quoting BJK: "I emphasize Fire Eater because those were the people who lead the charge for secession, so their opinions matter here more than most.****"
FLT-bird: "No it doesn’t.
The laws of economics have not changed in the last 150 years.
High margins attract competitors which drive down those margins.
Always has been the case, always will be the case.
Everybody could see the enormous power of industrialization by the mid 19th century."
You'd think, right?
But in fact, that's not what Confederates said at the time, which means you've let your sympathies and overactive imagination overrule basic historical facts.
quoting BJK: "Yes, Rhett did complain (falsely) that:
'The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected three-fourths of them are expended at the North.'****"
FLT-bird:
"No, he was correct about that." Rhett's and other similar complaints (i.e., Calhoun's) are only possibly valid if by "the North" they meant every state North of South Carolina.
Otherwise, the facts show that Federal spending was pretty well distributed whenever it didn't outright favor the South.
FLT-bird on Rhett's address: "He did not say industrialization no, but others could see what was coming.
It wasn’t some far off mystery."
But those "others" were not political leaders or newspaper editorialists, they were industrialists themselves and most likely Unionists.
FLT-bird: "The Upper South was rapidly industrializing by 1861...and slavery was starting to die out just as it had in other places that industrialized"
Sure, and even more so in Border States like Maryland & Missouri.
But the cause for slavery's decline in Border States was not "industrialization", but rather precisely the prosperity and huge demand for slaves in Deep South cotton states.
Cotton almost literally sucked slaves out of Border States where slavery was less profitable and into cotton states where it was hugely profitable.
At the same time many Northern immigrants moved into states like Maryland and Missouri, thus tilting the pro-slavery electorate more & more towards abolition.
That's why those states refused to join the Confederacy, even in the face of declared war on the United States.
FLT-bird: "Rhett was also correctly pointing out just how miserable things were for people at the bottom of the social order up North....and he was right about that.
The complete lack of tort law, OSHA, child labor laws, workmen’s comp, etc etc led to horrible abuses - the backlash against with spawned the labor unions which still plague much of the North."
True enough and an active debate at the time -- whether Northern factory workers or Southern slaves were worse treated?
A case could be made for either, but the key fact remained that Northern workers always could, and often did, pick up and move on to better lives elsewhere, out West for example.
FLT-bird: "The Southerners could cite a long train of abuses and usurpations which they detailed at great length in 1861 and which they had been detailing for quite some time."
But it was totally bogus because nothing, noooooothing in 1860 remotely resembled conditions in 1776.
What those alleged "abuses" really amounted to was Democrats being voted out of power in 1860.
Just as today, loss of power drove Democrats berserk.
FLT-bird: "The Founders believed that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
That was THE central point of the Declaration of Secession....err...Independence (same thing)."
"Consent of the governed" means constitutional elections, which were held in 1860 just as they had been in every election year for the past 72 years.
No Founder ever proposed or supported unilateral unapproved declaration of secession at pleasure, but that is just what Fire Eaters did in 1860-1.
FLT-bird: "So did this guy:
“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better." -- 1848 young Congressman Abe Lincoln on Texas.
In fact, of the four living former Presidents -- Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore & Pierce, only Virginian Tyler thought there was an unrestricted "right of secession".
Neither Democrat President Buchanan nor Republican Lincoln believed Fire Eaters had legitimate cause to secede, but both believed the Union could not stop them militarily, until, unless, except when... secessionists started war and that would make it a rebellion which the Union could constitutionally defeat.
FLT-bird: "Yes Yes I know.
Here is where you’ll come up with some desperate excuses as to why the plain words Lincoln spoke then did not mean what they actually meant and there were all kinds of conditions - which he errrr....forgot to name - that rendered the Southern states doing EXACTLY what he himself advocated a dozen years prior somehow not legitimate.
Go ahead.
I’m waiting for it with baited breath."
Sorry, FRiend, but facts are facts, regardless of whether you like them.
Even the young, naïve Congressman Lincoln in 1848 added a restrainer, "having the power", implying he did not expect every declaration of independence to go peacefully.
But in his March 1861 Inaugural President Lincoln did promise to remain peaceful with secessionists, saying they could only have a war if they themselves started it.
Confederate editorials of the time called that a "declaration of war".
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You’d think, right?
But in fact, that’s not what Confederates said at the time, which means you’ve let your sympathies and overactive imagination overrule basic historical facts.****
BS. That IS what many were saying at the time. Its just too inconvenient for you PC Revisionists to admit it. The power of industrialization was evident to just about everybody in the West...indeed in the whole world...by the mid 19th century.
Rhett’s and other similar complaints (i.e., Calhoun’s) are only possibly valid if by “the North” they meant every state North of South Carolina.
Otherwise, the facts show that Federal spending was pretty well distributed whenever it didn’t outright favor the South.****
Simply false as numerous sources I’ve posted already amply show.
But those “others” were not political leaders or newspaper editorialists, they were industrialists themselves and most likely Unionists.****
False. On both counts false. Thought leaders in the South well understood the power of industrialization. Look no further than the rapidly industrialization of the Upper South that was taking place at the time.
But the cause for slavery’s decline in Border States was not “industrialization”, but rather precisely the prosperity and huge demand for slaves in Deep South cotton states.
Cotton almost literally sucked slaves out of Border States where slavery was less profitable and into cotton states where it was hugely profitable.****
It was a combination of the two. Industrialization had steadily killed off slavery everywhere else in the Western world though including the Northern states in the first half of the 19th century. So it was not just the profitability of cotton production in the Deep South that was killing off slavery in the Upper South.
