Posted on 04/30/2008 9:12:42 PM PDT by BnBlFlag
I am assuming you know the English language.
Reading the Constitution as written is NOT my “interpretation”.
But consider the often heard claims that slavery would have been abolished "sooner or later," the secession crisis would have been peacefully resolved "someway or other," or the two sections would have reunited "sooner or later" if everyone -- Northerners in particular -- kept their heads.
The evidence you bring forward indicates that people -- Southerners in particular -- weren't "keeping their heads" and probably couldn't. If that's the case, then it's a blow to those rationalistic or pseudo-rationalistic arguments that everything could be resolved rationally.
Thanks, non. I don't know anything about an AOL site. I simply rely on figures which are common knowledge. If you want to recalculate them from the data (available at the UVA census site), lentulus, go ahead.
The numbers might be different if we were to (somehow) count instead the number of suffragans who owned slaves, or simply the number of individuals who owned them.
You do realize, lentulus, that you get very different figures if you use individuals (men, woman, and children) or voters as the numerator (or is it the denominator? I was never that good at math).
The percentage of slave owning individuals is always going to be watered down by large numbers of dependent wives children who would in the normal course of things own few slaves or other property.
The figure for voters might be closer to that for families. But if there were serious restrictions on the suffrage, it could end up being a higher figure than that for families.
The figure for families or households may have problems, but it's a better bet than the others, because it can indicate people who were intimately tied into the slave owning system without owning a slave themselves: dependent wives and children, younger sons, older relatives who lived together with their niece's or nephew's family.
So far as I can make out a "suffragan" is a "a "bishop who assists another bishop." If there's some relevance in the number of auxiliary bishops who owned slaves out of the total number of auxiliary bishops, now's the time to make the case.
There was demographic significance to that threshold, by the way, insofar as a single slave, or two slaves, tended to live with the family in the house and work side by side with family members, whereas larger numbers were associated with institutionalized arrangements (quarters, factories, workshops, etc.). Which implies further that there was a middle ground not discussed by any of our sources, in which some whites lived with slaves in a far more personalizing situation that would tend to inoculate them against the kind of group anxiety and hysteria about slave revolts that were common in the rest of society; but these slaveholders of "family slaves" were a splinter group.
That is an interesting hypothesis, and something you might want to explore. Geography probably played an important role.
The farmer or tradesman who had one slave and lived in the highlands where there were few slaves or slave owners would have a different view than another owner of a single slave who lived among the plantation slaves and planters of fertile lowlands.
The aspirational hypothesis comes into play. The highlander might see his future prospects tied to the development of handicrafts or manufactures and the prosperity of small farmers, while the lowlander would inevitably attach his hopes to cotton exports and slavery, to buying bottom land and field hands.
Both our highland and our lowland slave owner might have little fear from their own slaves. But the lowlander might worry about the neighbors' many slaves and the highlander might not have as much to fear.
There were reasons of politics, reasons of race and pride, reasons of fear of both peaceful labor competition and armed violence, that impelled Southerners who did not own slaves to take up arms in defense of their States against Northern armies pouring into them, and the Abolitionist and sectionalist destroyers who stood behind those armies, ordering them into the South.
If you just want to make a case for your thesis, you stop there and make the Northerners the aggressors in the conflict. If you really want to understand and do justice to all concerned that's hardly the last word. You'd have to take Northern fears into account as well. But I suspect you just want to see one side of the story.
Feel free to look them all up.
He is only ONE of the founding fathers anyhow.
But the one single one who was most responsible for creating the Constitution. What you're actually saying is "What the hell did he know?"
But as LG has pointed out, obviously the issue didnt seem important enough to prohibit, and you know why?
Because neither Madison or any of the other founders thought anyone would be dumb enough to believe unilateral secession was legal?
Because the states would have never ratified the Constitution if secession had been prohibited.
And for the umpteenth time, secession isn't prohibited. Unilateral secession is.
You guys sure do put your spin on it.
that was the situation that the southland faced before secession, as the boot of the ELITIST DAMNyankee minority was on our ancestor's necks.
secession was the ONLY honorable choice.
had "lincoln, the tool of the elitists/TYRANT" chosen PEACE with the new dixie republic, a MILLION Americans would NOT have died NEEDLESSLY. further, the ONLY WINNERS in that war was the financial/business/social ELITES out of the industrial northeast;everyone else, north & south, LOST the war.
free dixie,sw
Time to take your medication ...
OK. let me change that to “the states would not have ratified the Constitution if UNILATERAL secession had been prohibited.”
John C. Calhoun, one of the greatest and most brilliant statesman that ever lived believed in unilateral secession.
i never knew you had so much hair.
laughing AT you & the rest of the "clue-LESS, DAMNyankee coven of LOSERS/bigots/fools/antisemites/WEIRDOS".
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
Quote please. Specifically stating the unilateral nature of the secession.
John C. Calhoun, one of the greatest and most brilliant statesman that ever lived believed in unilateral secession.
Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln - all statesmen at least as great and as brilliant as Calhoun - did not. And most of those believed secession of any kind to be illegal and unconstitutional, at least Madison recognized that secession with the consent of the states was permissible. Sorry, I'll take my statesmen over your one any time. Heck, even dim bulbs like James Buchanan recognized secession for what it was, rebellion. So how hard could it have been?
James Buchanan did not personally believe in secession, but he ALSO believed he did not have the authority to interfere with the states in that regard either, unlike the great APE who came after him, destroying the Constitution......
The great 'Ape'? God, you lost causers as so damned predictable. SO just out of curiosity is this supposed to be an example where you are "smoking" me?
But I digress. Quotes indicating that had unilateral not been allowed then the states would not have ratified the Constitution, please? Like I asked for?
Ask LG. He has all the documentation you need.
I never said “I” smoked you. I said LG smoked you.
Get it straight.
So if everything is up to lentulusgracchus then what purpose are you serving here again?
Don’t be a smart*ss, NS.
You know he has the documentation. I don’t. It is easier for him to pull it, than myself.
BOTH would DO/SAY ANYTHING to "get ahead". NEITHER had the morals of an alley-cat.
PITY that you DAMNyankees are so blind to the fact that he was only a tool of the elitists out of the NE.
free dixie,sw
swattie, by contrast, does have the morals -- and brains -- of an alley cat.
free dixie,sw
Hey, as long as you’re here, Watie, would you care to explain why you’ve attributed that alleged massacre to both your mother’s and your father’s side of your family tree at different times?
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