Posted on 03/26/2002 10:38:41 PM PST by kattracks
Do states have a right of secession? That question was settled through the costly War of 1861. In his recently published book, "The Real Lincoln," Thomas DiLorenzo marshals abundant unambiguous evidence that virtually every political leader of the time and earlier believed that states had a right of secession.
Let's look at a few quotations. Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address said, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it." Fifteen years later, after the New England Federalists attempted to secede, Jefferson said, "If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in the union ... I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.'"
At Virginia's ratification convention, the delegates 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." In Federalist Paper 39, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, cleared up what "the people" meant, saying the proposed Constitution would be subject to ratification by the people, "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong." In a word, states were sovereign; the federal government was a creation, an agent, a servant of the states.
On the eve of the War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Maryland Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel said, "Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty." The northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace.
Just about every major Northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South's right to secede. New York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): "If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): "An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful could produce nothing but evil -- evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content." The New York Times (March 21, 1861): "There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go." DiLorenzo cites other editorials expressing identical sentiments.
Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, "It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense." Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives "to the cause of self-determination -- government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth." Mencken says: "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves."
In Federalist Paper 45, Madison guaranteed: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." The South seceded because of Washington's encroachment on that vision. Today, it's worse. Turn Madison's vision on its head, and you have today's America.
DiLorenzo does a yeoman's job in documenting Lincoln's ruthlessness and hypocrisy, and how historians have covered it up. The Framers had a deathly fear of federal government abuse. They saw state sovereignty as a protection. That's why they gave us the Ninth and 10th Amendments. They saw secession as the ultimate protection against Washington tyranny.
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©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Alas! I had thought it politeness.
So I will revert to simple refutation, and let the chips fall where they may.
Meantime, why not shoot all your ammo? We stand ready to receive it, and to advance undaunted.
Or, to put it more kindly, please show us all your cards, Sir.
Richard F.
Richard F.
It's a very complicated and ambiguous situation. On the one hand, the independence of the separate states is acknowledged. On the other hand, much of the rest of the document deals with the United States as a unit (though it was recognized that it would have to be the states, rather than the union that could provide whatever compensation that would be given to loyalists). Both sides can point to various aspects of the treaty. There's already a problem in that the independence and sovereignty of the states is acknowledged by the crown, but much of the land is vouchsafed to the federal union.
It should also be pointed out that it was negotiated under the Articles of Confederation, when the powers of the states were far greater than those of the federal government. The Constitution would bring changes to the relation of the states and the nation.
Maybe a parallel could be drawn with England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which would have been regarded as separate in some contexts and as one unit in others. The ambiguity involved in the name of our country is also worth noting. When we talk about "the States" or "the United States" what we mean depends a lot on the context.
You can find the Treaty and related documents at Project Avalon.
I will not play these silly games with someone attempting that that disingenuous tack.
Quackenbush please refrain from commenting on me or to me until and unless you explain your motivation for the attack on Mercer/DiLorenzo.
Richard I want to make sure that I address exactly what you are asking. Which speech and segment? I am sorry to not do the digging it out myself but I am caught between FR's "new and improved" format and severe time constraints. If you will kindly steer me to exactly what it is you ask I will be glad to answer.
That would appear to be a valid distinction, and I would be willing to make it, and let wiser heads than mine argue over whether it's "a distinction without a difference".
Well, no, actually, if the People are Sovereign, nothing is required of them.......nothing can be required of a Sovereign, except by the invisible high God of Abraham.
... Presumably the Minnesota[n]s did not think there had been "a long train of abuses," just one crucial election which the slave power had lost, and they also did not think the cause of perpetuating and extending human slavery naturally just.
The key word here being, Minnesotans. And you are aguing here ad populum, selecting a Unionist State as your court of appeals. Sorry, I can't accept that.
So, the key requirement for a just rebellion being absent, the secessionists were engaged in acts of treason.
I understand your enthusiasm in rushing forward to that conclusion, but please excuse me if I resist. First, the Confederates were, assembled as the People, Sovereign in their States, and they had the right and the power to reassert their sovereignty, as per Madison quoted ably above by Confederate Missourian. Therefore there can be no test or requirement of their powers as Sovereign.
Likewise, the idea that there must be some tripwire, some identifiable threshold of infringement, that must act as a trigger for the People's resumption of their powers from a government that has been overreached by the politicking of a tyrannical Faction, is spurious, and I argue further that, while the pretext may be discovered in Madison and Washington, all such political injunctions, when addressed to a Sovereign, become mere advice perforce.
Lastly, I think furthermore that the language of the Declaration to which you refer IMHO was offered by Jefferson "to a candid world" as evidence of the forbearance of the American colonists, who were subjects of the Crown, and of their longsuffering. It was a very different thing to show the world in 1776 that subjects had an adequate reason to rebel against their Sovereign Lord, than to show later that the Sovereign People themselves had rendered a decision on matters of state.
And as if we hadn't had enough of me yet, I would go further to say that it seems to me that the whole purpose of the Declarationists is to use Jefferson's words as a snare with which to bind the freedom of the People to the triumphal car of the Unionist cause, which was, I will repeat, merely the hackney cab of the Northern Industrialists as they rode to Washington to claim the United States of America as their prize -- and promptly burn down half of it, to make believers of the rest.
