Guess What Folks - Secession Wasn't Treason

The Copperhead Chronicles ^ | August 2007 | Al Benson

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Copperhead Chronicle Al Benson, Jr. Articles

Guess What Folks--Secesson Wasn't Treason by Al Benson Jr.

More and more of late I have been reading articles dealing with certain black racist groups that claim to have the best interests of average black folks at heart (they really don't). It seems these organizations can't take time to address the problems of black crime in the black community or of single-parent families in the black community in any meaningful way. It's much more lucrative for them (and it gets more press coverage) if they spend their time and resources attacking Confederate symbols. Ive come to the conclusion that they really don't give a rip for the welfare of black families. They only use that as a facade to mask their real agenda--the destruction of Southern, Christian culture.

Whenever they deal with questions pertaining to history they inevitably come down on that same old lame horse that the South was evil because they seceded from the Union--and hey--everybody knows that secession was treason anyway. Sorry folks, but that old line is nothing more than a gigantic pile of cow chips that smells real ripe in the hot August sun! And I suspect that many of them know that--they just don't want you to know it--all the better to manipulate you my dear!

It is interesting that those people never mention the fact that the New England states threatened secession three times--that's right three times--before 1860. In 1814 delegates from those New England states actually met in Hartford, Connecticut to consider seceding from the Union. Look up the Hartford Convention of 1814 on the Internet if you want a little background. Hardly anyone ever mentions the threatened secession of the New England states. Most "history" books I've seen never mention it. Secession is never discussed until 1860 when it suddenly became "treasonous" for the Southern states to do it. What about the treasonous intent of the New England states earlier? Well, you see, it's only treasonous if the South does it.

Columnist Joe Sobran, whom I enjoy, once wrote an article in which he stated that "...Jefferson was an explicit secessionist. For openers he wrote a famous secessionist document known to posterity as the Declaration of Independence." If these black racist groups are right, that must mean that Jefferson was guilty of treason, as were Washington and all these others that aided them in our secession from Great Britain. Maybe the black racists all wish they were still citizens of Great Britain. If that's the case, then as far as I know, the airlines are still booking trips to London, so nothing is stopping them.

After the War of Northern Aggression against the South was over (at least the shooting part) the abolitionist radicals in Washington decided they would try Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination (which would have been just great for Edwin M. Stanton) and as a traitor for leading the secessionist government in Richmond, though secession had hardly been original with Mr. Davis. However, trying Davis for treason as a secessionist was one trick the abolitionist radicals couldn't quite pull off.

Burke Davis, (no relation to Jeff Davis that I know of) in his book The Long Surrender on page 204, noted a quote by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, telling Edwin Stanton that "If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion...His (Jeff Davis') capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason." Burke Davis then continued on page 214, noting that a congressiona committee proposed a special court for Davis' trial, headed by Judge Franz Lieber. Davis wrote: "After studying more than 270,000 Confederate documents, seeking evidence against Davis, the court discouraged the War Department: 'Davis will be found not guilty,' Lieber reported 'and we shall stand there completely beaten'." What the radical Yankees and their lawyers were admitting among themselves (but quite obviously not for the historical record) was that they and Lincoln had just fought a war of aggression agains the Southern states and their people, a war that had taken or maimed the lives of over 600,000 Americans, both North and South, and they had not one shread of constitutional justification for having done so, nor had they any constitutional right to have impeded the Southern states when they chose to withdraw from a Union for which they were paying 83% of all the expenses, while getting precious little back for it, save insults from the North.

