Posted on 12/10/2019 5:05:52 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
I understand that they had quite a penchant for Caviar and Champagne.
I don't see your point. How is the Confederate constitution different from the U.S. Constitution?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Perhaps they assumed Lincoln was going to be a disaster, no matter which direction they went; and they would rather die free, than under the thumb of a tyrant. Just a thought . . ."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Die free? Well two-thirds of them perhaps. Thumb of a tyrant? What made him a tyrant specifically?"
I don't know: I have never been a tyrant. But Lincoln most certainly was a brutal tyrant during his brief executive career.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "It does appear the southerners lacked the "hindsight" of today's arm-chair quarterbacks."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Or their imagination."
You are correct. Today's armchair quarterbacks operate on imagination.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "A large portion of Americans believe the Secession was about slavery, even though Jefferson Davis never mentioned it in his Inaugural Address, and Lincoln mentioned it only in an accommodating manner..."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Perhaps people believe the Southern secession was about slavery because so many of the Southern leaders of the time said it was about slavery?"
Let's take a look:
1) Slavery was already protected by the Constitution;
2) Those in the border states would lose the protection of the constitution for the return of fugitive slaves if they seceded from the Union;
3) Lincoln was more than accommodating on the slavery issue, even supporting an irrevocable amendment that would protect slavery forever.
Therefore, I can think of only two reasons the South seceded:
1) Unfair wealth redistribution via targeted tariffs (e.g., crony capitalism -- socialism!)
2) The South believed "Honest Abe" was lying about slavery and his support for the Constitution.
The former is history. We can only speculate on the latter.
Perhaps people believe what they want to believe, and ignore the rest. I am more of a realist: I believe it when I see it.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "And while Davis may not have mentioned slavery in his inaugural address, it was certainly topic A in his first address to Congress."
Do you have a source?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion -- no using of force against or among the people anywhere."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Please continue. Lincoln went on ..."
>>DoodleDawg quoting Lincoln: "Where hostility to the United States, in any interior locality, shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable withal, that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "What Lincoln was stating was his intention to continue on the functions of government - mails, courts, revenue collection - and would not appoint office holders that might exacerbate the situation. For you to latch on to collecting tariffs and claiming that was Lincolns sole purpose for opposing Southern secession makes about as much sense as saying Lincoln fought the war to make sure the mail got delivered.
The part you quoted in no way modifies the preceding part. Lincoln clearly warned the secessionists that they still worked for him, or else! In other words, "Be my tariff slave, or die!"
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Indeed, the South had to import two-thirds of its clothing and manufactured goods from outside the region, and southerners paid artificially high prices because of the high tariffs erected at the behest of American industry."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "People in the North paid those artificially high prices as well. And that one-third of clothing and manufactured goods produced domestically in the South had the same tariff protections as Northern manufacturers had."
That is a gross over-simplification since the South was an agricultural society. Do you have sources so I can see the context?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "The South even had to import food. The North made nearly all the country's firearms, cloth, pig iron, boots and shoes, an ominous fact, considering the necessity of these things in a war. 'Financially, we are more enslaved than Negroes,' one prominent citizen said."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Perhaps it's because, as another prominent citizen said, "We are a primitive people sir! We are an agricultural people; we a primitive but civilized people. We have no cities-we don't want them. We have no literature-we don't need any yet. We have no press-we are glad of it. We have no commercial marine-no navy-we don't want them. Your ships carry our produce and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or, manufacturing classes. As long as we have our cotton, our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from these nations with which we are in amity."
That contradicts your previous quote. Do you have sources so I can see the context?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "In Adam's book there is only one brief mention of the Kansas Territory, regarding John Brown; so obviously it was not important to his narrative. How does Kansas fit into your narrative?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Because for almost ten years prior to the rebellion, slavery forces fought to bring Kansas in as a slave state before anti-slave forces finally got the adoption of an anti-slavery constitution completed. The same kind of fight might well have happened in Nebraska or other states. Arizona and New Mexico were not viewed as the only possible areas for expansion by slave supporters. They wanted the whole country."
Sources?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "The North American Review that Adams quoted was "hanging around" 160 years ago."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Quotes by Southern leaders of the period make it clear that slavery was by far the single, most important reason for their secession. Did Mr. Adams not read their words and writings?"
Yes. Did you?
"There is a new breed of historians and writers willing to desanitize the Civil War, bucking so many historians of the past century with their zeal to make heroes out of Northern leaders and generals-not unlike Soviet historians of the recent past who glorified Lenin and the heroes of the Communist revolution. If the Communist revolution was a disaster for Russia, so was the Civil War a disaster for America. But, you may argue, it did bring about the end of slavery. That subject, too, however, needs to be examined to see how it failed to live up to even minimal expectations and possibilities. Of all the emancipations of the nineteenth century, ours was the worst. We will look into that.
"We northerners like to read about Lincoln the martyr and the dying god, but do we want to know about Lincoln the dictator who circumvented the Constitution to wage war on the South? His best generals would have a difficult time avoiding conviction by a war crimes tribunal according to the laws of war at that time for their plunder of Southern civilization. Would such a treatise find favor with the dyed-in-the-wool northern apologists who don 't want to see any tarnish on the northern assault and conquest of the South? Is America ready for that kind of insight and history? I think so. I for one, as a northerner educated in sanitized Civil War history, find a more truthful account of that war as refreshing as our honest accounts of Vietnam.
"Wars have seldom been justified, and as the years and the centuries pass, war looks increasingly foolish. The gung-ho attitude in the North to punish the traitors in the South for wanting to withdraw from the federal Union looks ridiculous today; and the Southerners ' belief that the North was out to destroy their slave economy looks equally absurd. That one Southerner could lick ten Yankees was soon proven false, and Lincoln 's concern that government "of the people" would perish from the earth if the North lost may have been the biggest absurdity of all. Yet for all the vociferous absurdities, the Civil War, like most wars, had a rational basis and was objectively grounded in the economic realities of the times. If the Gulf War in the 1990's was justified for economic reasons, so was the Civil War. Men will not willingly, and with zeal, die for an economic purpose, but they will die for some "cause" that has a noble purpose. Governments, when engaged in war, have to keep a patriotic "cause" alive and motivational, and cover up the economic realities that are the true reason for the conflict. As we shall see, in analyzing the Civil War, foreign war correspondents and writers from Europe saw the issues more clearly, and we shall focus at times on what these foreign observers had to say. Their objectivity and distance from the conflict in America will help us to see this awful conflict for what it was, and most of all, to "fess-up" to what the war was all about and heal the breach with the Southerners.
"To me, the slave issue and secession constitute the great enigma of the Civil War. There is something strange, even irrational, about the thesis that the solid South seceded over slavery, even though many Southerners said so. Jeffrey Hummel 's remarkable study, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, points to the slave issue as the cause of the secession of the solid South, while Charles Dickens wrote that the South seceded in spite of slavery, not because of it."
[Charles W. Adams, "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession." Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp.2-3]
Let's visit Jeffrey Hummel's book:
"The deep South's refusal to abide by the outcome of a fair and legal election struck northern voters as a selfish betrayal of the nation's unique mission. 'Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,' argued Lincoln. Indeed, his inaugural equated secession with despotism. 'A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism,' because 'unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.' Worse still, the successful breakaway of the lower South raised the possibility of other regions separating.
"Yet Lincoln also wished to preserve the loyalty of the upper South. He therefore settled upon a defensive strategy to uphold national authority. The government would for the moment make no effort to retake federal posts. Like Buchanan, Lincoln would merely hang on to those posts still under the government's control. Simultaneously, United States ships stationed off the Confederate coast would attempt to collect duties. The new President could thus close his inaugural with a moving plea for peace: 'In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.... We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living hearth and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.'"
[Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers, "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men." 2014, Chap.5]
Even Hummel, who has also bought into the "war over slavery" myth, admits that one of Lincoln's first acts was to blockade Southern ports so he could collect HIS precious duties (and, perhaps, to provoke war.) However, Slick Abe made it appear the South was the aggressor,
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>>Kalamata wrote: "...the agricultural South could no longer afford to buy many British manufactured goods on which they depended."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "And what goods were those? What did the South import from Europe in such great quantities?"
One more time, from Weisman:
"[C]otton prices were high, yielding rich incomes for plantation owners. But cotton made even more money for the credit, insurance, warehousing, manufacturing and shipping companies that were based in the North or overseas. Seventy percent of the cotton was exported, and the remainder went to mills in the North and then came back to the South in the form of clothing and other textiles. Indeed, the South had to import two-thirds of its clothing and manufactured goods from outside the region, and southerners paid artificially high prices because of the high tariffs erected at the behest of American industry. The South even had to import food. The North made nearly all the country's firearms, cloth, pig iron, boots and shoes, an ominous fact, considering the necessity of these things in a war. 'Financially, we are more enslaved than Negroes,' one prominent citizen said.
"From the perspective of the South, the North's economy rested on a kind of state capitalism of trade barriers, government-sponsored railroads, coddling of trusts, suppression of labor and public investment in canals, roads and other infrastructures. Southern slave owners sought to protect and extend slavery, to be sure, but also to secure free trade, overseas markets and cheaper imports. Southern resentment of the tariff system propelled the Democratic Party to define itself as the main challenger to the primacy of the industrial and capitalist overlords of the system."
[Weisman, Steven R., "The Great Tax Wars." Simon & Schuster, 2002, pp.52-53]
There are two economic factors at work here:
1) the South paid more for imports from both foreign and domestic regions.
2) foreign importers has less money to buy southern exports due to the high tariff on their exports.
Mr. Kalamata
The U.S. Constitution does not specifically protect slave imports for a start.
I don't know: I have never been a tyrant. But Lincoln most certainly was a brutal tyrant during his brief executive career.
How so?
