Posted on 05/23/2003 1:15:02 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
An excerpt from the Georgia Declaration of Secession follows --
In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects.
Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.
But when these reasons ceased they were no less clamorous for Government protection, but their clamors were less heeded-- the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.
All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success...
Huh?
An excerpt from The Mythical Lincoln, by Thomas DiLorenzo --
Actually no, it couldn't have. It was to be inserted as an unamendable provision under Article V.
"Only one attempt to amend Article V was among the select group of six proposed amendments that was actually passed by Congress and defeated by the states.[Note 2] It is the so-called Corwin amendment. Without its preamble it read:
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.
Congress adopted this proposal on March 2, 1861. It is substantively, although somewhat covertly, concerned with slavery. It proposes to protect slave states from congressional interference. But it can rightly be considered an amendment to Article V because, if ratified, it would significantly and expressly have curtailed the federal amending power. Moreover, as originally adopted, Article V included an express limitation that prevented the abolition of slavery by amendment until 1808. The Corwin amendment would have renewed the limitation in perpetuity.
The Corwin amendment is ambiguous on the question whether it precludes an amendment directly abolishing slavery, or merely precludes amendments that authorize Congress to abolish slavery. The former would constitute the entrenchment, but not the self-entrenchment, of slavery; even under its stringent interpretation, the Corwin amendment did not (explicitly) bar its own repeal.
Orfield counts 14 proposed amendments that would somehow have precluded the abolition of slavery. Only the Corwin amendment passed Congress.[Note 3] Four years and one Civil War after passing the Corwin amendment, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, which was ratified by the states. Needless to say, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment preempted the movement to ratify the Corwin amendment. However, the Corwin amendment had only been validly ratified by two states (Ohio, Maryland). Illinois attempted to ratify it, but probably did so defectively by voting to ratify it in a state constitutional convention that happened to be in session in 1861.[Note 4]
Incidentally, the Corwin amendment and the Thirteenth Amendment were the only proposed amendments ever signed by the President. James Buchanan signed the Corwin amendment two days before leaving office for Abraham Lincoln, in a desperate eleventh-hour effort to avert the Civil War. Lincoln signed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but thinking he erred he notified Congress. The Senate declared the signature unnecessary and not to be a precedent. When the Twelfth Amendment was still in Congress, a Senate resolution to submit it to the President (Jefferson) was defeated. Before and after the Corwin amendment Congress realized that the President need not sign, and cannot veto, a constitutional amendment.[Note 5]"
The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/app1.htm
Much as I would like to continue this very interesting dialogue, I gotta scoot. Freegards.
Who'd be national security advisor if Lincoln hadn't kept America together? It wouldn't be a woman born in Georgia or Alabama (or whereve Condie's from) --- and, in any event, a black woman born down there wouldn't be eligible for high office even in the confederacy)
...
It's pure speculation to try to second guess what America would be like if Lincoln had not forced the south back into the union.
Many economists agree that slavery was well on it's way into the dustbin of history at the start of the Civil War. Whether you call them slaves or "proletarians in worker's paradise," slavery is still unsustainable, as the Communists have learned.
After a few years, most likely the Confederate states could have rejoined the union after coming to an agreement on their issues. Slavery was never an issue until Lincoln tried to hitch his wagon to the abolitionist movement in order to support his failing war efforts.
If I recall my history correctly, the anti-conscription protests escalated into civil strife that killed around 1,000 people in New York City.
I have been meaning to read L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach." He wrote a what-if book based on this topic. Perhaps I should head to the library tomorrow...
Not entirely. One thing is for sure, The South would not be in the Union -=- and the nation would be poorer for that fact.
If you go on to read the rest, you find that there were three basic motives driving secession: the denial of the western territories to slavery, the refusal of the northern states to return runaway slaves, and the election of the abolition party to control of the federal government.
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state.
The immediate cause of secession is Lincoln, the abolitionist. DiLorenzo may say that Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but Georgia saw him differently.
We had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it; how, in relation to slavery, was the question then demanding solution. This state of facts gave form and shape to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North and the conflict began. Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South. We had shed our blood and paid our money for its acquisition; we demanded a division of it on the line of the Missouri restriction or an equal participation in the whole of it.
The greatest issue driving secession was control of the western territories.
The North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future time. It was the announcement of her purpose to appropriate to herself all the public domain then owned and thereafter to be acquired by the United States. The claim itself was less arrogant and insulting than the reason with which she supported it. That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists.
They understood that denying slavers the right to westward expansion -as slavers- would undercut them and eventually bring about the end of slavery in the territories where it already was in place.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends....[I assume that refers to the collapse of the Whig party]... Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery and to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. ...[That would be the rise of the Republicans]... This is the party to whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded. ...[Lincoln}...
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees it its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers. The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization.
