Posted on 06/14/2004 5:16:34 AM PDT by Theodore R.
They Aren’t What They Used to Be
May 27, 2004
If I had to sum up American history in one sentence, I’d put it this way: The United States aren’t what they used to be.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s literal fact. Before the Civil War, the United States was a plural noun. The U.S. Constitution uses the plural form when, for example, it refers to enemies of the United States as “their” enemies. And this was the usage of everyone who understood that the union was a voluntary federation of sovereign states, delegating only a few specified powers, and not the monolithic, “consolidated,” all-powerful government it has since become.
Maybe Americans prefer the present megastate to the one the Constitution describes. But they ought to know the difference. They shouldn’t assume that the plural United States were essentially the same thing as today’s United State, or that the one naturally “evolved” into the other.
The change was violent, not natural. Lincoln waged war on states that tried to withdraw from the Union, denying their right to do so. This was a denial of the Declaration of Independence, which called the 13 former colonies “Free and Independent States.”
Washington and Jefferson at times expressed their fear that some states might secede, but they took for granted that this was the right of any free and independent state. They advised against exercising that right except under serious provocation, but they assumed it was a legitimate option against the threat of a centralized government that exceeded its constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, several states considered leaving the Union, and abolitionists urged Northern states to do so in order to end their association with slave states. Congressman John Quincy Adams, a former president, wanted Massachusetts to secede if Texas was admitted to the Union. Nobody suggested that Adams didn’t understand the Constitution he was sworn to uphold.
But the danger to the states’ independence was already growing. Andrew Jackson had threatened to invade South Carolina if it seceded, shocking even so ardent a Unionist as Daniel Webster. Jackson didn’t explain where he got the power to prevent secession, a power not assigned to the president in the Constitution. Why not? For the simple reason that the Constitution doesn’t forbid secession; it presupposes that the United States are, each of them, free and independent.
Still, Lincoln used Jackson’s threat as a precedent for equating secession with “rebellion” and using force to crush it. This required him to do violence to the Constitution in several ways. He destroyed the freedoms of speech and press in the North; he arbitrarily arrested thousands, including elected officials who opposed him; he not only invaded the seceding states, but deposed their governments and imposed military dictatorships in their place.
In essence, Lincoln made it a crime — “treason,” in fact — to agree with Jefferson. Northerners who held that free and independent states had the right to leave the Union — and who therefore thought Lincoln’s war was wrong — became, in Lincoln’s mind, the enemy within. In order to win the war, and reelection, he had to shut them up. But his reign of terror in the North has received little attention.
He may have “saved the Union,” after a fashion, but the Union he saved was radically different from the one described in the Constitution. Even his defenders admit that when they praise him for creating “a new Constitution” and forging “a second American Revolution.” Lincoln would have been embarrassed by these compliments: He always insisted he was only enforcing and conserving the Constitution as it was written, though the U.S. Supreme Court, including his own appointees, later ruled many of his acts unconstitutional.
The Civil War completely changed the basic relation between the states, including the Northern states, and the Federal Government. For all practical purposes, the states ceased to be free and independent.
Sentimental myths about Lincoln and the war still obscure the nature of the fundamental rupture they brought to American history. The old federal Union was transformed into the kind of “consolidated” system the Constitution was meant to avoid. The former plurality of states became a single unit. Even our grammar reflects the change.
So the United States were no longer a “they”; they’d become an “it.” Few Americans realize the immense cost in blood, liberty, and even logic that lies behind this simple change of pronouns.
Joseph Sobran
Lincoln damaged the Constitution. FDR corrupted it.
"The two instances where federal power has been used to solve controversial moral questions (slavery and abortion) were disasters. Slavery existed in one form or another for 100 years after the 13th amendment in this country, and it is still practiced throughout the world (and that's not even counting the enormous cost in lives of the civil war). Abortion certainly wasn't settled by Roe v. Wade, and its likely that it will take about a century for that issue to be resolved."
I believe what you've identified is the problem of how a unique political entity, that is, American democratic republicanism, has struggled to confront difficult social issues it has encountered through years. Slavery was an economic condition that was abolished in European empires by monarchical decree. The legalization of abortion was enabled in Europe through the use of parliamentary systems that reflected limited democratic participation. The mainstreaming of homosexuality was accomplished in these countries through similar means. These countries all have elitist government that doesn't allow the will of the people to be expressed to the degree of the US system.
