Posted on 07/01/2016 6:24:15 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
In other words, Liberals were ignoring the clear meaning of Constitutional requirements and substituting their own personal feelings for the existing law. Same as today.
I just yesterday read a statement made by a man at the South Carolina secession convention and he touched on exactly the point you mentioned. He said the South was holding true to the meaning of the Declaration and the US Constitution, but it's requirements were being routinely violated by the Northern states.
Wouldn't a constitutional amendment have been easier?
Yes to all. Today’s American liberalism is a direct outgrowth of a novel interpretation of Christianity, and it is is odd (or possibly ironic) that it comes to fruition in pagan totalitarianism.
The ToT was a cruel farce worked on the Cherokee and others, supposedly in concord with a few Indian bigwigs who presumed to have command over the rest. Even most forced deportations are not death marches.
“Christian ethics” took a big nose dive here.
It’s like many entanglements in vice. There is such a warpage of conscience and defensiveness of evil, that it can not come undone overnight.
The original constitution shouldn’t have allowed slavery. That was a very poisonous pill for the new America. You can’t be trumpeting independence before God while denying some of His creatures the independence that He wants them to have. Not without inviting retribution.
Had it not protected slavery, the Southern states would have broken away in 1787 when the Northern states would not have been able to stop them.
Is that the one that was proposed to guarantee stronger protection for slavery? The one that was originally intended to be the 13th amendment?
I am not a big fan of the Civil War, a needless, horrible castrophe, but a constitutional amendment requires 3/4’s of the states and 2/3 of the Senate to approve it. The South cheered the Dred Scott decision, not realizing that the chain of events it unleashed.
Their economic output was based on the usage of slave labor. People defend their rice bowls no matter what.
The problem was not so much with the Dred Scott decision, which was mostly correct from a legal technicality perspective, it is the fact that states who's culture had changed such that they no longer wished to abide by the agreement they had signed.
They were trapped by a law that said they had to enforce slavery whether they liked it or not, and their moral preferences.
What they did was ignore the law, and then made up excuses for refusing to enforce it. They knew they didn't have the clout to get an amendment passed, and so they simply practiced "Irish Democracy" on the issue.
Oh indeed.
Besides the Cherokeewere a fully assimilated and successful community. The heathens were the dirty greedy gold diggers
On April 6, 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott filed petitions in the Missouri circuit court at St. Louis seeking to establish their right to freedom based on their residence on free soil. Under Missouri law they had a strong case. As Fehrenbacher says, "again and again, the highest curt of the state had ruled that a master who took his slave to reside in a state or territory where slavery was prohibited thereby emancipated him." Unfortunately for the Scotts, their lawyer allowed a technical weakness in his case to sabotage the verdict. He didn't provide a witness that could establish that Mrs. Emerson owned the Scotts, even though all concerned knew that to be the case. Because of that defect the verdict went against the Scotts. They filed a motion for a retrial, but the defendant filed something called a bill of exceptions and the case was sent to the supreme court of Missouri. It was not until March 22, 1852 that the state supreme court handed down a decision. The Scotts still had the facts on their side and probably would have prevailed except that the issue of slavery had become so heated in the nation by 1852 that the proslavery justices of Missouri were not disposed to give the anti-slavery side their way. The court ruled against the Scotts.
Which it would have to do to remain compliant with Article IV, section 2.
(So much for states' rights.)
The powers possessed by the states do not include powers that are explicitly removed by the US Constitution. Creating a "free state" is contradictory to Article IV, Section 2. It can't be done, or at least I can't see any way in which it could have been done.
Basically, the court was inviting an opportunity to overturn antislavery statutes in the North.
Yes, because the law was clearly against such statutes. How can you make a statute "freeing slaves" when the US Constitution requires that you return them to their owners? How does that work?
The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
We knew, and the Indians knew, that the Indians were nomadic peoples. It’s not like they hated on sheer principle to move around as needed. But this was just crazy cruel.
True . The Cherokee had a stable non-nomadic life by the 1700s. They were adept at trading, agriculture, and other wealth making activities
This would have been a civil, not a criminal case and so they could have compelled Mrs. Emerson to testify. I don’t quite grok this.
This particular group of Indians were not nomadic at all. They lived in houses, grew crops, ran newspapers, they helped us fight the British, and they built things. They were the most civilized of all the Indians in North America, they are the Cherokees.
Do they look like nomadic Indians to you?
Continued from June 30 (reply #45)
Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
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