Posted on 06/12/2003 5:58:28 AM PDT by Aurelius
Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'
Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."
Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?
At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."
Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.
Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???
Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.
Sure it is. By its very nature it is a loose constructionist approach, which is in turn inherently left wing. To invoke Blackstone as an argument against perjury's inclusion among "high crimes and misdemeanors" is absurd because Blackstone explicitly included them as "offences against public justice" - the very concept around which the founders based the impeachment power.
Put differently, strict construction means, by definition, reading the constitution's language as originally intended by the founders.
Original intent by the founders in the case of impeachment means Blackstone's commentaries on offences against public justice.
Blackstone said perjury was indisputably an offence against public justice.
That means perjury is a grounds for impeachment
Constitutional scholars may disagree, but the concept of 'high' crimes as consisting of those against the public interest [as opposed to private matters], is well founded in English Common Law. Blackstone himself has written in support of this restrictive interpretation.
Did you not even bother to read the excerpt of Blackstone I provided for you? Blackstone explicitly said that perjury was a public offense - a crime against public justice and the polity of a nation. To suggest otherwise is to ignore Blackstone, and to suggest that Blackstone would not have found perjury impeachable is to LIE.
Sure they did. They had reporters on the field who saw the battles and their aftermaths first hand.
especially the existence of those phantom black Confderates whom neo-Confederates love to conjure up.
You mean the ones that are documented in the official muster roles, pension records, and even the US Government's War of the Rebellion set of records from the war?
Your relying one ill-informed source to corroborate another is highly illogical.
Demonstrate that either Greeley or Douglass was ill-informed. Or is that simply another of your infamous and frequent gratuitous assertions?
So in other words you opt for your most frequent alternative tactic to gratuitous dismissals of factual evidence, that being ignore anything that contradicts you all together.
To demonstrate that you would first have to cite a fact and then show evidence of my alleged imperviousness to it. Seeing as you have done neither I have no option but to conclude that your above statement is yet another gratuitous assertion.
and your claims to being logical are pathetic.
I make no out of the ordinary claims to my own logical abilities - only to the lack of your own as demonstrated on a case by case basis.
Get a job.
I already have one, and it fortunately does not entail peddling books like a door to door salesman on internet message boards.
free dixie,sw
REVISIONIST historiography began at the earliest in 1965 at the history department @ harvard university.
revisionist historiography is now and always has been a reflection of the most extreme, hatefilled, self-serving,self-righteous, leftist/statist/fascist school of political thought out of the "oh, so PC" poison-ivy league schools of new england.
none of the writings/thoughts of Davis nor Stephens fit that description.
SORRY, but i'm not buying any;neither are any of the more well-read sorts on FR.
once again, until about 1960, traditional historians were either neutral or openly PRO-southern.
free dixie,sw
The Militia Act does not apply to a state that seceded, even though the central government or a sectional party aggrandizing itself at the expense of other states might assert that it does.
What about New York and Virginia's conditions on ratification of the Constitution that they could resume government again if they wished? I imagine the Federalists knew they could never get the Constitution ratified if they included a "thou shalt not secede" clause in the Constitution. They would have lost New York, Virginia, and I forget who the third state was that expressed similar conditions.
BTW, had the western rebel forces had any $$$$$$ and/or supplies from the Richmond government, i think things would have been a FAR different story.
what the partisan rangers of the trans-mississippi west were able to do with NOTHING is almost beyond belief.
give Sterling Price, Pat Cleburne, John Bankhead & other western leaders a few hundred thousand dollars worth of weapons, supplies, ammunition and the war in the west could have been won.
our lads were NOT short on determination & guts;it was things they lacked.
furthermore,had President Davis followed the advice of Nate Forrest, you'd be writing me from a foreign country.
free dixie,sw
while we're doing "what ifs", what happens if Richmond, in 1862-64, looses Nate Forrest's lads to DESTROY the northern cities by a combination of fire, explosions, targeted assassinations & other "special actions"?
or if the southern high command aims COL Quantrell and his band like a weapon on the midwestern states? (fyi, my ancestor was one of that merry band of partisans;he wouldn't have blinked an eye before setting ANY yankee city ablaze. my great uncle remembers Little Thunder and says he had the "coldest eyes he'd ever seen", even in his late '80s.)
5,000 southern guerillas in the cities of the north could have/would have caused absolute panic/havoc. the NY draft riots would have been a "minor disorder" by comparison.
perhaps our southern ancestors were too gentlemanly to WIN the war by any means necessary.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
are you off your meds AGAIN???
free dixie,sw
FRee dixie,sw
head over to DU, where fools & idiots dwell. they will like you.
free dixie,sw
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