Let's take a look:
Yes lets.
"African slavery is the cornerstone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depoulation and barbarism." - South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt, 1860
"Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." - Lawrence Keitt
"The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South... This war is the servant of slavery." - Rev John Wrightman, South Carolina, 1861.
"[Recruiting slaves into the army] is abolition doctrine ... the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." - Editorial, Jan 1865, North Carolina Standard
"What did we go to war for, if not to protect our [slave] property?" - CSA senator from Virgina, Robert Hunter, 1865
"I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slaverya soldier fights for his countryright or wronghe is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in ... The South was my country." - John Singleton Mosby
"The South had always been solid for slavery and when the quarrel about it resulted in a conflict of arms, those who had approved the policy of disunion took the pro-slavery side. It was perfectly logical to fight for slavery, if it was right to own slaves." - John S. Mosby, Mosby's Memoirs, p. 20
We have dissolved the Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. Now, is there any man who wished to reproduce that strife among ourselves? And yet does not he, who wished the slave trade left for the action of Congress, see that he proposed to open a Pandora's box among us and to cause our political arena again to resound with this discussion. Had we left the question unsettled, we should, in my opinion, have sown broadcast the seeds of discord and death in our Constitution. I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution; we have sought by no euphony to hide its name - we have called our negroes "slaves," and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property. - Alabama Congressman Robert H. Smith
As the last and crowning act of insult and outrage upon the people of the South, the citizens of the Northern States, by overwhelming majorities, on the 6th day of November last, elected Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, President and Vice President of the United States. Whilst it may be admitted that the mere election of any man to the Presidency, is not, per se, a sufficient cause for a dissolution of the Union; yet, when the issues upon, and circumstances under which he was elected, are properly appreciated and understood, the question arises whether a due regard to the interest, honor, and safety of their citizens, in view of this and all the other antecedent wrongs and outrages, do not render it the imperative duty of the Southern States to resume the powers they have delegated to the Federal Government, and interpose their sovereignty for the protection of their citizens.
What, then are the circumstances under which, and the issues upon which he was elected? His own declarations, and the current history of the times, but too plainly indicate he was elected by a Northern sectional vote, against the most solemn warnings and protestations of the whole South. He stands forth as the representative of the fanaticism of the North, which, for the last quarter of a century, has been making war upon the South, her property, her civilization, her institutions, and her interests; as the representative of that party which overrides all Constitutional barriers, ignores the obligations of official oaths, and acknowledges allegiance to a higher law than the Constitution, striking down the sovereignty and equality of the States, and resting its claims to popular favor upon the one dogma, the Equality of the Races, white and black." -- Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. --Mississppi Declaration of the Causes of Secession
SIR: In obedience to your instructions I repaired to the seat of government of the State of Louisiana to confer with the Governor of that State and with the legislative department on the grave and important state of our political relations with the Federal Government, and the duty of the slave-holding States in the matter of their rights and honor, so menacingly involved in matters connected with the institution of African slavery. --Report from John Winston, Alabama's Secession Commissioner to Louisiana
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last. -- Speech of Fulton Anderson to the Virginia Convention
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. -- Texas Declaration of the causes of secession
What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Convention
Gentlemen, I see before me men who have observed all the records of human life, and many, perhaps, who have been chief actors in many of its gravest scenes, and I ask such men if in all their lore of human society they can offer an example like this? South Carolina has 300,000 whites, and 400,000 slaves. These 300,000 whites depend for their whole system of civilization on these 400,000 slaves. Twenty millions of people, with one of the strongest Governments on the face of the earth, decree the extermination of these 400,000 slaves, and then ask, is honor, is interest, is liberty, is right, is justice, is life, worth the struggle?
Gentlemen, I have thus very rapidly endeavored to group before you the causes which have produced the action of the people of South Carolina. -- Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention
This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable --- -- Address of William L. Harris of Mississippi
But I trust I may not be intrusive if I refer for a moment to the circumstances which prompted South Carolina in the act of her own immediate secession, in which some have charged a want of courtesy and respect for her Southern sister States. She had not been disturbed by discord or conflict in the recent canvass for president or vice-president of the United States. She had waited for the result in the calm apprehension that the Black Republican party would succeed. She had, within a year, invited her sister Southern States to a conference with her on our mutual impending danger. Her legislature was called in extra session to cast her vote for president and vice-president, through electors, of the United States and before they adjourned the telegraphic wires conveyed the intelligence that Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to equality with ourselves and our children, and coupled with all this was the act that, from our friends in our sister Southern States, we were urged in the most earnest terms to secede at once, and prepared as we were, with not a dissenting voice in the State, South Carolina struck the blow and we are now satisfied that none have struck too soon, for when we are now threatened with the sword and the bayonet by a Democratic administration for the exercise of this high and inalienable right, what might we meet under the dominion of such a party and such a president as Lincoln and his minions. -- Speech of John McQueen, the Secession Commissioner from South Carolina to Texas
History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity. -- Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention
Now, perhaps you can give us similar quotes about how it was the tariff?
Do you have a source?
Slave, slaves, or slavery mentioned 23 times. Tariff, revenue, tax or taxes not mentioned once.
The part you quoted in no way modifies the preceding part. Lincoln clearly warned the secessionists that they still worked for him, or else! In other words, "Be my tariff slave, or die!"
You do have a vivid imagination.
That is a gross over-simplification since the South was an agricultural society. Do you have sources so I can see the context?
What's wrong with the sources you used for your claim?
That contradicts your previous quote. Do you have sources so I can see the context?
It's from Louis Wigfall's conversation with William Howard Russell of The Times of London.
Sources?
Any history of Kansas statehood to begin with. Any history covering Bleeding Kansas to continue.
Did Mr. Adams not read their words and writings?"
Yes. Did you?
I noticed that neither Mr. Adams or Mr. Hummel are quoting any Southern leaders, like the ones I quoted above. I wonder why?
One more time, from Weisman:
Yeah, didn't we just cover that with Wigfall's quote? And the fact that the one-third of goods produced domestically in the South benefitted from the same tariffs that protected Northern producers? And the fact that tariffs impacted Northern consumers just as much as Southern consumers yet they saw no reason to rebel over them? So then why did the South secede except because of slavery?
Hey, Homer, what’s going on with Photobucket and your posts?
Photobucket crashed. Due to a power outage, they say. They insist all the images are safe and they will be back up in time. It has been that way since early yesterday. I posted yesterday’s and today’s images at the facebook group The Original Civil War Buff page, if you want to see them. Otherwise I will post them here when it is possible.
Show us what you are talking about in the original sources.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "I don't know: I have never been a tyrant. But Lincoln most certainly was a brutal tyrant during his brief executive career."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "How so?
You don't know? This is from a devout Lincolnite:
"By a proclamation of April 19 Mr. Lincoln clamped a blockade on the ports of the seceded states, a measure hitherto regarded as contrary to both the Constitution and the law of nations except when the government was embroiled in a declared, foreign war. On April 20 he ordered a total of nineteen vessels to be added immediately to the Navy "for purposes of public defense," and a few days later the blockade was extended to the ports of Virginia and North Carolina." [Rossiter, Clinton, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, p.226]
"On April 20 [Lincoln] had directed Secretary of the Treasury Chase to advance two millions of dollars of unappropriated funds in the Treasury to three private citizens of New York who were absolutely unauthorized to receive it, "to be used by them in meeting such requisitions as should be directly consequent upon the military and naval measures necessary for the defense and support of the Government" this despite the blunt constitutional provision that "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law." This extraordinary and unconstitutional action, necessitated as Mr. Lincoln later explained by reason of the large number of disloyal persons in the various departments of the government a fact which he regarded as permitting him to confide official duties to private citizens "favorably known for their ability, loyalty, and patriotism" was not adequately recounted and elucidated by the President until a letter to Congress of May 26, 1862. Another unprecedented act of a legislative character was the offer of a temporary loan, a pledging of the credit of the United States for a quarter of a billion dollars." [Ibid. pp.226-227]
"The actions of President Lincoln by which he undertook to maintain public order and suppress open treason in the loyal sections of the Union were even more astounding. The outstanding step of this nature was his proclamation of April 27 authorizing the Commanding General of the United States Army to suspend the writ of habeas corpus "at any point or in the vicinity of any military line which is now or which shall be used between the city of Philadelphia and the city of Washington." This was his answer to the violence being visited by the Baltimore mobs on the Washington-Philadelphia Railroad and the Northern regiments passing along it on their way to Washington. A proclamation of July 2 extended this power to a similar area between Washington and New York. This was done by the President in the face of almost unanimous opinion that the constitutional clause regulating the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was directed to Congress alone, and that the President did not share in this power of suspension. Mr. Lincoln solved this particular problem by having Attorney General Bates work up an opinion championing his view that the President had the power and duty to take such action in case of necessity. The still undecided question of the location of the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus Lincoln decided in his own favor, and the only official judicial or legislative declaration ever to contradict his actions and the opinion of Bates, the brave decision of Chief Justice Taney in the circuit case of Ex parte Merryman, was simply disregarded." [Ibid. p.227]
"It was on May 3 that the President for the first time passed well beyond the most latitudinarian construction of his constitutional powers and entered into one of the hitherto (and ever since) most jealously guarded fields of congressional power, those clauses of the Constitution which state that Congress shall have power "to raise and support armies" and "to provide and maintain a navy." Although he had been able to point to statutory authority allowing him to call out the militia of the several states, his proclamation of May 3 (appealing for "42,034 volunteers to serve for the period of three years" and enlarging the regular army by 23,000 and the navy by 18,000) was an out-and-out invasion of the legislative power of the Congress of the United States, an invasion hardly mitigated by the President's declared purpose of submitting these increases for the approval of Congress as soon as it should assemble. This amazing disregard for the words of the Constitution, though considered by many as unavoidable, was considered by nobody as legal." [Ibid. p.226]
"THE President not only asserted that the crisis brought him unique executive, legislative, and even constituent power; he further assumed authority of a judicial nature. Throughout the war the governmental control of individual liberty, such as it was, was almost completely in his hands, not because Congress had decided that this would be a good policy, but because he as President undertook such responsibility on his own initiative. The entire program to suppress treason was based on the presidential suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Although Lincoln had invited congressional ratification of his suspensions during the eleven weeks dictatorship, he had also made clear that he considered this dictatorial power to belong to him as well as to Congress under the terms of the Constitution. He was able to maintain this stand in defiance of Chief Justice Taney and all precedent; nor was Congress itself ever able effectively to gainsay this claim. His most sweeping cancellation of the writ, on September 24, 1862, was effected without even a reference to Congress. This proclamation is all the more remarkable in its assertion of presidential power to institute martial law proceedings for persons indicted for aiding the rebellion." [Clinton Rossiter, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, p.235]
Make note that those are statements written by a devout Lincoln supporter, and are mildly stated.