At the same time many Northern immigrants moved into states like Maryland and Missouri, thus tilting the pro-slavery electorate more & more towards abolition.
That’s why those states refused to join the Confederacy, even in the face of declared war on the United States.*****
The border states generally tried to stay out of it because they feared internal strife among their own people. Missouri can well be argued to have seceded. Kentucky less so. Maryland was occupied before they had a chance to decide.
True enough and an active debate at the time — whether Northern factory workers or Southern slaves were worse treated?
A case could be made for either, but the key fact remained that Northern workers always could, and often did, pick up and move on to better lives elsewhere, out West for example.****
Some certainly did. This was a big motivation for the Homestead Act. It was a means for factory owners to get cheap labor from Europe since owning land in Europe for those who were not rich was the impossible dream. So they could get people to come and work and live in really terrible conditions for a period of time until they could scrape together a little money and set out for the frontier to acquire their own plot of land.
Slavery was awful. The lot of industrial workers was awful (particularly those in company towns who were paid in scrip or those killed and mangled in horribly unsafe factories or those who died in horrible tenement housing with no sanitation). It can well be argued that the lot of industrial workers was worse. They died at a much higher rate than slaves did just as indentured servants before them died at a much higher rate than slaves did. If you don’t own it, you are much less likely to take care of it - that applies to human property just as with other forms of property.
But it was totally bogus because nothing, noooooothing in 1860 remotely resembled conditions in 1776.
What those alleged “abuses” really amounted to was Democrats being voted out of power in 1860. Just as today, loss of power drove Democrats berserk.***
That’s certainly debatable. Most Southerners felt it was as bad. Yes they had representation unlike in 1775. On the other hand they were in the minority and the taxes laid on them were vastly higher than the taxes that were being laid on the colonies by Parliament.
“Consent of the governed” means constitutional elections, which were held in 1860 just as they had been in every election year for the past 72 years.
No Founder ever proposed or supported unilateral unapproved declaration of secession at pleasure, but that is just what Fire Eaters did in 1860-1.*****
Sure they did.
In his book Life of Webster Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge writes, “It is safe to say that there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton to Clinton and Mason, who did not regard the new system as an experiment from which each and every State had a right to peaceably withdraw.”
To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can only exist by the sword?” Alexander Hamilton
“The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.” – Thomas Jefferson
“If any State in the Union will declare that it prefers separation” over “union,” “I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate.’” Thomas Jefferson
And in anticipation of the next attempt to dodge....no neither Jefferson nor any other Founder prior to ratification of the Constitution said states could only secede with the permission of others or if some arbitrary standard of abuses against them had been reached etc etc. They would hardly have said that considering they had just unilaterally seceded from the British Empire 8-9 years earlier.
In fact, of the four living former Presidents — Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore & Pierce, only Virginian Tyler thought there was an unrestricted “right of secession”.
Neither Democrat President Buchanan nor Republican Lincoln believed Fire Eaters had legitimate cause to secede, but both believed the Union could not stop them militarily, until, unless, except when... secessionists started war and that would make it a rebellion which the Union could constitutionally defeat.
Most presidents in fact DID think states had the right to secede.
“...the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a majority of the people of the Union, nor from that of a majority of the States.... Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own VOLUNTARY act” (Federalist 39).’ James Madison
‘It is indeed true that the term “states” ... means the people composing those political societies, in their highest sovereign capacity.... it follows of necessity that there can be no tribunal, above their authority, to decide, in the last resort, whether the compact made by them be violated; and consequently, that, as the parties to it, they must themselves decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of sufficient magnitude to require their interposition Report on the Virginia Resolutions written by James Madison
[the Constitution would be ratified by the people]”not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct independent States to which they respectively belong..”[not by the whole people] James Madison, the Federalist Papers #39
“If they had foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.” (The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky, 1992, reprint, p. 131)
“If there had been a desire on the part of any single State to withdraw from the compact at any time while the number of States was limited to the original thirteen, I do not suppose there would have been any to contest the right, no matter how much the determination might have been regretted.” (The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, p. 130)
President John Tyler likewise believed a state had the right to leave the Union. So did President John Quincy Adams who tried to organize the New England states to secede in the 1820’s.
The Northern Federalists’ Hartford Convention declared in 1814 that a state had the right to secede in cases of “absolute necessity” (Alan Brinkley, Richard Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams, American History: A Survey, Eighth Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991, p. 230).
On March 2, 1861 a constitutional amendment was proposed that would have outlawed secession (See H. Newcomb Morse, “The Foundations and Meaning of Secession,” Stetson Law Review, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 419—36). This is very telling, for it proves that Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional under the Tenth Amendment. It would not have proposed an amendment outlawing secession if the Constitution already prohibited it.
Sorry, FRiend, but facts are facts, regardless of whether you like them.
Even the young, naïve Congressman Lincoln in 1848 added a restrainer, “having the power”, implying he did not expect every declaration of independence to go peacefully.
LOL! Really weak attempt. Lincoln endorsed the tradition American view that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed and that if any group of people (especially a sovereign state) no longer consented, it had the right to throw off the rule of the central government and become independent. He didn’t say “if they manage to win a bloody war to do it”. It would hardly be a right or a “principle to liberate the world” then. It would simply be a fact on the ground.
But in his March 1861 Inaugural President Lincoln did promise to remain peaceful with secessionists, saying they could only have a war if they themselves started it.****
Then he set about doing exactly that - ie starting it. He did so without congressional authorization. What Southerners called a declaration of war was Lincoln proclaiming he would collect taxes from them BY FORCE. You can’t tax somebody you do not rule over.