Posted on 06/05/2013 7:52:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse people feel to appropriate Lincoln for their own political agendas. Anyone who has watched Barack Obama, who as a senator wrote an essay for Time magazine entitled “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes” and swore the oath of office as president on Lincoln’s Bible, will be familiar with the phenomenon. Democrats like to claim Lincoln as, in effect, the first Big Government liberal, while Republicans tout him as the founder of their party.
But the reflex identified by Donald isn’t universally felt. A portion of the Right has always hated Old Abe. It blames him for wielding dictatorial powers in an unnecessary war against the Confederacy and creating the predicate for the modern welfare state, among sundry other offenses against the constitutional order and liberty.
The anti-Lincoln critique is mostly, but not entirely, limited to a fringe. Yet it speaks to a longstanding ambivalence among conservatives about Lincoln. A few founding figures of this magazine were firmly in the anti-Lincoln camp. Libertarianism is rife with critics of Lincoln, among them Ron Paul and the denizens of the fever-swamp at LewRockwell.com. The Loyola University Maryland professor Thomas DiLorenzo has made a cottage industry of publishing unhinged Lincoln-hating polemics. The list of detractors includes left-over agrarians, southern romantics, and a species of libertarians — “people-owning libertarians,” as one of my colleagues archly calls them — who apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery. They are all united in their conviction that both in resisting secession and in the way he did it, Lincoln took American history on one of its great Wrong Turns.
The conservative case against Lincoln is not only tendentious and wrong, it puts the Right crosswise with a friend. As I argue in my new book, Lincoln Unbound, Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the foremost proponent of opportunity in all of American history. His economics of dynamism and change and his gospel of discipline and self-improvement are particularly important to a country that has been stagnating economically and suffering from a social breakdown that is limiting economic mobility. No 19th-century figure can be an exact match for either of our contemporary competing political ideologies, but Lincoln the paladin of individual initiative, the worshiper of the Founding Fathers, and the advocate of self-control is more naturally a fellow traveler with today’s conservatives than with progressives. In Lincoln Unbound, I make the positive case for Lincoln, but here I want to act as a counsel for the defense. The debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important because it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or — in this hour of its discontent — dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles. A conservatism that rejects Lincoln is a conservatism that wants to confine itself to an irritable irrelevance to 21st-century America and neglect what should be the great project of reviving it as a country of aspiration.
The fundamental critique of Lincoln is that he was “the Great Centralizer,” as columnist and George Mason economist Walter Williams puts it. He earned this pejorative sobriquet, first and foremost, by resisting secession, which “remained a reserved right of the states,” in the words of Thomas Woods in his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. In defending secession, Lincoln-haters often revert to the brilliant 19th-century South Carolina politician and thinker John C. Calhoun, although he’s a dubious source of wisdom about the Constitution. (I draw particularly on the excellent work of Thomas Krannawitter in his Vindicating Lincoln and Daniel Farber in his Lincoln’s Constitution in what follows.)
Calhoun didn’t want to preserve the constitutional order, but to change it to afford even more protections for the slave states. Historian Richard Hofstadter called him “The Marx of the Master Class.” He disdained the Federalist Papers. Believing that the Constitution represented only a loose “compact” between the states, he thought the country had gone wrong from the very first Congress, which had set the country on a nationalist path “from which it has never yet recovered.” He wanted to substitute his own constitutional scheme — involving nullification by the states under his doctrine of “concurrent majority” — for that of the Founders.
Calhoun’s theories got a test run in the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, when South Carolina “nullified” the so-called 1828 Tariff of Abominations before backing down in the face of President Andrew Jackson’s fierce reaction (a compromise was forged over tariff policy). Then came the South’s secession after Lincoln’s election in 1860, which was defended in Calhounite terms by Jefferson Davis himself. He said “that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact.”
There is nothing in the text of the Constitution to suggest that it is a treaty among independent nations, and the right to secession shows up nowhere. You don’t need to embrace Lincoln’s robust nationalism — he thought the Union had existed prior to the Constitution and the states, and argued that “perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments” — to reject nullification and secession. You need only go to the Father of the Constitution, James Madison.