Lincoln's actions might be forgivable of a President if the nation is being invaded, but not when the President is doing the invading. Further, neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court was allowed any input, plus over 300 Union newspapers were supposedly closed, freedom of the press was completely suppressed, and many journalists and editors were arrested. And that only scratches the surface.
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>>DoodleDawg presented many quotes on slavery, and said, "Now, perhaps you can give us similar quotes about how it was the tariff?"
We will start with one of your quotes. This is your quote by John Mosby, in context:
"When Lincoln's proclamation was issued, the Virginia Convention was still in session and had not passed a secession ordinance, so she was not included with States against which the proclamation was first directed. With the exception of the northwestern section of the State, where there were few slaves and the Union sentiment predominated, the people of Virginia, in response to the President's call for troops to enforce the laws, sprang to arms to resist the Government. The war cry "To arms!" resounded throughout the land and, in the delirium of the hour, we all forgot our Union principles in our sympathy with the pro-slavery cause, and rushed to the field of Mars.
"In issuing his proclamation, Lincoln referred for authority to a statute in pursuance of which George Washington sent an army into Pennsylvania to suppress the Whiskey Insurrection. But the people were persuaded that Lincoln's real object was to abolish slavery, although at his inaugural he had said:
"There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension that by the accession of the Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security were endangered. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
"The South had always been solid for slavery and when the quarrel about it resulted in a conflict of arms, those who had approved the policy of disunion took the pro-slavery side. It was perfectly logical to fight for slavery, if it was right to own slaves. Enforcing the laws was not coercing a State unless the State resisted the execution of the laws. When such a collision came, coercion depended on which was the stronger side."
[Charles Wells Russell, "The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby." Little, Brown & Company, 1917, pp.19-20]
This is an instance where a prominent southerner either didn't believe Lincoln's accommodating and conciliatory inaugural statements about slavery, or he was not being candid, despite the fact that Lincoln's war proclamation never mentioned slavery, but it did mention the collection of revenue for the Union had been obstructed:
"And whereas, since that date, public property of the United States [Fort Sumter] has been seized, the collection of the revenue obstructed, and duly commissioned officers of the United States, while engaged in executing the orders of their superiors, have been arrested and held in custody as prisoners, or have been impeded in the discharge of their official duties without due legal process. . ." [Abraham Lincoln, "Proclamation of April 27, 1861." United States Government, April 27, 1861, p.1]
Those quotes take me back to Charles Adams' statements. The only thing that makes sense is Lincoln's proposed tariffs would have destroyed the Southern economy. In any case, Lincoln never hinted at usurpation to get rid of slavery; but rather sought to reinforce slavery in the slave states to the point of making it permanent via an Amendment to the Constitution.
You asked for quotes on the Tariff? These are a few:
Charles and Mary Beard, "The Rise Of American Civilization," 1934:
"Had the economic systems of the North and the South remained static or changed slowly without effecting immense dislocations in the social structure, the balance of power might have been maintained indefinitely by repeating the compensatory tactics of 1787, 1820, 1833, and 1850; keeping in this manner the inherent antagonisms within the bounds of diplomacy. But nothing was stable in the economy of the United States or in the moral sentiments associated with its diversities As the years passed,the planting leaders of Jefferson's agricultural party insisted with mounting fervor that the opposition, first of the Whigs and then of the Republicans, was at bottom an association of interests formed for the purpose of plundering productive management and labor on the land. And with steadfast insistence they declared that in the insatiable greed of their political foes lay the source of the dissensions which were tearing the country asunder.
"'There is not a pursuit in which man is engaged (agriculture excepted),' exclaimed Reuben Davis of Mississippi in 1860, "which is not demanding legislative aid to enable it to enlarge its profits and all at the expense of the primary pursuit of managriculture... Those interests having a common purpose of plunder, have united and combined to use the government as the instrument of their operation and have thus virtually converted it into a consolidated empire. Now this combined host of interests stands arrayed against the agricultural states; and this is the reason of the conflict which like an earthquake is shaking our political fabric to its foundation."...
"With challenging directness, [Jefferson] Davis [of Mississippi] turned upon his opponents in the Senate and charged them with using slavery as a blind to delude the unwary: "What do you propose, gentlemen of the Free-Soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery.... Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country.... It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South.... You desire to weaken the political power of the southern states; and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England states, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry."
"Such in the mind of Jefferson Davis, fated to be president of the Confederacy, was the real purpose of the party which sought to prohibit slavery in the territories; that party did not declare slavery to be a moral disease calling for the severe remedy of the surgeon; it merely sought to keep bondage out of the new states as they came into the Unionwith one fundamental aim in view, namely, to gain political ascendancy in the government of the United States and fasten upon the country an economic policy that meant the exploitation of the South for the benefit of northern capitalism."
[The Approach of the Irrepressible Conflict, in Beard & Beard, "The Rise Of American Civilization." The MacMillan Company, 1934, Vol II.XVII, pp.3-6]
Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, 1857:
"A few facts must be plainly stated. Practically a despotism, the great slaveholding interest, with farsighted policy, professes those extreme principles of democracy which are upheld by the larger proportion of northern citizens-- much as if the high conservative body in England were, for party purposes, to declare for extreme radicalism. Northern men, on the other hand, seek to conciliate the South, for the sake of selfish Interests. The doctrine that high protective duties are an essential element of national prosperity, though long since exploded by political economists, is still current in the northern states of the Union. Doubtless, it is only through the efficacy of such protective duties as 80 per cent, that certain northern manufacturers can keep open their establishments; and we may assume that if these restrictions were removed, much misdirected capital would flow into more natural channels, and produce results more advantageous to all parties.
"Northern manufacturers, however, being the immediate gainers by so preposterous a system of protection, cling as closely to the privilege of taxing the community as ever did the landowners of Great Britain by their restrictions on the free import of food. Such prepossessions could meet with no response in the South, but for the necessity of buying party support, All the clothing, shoes, hats, and other articles required on southern plantations, are imported coastwise from northern manufacturers; so that, in reality, the South taxes itself in an enormous sum annually, a purchasing dear northern goods. 'Up to the present moment,' says an American writer, ' the North has been a commercial and equal partner with the South in all the material values or pecuniary results produced by slavery "
"What three millions of slaves grew under the lash in the South, made a continuous and profitable business for at least twice that number of freemen in the North. The latter, by that species of compromise for which It has been distinguished, grasped at the lion's share of the dividends of this commercial partnership. It coveted to sell to the southern states far more than it purchased from them. If they would only consent to a high protective tariff which would give their market for manufactures exclusively to the North anti-slavery agitation in the free states should be put down and extinguished. The mobbing of 'abolition agitators' in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other northern cities, was a part of the business transaction--a small installment of the purchase price of protection. The case then stands thus: the South pretends to be democratic, to gain northern votes; and the North sells itself for southern money. Or to come to the subject in hand--the South votes for Protection, and the North in return votes for Slavery."
[William Chambers, "Glimses of Affairs in America." Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Vol.7, Nos.157-182, p.178-181; Jan-Jun, 1857]
The Boston Transcript, 1861:
"It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding States to the Union, which they have abandoned. Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding States are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile greatness, by a revenue system verging upon free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby. The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties.... The... [government] would be false to all its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against." [Boston Transcript, March 18, 1861, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, p.69-70]
Philadelphia Press, 1861:
"One of the most important benefits which the Federal Government has conferred upon the nation is unrestricted trade between many prosperous States with divers productions and industrial pursuits. But now, since the Montgomery Congress has passed a new tariff, and duties are exacted upon Northern goods sent to ports in the Cotton States, the traffic between the two sections will be materially decreased.... Another, and a more serious difficulty arises out of our foreign commerce, and the different rates of duty established by the two tariffs which will soon be in force...
"The General Government... to prevent the serious diminution of its revenues, will be compelled to blockade the Southern ports... and prevent the importation of foreign goods into them, or to put another expensive guard upon the frontiers to prevent smuggling into the Union States. Even if the independence of the seceding Commonwealths should be recognized, and two distinct nations thus established, we should still experience all the vexations, and be subjected to all the expenses and annoyances which the people of Europe have long suffered, on account of their numerous Governments, and many inland lines of custom-houses. Thus, trade of all kinds, which has already been seriously crippled would be permanently embarrassed...
"It is easy for men to deride and underestimate the value of the Union, but its destruction would speedily be followed by fearful proofs of its importance to the whole American people.