Most of us detest big government or collectivism. Yet, since the advent of the Lincoln administration we have been getting ever increasing doses of it. Lincoln was, in one sense, the "great emancipator" in that he freed the federal government from any chains the constitution had previously bound it with, so it could now roam about unfettered "seeking to devous whoseover it could." And where the Founders sought to give us "free and independent states" is anyone naive enough anymore as to think the states are still free and independent? Those who honestly still think that are prime candidates for belief in the Easter Bunny, for he is every bit as real as is the "freedom" our states experience at this point in history. Our federal government today is even worse than what our forefathers went to war against Britain to prevent. And because we have been mostly educated in their government brain laundries (public schools) most still harbor the illusion that they are "free." Well, as they say, "the brainwashed never wonder." ___________________

About the Author

Al Benson Jr.'s, [send him email] columns are to found on many online journals such as Fireeater.Org, The Sierra Times, and The Patriotist. Additionally, Mr. Benson is editor of the Copperhead Chronicle [more information] and author of the Homeschool History Series, [more information] a study of the War of Southern Independence. The Copperhead Chronicle is a quarterly newsletter written with a Christian, pro-Southern perspective.

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Copperhead Chronicle | Homeschool History Series | Al Benson, Jr. Articles

[rustbucket]

By the way, you quoted two letters by Confederate generals, John Bankhead Magruder and M Jeff Thompson, demanding justice from the Feds.

How exactly does that correspondence support the virtues of the Union army?

[Philly Nomad]

You are just like those anti-American libtards who complain about Gitmo.

It’s a simple rule, you don’t want your a$$ kicked, don’t with the United States.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

How exactly does that correspondence support the virtues of the Union army?

It doesn't!

Ya got me there. It shows

1. I need new glasses, or

2. I need to be more careful when I find something and link it.

Or maybe a combination of both. :)

[rustbucket]

Are you sure Johnson is wrong? He seems pretty adamant. Can you point me towards your source? Johnson seems pretty definate when he claims that the decision to seceed and then to go to war was made by those most likely to gain from it, and not those who did not own slaves (the poor and working poor).

Johnson says, "No state held a referendum. It was decided by a total of 854 men in various secession conventions, all of them selected by legislatures, not by the voters."

Here is some information about the election of delegates to the Texas secession convention: Link. Here is an old post of mine with more details from the State Gazette newspaper of Austin, Texas: Link #2

Texas voters elected delegates to the secession convention. The convention voted for secession and then put the question before the voters of the state. This is a greater confirmation of an action by the sovereignty of a state (the voters) than the original 13 states did in their ratifications of the US Constitution. I don't think any of the original 13 put the ratification of the Constitution directly to their voters, as Texas did with the secession question.

Interestingly, the the popular vote for secession by the voters of the state in late February 1861 very closely matched the votes in the presidential election the previous fall. Breckenridge, the Southern Democrat, got 47,548 to 15,463 for Bell, the Southern Unionist vote. The secession vote of the state was 46,129 for to 14,697 against. (My numbers come from Lone Star by T. R. Fehrenbach.) The state then formally seceded on March 2, Texas Independence Day (the day of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico in 1836).

I've read in various old newspapers where the large slaveholders in some regions were against secession. Probably they felt that they stood a better chance to hold on to their slaves by staying in the Union than risking losing them in the war that might come.

[stand watie]

tell it to someone who cares what FR's main SERIAL LIAR, DAMNyankee & general all-around BIGOT thinks.

laughing AT you, "bubba, the LIAR".

free dixie,sw

[quadrant]

No one believed that slaves were not human beings but
most Southerners believed slaves were human beings who
were condemned by circumstances of birth to a lifetime
of servitude.
This attitude was common during antiquity. It was as natural a belief as is that of modernity which holds chattel slavery to be immoral. Even the most sensitive of men accepted slavery, as it flows through the writings of St Paul. By the 19th Century this attitude was no longer tenable, especially in the United States, which on paper was committed to political equality. Whether the Founders intended their proclamations to apply to black people can only be speculated but nonetheless the Founders proclaimed all men to be created equal.
Those who founded this country did so in the knowledge that slavery existed. Some, perhaps most, wished it abolished, but they wanted union more than abolition. Such a notion is understandable. They were men of the 18th Century, not the 19th, and they were old men (for their time) by 1787. They knew that any attempt at abolition meant no union. Faced with an unpleasant situation, they hedged, they compromised. They set a time after which the slave trade could be abolished. They insisted that slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person. Were they wrong to chose as they did? In our present situation condemnation is easy, but if they had chosen abolition what we have now would not exist.

