Southern Secession Was One Thing-The War To Prevent It Was Another

Mises.org ^ | August 24, 2017 | Ryan McMaken

[x]

Slaveowners didn't have vast stores of pounds, francs, marks, and pesos lying around.

The took their profits in dollars.

The foreign money was in New York banks and available to buy imports.

Or do you really think that the planters had both all the foreign currency they "earned" and all the dollars they exchanged the foreign money for?

Or that they had some moral right to all the foreign money they'd exchanged and the US money they exchanged it for?

[cpdiii]

The slaveholders of the South would have just started doing informal military campaigns using these mercs to spread slavery all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.

You good sir are an absolute idiot. In certain nations in South America slavery was still accepted. In other nations it was banned. However, in those nations the freed slaves were second class citizens then and they are today.

However, if you want to look at genocidal slavery one must look to Argentina. What the Spaniards did not enslave they killed. Today Argentina is very very white. It is mostly Spanish, German and Italian blood today.

[DiogenesLamp]

Actually it is a good example of an”Activist Decision” on the part of the Supreme Court. The only issue before the Court in Scott V. Sanford was whether Scott could sue in Federal Court for his freedom. This could have been answered in a one page opinion, i.e., Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States and therefore had no standing to sue in Federal Court for his freedom. Instead we got copious pages of opinion including that The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, that was not an issue presented in the suit to the court. The Federal Government has no Constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in any state where slavery is legal. That was also an issue that was not in the suit. The Federal Government must enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Again that was not an issue in the suit. And finally, there is no way that a slave can become a citizen of the United States. That per se was not in the suit. Only Dred Scott’s status as a slave and citizenship was the question to be interpreted per the Constitution. That seem to be pretty activist jurisprudence to me.

Okay, you make a good case that in terms of legal process, Tanney went far beyond what was necessary. Yes, he could have dismissed it on the basis that Scott was not a citizen, however, the term "Judicial Activist" is normally used to describe a condition in which a Judge interprets a law in a manner never intended by it's creators, such as "Pornography" being part of "Free Speech" of "Abortion" being derived from the 14th amendment.

Taney may have gone beyond what was the necessary legal process, but I don't see where he invented any new law. He may have been an "activist" in so far as he used this case as a vehicle to clarify the existing law on larger points than just the status of Dred Scott.

Yes, he would appear to be an activist in that regard, but this is very different from what we normally consider "Judicial Activism."

[a fool in paradise]

Can the US go to war against the California Democrats/Communists calling for Calexist/Reconquista?

[DiogenesLamp]

And with any decision there are consequences. No one stopped them seceding. But there were consequences. I personally believe if they had done it for good moral reasons they would have ultimately wound up winning and would have been a separate nation.

Had they remained in the Union, the nation may very well still have slavery. Would that be a "good consequence"?

It takes 3/4ths of the States to amend the Constitution. If the 11 slave states held together, it would require a 44 state Union for 33 state to outvote those 11 states and ban slavery. This could not have happened until 1896 at the earliest.

Had the five Union slave states also joined with them, it would have required a 64 state Union to outvote them. We do not yet have 64 states in the Union.

The Union was a slave Union. It would have continued being a slave Union if the South hadn't tried to become independent of Washington DC's control.

[DiogenesLamp]

The took their profits in dollars.

And who made the exchange? And why does it matter what form the European payment for their products was in? It was still their European money that must be used to buy the European products imported into the Nation.

The foreign money was in New York banks and available to buy imports.

Of course it was, and who would be loath for this economic activity to move elsewhere?

You are trying to play some "hocus pocus" by invoking middlemen to cloud the origin and ultimate disposition or the money, but when you summarize the whole thing, European imports were being paid for by Southern produced wealth.

The products bought by Northerners from Europe were bought using money they had gotten from Southerners through intrastate trade that was deliberately pumped up by Washington's Protectionist policies.

[mrsmith]

The idiocy of the idealism is stinging!

[Chewbarkah]

If you believe that “The South didn’t care about states’ rights”, you should ponder why the South established a Confederate system of government, echoing the failed “Articles of Confederation”, with sovereign States associated via a weak central government. I view the Civil War as being about States’ rights ...to have and extend slavery. The two are inextricably linked; it’s foolish to argue one over the other.

“The South was controlled by a semi-aristocratic clique of slaveholders who sought to oppress the Northern white working class.” I’ll go along with the clique of semi-aristocrats leading the South into perdition, but I doubt they gave a thought to northern industrial labor. The aristocrats tended to be deeply in debt, land and slave rich but cash poor, and determined to find outlets for the slaves they already had in profusion. Even in Washington’s day, in states like South Carolina and Virginia there were far more slaves than productive enterprise for their labor. Preserving the value of slave capital required relocating slaves into the “Deep South”; once this zone too was saturated, Old South slaveholders wanted to outplace operations into the West and Caribbean, or liquidate their capital stock of human beings by selling into those markets. The expansion of slave territory was the desperate need of the greedy bastards, and States’ Rights to maintain and expand slavery was their key issue.

[DoodleDawg]

It’s not very often one sees someone speaking well of the Scott v. Sanford decision, but then again you never cease to amaze me.

[Alas Babylon!]

Yes! But no Reconstruction.

Just hang all the traitors, which might be pretty much the entire democrat party there!

[Alas Babylon!]

My little town in Alabama is at the Falls of the Tallapoosa river.