They go on to complain at length that the northerners are refusing to return runaway slaves, or to punish the underground railroad that is sheltering them.
And then finally: Such are the opinions and such are the practices of the Republican party, who have been called by their own votes to administer the Federal Government under the Constitution of the United States. We know their treachery; ....
...because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides. To avoid these evils we resume the powers which our fathers delegated to the Government of the United States, and henceforth will seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security, and tranquillity.
They understood that having the abolition party in control of the federal government would ultimately bring about the end of their way of life, and they were probably right.
There are conflicts that are just going to be settled by arms, and this was one. The other Articles are even more explicit than this one in their defense of their peculiar institution. They were right in believing that they could no longer coexist with abolitionists. They were right in believing that they would never rest easy with abolitionists in the White House, and if they wanted to save their institution they had no choice but to secede.
The Whigs held many of the same opinions economically as did the Republicans, but they were not a threat; they may have opposed slavery but they were not sworn to end it. The Republicans were. That was all the difference.
It is one thing to argue the legalities of secession, and the constitutionality of a war to prevent secession. It is an interesting exercise. But that the war was about slavery, at least from the southern point of view, should not be in doubt, and that Lincoln was viewed in the south as the number one threat to slavery, even if Di Lorenzo doesn't see it, should likewise not be in any doubt.
There is a small irony here. For Lincoln it is about preserving the union, and he was willing to compromise on slavery to achieve it. For the south, it was about slavery, and they correctly understood that compromise or no, with Republicans in the White House, and expansion west cut off, they must secede or see their way of life overturned.
Why is that certain? Economic ties would have drawn the South back toward some form of free trade zone or federation. And once slavery was gone, there would be no barrier to those states being readmitted to the U.S.
My hat is off to all of you, my knowledge has grown to the point that I now need to do some reading up on the subject.
I have always stood by the mantra that the great thing about History is that "The more you know, The more you know you don't know.
I am justifiably feeling very stupid right now, so I will study up on the subject to see who I truly agree with.
This is why Freerepublic should be a mandatory subject for every High School student in America.
I'm well aware of the 1860 Republican Party platform. And I'm just as aware that Lincoln did not consider that war to be about slavery, but about union and about the disputed right of secession. Slavery formed one of the occasions for this dispute over right of secession, but it was not the only one. Only a tiny minority of northerners even cared what happened to the slaves.
(Still think Lincoln was an "abolitionist"?)
From the war‘s outset, abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips had insisted that the outbreak of rebellion called for the emancipation of the slaves...
President Lincoln resisted this pressure. When, in August of 1861, another political general, John C. Fremont, declared martial law in response to guerrilla warfare in Missouri, his declaration ordered the seizure of property of known rebels (and the execution by firing squad of certain rebel fighters.) Just in case anyone doubted whether Fremont‘s order included slaves, —The Pathfinder“ made it explicit: he declared these slaves to be —free men.“ Lincoln‘s response came in a confidential letter to the general (Document 1.) When Fremont refused Lincoln‘s request to withdraw the order, the President drafted an order, and eventually removed the general from the Missouri command. Criticized for his stand by abolitionists, Lincoln explained his reasoning further in a letter to a longtime political friend from Illinois, Senator Orville Browning.
(Does an "abolitionist" Commander-in-Chief fire one of his generals for setting slaves free?)
Philosophers can be directly quoted no matter what corner of "esotericism" they "dwell in." It's done all the time. In fact, by not quoting Strauss directly one could argue that DiLorenzo is guilty of the very offense he and others accuse Strauss of, i.e., not believing the masses can comprehend rarefied philosophical minutiae.
I think it's more likely, though, that the reason this author and a few others I've read lately haven't been quoting Strauss is because they've never read the guy.
I'm no expert myself, but I've read that Strauss' chief value to conservatism is his penetrating dissection of 20th century liberalism and its statist cousins on the European continent, believing as he did that they ineluctably lead to relativism, which in turn descends into nihilism. Any analysis of the man's work which omits this aspect is some kind of deliberate distortion, and therefore suspect.
If greater time permits, I'll happily point you to some of the documents on this matter. Some are very obscure and hard to come by, though I do have some photocopies of my own of some of them that I could excerpt. For the immediate time being, I'm going to have to ask you to trust me on it (I wrote a thesis on compromise legislation during the secession winter and have extensively researched the congressional records from that session if it helps any to establish me as a credible source on the matter). If I get around to pulling out my old files on it over the holiday though, I'll try and locate the relevant stuff on it.
Not really. It evidences its presence as a major issue, but not "the" issue. If you look through the legislation of that session, you will find vehement southern opposition to several other matters both slavery related and not. One of the most contentious pieces, for example, was the Morrill tariff bill. Things were also still brewing from the debate over the Homestead bill from the previous summer. Senator Robert MT Hunter, for example, summarized his grievances with the Morrill tarriff bill in one of the longest speeches of the session. It concluded with the statement "I know that here we are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us; those who are strong enough to help us do not sympathize with our wrongs, or whatever we may suffer under it. No, sir; this bill will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania held the power to deal with her interests."
