Posted on 12/24/2001 4:25:26 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
That being said I do believe that membership in the Union is voluntary and a state or states should be allowed to leave if they so choose. It ought to also be possible to expel a state if its behavior, policies or laws are viewed as unacceptable.
Secession was not the South's crime. Slavery was. No amount of latter-day reasoning and rationalization by Confederate apologists can erase the racist stain of slavery. The war was horrible but it was the price this country had to pay for slavery.
Ohhhh come on. Lincoln signed off on all the anti-black laws in his own state of Illinois when he was in the congress. No blacks could take up residency in Illie... They could pass through, but they couldn't stay. Lincoln wanted the western territories to be white!
BTW. Show me where Lincoln ever proposed or sponsored an amendment to guarantee slavery where it existed. I'd like to see your source for that. Such an amendment would have been redundant in the first place since the constitution already acknowledged the legality of slavery.
On 2 March 1861, the 36th U. S. Congress (minus, of course, the seven seceded states of the Deep South) passed by a two-thirds majority a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Had it been ratified by the requisite number of states before the war intervened and signed by President Lincoln (who looked favourably on it as a way to lure the Southern states back into the Union), the proposed 13th Amendment would have prohibited the U. S. government from ever abolishing or interfering with slavery in any state.
The proposed 13th Amendment reads: "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
Note well that this amendment was designed to be unrepealable (i.e. "No amendment shall be made . . . .") This gives the lie to claims that a righteous North went to war in 1861 to free the slaves. Moreover, it undermines the claim that the South seceded to preserve the institution of slavery. If that had been the South's goal, then what better guarantee did it need than an unrepealable amendment to the Constitution to protect slavery as it then existed?
All one has to do is read what Lincoln, himself, said about it. Any library has his first inaugural speech of May 4, 1861. In it, speaking of his intent and powers, Lincoln says, to collect the duties and imposts (taxes); but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.? Notice, no mention of slavery here.
However, near the end of his inaugural address, he did mention slavery. U.S. President Lincoln offered slavery to the States, which desired it forever. Two days earlier, on May 2, 1861, both houses of the U.S. Congress, after most of the Southern states had already withdrawn, passed by a two-thirds vote a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This Northern pro-slavery Amendment stated: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State. Source: U.S. Statutes at Large (1861) page 251.
The U.S. Congress had offered the Southern States slavery forever if they would just come back and continue paying the oppressive taxes.
Here's what U.S. President Lincoln had to say about the guarantee of slavery forever. From his inaugural speech again, I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held to service holding such a provision to now be implied Constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
And where did you get the factoid that Fort Sumter was a customs house?
You will note that the year 1860 was a nearly all time low for tariffs followed by a very steep rise to an all time high of 45% to pay for the Civil War. I would assume that nearly all of that increase was paid by citizens of the North. The fact is however, that the total federal take in taxes was meaningless it was so small. It simply had little or no impact on the average person in those days.
Ahhhh. The Republic platform and Lincoln ran on the Morrill tariff which raised taxes to an all time high. And of course the southern states would have paid the vast majority of them.
By their own words, they did not break over tariffs. They broke over the issue of slavery!
I suggest you read Jefferson Davis'First Inaugural Address"> Slavery is never mentioned, but he does say "An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities"
BTW, do you know of reliable surveys that show how a majority of Americans truly feel about the CSA flag? I don't mean some ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN survey of 17 Manhattanites, but a representative sampling of all Americans.
Your canned responses and cookie cutter posts are getting old.
Yes, that's right.
"It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the present movement at the south be called "secession" or "rebellion." The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning, they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude, by any name that implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, as much pride in, and reverence for, the history, and government, of their common country, as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments.
Accordingly they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented a sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is, that any state of the Union may, consistently with the national constitution, and therefore lawfully, and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other state. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is to thin to merit any notice..."
A. Lincoln 7/4/61
And it is still too thin to merit notice.
Walt
Davis also said:
"As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure thetenure of property in slaves. . . .
Emboldened by success' the theatre of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights ofthe Southern States was transferred to the Congress. . . . Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government' with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by al1 the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of those rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless' and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party' thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States... the productions in the South of cotton' rice' sugar' and tobacco' for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.'
--Jefferson Davis
The cause of the war was slavery, and anything of value you people might have to say is always going to be muted when you say otherwise.
Walt
Lee wrecked his army for offensive operations.
That seriously weakened the CSA's ability to resist. How much blame Lee directly bears for the failure of the CSA is hotly debated.
By any measure, Lee was a loser.
You yearn for the confederacy; Lee was instrumental in denying it to you.
Walt
They'll remain fresh as long as the myth of CSA honor, propriety or legality is put forward.
Most of what I use is on the 'net.
I guess as a lazy, indolent southerner, you are unable or unwilling to prove they don't represent the true record.