We started our first textile mill in 1845 and had several more built in the 1850s. We even had an armory making Enfield carbine rifles by the time the war started. The only armory, incidentally, never to have been burned to the ground by the Union Army. They did stop making the rifles in mid-1865, as no one was buying anymore!

Another fellow, from New Hampshire, named Daniel Pratt, who the town of Prattville is named after, started his mills in the 1840s.

In other words, industrialization WAS coming to the South, and textile mills producing cotton cloth were undercutting everyone up North because they were so close to the cotton product they used.

If the war and succession had not happened, the South would have industrialized as much as the North had.

Kind of sad that the hotter heads prevailed. I often wonder what would have come of this area if the peacemakers prevailed. My people down here were Whigs and Unionists (the Nation—not labor groups). They thought the Succession was a disaster, even though they fought for it out of honor and loyalty.

[DiogenesLamp]

It’s not very often one sees someone speaking well of the Scott v. Sanford decision, but then again you never cease to amaze me.

You call it speaking "well", I call it speaking "objectively."

I don't have to agree with something to recognize that it is correct according to the laws of that time period.

[Alas Babylon!]

Fixed my tagline....

[DiogenesLamp]

The expansion of slave territory was the desperate need of the greedy bastards, and States’ Rights to maintain and expand slavery was their key issue.

I've seen the "expansion" argument a lot, and I have recently discovered there is a serious problem with it; It wasn't possible.

The only crop that made slavery profitable was cotton. Here is a modern map of cotton growing in the United States.

Other than a tiny bit in Kansas, Cotton wouldn't grow in the Western states above Oklahoma. The Cotton you see growing in California, Nevada, New Mexico and West Texas all grow as a result of modern irrigation systems that simply weren't possible in the 19th century.

What does this mean? Well as near as I can tell, it meant that it wasn't possible for any significant degree of slavery to expand into the territories. The territories would not support a profit making system based on slavery.

Did the Cotton people in the South know this back in 1860? If they knew their agriculture, they probably did. So what was actually at stake here with this "expansion" business?

Control of Congress, and therefore Control of Commerce, especially the international commerce.

[DiogenesLamp]

If the war and succession had not happened, the South would have industrialized as much as the North had.

From the angle that I have been looking at things for the last couple of years, I think that is exactly what the North was afraid of. No, they'd rather keep all the economic control and power, thank you very much!

If you start to look at this thing as a fight over money and control, a lot of stuff starts to make sense that didn't make any sense before.

[Secret Agent Man]

You know very well the southern economies would not have allowed it to keep going much longer anyway. Even the folks FOR secession admit this in their excuse why the north shouldn’t have gone to war with the south over slavery.

[Bull Snipe]

would agree with you on your points.

[Yulee]

“to spread slavery all the way down to Tierra del Fuego”

---

Slavery already had existed south of the border for centuries.

Between 1525 and 1866 10.7 million Africans were shipped to the West. Of these only about 388,000 came directly to North America, with 450,000 ended up in what would become the US. The remaining 10 million ended up in South America and the Caribbean.

The US banned the importation of slaves and slave trading in 1808. So slaves were legally imported into the US from 1787 to 1808. A total of 21 years.

Slavery existed in the United States from 1787 when we became an independent country to 1865, yet the world acts like we started the slave trade.

Cuba emancipated its slaves in 1886. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to emancipate all its slaves in 1888.

And yet slavery still exists in many parts of the world.

[tophat9000]

how do you figure it interpreted law exactly as Founders had written

you clearly don’t seem to believe in the concept of “original intent” in the Constitution seeing how the founders behave before and after they wrote the Constitution

Since the founders have been banning slavery in the territories with Northwest ordinances before The Constitution

they prohibited the import of slaves in the Constitution

and the same founders were prohibiting slavery in some territories and States after the Constitution

the founders regulating slavery all over the place

the Founders demonstrated over and over and over again before during and after the writing of the Constitution that they thought it was inside their rights to regulate and restrict slavery wherever they saw fit

the only place they didn’t think they had the right to do was touch slavery inside a state that already had it

It was the Supreme Court that all of a sudden steps in and says no you can’t

Dred Scott was the Roe v Wade of his day a completely invented right

a slave owner had no more right to expect this slave claim to be honored in a free state let alone expect the federal to enforce his claim in a free state....

Then a gay marriage in a gay marriage state should be forced to be honored in a non gay marriage States

that is until then Supreme Court stepped in and impose gay marriage on all of us that was another Dred Scott like activist decision

it’s a total joke to say The South was for states rights when they’re expecting the federal to go around imposing slave states will on free states

speaking of states rights.. if a slave state lets say Virginia decided for whatever reason it wanted to end slavery... under Dred Scott they couldn’t do it ... so much for states rights and freedoms

you seem to adopt this attitude that if one state wanted slavery the other all the other free states had to respect and enforce it inside their and the federal had to enforce it inside all federal territories.... it that’s not state rights

[DiogenesLamp]

You know very well the southern economies would not have allowed it to keep going much longer anyway.

Why is that? I don't know this, but if you will explain it to me, then I will add that information to what I do know.

I think Slavery wouldn't have lasted much longer, but Cotton might have continued to command a lot of money for quite awhile longer.

Even the folks FOR secession admit this in their excuse why the north shouldn’t have gone to war with the south over slavery.

I don't know of this, and I haven't really heard a good explanation as to why this might be so.