Posted on 01/18/2006 1:03:24 PM PST by neverdem
Your comment is well taken, except that Congress could not determine whether secession was Constitutional, inasmuch as the reps from the seceding states had left.
Anyway, the question was a legal/constitutional one, not a political one, and it would have been more appropriate to address it in the SC than in Congress. IMHO.
Except that the seceding states never attempted to do so.
Nuke terror justifies a lot. Nuke terror is the threat that this administration is REALLY fighting. They know that it is much, much closer than is commonly believed.
Yes. Are you?
Now, that was almost unquestionably an illegal, unconstitutional act orchestrated by pro-Union forces to punish the state of Virginia.
In your opinion.
Sir..I am ex-navy, and I agree with what you are saying. What I meant was that if the South did not assert their rights, their honor would have been lost. They were left with no choice but war. The act of war itself is not glorious. And I hate the term "Civil War" and simply use it as a neutral term.
The slave power knew that too. That is why they made war on the federal government.
It was the Constitution that they feared.
I agree with you completely. Harry Jaffa, who is probably the biggest Lincoln fan among historians of the Civil War period has acknowledged that "the analysis that we have of the American economy in the antebellum United States indicates—that if the expansion of slavery had been ended, and if it was no longer possible for surplus slaves to be sold from the old states to new territories, that the pressure within the states to adopt programs of emancipation would become great enough to do that.”
It seems likely that Democrats in the South knew that which is why the expansion of slavery into the territories and the process for dealing with fugitive slaves were the two biggest issues for Southern politcians in the years leading up to the Civil War.
So we know that the US Constitution includes a provision that gives slave owners the right to claim their slaves that escaped to free states, but that provision gives the federal government no right to enforce that provision...so, in 1793, Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Act. But, being that we were still faithful to the Constitution at that time...states (and not the federal government) were the ones that had to enforce the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act.
Of course, several free states made things very difficult for slave owners...they would require the slaveowner to come and appear in court in the state where the slave was...they provided full trials to captured slaves and some states outright refused to enforce it...exercising their states’ rights under the Constitution.
Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state but declared all of the rest of what was the Missouri territory to be free...that territory encompassed most of what the US purchased under the Louisiana Purchase. Congress, under the Constitution, had full authority to make all laws regarding territories that were not states.
So, with the Fugitive Slave Act being only sporadically enforced and with what was left of the Missouri territory free...southern slave-owners had a rough time.
So fast forward now to 1850...and the Compromise of 1850, under which the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed...a blatantly unconstitutional bill that, for the benefit of the slave states, will create a new federal office to go into free states and collect fugitive slaves and provides a very summary proceeding in which slaves have no due process rights whatsoever...another clear violation of the Constitution. The slave states gave up much to get the Fugitive Slave Act passed as part of the Compromise of 1850...California was added as a free state, the territories of Utah and New Mexico would decide the issue of whether they would be free states or slave states at some point in the future when they would be admitted as states, slavery was ended in Washington DC and a western border was established in Texas...beyond which would be free territory. That should give you some evidence of how badly the slave states needed an effective Fugitive Slave Act.
But, again, states would not cooperate. In the case of Ex rel Booth, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin declared the obvious...that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was unconstitutional...the federal government exceeding all of its authority and violating the sovereignty of the states. The US Supreme Court, predictably, demanded that Wisconsin assist the feds in enforcing the Act...which Wisconsin never did.
Its important to remember that most Republicans, including Lincoln, fully supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 because they saw it as a necessary concession to keep the South in the Union....which really, in the case of Lincoln was his primary concern. In case it wasn’t obvious based on the way he conducted the Civil War, you have to know that Lincoln cared little about slaves or the Constitution.
In 1854, southern states successfully repealed the Missouri Compromise and enacted the Kansas-Nebraska Act...which provided that the settlers in those territories would decide the issue of whether they would be slave or free states. When it became clear that Kansas would be admitted as a free state in 1860...the slave states had to know the jig was up.
By Lincoln’s election, slavery was effectively dead...the Fugitive Slave Act was being nullified by free states and slavery was not to be extended throughout the new territories.
Lincoln himself wrote, in an 1862 letter to the NY Tribune:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
When you disconnect the Civil War with the end of slavery (as I think the facts do), it puts the question of states rights versus centralized government in a different light.