Madison held something of a middle position. He explained in Federalist 39 that we have “neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both,” or, as he said elsewhere, “a new Creation — a real nondescript.” That didn’t mean that the union wasn’t a nation. “What can be more preposterous,” Madison asked, “than to say that the States as united, are in no respect or degree, a Nation, which implies sovereignty; altho’ acknowledged to be such by all other Nations & Sovereigns, and maintaining with them, all the international relations, of war & peace, treaties, commerce, &c.” In the 1869 case of Texas v. White, the Supreme Court nicely stated a Madisonian view of the question: “The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.”
Madison considered Calhoun’s views dangerous. If the states had the power to decide whether or not to abide by federal law, it would lead to clashes between state and federal officials “in executing conflicting decrees, the result of which would depend on the comparative force of the local posse.” It put “powder under the Constitution and Union, and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Secession was “the twin” of nullification, and Madison urged in 1832, “It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion.”
It hasn’t been entirely put down yet. In his anti-Lincoln tract The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo argues that secession is as American as apple pie. “The United States were founded by secessionists,” he insists, “and began with a document, the Declaration, that justified the secession of the American states.” No. The country was founded by revolutionaries and the Declaration justified an act of revolution. No one denies the right of revolution. Madison said that revolution was an “extra & ultra constitutional right.” Even Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, concedes the point: “If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such right were a vital one.”
The friends of secession aren’t eager to invoke the right to revolution, though. For one thing, when a revolution fails, you hang. For another, the Declaration says a revolution shouldn’t be undertaken “for light and transient causes,” but only when a people have suffered “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” What was the train in 1860 and 1861? Seven southern states left the Union before Lincoln was inaugurated. The South had dominated the federal government for decades. Abuses and usurpations? It’s more like lose an election and go home.
As Thomas Krannawitter points out, the Founders thought revolution was justified in the case of a violation of natural rights. The Confederates, in contrast, wanted to wage a revolution to ensure no interference with their violation of the natural rights of slaves.
This gets to another element of the anti-Lincoln case, which involves denying or downplaying the role of slavery in secession and the Civil War. DiLorenzo says, for example, that Lincoln’s cause was “centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” Walter Williams addressed the issue in a column aptly titled “The Civil War Wasn’t about Slavery.” Charles Adams, author of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, pins the war on “economic and imperialistic forces behind a rather flimsy façade of freeing slaves.” The pro-secessionists typically fasten on the tariff as the cause of all the unpleasantness.
This is laughable. The tariff wasn’t anything new, and in fact was the main source of revenue for the federal government. Tariff rates bumped up and down. When South Carolina got the ball rolling on secession in December 1860, the tariff was at its lowest level since 1816, thanks to southern and western success at dropping rates in 1857. The Morrill tariff, steeply hiking rates and supported by Lincoln, passed the House in May 1860. But it didn’t pass the Senate until early the next year, its cause aided by the departure of southern senators who were no longer there to vote against the measure that some of their chronologically challenged latter-day apologists would hold responsible for their exit.
There’s no doubt that the South had reason to be aggrieved by high tariff rates favoring northern manufacturers, and the issue came up in its justifications for leaving the Union. But it was decidedly secondary to the primary issue: slavery, slavery, and slavery. South Carolina’s declaration of secession complained, first of all, that northerners had become maddeningly lax about returning fugitive slaves to bondage. The second sentence of the Georgia declaration was: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Mississippi avowed with refreshing frankness: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
Even DiLorenzo concedes that slavery was the initial cause of secession, but he does it almost by way of an aside, so that he can keep his focus on the tariff and economics. But slavery was the South’s prism for everything. Some southerners worried that if the federal government could impose a tariff, it could interfere with slavery. The South’s commitment to federalism was highly situational. It insisted on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to tighten the screws on anyone in the northern states who was insufficiently zealous about returning runaways. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention when the party couldn’t forge a consensus on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories.