[Philadelphia Press, March 18, 1861, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, p.69]
The Boston Herald, 1860:
"Should the South succeed in carrying out her designs, she will immediately form commercial alliances with European countries who will readily acquiesce in any arrangement which will help English manufacturing at the expense of New England. The first move the South would make would be to impose a heavy tax upon the manufactures of the North, and an export tax upon the cotton used by Northern manufacturers. In this way she would seek to cripple the North. The carrying trade, which is now done by American vessels, would be transferred to British ships, which would be a heavy blow aimed at our commerce. It will also seriously affect our shoe trade and the manufacture of ready-made clothing, while it would derange the monetary affairs of the country." [The Boston Herald, November 12, 1860, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, p.68]
Representative Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, 1846:
"It is now more than two years since I declared to this House and the country, that if Texas were admitted, "our tariff would be held at the will of Texan advocates of free trade."... The... bill to repeal the tariff of 1842... was carried through the Senate by a majority of only one vote, while both Senators from Texas voted for it. Thus was my prediction most amply fulfilled I have no doubt that the cotton-growing interest, separately considered, may be benefited by free trade. It is opposed to all the other great interests of the country. In order to strike down the industry of the North, they must have the numerical force. To obtain this, they must extend the slave-holding territory... Sir, their political power was extended, and we now see the consequences. The people of the free States will soon feel its weight, and will realize the loss they have sustained by their inactivity." [Representative Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, 1846, Speeches in Congress, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, pp.67-68]
Representative John H. Reagan of Texas, 1861:
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers for northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions... We do not intend that you shall reduce us to such a condition. But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been. It will compel us to manufacture for ourselves, to build up our own commerce, our own great cities, our own railroads and canals; and to use the tribute money we now pay you for these things for the support of a government which will be friendly to all our interests, hostile to none of them. [Speech of Representative John H. Reagan of Texas, January 15, 1861, Congressional Globe, 36 Congress, 2 Session, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, p.66]
Vicksburg Daily Whig, 1860:
"By mere supineness, the people of the South have permitted the Yankees to monopolize the carrying trade, with its immense profits. We have yielded to them the manufacturing business, in all its departments, without an effort, until recently, to become manufacturers ourselves. We have acquiesced in the claims of the North to do all the importing, and most of the exporting business, for the whole Union. Thus, the North has been aggrandised, in a most astonishing degree, at the expense of the South. It is no wonder that their villages have grown into magnificent cities. It is not strange that they have "merchant princes," dwelling in gorgeous palaces and reveling in luxuries transcending the luxurious appliances of the East! How could it be otherwise? New York city, like a mighty queen of commerce, sits proudly upon her island throne, sparkling in jewels and waving an undisputed commercial scepter over the South. By means of her railways and navigable streams, she sends out her long arms to the extreme South; and, with an avidity rarely equaled, grasps our gains and transfers them to herselftaxing us at every stepand depleting us as extensively as possible without actually destroying us." [Vicksburg Daily Whig, January 18, 1860, quoted in Dumond, Southern Editorials on Secession, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, pp.65-66]
Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, 1860:
"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; 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 billthe robber and the incendiary struck hands, and united in joint raid against the South. Thus stands the account between the North and the South. Under its ordinary and most favorable action, bounties and protection to every interest and every pursuit in the North, to the extent of at least fifty millions per annum, besides the expenditure of at least sixty millions out of every seventy of the public expenditure among them, thus making the treasury a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands [Senator Robert Toombs, speech before Georgia legislature on the Morrill Tariff, November, 1860, in Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, pp.64-65]
And, finally, from the editor of the historical compilation quoted above:
"In seeking the causes of the Civil War, they argue, one must consider the basic differences between the economies of the two great sections, the numerous practical issues upon which sectional leaders were divided. It was opposition to the protective tariff that drove South Carolina to the edge of rebellion in 1832; it was the fact that Southerners repeatedly blocked the passage of internal improvements (rivers and harbors) bills that caused many Northerners to denounce the Slave Power so violently; and it was the payment to various Northern interests of subsidies from the federal treasury that prompted many Southerners to "calculate the value of the Union." Slavery and slavery expansion were, after all, economic as well as moral problems, for slavery was a labor system and represented a large investment of Southern capital. According to those who advance an economic interpretation of the Civil War, sectional leaders, while expounding great moral and constitutional issues, were often simply disguising economic self-interest with a thin veneer of idealism." [Stampp, Kenneth M., "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, p.63]
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Do you have a source?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Source: Slave, slaves, or slavery mentioned 23 times. Tariff, revenue, tax or taxes not mentioned once."
How do you interpret this statement from your source:
"By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control. They learned to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the principles of the Constitution been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, he asserts as an axiom, which he plainly deems to be undeniable, that the theory of the Constitution requires that in all cases the majority shall govern; and in another memorable instance the same Chief Magistrate did not hesitate to liken the relations between a State and the United States to those which exist between a county and the State in which it is situated and by which it was created. This is the lamentable and fundamental error on which rests the policy that has culminated in his declaration of war against these Confederate States. In addition to the long-continued and deep-seated resentment felt by the Southern States at the persistent abuse of the powers they had delegated to the Congress, for the purpose of enriching the manufacturing and shipping classes of the North at the expense of the South, there has existed for nearly half a century another subject of discord, involving interests of such transcendent magnitude as at all times to create the apprehension in the minds of many devoted lovers of the Union that its permanence was impossible." [Jefferson Davis, "Message to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, April 29, 1861." 1861]
That statement is the key to everything. Lincoln didn't give a rat's behind about State's rights, or, at least, Davis believed that to be the case. And, of course, therein lingers that pesky tariff.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "The part you quoted in no way modifies the preceding part. Lincoln clearly warned the secessionists that they still worked for him, or else! In other words, "Be my tariff slave, or die!"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "You do have a vivid imagination."
And you have a reading comprehension problem, and/or an unnatural idolization of a power-hungry man who was responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 Unionists and Confederates, all based on a warped belief that he could save the Union by destroying it; and destroy it he did!
Did you ever wonder why so many big-government leftists (Marxists) idolize Lincoln? You can thank his big government policies. Did you ever wonder how the Supreme Court and lower courts obtained so much power? You can, again, thank Lincoln.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "That is a gross over-simplification since the South was an agricultural society. Do you have sources so I can see the context?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "What's wrong with the sources you used for your claim?"
You made the claim. Can you not support it?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "That contradicts your previous quote. Do you have sources so I can see the context?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "It's from Louis Wigfall's conversation with William Howard Russell of The Times of London."
It would make life a lot easier if you would provide sources with your statements. This is the full quote:
"We are a peculiar people, sir! You don't understand us, and you can't understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities we don't want them. We have no literature we don't need any yet. We have no press we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine no navy we don't want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides. But with the Yankees we will never trade never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the South to their accursed cities; not one ounce of their steel or their manufactures shall ever cross our border." [William Howard Russell, "My Diary, North and South." T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863, Chap.XXIV, p.179]
Like I said, it contradicts your previous statement.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Sources?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Any history of Kansas statehood to begin with. Any history covering Bleeding Kansas to continue."
Let me try a different approach: what does that have to do with this discussion?
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "I noticed that neither Mr. Adams or Mr. Hummel are quoting any Southern leaders, like the ones I quoted above. I wonder why?"
Perhaps he had already read them and rejected them as historical noise.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "One more time, from Weisman:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Yeah, didn't we just cover that with Wigfall's quote? And the fact that the one-third of goods produced domestically in the South benefitted from the same tariffs that protected Northern producers? And the fact that tariffs impacted Northern consumers just as much as Southern consumers yet they saw no reason to rebel over them? So then why did the South secede except because of slavery?""
No, we didn't cover that. You made an unsourced statement. If you want your statements to be taken seriously, perhaps you will consider providing sources at the time you make them.
Your assertion "that tariffs impacted Northern consumers just as much as Southern consumers" is not relative.
Mr. Kalamata
(*sigh*) Here is a link to the U.S. Constitution, my original source. Nowhere is there is slavery explicitly protected.
You don't know? This is from a devout Lincolnite:
I don't know too many people who would term Clinton Rossiter a "devout Lincolnite" since none of his books deal solely with Lincoln. And most of his claims are opinion and are contradicted by other sources. To wit:
1. The legality of the blockade was upheld by the Supreme Court in their 1863 Prize Cases decision.
2. Lincoln shifted funds already appropriated for other purposes. If that makes him a tyrant then does that also make Donald Trump a tyrant since he does the same?
3. The Constitution does not specifically state who can suspend habeas corpus. The Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on Lincoln's actions and justices as recent as William Rehnquist have admitted the question on whether Lincoln's actions were illegal are still unanswered.
4. Your own source admits that the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1803 gave Lincoln the authority to call up the militia to suppress the Southern rebellion since Congress was not in session.
Lincoln's actions might be forgivable of a President if the nation is being invaded, but not when the President is doing the invading.
He was a president facing armed rebellion. His actions violated no precedent and all were subject to Supreme Court review. Unlike Jefferson Davis.
Further, neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court was allowed any input, plus over 300 Union newspapers were supposedly closed, freedom of the press was completely suppressed, and many journalists and editors were arrested. And that only scratches the surface.
LOL! So many falsehoods in one sentence. Impressive. So let me ask you one favor; can you point me to a source that identifies the 300 Union newspapers that were closed down? Let's start there.
We will start with one of your quotes. This is your quote by John Mosby, in context:
And Moseby mentions the tariff where exactly?
"And whereas, since that date, public property of the United States [Fort Sumter] has been seized, the collection of the revenue obstructed, and duly commissioned officers of the United States, while engaged in executing the orders of their superiors, have been arrested and held in custody as prisoners, or have been impeded in the discharge of their official duties without due legal process. .
LOL! Ignored the rest of it I see? Lincoln, in his inaugural address, promised, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices." In that statement he outlined how all three - holding property, collecting revenue, appointing federal officials - were violated by the rebels. You focus on one and ignore the rest.
Charles and Mary Beard, "The Rise Of American Civilization," 1934:
I provided quotes from the period, you provide opinions from 70 years later.
