Posted on 04/05/2005 11:27:48 AM PDT by Crackingham
The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.
The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
You might want to read this: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/csa/scarsec.htm
South Carolina was the first State to secede, and in that declaration she gave her reasons:
"...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-slave holding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; 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."
"For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "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..."
"On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States..."
Slavery, northern opposition to it, and possible future interference with each State's power to decide the issue for herself led South Carolina to secede. Other slave states followed. Lincoln did not recognize the secession as lawful, and in his first inaugural address had promised to "...hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts.." South Carolina fired on one of those places: Fort Sumter, and the war was on.
The issues were federalism, slavery, the legality of secession, and the tariff ("duties and imposts").
I have tremendous respect for the people of faith who were at the forefront of abolitionism.
I don't. They were a large part of the reason that sectional hatred began. Slavery might have very well ended peacefully, if not for William Lloyd Garrison, and his abolitionist friends. The lives of 600,000 men were sacrificed to achieve something that could have been done without the bloodshed.
In Texas, we had an even longer list. It is interesting reading.
Don't believe everything Ditto, and his buddies are spewing. Slavery was one of the causes, but only one. Read the Texas Articles of Secession:
A declaration of the causes
which impel the State of Texas to secede
from the Federal Union
The government of the United States, by certain joint resolutions, bearing date the 1st day of March, in the year A. D. 1845, proposed to the Republic of Texas, then a free, sovereign and independent nation, the annexation of the latter to the former, as one of the co-equal States thereof,
The people of Texas, by deputies in convention assembled, on the fourth day of July of the same year, assented to and accepted said proposals and formed a constitution for the proposed State, upon which on the 29th day of December in the same year, said State was formally admitted into the Confederated Union.
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquillity and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretenses and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.
The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.
These and other wrongs we have patiently borne in the vain hope that a returning sense of justice and humanity would induce a different course of administration.
When we advert to the course of individual non-slave-holding States, and that a majority of their citizens, our grievances assume far greater magnitude.
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions--a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength, they hare placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a "higher law" than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.
And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.
In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States. By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.
For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons - We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freeman of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.
Adopted in Convention on the 2nd day of Feb., in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one and of the independence of Texas the twenty-fifth.
Yea, but so did General Grant, and he also wanted to end the war, but he never actually set his free, the end of the war did that.
Before Lincoln, most folks ( if you could have polled them) would have probably assumed it was going to be New England, since they always were threatening to secede.
A big part of the irony, is that one of the main reasons New England talked about seceding, had to do with the issue of slavery, and a flip side interpretation of states rights.
In fairness, that generalization doesn't fit Garrison (or a lot of the religious based anti-slavery zealots.) Garrison was opposed to war and was willing to allow the South to leave the Union. He simply didn't want to be part of a nation that tolerated slavery. He didn't give a damn about the Constitution, and said so. But when Jeff Davis was arrested at the end of the war, it was Garrison who posted his bond and paid for his lawyers. He was driven by religion, not politics.
The feel I get from my readings is that the impact of the "pure" abolitionists and "underground railway" types has been overstated in history, and it was definitely exxegarated by the pro-secession side in the years leading up to the war as a way to create fear among Southerners who were not hot for secession but who dreaded the idea of slave insurrections.
Kind of like the left today using some nut-case who blows up abortion clinics as a caricature for anyone who opposes abortion.
IMHO, Garrison had more "influence" in the South than he did in the North, if you follow my drift.
Inaccurate. See Did Grant own Slaves?
Absent the rebellion, slavery would not doubt have continued for decades. And when it did eventually end it would still have been through government intervention, and over the screams and the protests of the southern slave owners.
Jefferson Davis insisted on the right of Confederates to own slaves as a condition for ending the war.
Your opinion, not fact. Really, it is a supposition altogether, Your opinion and mine.
Are you sure about this?????
Yes, I agree for the most part, but if you read the Texas Articles, which I have posted elsewhere, you will see this:
"They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides."
That was a very real problem. The abolitionists were indeed using the mails to disseminate their beliefs, and in Texas, there were many instances of fires that were started by abolitionists, or slaves, etc. due to people like Garrison.
I thought Horace Greeley paid Davis's bail?
I see, so Grant's wife owned slaves that were not set free until the end of the war.
And yet somehow it is innacurate for people to say that Grant's family owned slaves or that he owned slaves during the war?
So I am to understand that in 1865 America a man could not be associated with the possessions of his wife... laughable.
And am I to understand that his wife is not considered his 'family'?
Sorry, but to me that article seems like nothing more than an attempt to distance Grant from slavery regardless of the fact that slaves were resident in HIS HOME as just that, slaves.
Which is unconstitutional. One staet (or group of states cannot impose tarrifs on another state (or group of states.)
and the South moved to suceed
You mean secede -- the ultimate Constitutional enforcement mechanism.
But Lincoln was not one of them, and it was not the issue. He himself said that if he could "save the Union" without freeing one slave, he would do so. The Emancipation Proclamation freed not one single slave, as it only applied to the territory that the Union (i.e., Northern) government didn't control.
Slavery was propaganda for the North, but it's not really what they were fighting about.
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