Such views were characteristic of the southern grievances on practically every issue they opposed - it was not all "you're going to abolish slavery." It was rather that "you have complete control of the government and are using that control to push policies that put our region and economy at the mercy of northern interests."
It was the only major legislation passed to try to head off secession and it directly addressed the question of slavery to try to assure the South there would be no abrupt change of the status quo.
The reason it was the only legislation passed to head off secession was due to northern obstructionism in a small "radical republican" crowd that used parliamentary devices to tie up practically everything except for the bills they wanted. For all practical purposes, that amendment was the only measure they could not muster the strength to halt (though they did indeed try, and that is why it barely passed with only the slimmest of margins). If you want a glimpse of just how obnoxious and obstructionist the Charles Sumners of that session were, you don't even need to read the southern complaints against them. The statements and writings of the leveler headed members of the GOP, and even some of its more outspoken members, express equal disgust and frustration with Sumner and his following. Thomas Corwin, Charles Francis Adams, and even William Seward put much of the blame for the inability of congress to reach a compromise on Sumner. If anything, he is one of the major reasons why many states seceded before Lincoln's inauguration and why legislative attempts to keep them in the union failed.
As I said in an earlier post, I am no expert on Strauss. But even I know he spent a good chunk of his career denouncing Heidegger. He considered Heidegger the most brilliant philosophical mind of his time, but then he asked, "What was it about modern thought that could have led Heidegger to make these disastrous practical misjudgments [about Hitler etc.]?"
His answer was to return to Plato and Aristotle, and take them seriously, because he felt they grasped a fundamental truth about the human condition, i.e., inequality is ineradicable. Heidegger et al., he concluded, suffused with an arrogance born of several centuries of scientific successes, mistakenly believed that a sufficiently sophisticated "system" could eradicate inequality and straighten the cruel vicissitudes of fortune. Strauss disagreed and spent his life documenting his reasons.
You are missing the point of Strauss entirely. It is not a matter of quoting him but rather the fact that nobody is quite sure of exactly what he meant. When I said that he dwelled in esotericism, I was speaking literally and referencing a behavior of the most extreme form. He developed a significant ammount of what he wrote around the premise that the philosophical works of centuries past were filled with hidden meanings and did not shy away from loading his own stuff with the same to such a degree that even his own students are in rabid factional disagreement about what Straussianism is. If you desire to read something Strauss wrote, fine - some of it is online and most bookstores will have at least a couple things by him, so it is readily accessible. Now making sense of it and trying to figure out exactly what Strauss meant by it all...well that's another thing.
I think it's more likely, though, that the reason this author and a few others I've read lately haven't been quoting Strauss is because they've never read the guy.
I honestly couldn't tell you as I have not asked that question of any of them. I get the impression that DiLorenzo is familiar with at least some of Strauss and he's definately aware of perhaps the largest school of Straussians - the so-called "west coasters" - because he has been involved in an extensive academic debate with them for the last year or so. But if you desire to ask that question of him, by all means email him.
I'm no expert myself, but I've read that Strauss' chief value to conservatism is his penetrating dissection of 20th century liberalism and its statist cousins on the European continent, believing as he did that they ineluctably lead to relativism, which in turn descends into nihilism.
According to some of his advocates, yes. But even that is replete with esotericism.
Any analysis of the man's work which omits this aspect is some kind of deliberate distortion, and therefore suspect.
Again, I think you are missing the purpose of this article. It is admittedly not an esoteric deconstruction of Strauss' contribution to conservatism, but rather an editorial commentary on the adoration of Lincoln exercised by Strauss' largest contingent of students, advocates, and interpreters.
"You, and others like you have done more, according to your abilities, to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery, than any other men in the nation; for while honest men were explaining the true character of the constitution, as an instrument giving freedom to all, you were continually denying it, and doing your utmost (and far more than any avowed pro slavery man could do) to defeat their efforts. And it now appears that all this was done by you in violation of your own conviction of truth. In your pretended zeal for liberty, you have been urging on the nation to the most frightful destruction of human life; but your love of liberty has never yet induced you to declare publicly, but has permitted you constantly to deny, a truth that was sufficient for, and vital to, the speedy and peaceful accomplishment of freedom. You have, with deliberate purpose, and through a series of years, betrayed the very citadel of liberty, which you were under oath to defend. And there has been, in time country, no other treason at all comparable with this." - Open letter to Senator Charles Sumner, 1864
"The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor." Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general --- not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white. And yet these imposters now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man --- although that was not the motive of the war --- as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference of principle --- but only of degree --- between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree." - No Treason, 1870
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