Lincoln’s forceful response to the dissolution of his country is another count against him for his critics. They, of course, call him a “dictator,” among other choice names. Economist Paul Craig Roberts called him “an American Pol Pot, except worse.” For DiLorenzo, he was “a glutton for tyranny.” These Lincoln-haters are real sticklers for the Constitution yet have no use for the admonition in Article II that the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
They come up with fanciful alternatives to military conflict. Ron Paul wonders why Lincoln didn’t forestall the war by simply buying up and freeing the slaves. With his usual sense of realism, Paul ignores the fact that Lincoln repeatedly advanced schemes for just such a compensated emancipation. Lincoln argued for these proposals as “the cheapest and most humane way to end the war.” But except in the District of Columbia, they went precisely . . . nowhere. The border states weren’t selling, let alone the South. Even little Delaware, which was selected as a test case because in 1860 it had only 587 slaveholders out of a white population of 90,500, couldn’t be persuaded to cash out of slavery. One plan proposed by Lincoln would have paid $400 or so per slave and achieved full abolition by 1893. A version of the scheme failed in the state’s legislature.
The bottom line is that the South created a national emergency, and, ever since, its apologists have excoriated Lincoln for responding with emergency powers. After the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln replied with every lever at his disposal — and then some. He called out the militia. He blockaded southern ports. He called for volunteers to increase the size of the regular army and expanded the navy. He directed that $2 million be forwarded to private citizens in New York for expenditures related to the national defense (he suspected the loyalty of the federal bureaucracy). He did all of this without consulting Congress, which wasn’t in session. Lincoln, who wanted to control the early response to the war, didn’t call it back until July 4.
There was no doubt about his power to call out the militia. For the rest, he fell back on the authority of Congress. “These measures, whether strictly legal or not,” he said in his July 4 message to Congress, “were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” Expanding the military and appropriating funds without Congress can’t pass constitutional muster, but Congress did indeed bless all his military measures retroactively — in the bill’s language, “as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States.”
Most controversial is Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He first suspended it between Washington and Philadelphia in April 1861 after troops heading to the undefended capital from the north were attacked by a mob in Baltimore, after which Baltimore railroad bridges and telegraph lines were cut. This was a genuine crisis of a government beset by enemies on all sides. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The circumstances certainly justified suspension, but the placement of this provision in Article I suggests it is a congressional power.
Congress rendered the question moot in 1863 when it passed a law saying the president had the power to suspend. As the suspension covered the entire country, the military arrests and trials brought inevitable overreaching and abuses. They earned Lincoln a rebuke from the Supreme Court after the war, when it ruled against military trials where civilian courts were still open. Some high-profile arrests, most famously of the anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio — in 1863, without Lincoln’s prior knowledge — have proven embarrassments for the ages. But in his careful, Pulitzer Prize–winning study of civil liberties during the war, Mark Neely gives a basically exculpatory though hardly uncritical verdict on the Lincoln record.
Overall, according to Neely, arrests “were of less significance in the history of civil liberties than anyone ever imagined.” He points out that even Lincoln-administration officials often used the term “political prisoner” for any civilian held by the military, a highly misleading label. “A majority of the arrests,” he writes, “would have occurred whether the writ was suspended or not. They were caused by the mere incidents or friction of war, which produced refugees, informers, guides, Confederate defectors, carriers of contraband goods, and other such persons as came between or in the wake of large armies. They may have been civilians, but their political views were irrelevant.”
Lincoln wasn’t a dictator; he was a wartime president operating at the outer limits of his power in dire circumstances when the existence of the country was at risk, and — inevitably — he made mistakes. Lincoln didn’t try to put off elections, including his own in 1864, which he was convinced for a long stretch of time that he would lose.
Yet another favorite count against Lincoln on the Right is that he was the midwife for the birth of the modern welfare state — a false claim also made by progressives bent on appropriating him for their own purposes. The war necessarily entailed the growth and centralization of the state, but this hardly makes Lincoln a forerunner to FDR or LBJ. The income tax required to fund the war, instituted in 1861 and soon made into a progressive tax with higher rates for the wealthy, was a temporary measure eliminated in 1872. Wars are expensive. In 1860, the federal budget was well under $100 million. By the end of the war, it was more than $1 billion. But the budget dropped back down to $300 million, excluding payments on the debt, within five years of the end of the war.