The Boston Transcript, 1861
Not an opinion from the south, but a Northern newspaper editorial making a ridiculous argument. What difference would Confederate tariff have on Northern imports? All goods previously purchased from up North duty free would now have tariffs applied to them. How did that harm the North?
Philadelphia Press, 1861
Again not a Southern source, a Northern Democrat newspaper editorial, and again making a ridiculous argument. Since upwards of 95% of all imports entered through Northern ports to begin with, how could losing the South lead to a massive lost in tariff revenue?
The Boston Herald, 1860:
Still another Northern source, still another ridiculous scenario. How could the heavy duties placed on imports cripple the North since those same duties would be placed on imports from Europe? How would heavy taxes placed on Southern cotton exports cripple the North and not Europe? Never mind the fact that such a tax violated the Confederate constitution but we already know what that's worth.
Representative Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, 1846:
Fifteen years before the rebellion? Really?
Representative John H. Reagan of Texas, 1861:
Here is Reagan's speech in its entirety: Link
Care to discuss how much time he devoted to slavery long before he touched on tariffs?
Vicksburg Daily Whig, 1860:
They appear to be complaining that they voluntarily gave the import and export and transport business to the North. What prevented them from starting those businesses prior to the rebellion except that they didn't want to?
Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, 1860:
That speech of Toombs was delivered in January 1860, following the passage of the Morel Tariff that was voted down in the Senate later in that secession. Eleven months later Toombs delivered a speech to the Georgia assembly supporting secession. In that speech he mentions slaves or slavery 28 times. Tariffs? Only twice.
And you have a reading comprehension problem, and/or an unnatural idolization of a power-hungry man who was responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 Unionists and Confederates, all based on a warped belief that he could save the Union by destroying it; and destroy it he did!
You do love your hyperbole, don't you?
You made the claim. Can you not support it?
Actually it was your claim that southerners paid artificially high prices because of the high tariffs. I merely pointed out that Northern consumers paid the same prices made artificially high by the tariff. The same source you used for your claim would also support that.
Like I said, it contradicts your previous statement.
I did support the quote in context and it supports my claim that the South depended on the North for much of their manufactured goods by choice and not because they were forced to. How can they complain about a situation that they themselves freely entered into?
Let me try a different approach: what does that have to do with this discussion?
It shows that your previous claim that the South looked to only Arizona or New Mexico as areas where slavery could be expanded is false.
Perhaps he had already read them and rejected them as historical noise.
Or because they did not support his agenda.
Your assertion "that tariffs impacted Northern consumers just as much as Southern consumers" is not relative.
It certainly is. Northern consumers paid the same prices as Southern consumers. Yet they didn't rebel over the tariff and you claim the South did.
You (or Adams) leave off the next bit:
And the ultra abolitionists have not failed to supply sufficient fuel to keep the matter at a white heat. All these projects for immediate emancipation at the present time are direct aids to the rebellion.
It is the inordinate political ambition of the Southern politicians which is the cause of the rebellion,slavery being only a remote agency, as it fosters and develops that ambition, and furnishes it with a subject for agitation; just as the personal ambition of some of the most prominent antislavery men of the North is the cause of their zeal for abolition, their love for the negro and for human freedom being assumed as the best subject on which to agitate themselves into public office. If the nullification of 1832 had become an active rebellion, the tariff would not have been the cause of the war, but only the pretext for it.
In other words, it was bad men doing bad things for their own advancement who were responsible and the tariff would have been as much of a pretext as slavery was. And in the article writer's mind anti-slavery was also just designed to get power for Northern politicians.
Joel Parker, who wrote the article, didn't think slavery was a big deal. He'd lived his whole life in a country half-enslaved and half-free, and he didn't see why that should change, so he just ignored what the rest of the country was up in arms about and wrote it all off as the work of ambitious politicians.
If slavery was what "fired the Southern heart" then it stands to reason that it was a very important cause of the war. If politicians could only get elected by rousing fears of abolitionists then it's clear that slavery was very much on the minds of Southerners and that the fears were real. Whether or not you or I or Adams or Roberts thinks that slavery was threatened, people in the slave states at the time certainly believed that it was.
But the bad men and ambitious politicians theory doesn't hold much water. Those politicians were slave owners themselves, and in lowland South Carolina, where secessionism was strongest and had its start, their voters tended to be slaveowners, and Whites were outnumbered by Blacks. Slavery was a matter of more pressing concern than any theories about tariffs. They considered the continuation of slavery to be a matter life or death, both economically and physically.
The prospect that this tariff would split the nation and foster secession was expressed decades before 1860 by a Southern congressman in the debates in the House of Representatives in 1828: "If the union of these states shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, historians who record these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government, nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century under such a system of legislation."
That was George McDuffie. He felt strongly about other things too. You can read an excerpt (more) of his 1835 Message to the South Carolina Legislature on "The Natural Slavery of the Negro" and ask yourself how he'd feel about challenges to the slave system.
Right, but now you've finally confessed that the "general public" was not moved by Southern elites' concerns with tariffs or "New York power brokers".
That's why such concerns were never mentioned in official Reasons for Secession documents.
Instead, those documents gave reasons that real people, voters, cared about, and number one was the alleged threat to slavery by Black Republicans.
Danny-baby, you're a newcomer here, the references you seek have all been posted many times over hundreds of threads going back decades.
If you stick around long enough you'll see them all posted many times again.
I make the effort to post quotes & links when I have enough time, which lately has not been in abundant supply.
So I go with the short version.
When I get more time, you'll see more sources.
Kalamata after quoting Charles W Adams 2000: "Makes sense to me."
All nonsense, and the reason is that long before 1860 most Southerners thought of themselves as loyal Americans -- they served in America's military, they fought in America's wars, they paid America's taxes, obeyed its laws, etc.
How possibly do loyal Americans come to declare secession and war on their own country?
The answer is there's only one possible way, and it has nothing to do with accountants' numbers on spreadsheets, but rather on a simple and much more direct threat: "they hate us and they're going to destroy us!"
Prosperous Southerners who owned slaves and owed money to Northern banks were convinced that Northerners represented an existential threat to their most basic "way of life", slavery.
That's what drove Southern voters, regardless of what their super-wealthy elites may have thought.
The real fact is Southern super-elites could not have sold secession to average Southerners on any grounds other than slavery.
Kalamata: "LOL! What does that have to do with anything, Joey?
Clay was a Hamiltonian, big-government protectionist, that is, a crony-capitalist.
Besides, the tariff was NOT a North vs. South issue; it merely seemed that way because the issue was centered around agriculture vs manufacturing -- agriculturalists in other states also opposed the tariff."
And so, Danny-baby, you wish us to believe that tariffs were the "real reason" for Southern secession and yet tariffs were not even a North-South issue?
How does that work?
Kalamata: "In a nutshell, the manufacturers wanted tariff protection for their goods (e.g., crony-capitalism,) while the agriculturists (generally) wanted free trade.
Those agriculturalists whose goods were protected by the tariff, such as the hemp farmers in Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri, obviously supported the tariff."
Nonsense because there were protective tariffs on every Southern export, from cotton to sugar.
Of course anyone would wish for higher tariffs on their own exports and lower tariffs on their purchases, but that's what politics was for -- tariff rates went up & down over time, and except for the highest "Tariff of Abominations" nobody used them to threaten secession.
Kalamata: "Calhoun was a devout free-trader (in the mold of Jefferson) who strongly OPPOSED a protectionist tariff. "
For tactical reasons Calhoun originally supported the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations".
Yes, later he opposed it, but how "principled" can his opposition be if he was willing to set them aside for political reasons?
Kalamata: "Andrew Jackson despised the entrenched political establishment, such as the bankers and protectionists.
Although he supported the tariff that he inherited from Adams, he used it primarily to pay down the national debt "
Right, and the key point about both Jackson and Calhoun is they were both Southerners and the "Tariff of Abominations" was opposed by, among others, many New Englanders.
That makes the whole thing nothing to do with North vs. South or somehow justification for secession.
Kalamata: "I have read that Jackson was the last president to serve under zero national debt."
Not just the last, the only President ever to pay off the US national debt.
It's another reason why he deserves to remain on the $20 bill.
Kalamata: "You come up with the strangest "arguments!"
I have read that the southern states voted 64 to 4 AGAINST the 1828 tariff!
Where did you get your information?"
Obviously, I need to make better use of the </sarcasm> tag.
My point is that it was not only Southerners opposed to the 1828 Tariff, but also many New Englanders and it was not only Northerners who supported it, but also some notable Southerners.
It was not a North vs. South issue and therefore not serious justification for secession in 1860.
Kalamata: "The way I read that, the adoption of the 1828 tariff by the Adam's administration helped defeat Adams in the next election against Andrew Jackson."
Sure, but Jackson's people had not opposed the 1828 tariff, nor did Jackson move to abolish it, nor did Jackson tolerate South Carolina's threats of secession.
It was not strictly a North vs. South issue.
"SOUTH CAROLINA READY FOR SECESSION Governor Gist, of South Carolina, sent his message to the Legislature on November 30 {1859}.
In reference to the relations of the South to the North, he takes bold and decided ground against the agitators of the North and in favor of a separation in the event of the election of a Black Republican President.
The following resolutions were offered in the South Carolina House on the same day:
'Resolved, That the State of South Carolina is ready to enter, together with the other slaveholding States or such as desire present action, into the formation of a Southern Confederacy.
Resolved, That the Governor be requested to forward this resolution to the various Southern Executives.'
Another resolution was offered, asking official information as to the condition of the State arsenals, arms, amunition, number of men enrolled in the State militia, the style of their arms, etc."
This has drifted far off the original topic. You stated in #38:
"The Southern states, on the other hand, adopted a constitution that specifically protected to an extent that would never have been possible in the U.S., including protecting slave imports."
