Posted on 07/27/2003 5:08:19 PM PDT by thatdewd
Edited on 05/07/2004 6:46:56 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The writer is a circuit judge who lives in Kuttawa, Ky.
KUTTAWA, Ky. - The Courier Journal, at the behest of its columnist John David Dyche, has called for the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol. Such a supposedly politically correct viewpoint reflects a shallow, selective and even hypocritical understanding of history.
(Excerpt) Read more at courier-journal.com ...
Even Lincoln supported the Fugitive Slave Act as being constitutional. How is it not so? States rights refers to rights not delegated to the Federal government. As Lincoln said:
I suppose most of us (I know it of myself) believe that the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave law,—that is a right fixed in the Constitution. But it cannot be made available to them without Congressional legislation. In the Judge’s language, it is a “barren right” which needs legislation before it can become efficient and valuable to the persons to whom it is guaranteed. And as the right is constitutional, I agree that the legislation shall be granted to it,—and that not that we like the institution of slavery. We profess to have no taste for running and catching niggers,—at least, I profess no taste for that job at all. Why then do I yield support to a Fugitive Slave law? Because I do not understand that the Constitution, which guarantees that right, can be supported without it.
If you are going to make that charge you also have the burden of establishing that the offense happened. As has been noted in detail to you previously, there are great problems with attaching the "treason" label to the confederates, not one of which you have even bothered to concern yourself with, much less answer. So yet again it appears that your charge is entirely gratuitous and thus discardable.
Not really. Lincoln seldom even took up the issue of slavery prior to 1854 save in private, politically safe, or inconsequential environments. After 1854 he discussed the issue heavily but with fluctuation worthy of a Bill Clinton. His slavery views between 1854 and 1865 were literally all over the radar. They included campaigning for a constitutional amendment to permanently protect slavery to campaigning for one to permanently abolish it and practically everything in between. The only circumstance of slavery on which he exercised any semblance of consistency on was his opposition to its expansion into the western territories, and that he repeatedly noted ws predicated on his strong belief that those territories should belong exclusively to white people. It could probably be safely said that Lincoln did experience some sort of passive moral objection to slavery itself. But only when it was politically opportune did that ever translate into consistency with his action, and just as often as not he was pushing the exact opposite for similarly political reasons.
It started in theory, as enabling legislation in compliance with the constitutional requirement for states to return fugitives in their custody. As in most other legislation of that day, the slaveocrats pushed it far beyond any intent of the Framers. The FSA became an open bounty on any black in the north, free or escaped slave, who happened to unlucky enough to be grabbed by a slave catcher. Many free blacks --- individuals who had never been slaves, were hauled in chains to the south and sold into slavery under terms of the FSA. Under the act, Blacks was not allowed to testify on his own behalf or present any evidence in any way and cases were not heard by a jury, but by Federal magistrates who were awarded $5 if they found in favor of the black and $10 if they found in favor of the slave catcher.
The practice of jury nullification came into widespread practice as a result of the FSA when whites who were charged with assisting fugitives were acquitted by juries who saw the federal criminal penalties as blatantly unconstitutional and an infringement on individual liberty.
When Lincoln was elected, he did say that he was willing to enforce the FSA but with “modifications" that removed the Federal criminal penalties on people who either assisted fugitives or refused to participate in their capture and return to captivity.
Let me ask. How would you feel about a law that required you under penality of imprisionment, to transport women to an abortion clinic or forced you to help police arrest people illegally blocking an abortion clinic? That is how strongly many people felt about the FSA back then.
He introduced a bill during his only term in Congress in 1849 to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia. That was pretty big stuff back then.
Not so. He toyed with the idea as a lame duck congressman only a few days before he was to go home and never introduced the bill. In an era not far removed from such bold proposals as the Wilmot Proviso, Lincoln's unintroduced DC bill was an inconsequential action that he played at a politically safe and meaningless point in his career.
That depends entirely upon whether or not they commit treason. As for the confederates, they did indeed commit revolution and secession, if either can be called a crime. They also committed self defense and resistence to a federal government. But the crime of treason was not committed nor have you established that it was.
Isn't it currently against the law to aid escaped criminals? Not that escaped slaves were really criminals by our current law, but by the laws of the times they were. I'll have to look into the last version of the FSA to see exactly what it says. Thanks for your comment.