[stand watie]

to "roo",

"it was never the policy------" = oh, really???

tell us, then, WHY the DAMNyankees established CONCENTRATION CAMPS where MANY innocent civilians (WITHOUT even the PRETENSE of a charge/warrant/trial) & hundreds of thousands of helpLESS CSA prisoners of war were ROUTINELY starved, denied medical care & shelter, denied clothing, raped,tortured,assaulted & MURDERED in coldblood.

tell us WHY the guard supervisor at Point Lookout (MD) DEATH CAMP issued an order that GUARDS & STAFF-MEMBERS, who murdered POWs without ANY reason, were to be fined the grand "SUM of ONE DOLLAR".

at Point Lookout, alone, about 15,000 POWs were MURDERED without cause (except of course that one DY said that, "bullets were cheaper than beans".). the number of cold-blooded murders of the helpLESS at other DAMNyankee DEATH CAMPS was similar to the number slaughtered at PLPOWC!

tell us WHY the DAMNyankee officers protected the "plantation aristocrats" (who COLLOBORATED with the enemy) but NEVER tried to stop the RAPES/ASSAULTS/MURDERS of "persons of colour", Asians,Jews,Latinos, Roman Catholics, "the poorest of the poor whites" & other minority group members.

to ALL: i have often thought it IRONIC that the "crusade against slavery" by the DYS frequently ONLY freed the slaves from BEING ALIVE. (the ASSAULT,RAPE, SODOMY, TORTURE & COLD-BLOODED MURDER of "persons of colour", BOTH slave & free, was COMMONPLACE, wherever the union army was, throughout dixie.)

face it, "roo", you are defending GARBAGE & FILTH.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

what an UTTERLY STUPID LIE!!! (even a FOOL as big as you are shouldn't be ignorant enough to believe that!)

laughing AT you, FOOL.(are you trying to replace "x" as FR's most IGNORANT, hate-FILLED, anti-southern, BIGOT???)

laughing AT you!

to ALL: if any of our readers wonder WHY we southerners are not particularly fond of the LYING, arrogant, DAMNyankee extremists/bigots on FR, comments like "roo's" are ONE reason.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

the acts to "hasten the end of the war" in the Law of War are called: WAR CRIMES & CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

what DAMNyankees like sheridan/sherman, the WAR CRIMINAL, did in dixie was NO DIFFERENT than what we HANGED Japanese GEN Yamashita for doing in Manila.

ALL the DAMNyankee WAR CRIMINALS, who "suffered troops under their command to commit acts, which if committed in peacetime would be common crimes, may be adjudged by any international tribunal, as may choose to take jurisdiction over such war criminal", deserved HANGING.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

if you don't want to be thought a WAR CRIMINAL, then do NOT commit WAR CRIMES & CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

ask me sometime about the sacrifice of at least 92 civilian members (mostly women & small children) of MY family, who were assaulted/raped/robbed & MURDERED for just being "other than white persons".

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

you might want to read #847 & 849.

the "filth that flowed down from the north" was just that = FILTH.

what happened to MY family was FAR from unique.

if you were NOT a white person (& particularly if you were poor) , you were convenient PREY to the "criminals in blue uniforms".

this was especially true, if you were unfortunate enough to be a "comely" female SLAVE. the attitude of all too many union soldiers was: "she's HERE & she ain't white OR really HUMAN, so the officers don't care what we do".("Philly", that's the sort of behavior that you're defending.)

fwiw,attitudes like YOURS are a MAIN reason that we southerners MAY have forgiven,but have NOT forgotten & will NOT FORGET what was done to our families, EVER!

free dixie,sw

[Colt .45]

"Surely if the founders felt that states could simply walk away from the union they would have allowed for it in the constitution. Article 5 is the closest they come to anything like that."

So if I am reading you correctly, you seem to think that when the Original Sovereign and Independent States ratified the Constitution they ceeded all their sovereignty (recognized by King George III in the Treaty of Paris 1783) to the Federal Government. WHAT A CROCK OF CRAP! The States retained their sovereignty and COULD seceed if the people of that State wished to. I would suggest you read up on the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions to see how Statte sovereignty was viewed.