The United States was, and is, a unique political entity that the majority of the people in this country still do not seem to appreciate. The genius of the American system was in its ability to accommodate the interests and desires of its disparate States. As a nation, we are continuing to debate and construct the framework within which we function, getting farther removed from the original plan, and to our detriment, in my opinion. There was a lot of good in the earlier framework that we have allowed to be lost through ill-conceived modification of the Constitution.
Consider the difficulties that European nations are struggling with as they attempt to create their own United States of Europe. France has a smaller GDP than the State of Georgia, fer Crissakes! But without the common religious, cultural, and political traditions that existed when the American system was implemented, I don't see any success for their efforts. I even question whether or not the US can maintain its system in the future!
Nor did I accuse you of such. The people you speak of are in a distinct minority; it looks like a lot more becuase of the media. Bush will win in November..
You sound like a professional victim.
Yes, the Indian wars were wrong, including the many in which they killed each other.
All part of man's inhumanity to man......a fact of life on every continent, without exception, for centuries.
What matters is America today. It's not perfect, just the best.
Yes, the Indian wars were wrong, including the many in which they killed each other.
All part of man's inhumanity to man......a fact of life on every continent, without exception, for centuries.
You sound like someone who misinterpreted my post.
The point you bring up is exactly the point I was trying to make to Mr. Bonly Jones, with his...
The evil stupidity of the true sons of the slave rapers never ceases to amaze me.
And if you scroll down to his reply to me...you'll see he got my point.
1) All those that committed that crime against humanity are dead.
Which was precisely what I was trying to get him to say.
If the southern state Delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted the right to secede - they should have put it in the Constitution.
So, the government, through the Constitution, grants us our rights? We don't have a right to anything unless it's in the Constitution? You do realize that kind of reasoning is at odds with 100% of the Constitution's framers, right?
In defense of the southerners, fewer than 30 percent owned even one slave. They saw slavery as a system of stable labor by which the slave gave up participation in the private market for a lifetime of support. Southerners like John C. Calhoun thought slavery more humane than the "wage slavery" of the northern factories. Everyone is a "slave" to some extent -- a slave to something. Few people are so "free" that they can move anywhere they wish at any time for any reason. In the 1850s, it was illegal to work a slave on Sundays. How many "wage slaves" today are required to work on Sunday? Still that does not excuse slavery. But we should not judge the 1850s by the PC ideology of the 2000s.
Well said.
Slavery (and abortion) were (are) abhorrent. In a perfect world, they wouldn't exist. Of course, neither would murder, rape, poverty, disease, etc.
The sad fact is that we, as individuals, don't agree on many aspects of life and morality. The question is, what do we do about it?
Picking a side (however "right" it may be) and using the force of the federal government to ram it down the other side's throat hasn't worked all that well in the past. It galvanizes the other side and makes attempts to use reason, logic, and even emotion to sway the other side moot (witness the abortion debate, and the pre-war debate regarding slavery, also the pre-civil-rights legislation in the mid-60's).
It would be nice if force or legislation settled these issues, but history shows that it either prolongs the resolution, or widens the divide.
It's not a question of whether or not the intent is pure, or the intended result is good. That sort of argument brought us the horrors of the last century that linger today. In many ways, the way abortion manifest itself nationally is due in large part to the way that slavery was abolished. Abortion couldn't have been instituted by federal decree in pre-1865 America, but that sort of heavy-handed meddling was all but inevitable afterwards, much as Sobran points out.
3) I've never met an anti-Indian racist, much less one that hides his race hate behind an anti-Lincoln stance.
The above kinda sounds to me like you indulge in a little race hatred. You seem to have race-hatred confused with hatred for those who have destroyed our constitution.
The contrast between this article and the message we heard from Reagan repeated last week couldn't be greater.
BTTT
If he did that, he would have to address the issue. That is quite out of the question. The subject must be changed in order to avoid that.
With the death of Ronald Reagan we have been treated to many lists of 'great' Presidents. Infallibly Lincoln is at the top, this is why he should not be. Lincoln destroyed the concept of free and independent states, which led the oft-mentioned next 'great' President FDR to create a monolithic, central and socialist bureaucracy, which LBJ further expanded and Reagan attempted to tear down. So maybe we need to rethink who is actually a 'great' President.
It's a contemporary issue. Sobran's just laying the groundwork to support California's secession to form the sovereign state of Aztlan.
Ideas and concepts are always contempory. Some lose sight of that.
I did think nor did I intend to infer that you was accusing me.
Sorry if you took it that way.
I probably could have worded it better-the people you mentioned are truly the minority, its just that the media is able to project an image of division. I know you are not united with them!
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