There was a long history of Northern personal freedom laws designed to prevent Southerners from getting their escaped slaves back. The Supreme Court declared these Northern laws unconstitutional back as early as the 1840s if I remember correctly.
I suspect that the Southerners were reacting to stories of Southern agents being killed in the North simply for trying to get warrants for arret of fugitive slaves. I ran across the following in a Jefferson Davis speech of May 1861:
The constitutional provision for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of concientious obligation and religious duty. Men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact. Often owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magiistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave.
I don't know of any specific instance of that happening but I've seen other references to that sort of thing in Southern documents.
Let me ask. How would you feel about a law that required you under penality of imprisionment, to transport women to an abortion clinic or forced you to help police arrest people illegally blocking an abortion clinic?
IMO, people illegally blocking an abortion clinic should be put in jail. If a police officer were having trouble with an abortion protester and asked for my help subduing them, I would give it. Normally though, I don't think the police would need my help. Again, I'll have to hold comment until I read the last version of the FSA.
When one considers how Alabamans put up a statue to the boll weevil for weening them from dependence on cotton, there looks like plenty of reason for putting in a good word for Hamilton's plan to achieve the same result with less pain. Modern-day Alabaman Forrest McDonald apparently agrees -- about Hamilton, maybe about the boll weevil, too.
We can consider that Davis may have been sincere about what he believed and may have wanted what he thought was best for people. But we can't simply stop there and bow down before him, as some would like. I would probably keep the statue up if I were a Kentuckian, but I'd try to see to it that the capitol and its monuments reflected our best judgement of what is true and valuable, rather than a permanent subjugation to views that we recognize to be flawed or incomplete. Given that so many Kentuckians supported the Union, there is plenty of reason to question the monument's appropriateness, though. If our principle is not to offend traditions, it's hard to see how the statue got put up to begin with, save as a shaky extension of tolerance and magnanimity to the defeated.
I've done some checking. The last Fugitive Slave Act I could find was 1850. The Lincoln quote I cited before came from one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. How is it that Lincoln was not referring to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act? Is there a later one?
From what I gather, the FSA had penalties for marshalls who did not follow the law. Is this what your are objecting to? Federal marshalls are sworn to uphold the Constitution after all, and this was a constitutional law.
The FSA also called for penalties on individuals that helped slaves escape and hid them. I've addressed that in my earlier comments about current day escaped criminals.
The thing I don't like about the FSA (aside from keeping people in bondage) is that it did not permit escaped slaves to testify in court in their own defense. If Lincoln objected to that part of the law, I can understand it. However, blacks were not permitted to testify in court in some of the states at that time. Southern ones at least. Don't know about the North.
No, they were not criminals in any way. There were no federal criminal penalities on the slave for running away --- I guess Calhoon didn't think of that one.)
In the eyes of the government, they were "property" (that's what the slaveocrats insisted on) and treated by the Federal Government as such --- just like dogs and cats and cows.
Now is it a federal criminal offense for me to give your dog some food, water and a warm place to sleep for the night after he runs away from an abusive owner? There could be some civil liability, but a federal criminal offence --- especially in a day when there were literally only a handful of federal criminal offences on the books.
You can say stuff like that, but you can't say that they were cowards. The Union boys had to kill them to shut their mouths.
Frankly, I believe that the scions of the great state of Virginia, home of George Washington, knew more about the thought of the Founders than did many of those in the Northern states. We can see clearly that Massachusetts and New York have reverted to their Tory roots in the present day.
Who is more the traitor - the gun-grabbers in Taxachusetts who have forgotten Lexington, Concord and Boston Harbor, or the descendants of the Founders who died trying to take The Angle at Gettysburg?
Gee, I'm sorry about that education, and all the money your parents spent on it. Maybe you can request a refund? ;o)
President Jefferson Davis - duly elected President of the Confederate States Of America. Recognized as such by Pope Pius IX 3 Dec 1863, and by US Senator Jesse Bright on 1 Mar 1861.
But how do you really feel about it?
Right after the WBTS, only a small percentage of blue-coated Union troops attempted genocide against the western American Indians, but they all fought for a government that did so as a matter of policy. I guess your blue-coated Union heroes are the real nazis by comparison. All of the Generals and senior officers who formulated and excercised that policy of extermination were Union "heroes" of the WBTS. Nazis of their time...
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