Posted on 04/30/2008 9:12:42 PM PDT by BnBlFlag
So are YOU saying that the US should have fielding a larger standing army in the 1850s to protect Texas?
So are YOU saying that the US should have maintained a larger standing army in the 1850s to protect Texas?
Sorry for the double post. Thought I’d stopped the first one before it went through.
Titles & authors?
As I said, it was people who thought they'd gain under the slave system who were the strongest supporters of secession. That included a lot of wealthy planters who thought they'd control the new government. But some of the richest plantation owners didn't want to shake things up. Some of them were the sort of people who could have been bought off by compensated emancipation.
But anyway, I'm not the one going on about the evil rich. That's you. I'm simply pointing out that there was a ruling class in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Democratic Party. It wasn't necessarily nice or benign, either.
One problem with your view is that you put everything that's happened since in one side of the balance and some arcadian view of a frozen past on the other. The guy who ran a carding or spinning operation in rural Vermont was an evil Whig or Republican, while the Southern plantation owner (if not too rich) was a virtuous libertarian Democrat.
My point is that the agrarian ruling class in the South, given enough time, would have gotten into a lot of the vices of Northern capitalists. They already had done worse -- with slavery -- and had the potential to continue with things like the sharecropping system.
Garbage, because you say so? You'll forgive me if I remain underwhelmed by your arguement. Or your newest attempt to connect me with yet another totalitarian regime, though I think you missed the mark with this one.
Meanwhile, our Constitution doesn't say any of these things you keep reading into it.
By inplication it does.
Secession is not expressly limited or forbidden in Article I, where almost all the other express prohibitions are listed, and contrary you, powers not granted are reserved -- even Marshall said so, in the Virginia ratification debate.
And the word 'expressly' is found nowhere in the Constitution, and your claim that the only powers exercised under the Constitution are expressly stated - even Marshall said so, in McCulloch v. Maryland.
Plus, the Tenth Amendment makes it crystal-clear, that all other powers not granted, would be reserved, and everyone signed on with that. Some States were quite explicit about reserving the power to secede unilaterally, and New York, Hamilton's own State, was one of them.
And nowhere is the means of resuming those powers expressly stated in the ratification documents. Regardless, those documents do not form the law of the land. The Constitution does.
Even the IRS has to go through some legal proceedings before taking control of property. The confederates just stole it.
You just don't want to admit that a seceded State is out of your tight little fist and empowered to make sovereign acts of its own whether or not you approve.
You don't want to admit that all states enjoy the protections of the Constitution, not just the ones you decide do.
Isn't freedom a bitch? They just won't listen to you!
Only if you live in one of your chosen states. All others are screwed. Or so you would have us believe.
And I've offered Chief Justice Marshall, Chief Justice Chase, James Madison, Jefferson Davis's own writings. I'll stack mine against your's any time.
Still looking for luscious, juicy quotes from Foner and McPherson?
Hadn't even occured to me. But if you stoop to quoting Tommy DiLornezo or Chuck Adams I just may have to.
That would be James Madison? The man who spoke out against unilateral secession? You want to swap quotes?
I'll defer to your in depth knowledge of Hitler and his quotes. Present the one you're talking about and show where I support it.
Call me a liar?
That seems to be a pretty fair description of your latest stunts.
Not really. Your statement doesn't account for the 90% of people who didn't own a slave in some States, and their motivation in voting secession.
It's not that they thought they would gain under the slave system. The economic pressure, after all, was there. It's why Southern whites came to hate black slaves and freedmen, because of the planters' constant competitive threat to confound the yeomanry with bondmen of a conquered and prostrate race. That was the real significance of the racialization of slavery: it alienated freemen and slaves, and it marked the black race in the eyes of white working men who were trying to stay above water. They didn't want to end up like the slaves, and they resented it every time they worked elbow to elbow with slaves in any setting. (Thus T. R. Fehrenbach's explanation of some of the social stresses introduced by the planters' reliance on chattel African slavery.)