First, the desire of many polticians in the North to “preserve the Union” may have prolonged slavery by causing those politicians to give concessions to the South that the South believed would help in preserve slavery (namely the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act)...why not let the South go?...repeal the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
Whatever you may think of making citizens of one state submit to rule from Washington...was it worth the cost?
650,000-700,000 Americans dead...more than all other American wars combined
the first federal income tax
the first use of unconstitutional Presidential wartime powers...including imprisoning political opponents, shutting down newspapers that run editorials government policies, suspension of habeus corpus, etc.
I think that only state’s rights...not centralized federal power...could have ended slavery peacefully in the US...and, I think its mostly so with every question...moral, free political systems will overwhelm or influence less free, less moral political systems when people are free to travel between the competing political systems
The doctrine of states rights, and those who advocated it such as the Wisconsin Supreme Court, might be the only heros in the Civil War tragedy.
Strict federalism is not a perfect form of government but, as James Madison said, there is no such thing...the best man can do is find the least imperfect form of government
CONGRADS are in order, Ma'am! (my ostrich-plumed, GRAY, slouch hat is OFF to you.)
free dixie,sw
the war for dixie LIBERTY continues, by other means than arms.
there is MUCH here on TWBTS threads,of interest. (and since the "admin mod" cleaned some of the "riff raff" out of these threads, it's been BETTER, too! THANKS for that, AM!)
free dixie,sw
Interesting long post.
According to you, the South seceded and the North attempted to prevent secession, solely for monetary reasons. As far as I know, only Europeans who despised Americans, such as Dickens and Marx, made this argument at the time. Americans north and south knew much more important issues were at stake.
Let us assume that the South paid, in one way or another, 50% of the federal budget of $60M, or $30M. This works out to roughly $3 per year per southerner, hardly a massive burden. A federal tax rate of less than 1% of income. The equivalent today would be a family earning $50,000 which paid total federal taxes of $500.
Had the South been allowed to leave peacefully it would have been obligated to tax itself at a much higher rate than this in order to build an effective separate defense establishment.
Is it more likely that the South jumped ship in irritation at paying this $30M per year, or for the reason they themselves said at the time, because they wanted to protect a way of life based on the $3000M or so of capital invested in slaves? An amount, BTW, equal to approximately half the total wealth of the southern states, with most of the rest tied up in agricultural land values highly dependent on this type of labor to be productive.
You also claim that the Union states, to regain this revenue stream of perhaps $30M per year, were willing to tax themselves over four years to the tune of more than $6000M. Not a particularly wise investment!
The South did not secede because of the passing of a high tariff, since the Deep South states seceded right after the election, many months even before Lincoln took office, much less before the passing of the tariff. The tariff was passed as a war tax to raise money, not from the southern states, which had already seceded, but from the northern ones.
BTW, your contention that capitalism was financed by imperialism is the basic argument of Leninism, and is destroyed when careful study of the economics of modern empires is done. What it comes down to is that the areas conquered by 19th century empires were generally poor, often very poor. There was very little there to steal. Thus conquering and controlling them cost much more both initially and on an ongoing basis than just purchasing their meager resources would have cost.
We see this today in Iraq. Financially, we would have been much better off to buy oil from Saddam on the open market than to invade, conquer and occupy to get the oil. The same has been generally true of most empires for the last 200 years or so.
You will notice the absence of proponents of a US conquest of Mexico or South America. Morality aside, such a conquest would be very expensive and there is no chance we would ever recover the cost. Yet Latin America today is immensely more wealthy than most 19th century imperial conquests.
Tribute empires have existed in the past. Rome certainly made money by looting its conquests, as did the French revolutionaries and the Nazis. But the 19th century British, French and German empires all cost more to maintain than they yielded, often a large multiple. Individual Brits, Frogs and Huns did well out of the empires, but not the mother countries as a whole or their taxpayers.
Modern empires were built for many reasons, most of them related to prestige, nationalistic competition and dog-in-the-mangeritis. Getting rich by looting conquests was not one of them.
My apologies.
The Morill tariff was signed into law by Buchanan a couple of days before Lincoln took office.
Let me answer YOUR question, with a question: How much honor did the Yankees lose when they turned old men, women and children into the street during pouring rain, after Sherman took Atlanta? Think about which act was more dishonorable.
Bravo! Well written and concise reply!
But you did omit the differences in religous beliefs between the sections ;o)
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