Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
by William C. Davis
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
by William W. Freehling
Lee and His Army in Confederate History
by Gary W. Gallagher
The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills
The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).
Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.
The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:
They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[2]
In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."[3]
In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."[4]
At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.
The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."[5]
Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."[7]
If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.
For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.
These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"
There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.
Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."[8]
If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.
Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.
But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.
Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.
Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.
Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."[9]
"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.
Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.
Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.
Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.
Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.
[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.
[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.
[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.
[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.
[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.
[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.
[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.
[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.
[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.
I hadn't thought of that angle; I thought Butler was a Republican, like Thaddeus Stevens. And I remember Sickles's being a pol.....let's see, is he the guy who marched a brigade right up to Jackson's Corps at Antietam and got them shredded, or was he the idiot in the Wheat Field at Gettysburg who took a weak position in advance of his line and got thrashed by Hood?
Polk was political, and as wooden as they come (though Hood was the one called "Old Wooden Head"), but Braxton Bragg was the real operator. He was tight with Jefferson Davis and had much to do with the career chutes and ladders in the Confederate general staff. (He was actually captured with Davis in 1865 -- more "face time" with the boss!)
Equally political after the war were Jubal Early and Wm. N. Pendleton (the latter the only semi-competent chief of artillery). Early dominated the Southern Historical Society with Pendleton, and also the Lee Monument Association and the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia for some 30 years after the war, during which he built up the "man marmoreal" legend of Lee, to cover his own shortcomings, and was the inventor of the "dawn attack" slander against Longstreet's performance at Gettysburg. Now, that's political!
Brown did not discriminate in his choice of victims, he was an equal opportunity killer. Can it be that you actually think that there was anything positive or admirable about that homicidal fanatic?
As I recall from Bruce Catton, Butler basically controlled a state, I guess New York. He couldn't BE fired, at least until after the 1864 election, and he was fired afterward.
The troops he commanded down in the Bermuda Hundred were basically useless to Grant -- until Butler was fired.
Walt
Careful, there, fella. Your hatred is showing.
I am reading now, "Five Tragic Hours" about the battle of Franklin. The authors suggest that Davis' visit to the Army of Tennessee after Hood took over only made things worse. All he did was remove some of the more cabable and experienced officers in favor of those like Cheatham, who had never proved themselves.
He also gave Beauregard very ambigous instructions and basically screwed up the whole command structure by giving him supervisory powers that were indistinct and violative of good unity of command principles. Of course Davis was generally very ineffectual as president. President Lincoln learned as he went along, but Davis never did.
Of course, it wouldn't matter who was in charge once the attack on Schofield's works at Franklin was ordered.
Walt
Taney's influence generally was very bad. The habeas corpus thing isn't even the worst and most unreasonable thing he did.
The Taney court's attempt at social engineering in the Dred Scott case was an important factor in bringing on the war.
The court was attempting to settle political questions through judicial activism totally undounded in constitutional precedent.
How could Taney say in Dred Scott that blacks had no rights that blacks were bound to respect when blacks could vote in five states? Taney -was- a slouch when it came to his duties.
Walt
Is this where I'm supposed to burst into tears and beg your forgiveness for having had the temerity to say "red" when you said "blue"? There is such a thing in debate as "appeal to authority" -- but you have plenty of chutzpah setting yourself up as the authority, and grading everyone else's papers for him.
Lincoln couldn't endorse the 13th Amendment - it hadn't been proposed yet.
This is America, professor. Anybody can propose anything at any time.
The amendment was rushed through the Congress in February 1861 in an attempt to head off the southern rebellion.
Check your calendar, professor. Half of Dixie was already gone, and Jefferson Davis had one foot out the door of the United States Senate.
It would have been hard for Lincoln to campaign for something that hadn't been proposed yet.
You mean, like Reconstruction? Funny how that happened, though, even without his campaigning for it in 1860: Ladies and gentlemen, my platform is one of Reconstruction........after I burn the South to the ground, kill a quarter million of her free citizens, free all the slaves, and give them the franchise -- so they can be Southern Republicans and vote the surviving Southerners down on everything! Yessir, a vote for Abe Lincoln, the Rail Splitter, is a vote for pillars of smoke all over the South! We'll show them! On to Richmond!
Lincoln couldn't have done anything to halt the spread of slavery in Texas since Texas was already a slave state and could promote slavery anywhere within her borders.
Check my posts above, professor, and see if you can find the post in which I told you when Texas joined the Union! But thanks for the review.......
In short, there was nothing that Lincoln could have done to prevent the southern actions except lose the election.
Bull hockey! Fallacy of distraction, straw man. Bogus bull. He could have done plenty -- and since he was ONLY seeking the Presidency of the United States, he damn well owed it to everyone to do lots and lots to forestall the Civil War. The fact that he didn't, is precisely my charge against him. Which you seem to understand perfectly, while asking me to believe three impossible things before breakfast. For which I'm late -- see ya, fellas, I think I'll go git me some grits !
In 1860 that didn't apply to the 3.5 million Americans who were slaves.
Walt
What do you think President Lincoln could have done differently between November 1860 and March 1861?
Walt
Urk. That whites were bound to respect.
Walt
Seems pretty open and shut to me unless one believes that the Constitution is a living document, subject to twisting to suit the purposes of those in power. Here are some excerpts from Taney's opinion in Ex Parte Merryman.