To see in any of this the makings of the modern welfare state requires a leap of imagination. In the midst of the war, the State Department had all of 33 employees. The famous instances of government activism not directly related to the war — the subsidies to railroads, the Homestead Act — were a far cry from the massive transfer programs instituted in the 20th century. The railroads got land and loan guarantees but were a genuinely transformational technology often, though not always, providing an economic benefit. The Homestead Act, as Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo argues, can be viewed as a gigantic privatization of public lands, which were sold off at a cut rate to people willing to improve their plots.
In the North during the war, historian Richard Franklin Bensel points out, the industrial and agricultural sectors ran free of government controls. The labor force, although tapped for manpower for the war, was relatively unmolested. The government became entangled with the financial system, but that system was also becoming more modern, sophisticated, and free of European influence. Given its vitality and wealth, the North could wage the war without subjecting itself to heavy-handed command-and-control policies. Compared with the overmatched Confederacy, it was a laissez-faire haven.
It was, rather, the southern political economy that came to depend most heavily on bureaucratic control and government expropriation, as Bensel notes. An extensive conscription law effectively subjected the entire labor force to centralized direction. The government had the discretionary power to exempt certain occupations and to detail men to civic duties deemed necessary; private concerns, therefore, depended on the government for workers. Despite a constitutional prohibition, the government subsidized the construction of railroads and by the end of the war assumed control of them and, by extension, the supply of raw materials.
The Confederacy “impressed” property from manufacturers, farmers, and railroads to supply the military. The system led to wide-ranging price controls. One Confederate congressman complained of the government agents who were “as thick as locusts in Egypt.” Under pressure from the Union blockade, the government eventually prohibited the importation of luxuries and took control of a vast array of exports. It imposed a more progressive income tax than the North did. In short, the Confederates pioneered a program of war socialism back when Woodrow Wilson — the progressive president who would run the country’s economy on a similar basis during World War I — was still in knee-pants.
Lincoln’s economics are hardly invulnerable to criticism. He was indeed a government activist, though at a time when government was different from what it is today — vastly less extensive and obstructive, with the wealth transfers of the modern welfare state nowhere in sight. Throughout his career he supported internal improvements (i.e., transportation projects), a protective tariff, and sound, duly regulated banking. These policies were associated with their share of waste and corruption. On the other hand, wherever canals and railroads touched, they brought the competitive pressure of the market with them; the tariff was a support to the growth of industry; the banks produced a reliable paper currency necessary for a cash economy. They all tended to create a vibrant, diverse economy open to men of various talents. Here is where Lincoln is guilty as charged: The agrarians are right that he sought to end the simpler, agricultural America in favor of a modern commercial and industrial economy.
There is one final indictment against Lincoln. It is said that he elevated the Declaration and the principle of equality that it enshrines over the Constitution. NR’s venerable senior editor Frank Meyer worried that he had loosed a free-floating, abstract commitment to equality throughout the land that supported the leveling tendencies of modern liberalism. But Lincoln’s equality was the equality of natural rights, not results. “I take it,” he said in 1860, “that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” He warned a delegation of workingmen during the war of the peril of a “war on property, or the owners of property”: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”
Lincoln thought the purpose of the Constitution was to protect the inalienable rights enunciated in the Declaration; but this did not downgrade the Constitution. Despite his opposition to slavery, he honored the Constitution’s protections for it, even as his abolitionist allies bridled at them. In his final speech of the 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the Constitution. The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with the institution in the states, I have constantly denied.” When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as an inherently limited war measure. Allen Guelzo notes how he never lost sight of its prospective legal vulnerability once the war ended. He finally looked to the 13th Amendment — a completely constitutional measure — as the “King’s cure for all the evils.”
I think it is important to clear away the anti-Lincoln flotsam so that conservatives can appreciate what Lincoln has to teach them, especially in this moment when opportunity in America is under threat from stultifying and wrongheaded policies and from an ongoing cultural breakdown. Notwithstanding the Right’s ambivalence about Lincoln, he has always had friends in unexpected places. The great traditionalist Russell Kirk, despite devoting a chapter to Calhoun in his classic The Conservative Mind, admired Lincoln. “In his great conservative end, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded,” Kirk wrote, noting “the charity and fortitude of this uncouth, homely, melancholy, lovable man.” The formidable agrarian Richard Weaver also has a brilliant chapter on Lincoln in his book The Ethics of Rhetoric. He argues, “With his full career in view, there seems no reason to differ with [Lincoln law partner William] Herndon’s judgment that Lincoln displayed a high order of ‘conservative statesmanship.’”