The Confederate Constitution specifically forbade the importation of slaves from any nation or region other than the slaveholding states or territories of the United States. The U.S. Constitution protected Southern slaveholders, and Lincoln proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have protected slavery in the slave states forever, if they returned to the "Union."
Frankly, I don't know what your point is, nor its relevancy
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>>Kalamata wrote: "You don't know? This is from a devout Lincolnite: "
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "I don't know too many people who would term Clinton Rossiter a "devout Lincolnite" since none of his books deal solely with Lincoln."
I have read his works; and I cannot imagine anyone, other than perhaps a devout Marxist, who would not believe Rossiter is a devout Lincolnite.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "And most of his claims are opinion and are contradicted by other sources. To wit:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: 1. The legality of the blockade was upheld by the Supreme Court in their 1863 Prize Cases decision."
Your assertions are beyond confusing. This is Rossiter a little later in the chapter:
"[T]he Supreme Court, asked well over a year later in the Prize Cases to determine the legality of the presidential blockade, gave its direct sanction to this particular matter and its general blessing to Lincoln's extraordinary exercise of the war power. The subsequent congressional ratification of these actions was held to be unnecessary:
"Whether the President in fulfilling his duties as Commander-in-Chief, in suppressing an insurrection, has met with such armed resistance, and a civil war of such alarming proportions as will compel him to accord to them the character of belligerents, is a question to be decided by him, and this Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted.... He must determine what degree of force the crisis demands."
"What the Supreme Court held was simply this: that the President of the United States has the constitutional power, under such circumstances as he shall deem imperative, to brand as belligerents the inhabitants of any area in general insurrection. In other words, he has an almost unrestrained power to act toward insurrectionary citizens as if they were enemies of the United States, and thus place them outside the protection of the Constitution. This, it seems hardly necessary to state, is dictatorial power in the extreme. The Constitution can be suspended after all by any President of the United States who ascertains and proclaims a widespread territorial revolt."
[Clinton Rossiter, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, p.230]
That is exactly what the majority opinion stated in the case:
"Whether the President, in fulfilling his duties as Commander-in-chief in suppressing an insurrection, has met with such armed hostile resistance and a civil war of such alarming proportions as will compel him to accord to them the character of belligerents is a question to be decided by him, and this Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted. He must determine what degree of force the crisis demands. The proclamation of blockade is itself official and conclusive evidence to the Court that a state of war existed which demanded and authorized a recourse to such a measure under the circumstances peculiar to the case." [Robert Cooper Grier, "Supreme Court: Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 2 Black 635." United States Supreme Court, 1862]
Rossiter wasn't trying to hide anything. Rather he was making a statement of fact, that Lincoln's actions were unconstitutional at the time he made them, by all historical standards. The acquiesence of the Court and the Congress at a later date is immaterial.
This is what I mean by Rossiter being a Lincolnite:
"These actions are the sum total of "the Lincoln dictatorship," [Rossiter's quotes, not mine] an extraordinary eleven weeks of presidential activity unparalleled in the history of the United States. By the time Congress had come together, he had set on foot a complete program executive, military, legislative, and judicial for the suppression of the insurrection. When it is considered what forms of government have in recent years been labeled "dictatorships," the application of this word to Mr. Lincoln 's few weeks of unrestrained power is a blatant exaggeration. Yet it cannot be denied that he had proceeded to acts of a radical, dictatorial, and constitutionally questionable character."
"On July 4 he greeted Congress with a special message, a remarkable state paper in which he described frankly the steps he had taken, rationalized his more doubtful actions by reference to the "war power of the Government" under the Constitution (his phrase and evidently his idea), and invited whatever ratification Congress should think necessary to legalize them. This message is a significant assertion of the inherent crisis power of the President. Lincoln posed and answered with a forceful yes the fundamental question whether a constitutional government has an unqualified power of self-preservation, in this instance whether the government of the United States was constitutionally equal to the task of preserving the Union by force. More than this, he asserted that in the American government this power of self-preservation is centered in the office of the President."
"Mr. Lincoln apparently entertained no doubts concerning the legality of his calling out the militia and the establishment of the blockade, nor did he find it necessary to explain why he had chosen to postpone the emergency convocation of Congress to July 4. He asserted that the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus could belong to him as well as to Congress, and tactfully left the subsequent disposal of this matter to the legislators."
"These measures, whether strictly legal or not, 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. It is believed that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional competency of Congress."
"Thereby Mr. Lincoln subscribed to a theory that in the absence of Congress and in the presence of an emergency the President has the right and duty to adopt measures which would ordinarily be illegal, subject to the necessity of subsequent congressional approval. He did more than this; he seemed to assert that the war powers of the Constitution could upon occasion devolve completely upon the President, if their exercise was based upon public opinion and an inexorable necessity. They were then sufficient to embrace any action within the fields of executive or legislative or even judicial power essential to the preservation of the Union. The whole tenor of his message implied that this government, like all others, possessed an absolute power of self-defense, a power to be exerted by the President of the United States. And this power extended to the breaking of the fundamental laws of the nation, if such a step were unavoidable."
"Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?"
"In other words, in an instance of urgent necessity, an official of a democratic, constitutional state will be acting more faithfully to his oath of office if he breaks one law in order that the rest may operate unimpeded. This was a powerful and unique plea for the doctrine of paramount necessity. It established no definite rule for this or any other country, but it does serve as a superlative example of how a true democrat in power is likely to act when there is no other way for him to preserve the constitutional system which he has sworn to defend."
[Clinton Rossiter, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, pp.228-220]
The United States was not being invaded. Therefore, you can squeeze those words of Rossiter and Lincoln until the cows come home and you will not find any emergency that could not wait a short while for the advice and consent of the Congress and Supreme Court.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "2. Lincoln shifted funds already appropriated for other purposes. If that makes him a tyrant then does that also make Donald Trump a tyrant since he does the same?"
Apples and oranges.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "3. The Constitution does not specifically state who can suspend habeas corpus. The Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on Lincoln's actions and justices as recent as William Rehnquist have admitted the question on whether Lincoln's actions were illegal are still unanswered."
Of course it does. Article I applies ONLY to the Legislative Branch. Read it!
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "4. Your own source admits that the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1803 gave Lincoln the authority to call up the militia to suppress the Southern rebellion since Congress was not in session."
Succession is neither an insurrection nor a rebellion.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Lincoln's actions might be forgivable of a President if the nation is being invaded, but not when the President is doing the invading."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "He was a president facing armed rebellion. His actions violated no precedent and all were subject to Supreme Court review. Unlike Jefferson Davis."
There was no rebellion. Secession is not rebellion, but is rather an authorized Constitutional avenue for states against oppression or suppression by the general government.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Further, neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court was allowed any input, plus over 300 Union newspapers were supposedly closed, freedom of the press was completely suppressed, and many journalists and editors were arrested. And that only scratches the surface."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "LOL! So many falsehoods in one sentence. Impressive. So let me ask you one favor; can you point me to a source that identifies the 300 Union newspapers that were closed down? Let's start there."
I certainly cannot point to Rossiter, the Lincolnite, as the source. He downplayed it.
This is the article that points to the source(s):
"During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln tried to preserve the tenets of a constitutional democratic republic as set forth by the founders in the Constitution. This proved to be a daunting challenge. After all, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a power given explicitly to Congress, and his administration arrested more than 14,000 political prisoners and suppressed more than 300 newspapers.[1]" [David W. Bulla, "Abraham Lincoln and Press Suppression Reconsidered." American Journalism, Vol.26, Iss.4; Fall, 2009, p.11]
This is the footnote:
Therefore, you can reasonably assume that 300 Union newspapers were suppressed.[1] The figure of 14,000 political prisoners comes from Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),232. F.C. Ainsworth counted 13,535 for the period Edwin M. Stanton was the secretary of war. Neely could not find how Ainsworth arrived at this number, so he tried to re-do the count. Neely concluded it was impossible to get an exact number. He noted: "It is clear that far more than 13,535 civilians were arrested" (The Fate of Liberty, 130). Neely stopped counting at 14,000. Another historian deduced the total to be approximately 16,000. Another estimate found as many as 38,000 political prisoners in the war. As for newspaper suppression, Shelby Foote cited the 300 figure without providing a clue as to where he obtained the figure. See Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative. Volume Two (New York: Vintage Books, 1986, reprint of 1963 Random House edition), 635. Foote may have obtained that total from David Herbert Donald, who made a similar claim. Donald said most of the cases of suppression involved newspapers that opposed the Lincoln administration's policies or supported peace initiatives. See David Herbert Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 86. But the Foote-Donald total is almost certainly too conservative. Stephen E. Towne found sixty-nine cases of press suppression in Indiana and Dennis F. Saak discovered seventy-four in Missouri. Saak's total does not include a single case in 1865. Chances are that if 132 cases occurred in two of the twenty-five states that stayed in the Union, the total for the war far exceeded 300. However, there is no way to know with any degree of certainty just how many cases occurred. See Towne, "Works of Indiscretion: Violence against the Press in Indiana during the Civil War," Journalism History, 31, 3, October 2005,138-149. See Saak, "Newspaper Suppressions in Missouri during the Civil War," master's thesis, University of Missouri, 1974."
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>>Kalamata wrote: "We will start with one of your quotes. This is your quote by John Mosby, in context:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "And Moseby mentions the tariff where exactly?"
Did you bother to read the quote, and then my narrative?
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>>Kalamata quoting Lincoln: "And whereas, since that date, public property of the United States [Fort Sumter] has been seized, the collection of the revenue obstructed, and duly commissioned officers of the United States, while engaged in executing the orders of their superiors, have been arrested and held in custody as prisoners, or have been impeded in the discharge of their official duties without due legal process."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "LOL! Ignored the rest of it I see? Lincoln, in his inaugural address, promised, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "In that statement he outlined how all three - holding property, collecting revenue, appointing federal officials - were violated by the rebels. You focus on one and ignore the rest."