Like these:
"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States...
They have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
(from South Carolina Decl. of Secession)
"...[the Northern States] have united in the election of a man to high office of the President of the United States, whose opinions and purpose are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that the `Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction."
And here is what Texans thought of the Republican party:
"They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States."
--Texas Declaration of Secession.
The Mississippi secession convention began their declaration of causes with the statement, "Our cause is thoroughly identified with the institution of African slavery."
Soon to be CSA congressman Lawrence Keitt, speaking in the South Carolina secession convention, said, "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it."
"As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. . . .
Emboldened by success' the theatre of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress. . . . Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government' with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by al1 the States in common' whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of those rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless' and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party' thus organized' succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States... the productions in the South of cotton' rice' sugar' and tobacco' for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.'
--Jefferson Davis
From the Confederate Constitution: Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3: "The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government."
From the Georgia Constitution of 1861:"The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves." (This is the entire text of Article 2, Sec. VII, Paragraph 3.)
From the Alabama Constitution of 1861: "No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country." (This is the entire text of Article IV, Section 1 (on slavery).)
Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
Alfred P. Aldrich, South Carolina legislator from Barnwell: "If the Republican party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule -- it is a question of political and social existence." [Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear, pp. 141-142.]
Senator Hunter of VA. During the Negro Soldier Bill debate on March 7, 1865, the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS notes him as stating his opinion of the Bill as follows:
"When we had left the old Government he had thought we had gotten rid forever of the slavery agitation....But to his surprise he finds that this Government assumes the power to arm the slaves, which involves also the power of enamcipation....It was regarded as a confession of despair and an abandonment of the ground upon which we had seceded from the old Union. We had insisted that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery, and upon the coming into power of the party who it was known would assume and exercise that power, we seceded....and we vindicated ourselves against the accusations of the abolitionists by asserting that slavery was the best and happiest condition of the negro. Now what does this proposition admit? The right of the central Government to put slaves into the militia, and to emancipate at least so many as shall be placed in the military service. It is a clear claim of the central Government to emancipate the slaves."
"If we are right in passing this measure we were wrong in denying to the old government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery and to emancipate the slaves."
"He now believed....that arming and emancipating the slaves was an abandonment of this contest - an abandonment of the grounds upon which it had been undertaken."
Now I'd say based on this selection that the cause of the war was slavery.
If you don't like my cut and paste record, you need to show it is wrong.
But I guess you are just too lazy to do that.
Walt
Some reflection might give you a different perspective.
"What is now combatted, is the position that secession consistent with the Constitution -- is lawful, and peaceful. It is not contended that there is any express law for it; and nothing should ever be implied as law, which leads to unjust or absurd consequences. The nation purchased, with money, the countries out of which several of these states were formed. Is it just that they shall go off without leave, and without refunding? The nation paid very large sums, (in the aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to relieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is it just that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return? The nation is now in debt for money applied to the benefit of the so-called seceding states, in common with the rest. Is it just, either that creditors shall go unpaid, or the remaining States pay for the whole?
A part of the present national debt was contracted to pay the old debts of Texas. Is it just that she shall leave, pay no part of it herself?
Again, if one state may secede, so may another; and then when all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts. Is this quite just to creditors? Did we notify them of this sage view of ours when we borrowed there money? If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace, it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms terms upon which they will promise to remain...
If all the states, save one, should assert the power to drive that one out of the Union, it is presumed the whole class of seceder politicians would at once deny the power, and denounce the act as the greatest outrage upon State rights. But suppose that precisely the same act, instead of being called "driving the one out," should be called "the seceding of the others from that one," it would exactly what the seceders claim to do; unless, indeed, they make the point, that the one, because it is a minority, may rightfully do, what the others because they are a majority may not rightfully do. These politicians are subtle, and profound, on the rights of minorities. They are not so partial to that power, which made the Constitution, and speaks from the preamble, calling itself "We the People."
A. Lincoln, 7/4/61
The framers met to modify the Articles of Confederation because they were a failure. The document that superceded the Articles created a permanent union. Many resisted this, but finally acquiesed because nothing else would work.
Walt
I suggest you read Jefferson Davis 'First Inagural Address'
And I suggest you read the Declarations of the Causes of Secession published by South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. Then tell me it wasn't about slavery.
Yeah, there's a lithograph I've seen that shows Bearegard's representatives coming out to the fort; there's just a small door and steps. It could only handle small boats. The lies these people tell just get more shrill and fantastic every day.
I don't think they get out much.
The way they act reminds me of the way the Orc army swarms out to attack the Fellowship of the Ring. ;-)
Walt
False.