Then there is William F. Buckley Jr., who didn’t always agree with his friend Frank Meyer. Buckley wrote a letter to the editor dissenting from one of Meyer’s anti-Lincoln blasts in the 1960s. “Some conservatives have a Thing on Lincoln, including, unfortunately, my esteemed colleague Mr. Frank Meyer.” Buckley especially regretted the charge that Lincoln was “anti-humanitarian”: “It seems to me that this is worse than mere tendentious ideological revisionism. It comes close to blasphemy.” So many decades later, tendentious revisionism and blasphemy are still favorite tools of the anti-Lincoln Right.
We should reject them now, as Buckley did then, and re-discover the Lincoln who told the 166th Ohio regiment during the war that it was “through this free government” that they had “an open field and fair chance for [their] industry, enterprise, and intelligence,” and “equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.” He concluded, “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.” That jewel still needs to be secured, and it is still worth fighting for.
– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. Parts of this essay are drawn from his new book Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again, coming out this month from Broadside Books.
as exception strengthens the force of a law in cases not excepted, so enumeration weakens it in cases not enumerated,
Please show me the part of the Constitution where the federal government is authorized to operate on an 'implication' of a court.
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I don't think any rational person would believe that Slavery was illegal or unconstitutional. But there is a lot of effort expended by some on the Confederate side to portray slavery as irrelevant to the reasons for the rebellion.
True. I guess they never realize the weaken their own argument by doing so.
As you point out, slavery was the pillar on which the Southern economy rested on. It's not surprising that they would react badly to any perceived threat to it.
Also true, but one must also remember that it wasn't JUST slavery they were defending...it was the Constitution itself.
LOL. Where in the hell did you get that whopper?
LOL. I recall a quote from a FReeper a while back...
Do you seriously think the Founders threw down less than 5000 words and expected them to restrain the government?
The point is that they couldn't possibly anticipate every nuance and every evolution. So they did their best with broad strokes and depended on the honor of their descendents to have the wisdom to choose the right path. The pretended secession, the insurrection, and the rebellion weren't among those choices.
Also true, but one must also remember that it wasn't JUST slavery they were defending...it was the Constitution itself.
True to form, then just as now, the democrats defended the part of the Constitution that suited their direct interests. The rest...not so much.
Pat Toomey, my Senator and Keith Rothfus, my Congressman.
Which was, indeed, mine.
It was a discussion on the Constitution being written under the auspices of the Law of Nature and Nations by Vattel. A discussion, in which if I recall, I gave sources for same.
Now you want to try to act as if you're tossing down some type of definitive gauntlet thinking you are oh-so-cleverly using my own words against me! LOL!
The reality is that all you're actually doing is attempting to use a previous statement in an unrelated discussion.
Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot.... you've repeatedly displayed evidence to prove to the most objective observer that reading comprehension is definitely not your strong suit, so never mind.
Sure. But first please show me the part of the Constitution that authorized a U.S. Air Force.
They are none.
They are part of the problem and live in areas that have little or no conservatism yet direct their fire at those of us in the last reliable bulwark.
which might explain why in time so many are found not so conservative
just look at Meakers positions on social issues on his homepage
nuff said
just like so many before...r9etb, non sequitur, whiskey papa, trumandogz, sinkspur, illbay and so forth
all social moderates at best
for them...non reconstructed Southern offspring are a bigger threat than the progressives
and they also think racism is a big issue on this forum and that it is the prism through which we should view our history
ahem...and they even have someone here who goes on TV who agrees and writes about precisely that
that is just part of a larger problem isn’t it
why the GOP won’t really fight back
Toomey?
hysterical
the same conservative who tried to rush through a gun control bill with Manchin and failed?
you will have to do better than that
I was gonna say Mike Kelly...but his ACU is only 78...whew...much worse than even Trent Lotts
Rothfus...damn what a name eh?
too early to tell but looks promising
LOL! Trying to change the subject is an Alinsky tactic.
