two thus guaranteeing election of minority Republicans.
And the "fire eaters" were clear about their goals: they wanted secession and a new Confederacy.
So, as with the rest, this complaint about tariffs is totally bogus.
Indeed, the word "tariffs" never appears in any Deep South Reasons for Secession document.
The issue could have been settled, peacefully and over time, though the courts, or in Congress or through Constitutional Amendment, if that was what the Deep South slave-holders wanted.
But that's not what they wanted.
What they wanted was to:
rustbucket: "The North, on the other hand, was relying on invisible ink written on the back of the Constitution."
Not "invisible ink," original intent as written down and expressed by our Founders.
rustbucket: "Given the violations of the Constitution by some Northern states with regard to the return of fugitive slaves, it seems obvious that written agreements by the North and claims of allegiance to the Constitution were not worth the paper they were written on."
Northern Fugitive Slave Laws had no serious effect or injury on Deep South slave-holders.
Nor did those laws in any way meet the Founders' criteria of Federal "oppression," "usurpation", etc.
We need to be very, very clear in our minds about this fact: the Civil War did not begin because the Deep South slave-holders declared themselves seceded!
The Civil War began because the Deep South slave-holders after seceding: first provoked, then started, then declared and then made war -- eventually in every Union state and territory adjacent to the Confederacy.
So it's irrelevant what we might think was Constitutional or not, or even, for that matter, if they thought it was Constitutional.
What matters is that having seceded, the Deep South slave-holders immediately started, and the North accepted the Southern War of Aggression against the Union.
After reading most of your bloated postings I've concluded that they could easily be reduced to two words: Bull Shit. ;~)
If we were engaged in a battle of bloviation your side, with bloviatingbrojoe would certainly be in the lead. ( He's so full of manure that you plant him in the ground and grow another one just like him.)
Also, I can understand how admirers of obama would fall under the spell of brojoek, becoming mesmerized by the length of his posts and not the quality or accuracy of them, so I guess you and the rest of the coven get a pass, especially since you're all still in mourning.
Is that you, obama? Is that you, bro?
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
New York Yankees 10 - Carolina Creampuffs 0
Game over.
Yawn...
And California has long wanted its expenditures in imprisoning and educating illegal immigrants reimbursed by the federal government, and with about the same results. States can't just send a bill to the federal government.
The Feds could have charged more for the land and not given so much away for labor instead of cash, thereby reducing the need for so much tariff income.
So your vision is of a federal government financing itself by selling land to slaveowners and an American West settled by those slaveowners and their slaves instead of by homesteaders. Okay.
Just out of curiosity, isn't one of the standard Lost Causer talking points that slavery wasn't going to expand any further because the western lands weren't suitable for slave-labor activities?
:^) Now if I could only stop making typos.
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
All states have the same rights as the original 13. Otherwise there would be two or three classes of states having different rights.
Another way of approaching it is to ask how all the other successful secessions were handled. Of course I stopped myself and said "Duh!" since there haven't been any successful secessions to use as examples. But wait: there is one [Washington, DC].
And here I thought you were going to talk about West Virginia. Your link is interesting history that I didn't know. Thanks. On the map you can still see the outline of the Virginia portion of the old square shaped district -- the Virginia portion of which is now called Arlington County.
Wikipedia has some history of the District, originally called the Territory of Columbia. Land for it was, of course, ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Apparently, in deference to George Washington's and his family's land holdings in and near Alexandria, the erection of public buildings was prohibited on the Virginia side of the Potomac. In 1846 Virginia did recover her previously ceded lands in what Wikipedia calls "retrocession."
I am familiar with your protests over the way SCOTUS came to their ruling in Texas v. White, but the simple fact remains that it is the rule of law. And I do presume that you respect the rule of law.
Texas v, White is indeed the law. IMO, it is the law simply because might makes right. The Dred Scott ruling was also the law of the land too, although Northern states did not want to obey it even though it was the law. I'm not advocating for the correctness of the Dred Scott ruling here. I'm just trying to make the point that Supreme Court rulings depend on the political philosophies of the justices involved, and the rulings may not always be correct. It is our system, however, and everyone does not always agree with the outcome. It is why elections and nominations to the Supreme Court are so important -- on that, we no doubt agree
What are the ramifications of Madison's statements regarding "state's rights" and amendment issues? I'm not sure. I would remind you though, that on secession he said, ...
