Replies

Apologists for the Confederacy love to trot out this tired chestnut. There is absolutely no comparison at all between the independence of the colonies and the secession of the Confederacy. The colonists were nominally English citizens but they were deprived by the government of their right to representation in the nation's councils - they separated from Great Britain because Great Britain had continually refused their requests for representation in the Parliament that was levying taxes on them. The states of the Confederacy were fully represented in their nation's councils - in fact they were overrepresented due to the generous compromise of giving a 60% franchise to a population that couldn't even vote. Basically the colonists demanded their rightful place at the table and were summarily denied, while the South demanded and got a better place at the table than fairness warranted - and they left in a snit anyway because not everything went their way.

Nope. The South believed themselves to have a long train of abuses, so they felt themselves legitimate in seceding. What YOU think on the matter, with the hindsight on 130 years, is irrelevant.

Joseph Story - an author you apparently hold in high esteem - quoted Jackson not because of the fleeting historical circumstances surrounding his speech but because, in Story's words:

If you were actually paying attention to the progress of the thread, you'd have seen that it was suggested, and I agreed, that I was thinking of William Rawle's cmmentary on the Constitution, not Joseph Story's.

No Jackson was saying, and I quote him again:

Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms

The Confederacy had no constitutional right to secede, and to say that it did is to confound the meaning of terms. There may be a moral justification for breaking the law, but it is still breaking the law.

And as I said before, Jackson was simply incorrect in his understanding of the Constitution. There is not a single word in the Constitution which denies to the States their right of secession. Not Art.VI, Sect. 2 or any other. When ratifying the Constitution, the Virginia ratifiers said, "The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression." "The people" is shown to have been understood by the Founders as being the States - the people represented through their State officials - in Federalist 39. Secession is a right falling under the 10th amendment - it is (obviously) not granted to the federal government, nor is it denied the State governments. This is regardless of what Andrew Jackson and Joseph Story thought on the matter.

The South believed themselves to have a long train of abuses, so they felt themselves legitimate in seceding.

Completely and utterly irrelevant. The slave states constituted 20% of the free population and had 37% of Congressional representation.

They had a more than full voice in their government - their situation was completely different from that of the colonies.

I'm mistaken for not picking up on your original mistake? So, you don't like Joseph Story anymore, then?

And as I said before, Jackson was simply incorrect in his understanding of the Constitution.

LOL! Of course, of course. Joseph Story is all wet, so is President Jackson.

Again, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. If a state wants to secede, it has to ask the federal government for permission. Otherwise, it is out of luck.