Posted on 02/20/2020 9:13:10 PM PST by Pelham
Thomas Fleming talked about his book, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, in which he portrays the Civil War as a tragedy that American leaders foresaw and struggled to prevent.
He spoke about how public opinion and propaganda helped spark the war, and the longstanding tensions between the North and South. He also discussed events that heightened fear of a slave rebellion in the southern states. The Pritzker Military Library hosted this event.
>>Bull Snipe sniped: “The stop making inane statements”
Contribute something useful.
Mr. Kalamata
When you decide to stop sounding like a Democrate describing Donald Trump.
>>Bull Snipe sniped: “In war, there are two options, you win or you lose. Had the Southerners decided not to go to war. They would have been able to keep their slaves and avoided “million” deaths.”
The South was invaded.
Mr. Kalamata
>>Bull Snipe snipes: “When you decide to stop sounding like a Democrate describing Donald Trump.”
When will you stop sounding like Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, and David Brooks?
Mr. Kalamata
If that is what is necessary to win a war, then invasion is justifiable.
When you stop sounding like the contributors on “The Democratic Underground”
Bookmark
In every case other than the U.S., slavery was ended by government action and with the strong opposition of the slave owners themselves. The U.S could not have enacted a mandatory compensated emancipation plan because the Constitution would not permit it. A voluntary emancipation plan would fail because there is no reason to believe that the slave holders themselves would be willing to participate. That's why not.
And why didn’t Lincoln apply his emancipation order to the slaves in the North?
Slavery in the United States lasted longer than in the Confederacy.
Because an obscure little document called the Constitution prevented it.
Slavery in the United States lasted longer than in the Confederacy.
True. It ended in the Confederacy on January 1, 1862 and in the U.S. in December 1865 once the 13th Amendment was ratified.
When the CSA states left in 1861 the remaining USA states had more than enough votes to end slavery.
The states that had been interfering with that goal weren’t in Congress anymore.
And yet the ruling Republican Party waited until January 1865 to pass the proposed 13th Amendment and it wasn’t ratified until December.
What prevented them from doing this years earlier?
Thomas Jefferson used to be one of my favorite founding fathers. Because of his actions against Washington, and other things, he has dropped for me. Still indispensable to the revolution but I’m glad he was in France during the constitutional convention.
an opinion, Possibly the status of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, were part of the consideration in not pushing for the abolition of slavery. By late 1864, it was obvious, to most, that the South was going to lose the war. By that time it made no difference what those border states did, it would not effect the outcome of the war.
If the South had won the war would they have freed the slaves?
I’m not anti-Southern. Just anti-Confederacy.
The South chose a path of violent secession and lost. THEY LOST! Get over it.
America itself was founded on a path of violent secession. We got lucky, we won.
I view both entities as of similar moral equivalence -- on the issue of the right to secede, only.
And they did eventually.
And yet the ruling Republican Party waited until January 1865 to pass the proposed 13th Amendment and it wasn’t ratified until December.
Actually the 13th Amendment passed out of the Senate in the spring of 1864. But it required a two-thirds vote in the House to send it to the states for ratification and there were enough Democrats to prevent that from happening.
What prevented them from doing this years earlier?
Democrats and fighting the ongoing rebellion would be my guess.
Lincoln is talking about the right of revolution in that quote. Not the made up legal “secession” the southern rebels claimed was hidden in the constitution.
Notice it says “having the power”. Not any people anywhere can just claim independence from their existing government and that existing government has to let them go.
And yes secession was treason. The Supreme Court already had declared in three Supreme Court Cases that the constitution was ratified by the people m, not the states, and could only be undone by all the people, no subset of the people. The earliest decisions by the Supreme Court proclaiming this was in Chisholm vs Georgia 1793, just five years after the ratification of the constitution. It said this;
“It is remarkable that, in establishing it, the people exercised their own rights, and their own proper sovereignty, and, conscious of the plenitude of it, they declared with becoming dignity, “We the people of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution.” Here we see the people acting as sovereigns of the whole country, and, in the language of sovereignty, establishing a Constitution by which it was their will that the State governments should be bound, and to which the State Constitutions should be made to conform.”
In other words the people, as a whole, made the constitution and bound the states to it.
Also a President, when faced with the threat of secession, had already set the precedent thirty years earlier in his nullification proclamation.
“This, then, is the position in which we stand. A small majority of the citizens of one State in the Union have elected delegates to a State convention; that convention has ordained that all the revenue laws of the United States must be repealed, or that they are no longer a member of the Union. The governor of that State has recommended to the legislature the raising of an army to carry the secession into effect, and that he may be empowered to give clearances to vessels in the name of the State. No act of violent opposition to the laws has yet been committed, but such a state of things is hourly apprehended, and it is the intent of this instrument to PROCLAIM, not only that the duty imposed on me by the Constitution, ‘` to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” shall be performed to the extent of the powers already vested in me by law or of such others as the wisdom of Congress shall devise and Entrust to me for that purpose; but to warn the citizens of South Carolina, who have been deluded into an opposition to the laws, of the danger they will incur by obedience to the illegal and disorganizing ordinance of the convention-to exhort those who have refused to support it to persevere in their determination to uphold the Constitution and laws of their country, and to point out to all the perilous situation into which the good people of that State have been led, and that the course they are urged to pursue is one of ruin and disgrace to the very State whose rights they affect to support.”
“The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject-my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you-they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion, hut be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREASON.“
Andrew Jackson 1832
This is the precedent that both Buchanan and Lincoln followed when dealing with the “secessionist” in 1860-1865.
The southern rebels should have been under no delusion that “secession” was legal or allowed.
Can’t invade your own country. The south was taken over by rebels. And, as George Washington did to the Whiskey rebellion, Lincoln did to the southern rebels.
Also those southern rebels committed a bunch of hostile acts, before Lincoln was even inaugurated.
December 27, 1860—South Carolina seizes Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, a Federal schooner and other Federal property.
December 30, 1860—South Carolina seizes the Federal Arsenal at Charleston.
December 31—South Carolina seizes the U.S. post office and the Customs house in Charleston.
January 3—Georgia seizes Fort Pulaski to prevent U.S. troops from garrisoning it.
January 4—Alabama seizes the US arsenal at Mount Vernon.
January 5—Alabama seizes Forts Morgan and Gaines.
January 6—Florida seizes the Apalachicola arsenal.
January 7—Florida seizes Fort Marion.
January 9, 1861—In Charleston, southern guns fire on the Star of the West as it attempts to re-supply Fort Sumter.
January 10, 1861—Florida demands the surrender of Fort Pickens (refused).
February 18, 1861—Jefferson Davis is inaugurated as president of the Confederacy.
February 23, 1861—President-Elect Abraham Lincoln merely a
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