I'm familiar with some of his letters written near the end of his life, like the one you quoted from. Madison was not always consistent, as you may know. In those letters he may have been trying to protect what he and others created. But a good portion of the country later decided his union had been perverted against their interests. In a sense, Madison's voluntary union did fail, and it became one of coercion.
You're correct. Lee lost a higher percentage of his soldiers in battle than did Grant's bigger Federal armies. Ultimately Lee could not replace those he lost, while the Union could. Grant recognized that fact and kept after Lee despite the numbers of his own casualties.
Who decides "oppression" and "injury" in this case, the states who were injured or exploited or the states doing that injury or exploitation? You've made it clear that you don't consider that the Southern states were oppressed or injured in any serious way by the Federal government -- not serious enough anyway to justify secession. I disagree.
And I hope that California, Illinois, and New York do not have the power to decide what is "necessary to my state's happiness," to use the re-assumption of governance clause from New York's 1788 ratification of the Constitution. My state is a right to work state with a balanced budget requirement, no state income tax, and a positive business environment.
IMO, the tariff would have been the clearest example of large injury to the South up to that point in time. The tariff was something Northern states accomplished through the Federal Congress. The only way out of the negative effects of the tariff for the South was to secede. The South could no longer defeat tariff increases in Congress. Lest you think it was a non issue, here are some contemporary comments about the tariff.
New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 3, 1861: Some months ago we said to the Northern party, "You sought sectional aggrandizement, and had no scruples as to the means and agencies by which to attain your unhallowed purposes. You paid no heed to the possible consequences of your insane conduct." The fact was then patent that the condition in the bond by which the Northern protectionist party gave its weight and influence in aid of Black Republicanism was the imposition by the party of a protectionist tariff. The South was to be fleeced that the North might be enriched.
Having driven the South to resistance, instead of adopting a policy of conciliation, it added to the existing exasperation by adopting a tariff as hostile as could be to Southern interests. The estrangement of North and South was not sufficiently marked and intense. New fuel must be added to the fires of strife, new incentives to embittered feelings.
Senator Robert Toombs, Nov. 13, 1860: It is true that this policy has been largely sustained by the South; it is true that the present tariff was sustained by an almost unanimous vote of the South; but it was a reduction - a reduction necessary from the plethora of the revenue; but the policy of the North soon made it inadequate to meet the public expenditure, by an enormous and profligate increase of the public expenditure [sound familiar?]; and at the last session of Congress they brought in and passed through the House the most atrocious tariff bill that ever was enacted, raising the present duties from twenty to two hundred and fifty per cent above the existing rates of duty.
That bill now lies on the table of the Senate. It was a master stroke of abolition policy; it united cupidity to fanaticism, and thereby made a combination which has swept the country. There were thousands of protectionists in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and in New England, who were not abolitionists. There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders. The mongers brought them together upon a mutual surrender of their principles. The free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was the infamous Morrill bill - the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and united in joint raid against the South.
Senator Robert M T Hunter on the Morrill Tariff, US Senate, Feb 12, 1861: But pass this bill, and you send a blight over that land; the tide of emigration will commence - I fear to flow outward - once more, and we shall begin to decline and retrograde, instead of advancing, as I had fondly hoped we should do. And what I say of my own State I may justly say of the other southern States. But, sir, I do not press that view of the subject. I know that here we are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us; those who are strong enough to help us do not sympathize with our wrongs, or whatever we may suffer under it. No, sir; this bill [the Morrill Tariff] will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania held the power to deal with her interests.
Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860: The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole . . . We have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually. [And it was scheduled to go up substantially after the passage of the Morrill Tariff]
However, the South had tried the tariff issue before and found that it didn't impact or unite the Southern people as did slavery. The future economic threat of abolition to slavery, the basis of the Southern economy, was enormous and far larger than the tariff. In their declaration of causes document, Mississippi estimated the cost to the South of eliminating slavery to be 4 billion dollars.
The North made it easy for the South to target slavery. Some Northern states had for years violated the Constitution concerning the return of fugitive slaves, a clause without which the Constitution wouldn't have been ratified in some Southern states. Northern states were trying to prohibit the extension of slavery into the territories, territories that were paid for with Southern blood and money. Some Northern states and politicians applauded John Brown's attempt to cause a slave uprising in Virginia.
More later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.