Posted on 03/10/2013 8:19:44 AM PDT by BroJoeK
Or perhaps the definition of 'unilateral' in the English-Confederate/Confederate-English dictionary is different?
“Similarly, since the purpose of secession was not to expand the rights of men, but rather to prevent any such possible expansion, secession cannot be morally justified by the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
Which of course, begs the question as to, “what was the purpose of secession?”
As we see today, the concept of an overarching federal government and history has shown a mostly untrammelled expansion of federal power.
Is this really the basis by which the Republic was founded? Or was there another principle? Governments are governed by the consent of the governed - if the people themselves vote not to be ruled by the state - then the state has lost the confidence of the people and must be released.
This happened in South Carolina and throughout the South. Peaceable votes held by the legislature to leave the United States are sufficient cause in and of itself to show that the present governmnet had lost the consent of the governed.
“Unilateral secession doesn’t work. It doesn’t provide an authoritative and accepted structure to settle things.”
And war does?
Good point. So why did the south start one?
I would argue that the right to rebel (i.e. take up arms and shed blood) is only justified by God (or under 'Natural Law) if you are rebelling from abuse, and as Madison put it 'Intolerable Abuse.'
I have yet to hear any of the Confederacy's 'Lost Cause' school defenders define what abuses they were suffering in 1860 that morally justified their rebellion and resort to arms and bloodshed at that point in time. Not a thing had been done to them at that point.
It is a question I have asked here for years and have never once got an answer that justified the Confederate States rebellion against the United States.
It always comes back to the point I try to make. It was the expansion of slavery which was an economic imperative to the Southern states, while the majority of the population of the North with the election of Lincoln on a platform that finally promised to stop the expansion of slavery. That is entirely what drove events.
Of course, for a decade or more before the events in 1860, many in the South knew that day would eventually come when the nation rejected slavery and had campaigned for disunion long before anyone had ever heard of Lincoln and there was no such thing as a Republican party.
It was no harm or abuse done to any state or citizen by the Federal government or any other state that caused the Civil War.
It was simply this. With the ascendancy of Republicans in congress and Lincoln to the presidency, they correctly saw the threat to their social and economic institutions, if slavery had been confined forever to the 15 states that then had slavery.
If expansion of slavery was blocked, both the economic and social order of those slave states, especially those in the deep south was in dire jeopardy.
If in the north some combination of powers at the time said, 'You can keep all of your railroads and iron forges and textile mills and other factories where you have them now. But you will never be able to build another in any other state, the situation could likely have been reversed... who knows.
But in the end, it all gets back to slavery.
The south offered to negotiate.
Reading your posts, I'm just not seeing any love for anything American since 1860!
You sound more like one of those Euro-jerks that hate anything American just because it's American or should I suggest one of those equally idiotic Skin Head jerks who hate this country just as much as you do and couldn't give one reason why other than the fact that they are total losers.
Yes, we have problems with our governments -- local, state and Federal. But hate such as you project?
No rational justification for that crap.
I think you are way too tied up in myths about your ancestors to be of any value in these debates.
There were 11 states in the Confederacy, therefore it was not unilateral.
So yes, South Carolina's secession was unilateral, after which it became a plurality of states.
Definition of PLURALITY 1 : the state of being plural : the state of being numerous : a large number or quantity 2: pluralism 1; also : a benefice held by pluralism 3 : a number greater than another : an excess of votes over those cast for an opposing candidate
Forget the 19th century, if you don’t have white hot disgust and/or hate for FedGov™ at this point then you are stupid, in denial or are not really a conservative.
Fine, then don't respond to my posts and I will not respond to yours.
In bad faith. You don’t start aggressive acts against the state and then say, “Hey, we can be friends (as long as you do things my way)”.
Wow, even with the dictionary you get it wrong. Having a bad decade cva?
Sure, and you have an inherent "right" to declare war on the United States.
And after you've been defeated and surrender unconditionally, you still have an inherent "right" to lie about the whole thing, claiming you were the innocent "victim" of some oppressive government.
And everyone else has the inherent right to laugh at your nonsense.
This happened in South Carolina and throughout the South. Peaceable votes held by the legislature to leave the United States are sufficient cause in and of itself to show that the present governmnet had lost the consent of the governed.
Not exactly. In South Carolina 60% of the governed were not allowed to vote, indeed were enslaved (almost all of them) to the 40% who could vote.
So you can't say "the people" or "the governed" voted to secede, only that the minority enslaving the majority voted to secede. Such a vote is inherently illegitimate.
Look at it this way. Suppose blond Americans launched a revolt and enslaved the rest of us, then announced that their revolt and enslavement was legitimate according to the principle of the Declaration of Independence because a majority of blonds voted for it. Would you buy that?
While just an intellectual game, it is my supposition if you could bring back the founders and after studying history that they missed for 200 years, they would be, to a man, appalled and would especially have hatred of Lincoln.
Lincoln didn’t “kill states rights”.
Sounds like a deal to me.
You and I are in agreement, oddly enough, that the death blow dealt to states’ rights by the WBTS and the legacy of Jim Crow is a great tragedy. These two things have to my mind irreparably tainted a concept that could have done a great deal to prevent the expansion of the federal government.
Where I am sure we differ is who bears the responsibility for the disrepute the concept is in with most Americans.
You, and the rest of the Lincoln Coven, spreading the myths about the Civil War, myths started in the progressive era, here on Free Republic do not forward the cause of states rights.
All those things are true. I don’t defend the Confederacy. But it’s colossally hypocritical for the United States to forcibly deny secession to its constituent entities when the U.S. was itself formed by secession from the British empire.
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