There was no rebellion. Secession is not rebellion nor insurrection. Where is the part that states Lincoln would invade if the South didn't free its slaves?
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Charles and Mary Beard, "The Rise Of American Civilization," 1934:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "I provided quotes from the period, you provide opinions from 70 years later."
They are well-respected historians who provided a supportive narrative. All you provided were a bunch of meaningless, mostly unsourced quotes.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "The Boston Transcript, 1861"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Not an opinion from the south, but a Northern newspaper editorial making a ridiculous argument."
That is a quote from that period, and is a pretty strong argument that tariffs played a major role in the secession.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "What difference would Confederate tariff have on Northern imports? All goods previously purchased from up North duty free would now have tariffs applied to them. How did that harm the North?"
There would be no trade between them, at least not until hostilities ceased.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Philadelphia Press, 1861"
>>DoodleDawg quoting Lincoln: "Again not a Southern source, a Northern Democrat newspaper editorial, and again making a ridiculous argument. Since upwards of 95% of all imports entered through Northern ports to begin with, how could losing the South lead to a massive lost in tariff revenue?"
Are you really that economically-challenged? If Southern exports and imports no longer went through the northern ports, the crony-capitalism in the North would have to find a new slush fund.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "The Boston Herald, 1860:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Still another Northern source, still another ridiculous scenario. How could the heavy duties placed on imports cripple the North since those same duties would be placed on imports from Europe? How would heavy taxes placed on Southern cotton exports cripple the North and not Europe?
There were no export taxes on cotton, that I am aware of.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Never mind the fact that such a tax violated the Confederate constitution but we already know what that's worth."
Tariffs were authorized in both the U.S. and Confederate Constitutions.
Did it not occur to you that neither of those Union newspapers mentioned slavery or racism in the South as an issue?
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Representative Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, 1846: "
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Fifteen years before the rebellion? Really?
You are not making sense.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Representative John H. Reagan of Texas, 1861:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Here is Reagan's speech in its entirety: Link. Care to discuss how much time he devoted to slavery long before he touched on tariffs?"
You are missing the point. Lincoln didn't care one way or the other about slavery. It was all about the economy his economy of crony capitalism -- not slavery.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Vicksburg Daily Whig, 1860:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "They appear to be complaining that they voluntarily gave the import and export and transport business to the North. What prevented them from starting those businesses prior to the rebellion except that they didn't want to?"
Why don't you ask them?
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, 1860:"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "That speech of Toombs was delivered in January 1860, following the passage of the Morel Tariff that was voted down in the Senate later in that secession. Eleven months later Toombs delivered a speech to the Georgia assembly supporting secession. In that speech he mentions slaves or slavery 28 times. Tariffs? Only twice."
Again, it was all about economics, which was centered around the tariff. If slavery was the issue, Lincoln would have not waited several years before making a big deal out of it; and he would never have appointed a slave-holder as the commander of the armies he was sending to wipe out the slave-holders.
Besides, the North was at least as racist as the South, perhaps even more so, even after the war and reconstruction.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "And you have a reading comprehension problem, and/or an unnatural idolization of a power-hungry man who was responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 Unionists and Confederates, all based on a warped belief that he could save the Union by destroying it; and destroy it he did!"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "You do love your hyperbole, don't you?"
I like the truth. You, on the other hand, seem to be in love with Lincoln.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "You made the claim. Can you not support it?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Actually it was your claim that southerners paid artificially high prices because of the high tariffs. I merely pointed out that Northern consumers paid the same prices made artificially high by the tariff. The same source you used for your claim would also support that."
They were different economies. Remind me not to debate economics with you.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Like I said, it contradicts your previous statement."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "I did support the quote in context and it supports my claim that the South depended on the North for much of their manufactured goods by choice and not because they were forced to. How can they complain about a situation that they themselves freely entered into?"
What was the purpose of the protective tariff?
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Let me try a different approach: what does that have to do with this discussion?"
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "It shows that your previous claim that the South looked to only Arizona or New Mexico as areas where slavery could be expanded is false."
That was Adam's claim, and I didn't highlight it because it was a nonissue, according to Adams. And what does that have to do with this discussion?
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Perhaps he had already read them and rejected them as historical noise."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Or because they did not support his agenda."
Everyone has an agenda. That is why references are important in these kinds of discussions.
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>>Kalamata quoted: "Your assertion "that tariffs impacted Northern consumers just as much as Southern consumers" is not relative."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "It certainly is. Northern consumers paid the same prices as Southern consumers. Yet they didn't rebel over the tariff and you claim the South did."
They had different economies. The cost of the tariff to the South was disproportionally high. It seems everyone knows that, but you.
Mr. Kalamata
The Confederate Constitution specifically forbade the importation of slaves from any nation or region other than the slaveholding states or territories of the United States. The U.S. Constitution protected Southern slaveholders, and Lincoln proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have protected slavery in the slave states forever, if they returned to the "Union."
Bringing in something from a foreign country is, I believe, the definition of 'import' is it not? So the Confederate constitution specifically protected imports, albeit from a single source.
But let's not dwell on that alone. My claim was also that the Confederate constitution protected slavery to an extent never possible under the U.S. constitution. Article 1, section 9, clause 4 says no law impairing the right of property in slaves can every be passed. That, on the face of it, would seem to negate Article 1, section 9, clause 2 as well as make passing any constitutional amendment ending slavery impossible, and would make an interesting case for the Confederate supreme court had such a body existed. Article 4, section 2, clause 1 says slave owners can travel to any state in the Confederacy with their slaves and not be forced to dispose of them, making it impossible for a single state to end slavery within its borders. Article 4, section 3, clause 3 says slavery would be protected in any territory the Confederacy acquired, thus making it impossible for any future state admitted to be non-slave. There are ten specific references to slaves or slavery in the Confederate Constitution, none in the U.S. Constitution. So my claim that the Confederate constitution protected slavery is true, and your original claim that there is nothing the seceding states could have demanded to protect slavery that would not have been provided to be false. None of the proposed compromises in 1861 came close to protecting slavery to the extent the new Confederate constitution did. All they did was protect it where it existed.
The prospect of a slave revolt, aided and abetted by Northern Liberal kooks was likely quite frightening to the general public in that era. On the other hand, I don't think they gave a fig about whether or not wealthy land owners had slaves. Not many of the general public had slaves, so they likely had no personal interest in the matter.
Instead, those documents gave reasons that real people, voters, cared about,
Yeah, I don't think regular voters gave a sh*t. That stuff was the province of very wealthy people.
You mean the Northern states would be unable to go about their daily lives if the Southern states separated from them?
Why?
The part you appended does not appear to change the context. It seems to be a play on words.
Did you read this part?
"It will be observed that it appears as a simple repeal, or attempt to repeal, the ordinance by which the people of the State adopted the Constitution of the United States, thereby uniting with the people of the other States in the establishment of a general government over the whole. This attempt to repeal an act which is in its very nature irrepealable has been followed substantially in the other seceding States, with such difference of formula as the difference of circumstances under which they entered into the Union required." ["The North American Review, Vol. 95, No. 197." 1862, p.500]
That is pure 100% revisionist history! All states have the right to secede due to the nature of the distributed powers, not to mention the acceptance of the 1788 Virginia Ratification document by the Constitutional Convention, as expounded in Article VI, Section 2, Clause 1. Once the convention accepted Virginia's right to secede (the same later from New York,) that became part of the constitution, and that right automatically extended to all other states. That is the way legal documents work.
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>>x wrote, "Joel Parker, who wrote the article, didn't think slavery was a big deal. He'd lived his whole life in a country half-enslaved and half-free, and he didn't see why that should change, so he just ignored what the rest of the country was up in arms about and wrote it all off as the work of ambitious politicians."
Where did you get the name of the author? I have the article in my library, but there is no author mentioned. Are we talking about the same article?
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>>x wrote, "If slavery was what "fired the Southern heart" then it stands to reason that it was a very important cause of the war. If politicians could only get elected by rousing fears of abolitionists then it's clear that slavery was very much on the minds of Southerners and that the fears were real. Whether or not you or I or Adams or Roberts thinks that slavery was threatened, people in the slave states at the time certainly believed that it was. But the bad men and ambitious politicians theory doesn't hold much water. Those politicians were slave owners themselves, and in lowland South Carolina, where secessionism was strongest and had its start, their voters tended to be slaveowners, and Whites were outnumbered by Blacks. Slavery was a matter of more pressing concern than any theories about tariffs. They considered the continuation of slavery to be a matter life or death, both economically and physically."
That is grossly oversimplified. A slave, to the slaveholder, was just another means of production -- another business expense; and was therefore no different than the weaver on a set of looms in a northern textile factory. Both required planning and capital to utilize and maintain.
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>>Kalamata wrote, "The prospect that this tariff would split the nation and foster secession was expressed decades before 1860 by a Southern congressman in the debates in the House of Representatives in 1828: "If the union of these states shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, historians who record these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government, nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century under such a system of legislation."
>>x wrote, "That was George McDuffie. He felt strongly about other things too. You can read an excerpt (more) of his 1835 Message to the South Carolina Legislature on "The Natural Slavery of the Negro" and ask yourself how he'd feel about challenges to the slave system."
The 1828 quote was about the tariff.
Mr. Kalamata
Perhaps you need to revisit them.
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>>Joey wrote: "I make the effort to post quotes & links when I have enough time, which lately has not been in abundant supply. So I go with the short version. When I get more time, you'll see more sources."
Please do. No Wikipedia, please.