Rather than gain from the slave-labor system, whites looked more to secession to preserve what they had from the hostility of sectional bigots in the North, esp. among the literate classes who were the supporters of John Brown, and who actively and openly wanted to see a race war submerge the white South in blood, flames, and universal slaughter, just like Haiti. Fehrenbach points out that Northerners seem never to have gotten this point -- that just the threat of a race war was absolutely a declaration of war on the whole society: it caused people to turn violent instantly, and it brought to life, like a chemistry-lab demonstration of violent flammability, the 103-year spectacle of Southern lynch-law, hitherto unheard-of. (It was lost on Southern audiences, in their state of extreme survival-time excitation, that Abraham Lincoln deplored Brown's raid and what it stood for as much as Col. Robert E. Lee did.)
Cite and quote, post up or shut up.
Awwww. Is little lentulus all upset? Is he mad? He can call other's names but the poor baby just can't take it? Well I guess I'll just have to be more sensitive to your feelings next time.
Yeah, sure. Show me where he argues that unilateral secession is unconstitutional. As opposed to merely a bad idea, and as opposed to secession "for light and transient causes".
Meanwhile, as for the unthinkability and constitutional impossibility of same, I'll show you what John Quincy Adams said:
The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several states of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affection of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.
--John Quincy Adams, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Constitution.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/backroom/1388720/posts?page=354#354
There's also a Jefferson quote, writing to Madison, at the link. No date, unfortunately.
No. You lie like a rug, and you can't post anything to back up your lies. That's why I told you, cite and quote.
Because you can't, because you're lying.
Q.E.D.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that there was an episode in which one of the houses of Congress -- the House, I think -- refused to make an appropriation for frontier defense in Texas. It was in the Texas Declaration of Causes, but I looked for separate sourcing in my copy of Fehrenbach yesterday, and only found a general reference to the statement in the Declaration of Causes, not a narrative.
FWIW, after the war started, the frontier started going backward, and whites had to get out. I saw a statement somewhere that it retreated 100-200 miles, something like that. Texas had 25,000 men under arms in the State, but they were all in the coastal areas and east Texas protecting the big plantations from Yankee invasion.
His 1833 letter to Daniel Webster for a start. His letter to William Cabel Rivers in the same year. Or his 1832 letter in response to Alexander Rives.
Pot? Meet kettle. Kettle? This is pot.
have you found the place in the Constitution where secession is prohibited OR is this another case of your KNOWING,intentional, DAMNyankee LIES???
btw, PLEASE tell us again that you NEVER said that the Constitution prohibits unilateral secession, as we all need a BIG LAUGH at your expense.
you DAMNyankee radicals have to so many LIES about so many subjects, that you cannot keep your LIES straight.
laughing AT the "DAMNyankee coven of REVISIONISTS, "useful idiots" FOOLS,brain-DEAD HATERS & BIGOTS".
free dixie,sw
I'd suppose that many of your 90% who didn't own slaves either didn't vote, being women or children or slaves themselves or voted against secession.
In a state like Mississippi or South Carolina, where something like half the population had a slaveowner somewhere in the family, the vote for secession was higher than in states where slaves and slaveowners were rarer.
You are right that for many people it was more a matter of fear than of opportunity. But we were talking about elites, about people who owned many slaves and those who aspired to own slaves.
Further down the social ladder thinking was different and there was that fear of being submerged in the slave population or destroyed by rioting slaves or ex-slaves.
Rather than gain from the slave-labor system, whites looked more to secession to preserve what they had from the hostility of sectional bigots in the North, esp. among the literate classes who were the supporters of John Brown, and who actively and openly wanted to see a race war submerge the white South in blood, flames, and universal slaughter, just like Haiti. Fehrenbach points out that Northerners seem never to have gotten this point -- that just the threat of a race war was absolutely a declaration of war on the whole society: it caused people to turn violent instantly, and it brought to life, like a chemistry-lab demonstration of violent flammability, the 103-year spectacle of Southern lynch-law, hitherto unheard-of.
In the first sentence the Northerners "actively and openly want" a "race war," and in the long second sentence you say they just never got the point. Few people in the North wanted any sort of "race war." Some just wanted what they saw as liberty and justice. And Southerners reacted to what they saw as the probable consequences of emancipation.
While lynching certainly was characteristic of the post-Civil War South, I don't think you can quite argue that such mob violence was "unheard-of" before the Civil War. But it wasn't a racial phenomenon before the war in the way that it was afterwards.
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