Whether or not one supports or opposes secession depends a great deal on whose ox is being gored. New England Federalists advocated disunion with the Essex Junto and the Hartford Convention and were roasted as "traitors" by the grandfathers of those who later would defend the idea of secession to their last breaths. Meanwhile the abolitionists who later waged "holy war" for the Union were originally disunionists themselves.
James Buchanan, the perfect, stainless Jacksonian Democrat who allegedly represented "the Old Republic," before Lincoln was ever inaugurated, denounced secession as illegal. He didn't do anything about it, but he was a lame duck at the time.
It absolutely astounds me how people can think that any country should be expected to do absolutely nothing while one half of it declares it its intention to leave. I know of no country that would stand by and let this happen, yet Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans are considered monsters because they didn't do this?
The Constitution provides for the suspension of habeas corpus in cases of national emergency. The sundering of the country certainly fits that description. Also, it just so happens that the US Constitution defines "treason" as: "waging war against the United States or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." It's strange how such sticklers for "strict Constitutionalism" never see that their beloved heroes were by the Constitution's own definition traitors to the United States of America.
It is indeed bizarre to see American "conservatives" attacking capitalism with rhetoric that could have come from Karl Marx (indeed, Calhoun's rhetoric was very similar to Marx's). So you're against industrialism, capitalism, and economic self-sufficiency, eh? Well I hope you're happy with Barack Obama, the most anti-capitalist, anti-industrial President since Thomas Jefferson. Are our factories and our infrastructure not rusting fast enough for you people?
Finally, as for "northernizing" the South, the North of the period was far less radical than many "palaeos" seem to think. Yes, there were radicals among the abolitionists who wanted to do away with marriage for the same reason they wanted to do away with slavery. But not all opponents of slavery were radicals. Some were merely moralists who didn't like being forced to be implicated in something they sincerely felt was wrong, and any criticism of which was often answered by a lynch rope, a destroyed press, or tar and feathers. These were the same people who supported blue laws, temperance, and prohibition, and who opposed gambling and prostitution (and polygamy). To broadly brand every single opponent of slavery as a "new age" Communist freak is to libel thousands of people whom one has never known. And this by the same people who complain about being stereotyped as racists!
The "Old South" was not the South we grew up in. It was feudal and made life very hard for hardscrabble yeoman farmers just as it did for Blacks. Its religion was not Fundamentalist but cultural, with a definite leaning toward liturgical churches . . . very different from everything we have ever experienced about the South ourselves. In fact, Fundamentalist actually began in large Northern cities where churches and ministers fought back against liberals and modernists.
The South the North tried to create was based on Puritan New England, and it is this Puritanized Biblicist culture that today's liberals actually hate so much. Really, who gives a flying flip about "the ways of our ancestors" as opposed to the Objective Truth about G-d and what He wants from all of us? Nobody but henotheistic civilizationist "palaeos" and Communist "national liberation" terrorists, that's who!
Those awful "radicals" who came to the South set up the common school as it had been known in New England. And this was before John Dewey, remember. Though officially non-sectarian it was in fact Evangelical Protestant, with Bible reading, prayers, and hymns. And there was no federal control of this education!
Finally, please note that until now I have said practically nothing about racial issues at all. But here is where we come to the true psychosis at the heart of all "neo-Confederates" (or as I call them, "neo-Cons!"): these people insist that Black people are radically different from whites and have no place in this country; indeed, that their very presence here befouls the earth and air. They are nothing but Profound Left Wing Intellectuals who are only good for spewing Marxist dialectics and spreading Maoism. But just who was it who brought all these "terrible people" over here in the first place??? That's right--these same neo-Confederates! They subjected Blacks to a ninety year reign-of-terror after Reconstruction ended and hate their living guts today, but before "the late unpleasantness" they couldn't have enough of them! They brought them in from Africa and the West Indies as long as it was legal, then smuggled them in illegally after that. They surrounded themselves with these "Communist trouble-makers" on the plantations and then did everything they could not only to keep them, but to spread slavery through every state and territory of the Union. But the minute they lost them they regarded them as monsters of defilement who should not even be here to begin with! How in the name of all that is rational does one reason like that? It's crazy! It's nuts!!!
If Abraham Lincoln was the proto-Obama, then so was George Washington. It's time to stop damning the man who kept the United States united because today we face a totally radical government. Hey . . . I'm ideologically anti-secession (comes from being descended from Southern Unionists), but I'm seriously thinking of endorsing it today! As with the early Federalist secessionists, whether or not one advocates that step is dependent on what the government is up to at the time. In 1860 and '61 seven states seceded before Lincoln and those "awful" Republicans had done a thing. They left because they lost an election and it looked like the plot to nationalize slavery wasn't going to pan out!
When I was young (and I live in the Upper South) Lincoln was revered, and it had nothing to do with the "civil rights movement." He was revered because he saved our country from dissolution. I'm sick and tired of the attacks on him being leveled by hypocrites.
Excellent post.