The clause of the constitution, which authorizes the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, is in the 9th section of the first article. This article is devoted to the legislative department of the United States, and has not the slightest reference to the executive department. It begins by providing 'that all legislative powers therein granted, shall be vested in a congress of the United States, which shall consist of a senate and house of representatives.' And after prescribing the manner in which these two branches of the legislative department shall be chosen, it proceeds to enumerate specifically the legislative powers which it thereby grants [and legislative powers which it expressly prohibits]; and at the conclusion of this specification, a clause is inserted giving congress 'the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.' [skip paragraphs]
It is the second article of the constitution that provides for the organization of the executive department, enumerates the powers conferred on it, and prescribes its duties. And if the high power over the liberty of the citizen now claimed, was intended to be conferred on the president, it would undoubtedly be found in plain words in this article; but there is not a word in it that can furnish the slightest ground to justify the exercise of the power.
Congress was not in session much of the year back in this time frame. I don't know, but it seems like Congress was only in session 3-4 months out of the year. Not much of an emergency power if you have to wait several months to invoke it.
Then Congress should have seen fit to amend the Constitution.
WhiskeyPapa, you've endlessly cited rulings by Chief Justice Marshall to support your theories of government. As you no doubt noticed, Taney cites the following words of Marshall in Ex Parte Merryman: "If at any time, the public safety should require the suspension of the powers vested by this act in the courts of the United States, it is for the legislature to say so. That question depends on political considerations, on which the legislature is to decide; until the legislative will be expressed, this court can only see its duty, and must obey the laws."
Here is Taney again:
...I can only say that if the authority which the constitution has confided to the judiciary department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws, but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.
The ambiguousness charge is one that is also laid against Lee, who was by turns very general and vague in his orders (which allowed e.g. Imboden to stop in his progress into Pennsylvania, and contribute his aliquot to Lee's destitution of useful cavalry in the week before Stuart finally showed up in the middle of Gettysburg, when the affair was already half decided), and then sometimes very intricate and complicated in other orders.
You're right, Davis had a strong tendency toward inflexibility, he lacked creativity, and his lionization as a typical Southern "Great Man" (like Bear Bryant, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell and others), which removed his performance from the purview of most of his contemporaries, made him impossible to replace even if things weren't going well so that his failings bit more deeply than otherwise.
His worst failing was grand-strategical, in acceding to local politics (e.g. the discussion of States' home-defense troops above) to allow both gubernatorial interference in the employment of state troops (in the U.S. they'd have simply been nationalized under Article I), and also in allowing the governors to commit him to a territorial defense rather than concentrating (as per Jomini) and working on interior lines, which was much more what Longstreet had in mind. If Longstreet had had Lee's job......<shrugs>
Jackson is in New Orleans threatened by a British army. He's the executive on the spot, and he feels compelled to suspend the Writ.
If the victory at New Orleans was a close run thing and the suspension of the Writ was one of the items vital to that victory, should Jackson have just resigned himself to defeat because there was no way he could get the Congress to suspend the writ in a timely fashion?
You are relatively new here, so you may not have seen the oft-posted assertion by the current Chief Justice that presidential power to suspend the Writ has still yet to be definitively answered.
Walt
Well, let's turn this back on the "secession on demand" crew.
Where does the Constitution EXPLICITLY forbid the president from suspending the Writ?
Walt
Under the Texas Annexation agreement was a clause that allowed Texas to form itself into as many as five states if it chose, and if congress agreed. That potentially could have added 8 more members to the Senate. Some have suggested that Texas and the South in general were not too hot on this idea because the demographics showed that any new states carved out would have likely voted themselves 'free states' since slavery was heavly concentrated in the cotton region of the Gulf Coast. North and West Texas have very little slavery and most of the settlers there were free soiler farmers and ranchers.
And how many of those 3.5 million were found in Northern states? How many black lawmakers were there in the North prior to 1860, how many successful black business owners, etc.?
Face it, Walt, blacks were as much "n------" in the North as they were in the South as evidenced by the hypocrisy of Northern whites keeping the blacks from living in the white cities of the North.
See my post #485.
That isn't relevant to the point under discussion. N-S was cavilling that it would have been "hard" for Lincoln to have brought up the amendment. Lincoln wasn't a slave.
What do you think President Lincoln could have done differently between November 1860 and March 1861?
I've thought about that, and I think that if I'd been in Lincoln's position in 1860, I'd have begun a letter-writing campaign to the Southern papers, most of which would have printed them. People paid much closer attention to speeches and letters then, and I'd have used the papers as free advertising. I'd have made the offer of the amendment then, in the middle of much else offered up like FDR's "fireside chats". There were several demographic and political facts to work with:
1. The fact that slaveholders were a minority even among franchisees.
2. The divergence of interests between slaveholding planters and freeholders.
3. Lincoln wasn't committed to extending the franchise to blacks; I'd have put that in, along with other soothingly non-abolitionist statements, to underscore that I was not the John Brown partisan that people like Breckenridge were saying that I was.
4. I'd have talked redemption (for cash) and transportation (to relieve the Southerners' other bugbear about Haiti), and 5. An amendment like the proposed 13th would give the Southern planters most of what they wanted.
As Winston Churchill once said, jaw-jaw beats war-war.
By your logic then, the president can assume power for anything he is not EXPLICTLY forbidden to assume, including usurping powers given in the Constitution to the other branches of government?
I'm sorry, but that makes my head hurt.
You said -anybody- could propose -anything-, this being America and all.
But that wasn't correct, was it?
Walt
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