Kindest seasonal regards,
LentulusGracchus
Then who signed for the states? The United States was represented by three people, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and John Jay. If your theory is correct then wouldn't each state need to ratify the treaty or at least sign it? Also, the treaty is between Great Britain and the United States as it makes clear throughout the document.
Also, the ways in which each of us sees the world often differ quite a bit. So what you see as "being chained to the ... corpse of the son of Quantrill..." others might see quite differently. Indeed see as so devoid of any relation to your vision as to make the later seem quite bizarre and make us wonder if there is any possibility of "establishing a stable threshold to your reality". (The later quote is from an episode of Star Trek, (not an habitual watcher) in which the crew is trying to rescue one member who has become trapped in a projection of her own world view; a wonderful parable.)
Douglas has gained great credit among historians for his accurate prognostication that the end result of Lincoln’s policy would be a war between the states culminating in the final overthrow of freedom or slavery. Lincoln never denied that such a war was possible, but he insisted that it was no part of his intention to bring it about. And he would not be frightened from his policy by threats of war against it. Douglas’s assertion that Lincoln insisted upon uniformity is, however, true in a certain sense. But in the sense in which it is true Douglas himself also demanded uniformity. For if such an aphorism as Douglas’s “uniformity is the parent of despotism” is true, then Douglas must have believed it was as desirable that there be uniformity of conviction on this as Lincoln believed it was desirable to have uniformity of conviction on the moral wrong of slavery. The only true issue was what are the convictions—and hence what are the institutions—with respect to which it is desirable to have uniformity and what are the ones with respect to which diversity is either permissible or desirable, or both. Lincoln insisted that the diversity which sprang from soil and climate—or the diversity which sprang from religious freedom—was both permissible and desirable. But slavery was not such a thing. A free people cannot disagree, or agree to disagree, on the relative merits of freedom and despotism. If the majority favors despotism, it is no longer a free people, whether the form of the government has already changed or not. Jefferson had said: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error or opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Yet the change of opinion in the South, from the age of Washington and Jefferson, who treated slavery as a necessary evil to be gradually done away with, to the present positive good school, culminating in the open denial of equal human rights, had also led to the virtually complete suppression of divergent opinion there. When Senator Foote of Mississippi had in 1848 invited Senator Hale of New Hampshire to visit Mississippi and grace the highest tree in the forest there (which earned him the sobriquet of Hangman Foote), Hale responded by inviting Foote to New Hampshire, where he assured him a respectful hearing in every town and hamlet. Wherever the view that slavery was a positive good gained the ascendancy, a political demand arose for the purge of all dissenting opinion. The culmination of this trend, which came after the joint debates, was Douglas’s Senate speech, following John Brown’s raid, in which he called for a criminal sedition law which would have banned the Republican party as effectively as any law proposed by the late Senator McCarthy would have banned the Communist party. With the repudiation of human equality vanished the genius of republican freedom. The idea that any society can subsist without an agreement upon fundamentals is, of course, a delusion. But it is peculiarly true of a republican society, where the opinion of all the people enters into the government. Every “agreement to disagree” presupposes a prior agreement with respect to which disagreement can not tolerated. According to Lincoln, it was intolerable that the American people disagree upon the principle of the abstract equality of all men. In so far as they did so they were no longer one nation.
(end of quotation)
I take the last sentence as arguing that the issue in question was fundamental. Its bearing on the question of secession and/or revolution and/or rebellion is not clearly determined by the fact that slavery was a fundamental question, but certainly the fundamental character of the question of slavery will bear on the secession/revolution/rebellion issue.
Ceasefire ends, for me, at dusk.
There are some good new posts for discussion, and we may learn something.
Best you you and all,
Richard F.
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In the Lower South (SC, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, FL -- those states that seceded first), about 36.7% of the white families owned slaves. In the Middle South (VA, NC, TN, AR -- those states that seceded only after Fort Sumter was fired on) the percentage is around 25.3%, and the total for the two combined regions -- which is what most folks think of as the Confederacy -- is 30.8%. In the Border States (DE, MD, KY, MO -- those slave states that did not secede) the percentage of slave-ownership was 15.9%, and the total throughout the slave states was almost exactly 26%. Source: http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/stat.html
It is also a delusion to think that "agreement upon fundamentals" can be achieved and maintained through force of arms. The way to produce nations in which a genuine agreement upon fundamentals exists is to keep them small and homogeneous in those respects in which homogeneity is essential to those fundamentals requiring agreement.
As Alexander Stephens wrote, the War of Secession resulted from a disagreement on fundamentals that developed between the South and the North in the decades prior to 1860:
"The conflict in principle arose from different and opposing ideas as to the nature of what is known as the General Government. The contest was between those who held it to be strictly Federal in its character, and those who maintained that it was thoroughly National. It was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other."
The same conflict remains today, although it is no longer the case that the conflict has a regional character.
The Speech in question is given the name, "The Dred Scott Speech." Lincoln gave it on June 26th, 1857, at Springfield. In my Edition, by Roy Basler, it shows up starting at pg 352. Around para. 15, Douglas' consistency about court decisions forms the chief point of Lincoln's interest. The Bank comes up on pg. 356.
But the whole speech is worth reading, and is really not long. Links to Lincoln's works have been posted earlier on this thread, and any sensible google search will turn them up, but if you need a link, I'll be gald to be of service.
Happy Easter, and happy reading!
Richard F.
Cheers,
Richard F.
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