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You assert there was no Right to secession, I showed where and how the subject was not given to the federal government to decide.
Your stated that, somehow, an implication of the court made it so. In reply, I give you Madison.
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.
James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
The States ARE the 'parties to the Compact', and nowhere in either the Constitution OR the Judiciary Act of 1789 was any branch of government given the ability to imply or express what the Rights of the States are!
Particularly since the dissolution of the previous compact known as the Articles of Confederation....which made way for the new Constitution....was done by....(wait for it).....
SECESSION!
But the seceding states were certainly justified upon that principle; and from the duty which every state is acknowledged to owe to itself, and its own citizens by doing whatsoever may best contribute to advance its own happiness and prosperity; and much more, what may be necessary to the preservation of its existence as a state.30 Nor must we forget that solemn declaration to which every one of the confederate states assented . … that whenever any form of government is destructive of the ends of its institution, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government. Consequently whenever the people of any state, or number of states, discovered the inadequacy of the first form of federal government to promote or preserve their independence, happiness, and union, they only exerted that natural right in rejecting it, and adopting another, which all had unanimously assented to, and of which no force or compact can deprive the people of any state, whenever they see the necessity, and possess the power to do it. And since the seceding states, by establishing a new constitution and form of federal government among themselves, without the consent of the rest, have shown that they consider the right to do so whenever the occasion may, in their opinion require it, as unquestionable, we may infer that that right has not been diminished by any new compact which they may since have entered into, since none could be more solemn or explicit than the first, nor more binding upon the contracting parties. Their obligation, therefore, to preserve the present constitution, is not greater than their former obligations were, to adhere to the articles of confederation; each state possessing the same right of withdrawing itself from the confederacy without the consent of the rest, as any number of them do, or ever did, possess. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments established by compact should not be changed for light or transient causes; but should a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evince a design in any one of the confederates to usurp a dominion over the rest; or, if those who are entrusted to administer the government, which the confederates have for their mutual convenience established, should manifest a design to invade their sovereignty, and extend their own power beyond the terms of compact, to the detriment of the states respectively, and to reduce them to a state of obedience, and finally to establish themselves in a state of permanent superiority, it then becomes not only the right, but the duty of the states respectively, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Of the Several Forms of Government, St. George Tucker, View of the Constitution of the United States, Section XIII
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BTW - I love a good discussion, but please don't be one of those who toss non related statements, fail to source assertions or just tell me I'm dumb, wrong, don't understand, etc, etc, etc.
I'm heartily sick of the blah-blah Brigade!
I figure his use of US Army uniforms as he went forward to reconnoiter had much to do with his being shot too.
Ironically, General Martinet, after whom the term martinet comes, was also shot by his own men.
Jackson had the habit of holding his right hand in the air to equalize the blood flow between left and right.
Jackson was certainly odd, and his great victory at Chancelorsville was as much a matter of luck as anything else. He happened upon a farmer, who happened to know of a road which happened to lead to Hooker’s flank. Absent that, he would have gotten the greater part of Lee’s army lost in the woods.
Actually, it is article 3 that gives the supreme court the power to resolve controversies regarding the states or the states and the federal governments.
Of course the southern states didn’t have a case, they sought to start a war, thinking that that would give them a better chance than the nonexistant case for non-existant wrong not committed against them. They lost the war too.
The air force, just so you know, is justified by the same part that justifies the Army. The Army can be broken down into different parts, or can be grouped together in ways that the constitution does not discuss.
In like manner, we have two navies, one US navy, and a coast guard which used to serve as the revenue service cutters, later a separate branch under the treasury, and now I believe under the homeland security.
It was a discussion on the Constitution being written under the auspices of the Law of Nature and Nations by Vattel.
Not quite. It was a discussion where you claimed that the Constitution should be interpreted by inferences made by Vattel. Your repeated contention was that Law of Nations held bearing over the Constitution. Others (and I believe it was BroJoeK) contended that LON was merely another reference material used to draft an entirely original document. The Founders drew upon concepts contained within LON (as well as other reference materials) and made interpretations that suited their needs. LON holds no more bearing on the US Constitution than Webster's Dictionary.
Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot.... you've repeatedly displayed evidence to prove to the most objective observer that reading comprehension is definitely not your strong suit, so never mind.