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>>Kalamata after quoting Charles W Adams 2000: "Makes sense to me."
>>Joey wrote: "All nonsense, and the reason is that long before 1860 most Southerners thought of themselves as loyal Americans -- they served in America's military, they fought in America's wars, they paid America's taxes, obeyed its laws, etc. How possibly do loyal Americans come to declare secession and war on their own country?"
You misstated. Loyal Americans declared secession after decades of abuse by disloyal Americans. A disloyal American named Lincoln declared War on those loyal Americans.
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>>Joey wrote: "The answer is there's only one possible way, and it has nothing to do with accountants' numbers on spreadsheets, but rather on a simple and much more direct threat: "they hate us and they're going to destroy us!" Prosperous Southerners who owned slaves and owed money to Northern banks were convinced that Northerners represented an existential threat to their most basic "way of life", slavery. That's what drove Southern voters, regardless of what their super-wealthy elites may have thought."
You have been reading too much Marxist revisionist history.
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>>Joey wrote: "The real fact is Southern super-elites could not have sold secession to average Southerners on any grounds other than slavery."
That seems to be what Adams believed. Sometimes you must venture outside the accepted narrative to find the truth. This is Dickens from 1861:
"Each state has been the country of its citizens, a country not seldom larger in itself than France or Germany. Of all these countries, over a vast region, the people declare the Union is no longer advantageous to them. And all this, as the Oxford professor of international law has well observed, "in a country which has treasured the right of revolt as the charter of its own freedom, and regarded the exercise of it as restrained only by motives of prudence, and needing no public justification except out of 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind;' a country the only one in the world which has made the theory of a social compact the basis of its institutions; which was the first to promulgate formally the doctrine that 'all just governments derive their power from the consent of the governed,' and has never ceased to applaud every application of that doctrine abroad, nor to teach and proclaim it at home." So the ease stands, and under all the passion of parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils.
"While these pages are passing through the press, a new proof has arrived from the States that the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel. In the political heart of the North itself a separate secession is threatened by the Abolitionists. The standard they have raised, as if it were a new one, other than that under which the South is being fought, is Emancipation of the Slaves. Against abolition, the government, following up the policy distinctly indicated by its dismissal of Fremont, rage quite as fiercely as they rage against the Southern Confederates."
[Charles Dickens, "The Morrill Tarriff." All The Year Round, Vol.VI; Dec 26, 1861, p.330]
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>>Kalamata wrote: "LOL! What does that have to do with anything, Joey? Clay was a Hamiltonian, big-government protectionist, that is, a crony-capitalist. Besides, the tariff was NOT a North vs. South issue; it merely seemed that way because the issue was centered around agriculture vs manufacturing -- agriculturalists in other states also opposed the tariff."
>>Joey wrote: "And so, Danny-baby, you wish us to believe that tariffs were the "real reason" for Southern secession and yet tariffs were not even a North-South issue? How does that work?"
For all practical purposes, it WAS a "North-South" issue, Joey, centered around agriculture vs manufacturing. Focusing on the outliers, rather than the mean, is disingenuous.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "In a nutshell, the manufacturers wanted tariff protection for their goods (e.g., crony-capitalism,) while the agriculturists (generally) wanted free trade. Those agriculturalists whose goods were protected by the tariff, such as the hemp farmers in Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri, obviously supported the tariff."
>>Joey wrote: "Nonsense because there were protective tariffs on every Southern export, from cotton to sugar. Of course anyone would wish for higher tariffs on their own exports and lower tariffs on their purchases, but that's what politics was for -- tariff rates went up & down over time, and except for the highest "Tariff of Abominations" nobody used them to threaten secession."
There were no tariffs on exports, to my knowledge; and it is obvious you do not have even a marginal grasp of the situation. This is Dickens, again:
"It is true that here and there a Southern interest has taken advantage on its own behalf of a system that it was found impossible to overthrow. The duty on sugar, for example, has been higher than it would have been but for consideration of the interests of Louisiana. But the profit of a few districts bears little or no relation to the loss of the whole South by a system that compelled it to pay a heavy fine into the pockets of the Northern manufacturers as the price of its equal participation in the privileges of the constitution. The price is heavier than that. While the cost is raised of what it buys, the value of what it sells is lowered, because the American tariff is a check on the convenient, and to each side profitable, way of payment, by exchange of commodities. The South was sending to this country alone agricultural produce to the value of thirty millions a year, and its whole trade was fettered for the benefit of other interests within the Union that it has now cast off as a hopeless clog upon its progress." [Charles Dickens, "The Morrill Tarriff." All The Year Round, Vol.VI; Dec 26, 1861, pp.329-330]
One of the most reviled historians by the Marxist revisionists is Edgar Lee Masters, who explains the intended purpose of the tariff in this excerpt:
"We shall find in Lincoln's mind all through a division in his thinking, which sometimes involved him in contradictory statements, and at others in plain solecisms of argument. From the time of Washington's administration there had been the Hamiltonians who were latitudinarians, who based the right of the Federal government to charter corporations upon the implied powers of the Constitution, when the convention that framed it had expressly voted down that power. The Hamiltonians by the same sort of twisted reasoning had stood for the protective tariff, as a possible policy under the general welfare clause of the Constitution, when the instrument itself warrants only the imposition of duties for the purposes of revenue." [Edgar Lee Masters, "Lincoln The Man." The Foundation for American Education, 1931, p.25]
According to Masters' (and my understanding,) the Constitution states: "no crony capitalism allowed."
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Calhoun was a devout free-trader (in the mold of Jefferson) who strongly OPPOSED a protectionist tariff. "
>>Joey wrote: "For tactical reasons Calhoun originally supported the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations". Yes, later he opposed it, but how "principled" can his opposition be if he was willing to set them aside for political reasons?"
I recall Calhoun supporting the 1816 Tariff, but not the 1828. Do you have a source?
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>>Kalamata wrote: "Andrew Jackson despised the entrenched political establishment, such as the bankers and protectionists. Although he supported the tariff that he inherited from Adams, he used it primarily to pay down the national debt "
>>Joey wrote: "Right, and the key point about both Jackson and Calhoun is they were both Southerners and the "Tariff of Abominations" was opposed by, among others, many New Englanders. That makes the whole thing nothing to do with North vs. South or somehow justification for secession."
You don't understand the circumstances, Joey.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "I have read that Jackson was the last president to serve under zero national debt."
>>Joey wrote: "Not just the last, the only President ever to pay off the US national debt. It's another reason why he deserves to remain on the $20 bill."
My point was, he used the tariff income to pay off the national debt, rather than to enrich some cronies like the "protectionists" tended to do.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "You come up with the strangest "arguments!" I have read that the southern states voted 64 to 4 AGAINST the 1828 tariff! Where did you get your information?"
>>Joey wrote: "Obviously, I need to make better use of the tag. My point is that it was not only Southerners opposed to the 1828 Tariff, but also many New Englanders and it was not only Northerners who supported it, but also some notable Southerners. It was not a North vs. South issue and therefore not serious justification for secession in 1860."
Those who were hurt by the tariff typically opposed it.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "The way I read that, the adoption of the 1828 tariff by the Adam's administration helped defeat Adams in the next election against Andrew Jackson."
>>Joey wrote: "Sure, but Jackson's people had not opposed the 1828 tariff, nor did Jackson move to abolish it, nor did Jackson tolerate South Carolina's threats of secession. It was not strictly a North vs. South issue."
Jackson inherited the tariff, Joey.
Mr. Kalamata
Hair-splitting,
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "But let's not dwell on that alone. My claim was also that the Confederate constitution protected slavery to an extent never possible under the U.S. constitution. Article 1, section 9, clause 4 says no law impairing the right of property in slaves can every be passed. That, on the face of it, would seem to negate Article 1, section 9, clause 2 as well as make passing any constitutional amendment ending slavery impossible, and would make an interesting case for the Confederate supreme court had such a body existed."
Clause I.9.2 assigns a power:
"(2) Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy."
Clause I.9.4 prohibits any interference in the right of property in slaves:
"(4) No... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
The Confederate Congress could have prohibited any future importation of slaves (e.g., from the slaveholding states and territories of the United States,) but it could not pass a law that interfered in the property rights of slaveholders. Those two clauses convey similar powers and prohibitions as found in the original U. S Constitution Article I.9 and Article IV.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Article 4, section 2, clause 1 says slave owners can travel to any state in the Confederacy with their slaves and not be forced to dispose of them, making it impossible for a single state to end slavery within its borders."
That clause refers to transit and sojourning, not residency.
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>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Article 4, section 3, clause 3 says slavery would be protected in any territory the Confederacy acquired, thus making it impossible for any future state admitted to be non-slave. There are ten specific references to slaves or slavery in the Confederate Constitution, none in the U.S. Constitution. So my claim that the Confederate constitution protected slavery is true, and your original claim that there is nothing the seceding states could have demanded to protect slavery that would not have been provided to be false. None of the proposed compromises in 1861 came close to protecting slavery to the extent the new Confederate constitution did. All they did was protect it where it existed."
The U.S. Constitution specifically protected the rights of property by protecting slaveholders from the actions of free states regarding runaway slaves. It was somewhat vague on the rights of new states, which allowed sovereignty of new states to be trampled by the crafty. Lincoln proposed a new (13th) amendment that would have extended the protections of slaveholders.
The Confederate Constitution specifically respected the sovereignty of each member state:
"We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America" ["Constitution of the Confederate States." Avalon Project, March 11, 1861, Preamble]
Therefore, the issue of slavery resided solely within the sovereignty of each state, rather than the Confederate congress, absent the prohibition on importation, and including the aforementioned clause giving the congress the power to extend the prohibition, plus the protection of the rights of slaveholders while traveling.
Any notion that there could not be free states within the Confederacy is false.
Mr. Kalamata
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