"What makes emphasis on the tariff as a cause for secession particularly absurd is that the votes to pass the Morrill Tariff did not exist in Congress until *after* the secessionist Senators and Representatives resigned. More generally, an emphasis on economic (in the narrow sense) issues as an explanation for secession is thoroughly misguided for the reasons given by Allen Nevins more than a half century ago in *The Ordeal of the Union*: "One fact needs emphatic statement: of all the monistic explanations for the drift to war, that based upon supposed economic causes is the flimsiest. The theory was sharply rejected at the time by so astute an observer as Alexander H. Stephens. South Carolina, he wrote his brother on New Year's Day, 1861 was seceding from a tariff 'which is just what her own Senators and members of Congress made it.' As for the charges of consolidation and despotism made by some Carolinians, he thought they arose from peevishness, rather than a calm analysis of facts. 'The truth is, the South, almost in mass, has voted, I think, for every measure of general legislation that has passed both houses and become law for the last ten years.' The South, far from groaning under tyranny, had controlled the government almost from its beginning, and Stephens believed that its only real grievance lay in the Northern refusal to return fugitive slaves and to stop the antislavery agitation.
'All other complaints are founded on threatened dangers which may never come, and which I feel very sure would be averted if the South would pursue a judicious and wise course.'
Stephens was right. It was true that the whole tendency of federal legislation 1842 to 1860 was toward free trade; true that the tariff in force when secession began was largely Southern- made; true that it was the lowest tariff the country had known since 1816; true that it cost a nation of thirty million people but sixty million dollars in indirect revenue; true that without secession no new tariff law, obnoxious to the Democratic Party, could have been passed before 1863--if then. "In the official explanations which one Southern State after another published for its secession, economic grievances are either omitted entirely or given minor positions. There were few such supposed grievances which the agricultural states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota did not share with the South--and they never threatened to secede. Charles A. Beard finds the tap-root of the war in the resistance of the planter interest to Northern demands enlarging the old Hamilton-Webster policy. The South was adamant in standing for 'no high protective tariffs, no ship subsidies, no national banking and currency system; in short, none of the measures which business enterprise deemed essential to its progress.'
But the Republican platform in 1856 was silent on the tariff; in 1860, it carried a milk-and-water statement on the subject which Western Republicans took, mild as it was, with a wry face; the incoming President was little interested in the tariff; and any harsh legislation was impossible. Ship subsidies were not an issue in the campaign of 1860. Neither were a national banking system and a national currency system. They were not mentioned in the Republican platform nor discussed by party debaters. The Pacific Railroad was advocated both by the Douglas Democrats and the Republicans; and it is noteworthy that Seward and Douglas were for building both a Northern and a Southern line. In short, the divisive economic issues are easily exaggerated. At the same time, the unifying economic factors were both numerous and powerful. North and South had economies which were largely complementary. It was no misfortune to the South that Massachusetts cotton mills wanted its staple, and that New York ironmasters like Hewitt were eager to sell rails dirt-cheap to Southern railway builders; and sober businessmen on both sides, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, were the men most anxious to keep the peace and hold the Union together." Nevins,
*The Ordeal of the Union* quoted on pp. 212-213 of Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.), *The Causes of the American Civil War* (Boston: D. C. Heath 1961). In view of these facts, and in view of the fact that Southern pamphlets on the secession issue *invariably* emphasized the alleged danger to slavery represented by Lincoln and said comparatively little about economics (anyone who doubts this is invited to read Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., *Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861* [University of North Carolina Press 1996])
--why have so many people emphasized issues like the tariff? I would say there are three reasons: (1) It was a much more respectable justification for Southerners after the war than "we seceded because we believed--rightly or wrongly--that Lincoln's election would be a menace to slavery." (For the same reason the tariff "explanation" of secession was often used by Confederate representatives in Great Britain *during* the war.) (2) The view of the South as the victim of Northern exploitation seemed to fit what happened *after* the war, when Northern capitalism reigned supreme and the South was very poor. It seemed logical to many people that this was what the South had seceded to resist and the North had fought to bring about. What tended to be forgotten is that in 1860 the South was wealthier than most nations in the world; that in per capita income of its *white* population it was about equal to the North; that it was making considerable progress in industrialization; and that Northern capitalists and bankers, so far from being determined to crush the South, were generally the most pro-Southern element in the Northern population. It was largely secession and the ensuing war which brought about the economic results Southerners later claimed they seceded to prevent. (3) Finally, the economic explanation of the war fit in well with vulgarized Marxism--something which influenced a considerable number of non-Marxists from the Progressive Era onward. "
-from the ACW moderated newsgroup.
Listen, check out what you post; don't go with what you -think-. You obviously have some really skewed ideas--ideas when can easily be refuted by looking at any search engine and plugging in words like "republican", "platform", and "Morrill."
It took me ten seconds to find this.
Walt
When you think about it, what sense would it make to put the customs post in an army fort 2 or 3 miles away from the docks where the customs duties are collected? But these people don't stop and think about it. Logic means nothing to them.
;-)
Walt
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