Emote, emote, emote...
Far from changing the subject this goes to the heart of your argument on Congress acting on implied powers. So please answer the question, where is the Air Force explicitly authorized by the Constitution?
You assert there was no Right to secession, I showed where and how the subject was not given to the federal government to decide.
Wrong. I have never argued that. What I have said is a legal secession requires the approval of all the impacted parties, those leaving and those staying.
The States ARE the 'parties to the Compact', and nowhere in either the Constitution OR the Judiciary Act of 1789 was any branch of government given the ability to imply or express what the Rights of the States are!
Then as parties to a compact can we agree that no one state has any more powers than another state? And that the compact protects all states equally and cannot be used by one state or group of states to the detriment of the others? If so then how can one state or group of states call the compact broken regardless of the harm their actions cause the other states and regardless of the wishes of the other states? If it is not so then how can there exist a true compact between states if some enjoy more protections than others?
Particularly since the dissolution of the previous compact known as the Articles of Confederation....which made way for the new Constitution....was done by....(wait for it)..... SECESSION!
LOL!!!! So you're saying that the original states seceded from the United States and...(wait for it)
FOUNDED THE UNITED STATES?
Neat trick.
BTW - I love a good discussion, but please don't be one of those who toss non related statements, fail to source assertions or just tell me I'm dumb, wrong, don't understand, etc, etc, etc.
I promise I will keep any and all opinions in that area to myself.
Of course the founders anticipated that there would arise disagreements between the states, and between the states and the federal government.
They wisely provided that such controversies would be resolved by a supreme court (per article 3) as original jurisdiction.
Said provision removes any need for secession, by permitting resolution of disagreements without secession.
The remaining right to revolution is retained by the states, but the federal government has a right to punish revolution by putting down insurrection and punishing those who promote it with charges of treason.
And in order to be a successful revolutionary, you have to win.
Jackson was always ready to ride a horse where his men walked, I will give him that.
Longstreet was also shot by his own men.
One the government managed to 'mold' the Constitution to justify it's action, its ability to constitutionally rationalize would know no bounds, so the question itself becomes moot.
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What I have said is a legal secession requires the approval of all the impacted parties, those leaving and those staying.
By what authority does one State sit in judgment of another? You cannot have equal parties if that becomes allowed, you have a tyranny of the majority.
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If it is not so then how can there exist a true compact between states if some enjoy more protections than others?
That's a a rather ironic question since you are disregarding the fact you're granting UNequal protections to the Constitutionally and legally slave holding States by acting as if a continuously broken agreement can be ignored by the aggrieved parties.
Why should the Northern States be protected from their continued attacks on the Constitution?
If the South were to violate any part of the Constitution intentionally and systematically, and persist in so doing, year after year, and no remedy could be had, would the North be any longer bound by the rest of it? And if the North were deliberately, habitually, and of fixed purpose to disregard one part of it, would the South be bound any longer to observe its other obligations? I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the Northern States refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side.
Life of Daniel Webster, 1851 / Vol 1 / page 518
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LOL!!!! So you're saying that the original states seceded from the United States and...(wait for it) FOUNDED THE UNITED STATES?
Um, no. I'm saying the States seceded from the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, then the (again) autonomous States wrote the Constituion to form the currently known United States.
You seriously don't know about the Articles of Confederation?
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I promise I will keep any and all opinions in that area to myself.
I appreciate your restraint...LOL!
I've showed you this before. It is the last time I will do so.
Article 4 section 4The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
And on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive means the STATE governments, not the federal one.
At the same time it is properly provided, in order that such interference may not wantonly or arbitrarily take place; that it shall only be on the request of the state authorities: otherwise the self-government of the state might be encroached upon at the pleasure of the Union, and a small state might fear or feel the effects of a combination of larger states against it under colour of constitutional authority;
William Rawle
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The federal government has no authority for any presence within a State for any reason whatsoever without the express request of the State itself as per the Constitution
The States were protecting their Rights and doing their duty to their people. There was neither insurrection nor rebellion......just an overweening government authority with a megalomaniac at the helm.
Gee....I guess Obama IS just like Lincoln!
Evade, evade, evade.
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