[Maelstrom]

There weren’t any war crimes in GITMO.

Nothing approaching what the Union did to Confederate soldiers out of spite.

Shoot, I couldn’t complain if they did treat Confederate soldiers to the relative luxury accomodations and treatment received by those damned terrorists in GITMO.

[Maelstrom]

Find where I excused the Confederacy.

The entire point is that your union never accepted the facts.

These facts continue to be a point of contention almost 150 years later, along with the revisionist history that cast the war as only about slavery.

[x]

Well, there were a lot of pro-slavery papers that didn't consider themselves biased against the North, indeed a lot of those papers, like Bennett's New York Herald actually were Northern. Henry Watson Wilbur writes in his book, President Lincoln's Attitude Towards Slavery and Emancipation calls the Intelligencer "a paper always favorable to slavery."

A lot depends on who's ox was being gored. For a time the Intelligencer had followed Congress's "gag rule" and refused to mention slavery except when the topic was mentioned on the floor of Congress. Pennsylvania anti-slavery men also praised the Intelligencer after it decided that the state's personal liberty laws weren't unconsitutional.

But William Lloyd Garrison had little love for the paper: it had published a letter offering a reward to any one who delivered him "dead or alive into the hands of the authorities of any state south of the Potomac." And there were those ads for slave sales and the return of runaways.

According to the Intelligencer only some personal liberty laws were unconstitutional: mostly those that denied the authority of federal marshalls. But it's not hard to see why states passed such laws. They were a way of protecting their citizens from assault and kidnapping.

There were those who had been freed by masters who were sought by their heirs, for example. In a classic case, a woman had been freed by the terms of a will and moved North. When debts proved to be too large, the heirs sent slave hunters after her.

There were cases of mistaken identity. And there were people who had run away and been living, working, raising families, and paying taxes in the Northern states for years. The question of what rights they had wasn't as easy as supporters of slavery made out.

Curiously, it wasn't entirely a Black-White issue. There was some fear in the Middle West even among Whites of slavers and patrols. If you couldn't prove that you had been born White and were free, were you really safe? Such at any rate is the argument of Lawrence Tenzer's The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue.

[x]

what happened to MY family was FAR from unique.

swattie, when and where did this happen?

Did it happen at all?

Are you sure it wasn't the Confederates who did it?

I think you were unhinged like Shelton IV.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

But I didn't say anything bad about the rebel soldiers. I think most reb soldiers were good and brave men, just like most yankee soldiers. It's the stay at homes and the politicians that caused most of the problems. Surely as a fan of the CSA, you can not think much of those who would not put their life on the line for the CSA while professing loyalty and profiting from it.

The draft exemption for owners of slaves showed the Confederacy for what it really was and it opening the eyes of many brave CSA soldiers.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Some of those Union prison camps were every bit as criminally run as the Confederates’ Andersonville. According to a relation of my mother, a Confederate soldier GGG-Uncle of mine died at a Union prison in Ohio named Camp Chase. He had just turned 19. I do not know if it was an unavoidable illness or combat injury that killed that boy or whether it was willful neglect or even active abuse that killed him, but 19 is too young to die.

I know many other young men on both sides died because of incomptence in POW camps.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

what DAMNyankees like sheridan/sherman, the WAR CRIMINAL, did in dixie was NO DIFFERENT than what we HANGED Japanese GEN Yamashita for doing in Manila.

Totally different. Sherman won, Yamashita lost. If you don't win the war, you have no complaint. It wasn't Sherman's job to be nice to the Confederacy, it was the Confederacy's job to stop him.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

tell us WHY the DAMNyankee officers protected the "plantation aristocrats"

Here's something you say that I can totally agree with. Radical Republicans had the same complaint. Too many Democrats and weak Republicans in the army treated the plantation aristocrats too easy while not showing concern for Unionists and honorable poor rebels.

I think a lot of what Southerners remember as the horrors of Reconstruction came about from such Yankee Democrat carpetbaggers.

It would have been better for all if the Radicals were allowed to run things after the war. Reconstruction would have been quicker and more successful.