Could the South Have Won?

NY Books ^ | June 2002 ed. | James M. McPherson

[WhiskeyPapa]

I'm sorry, but that makes my head hurt.

Your head would hurt a lot worse if the secessionists had had their way.

Walt

[lentulusgracchus]

Well, let's turn this back on the "secession on demand" crew....

Where does the Constitution EXPLICITLY forbid the president from suspending the Writ?

Foul! Irrelevant conclusion: the argument you assert for presidential prerogative is a misapplication of the argument about reservation of powers. The secessionists argued that the right of secession is among the rights reserved by the Ninth Amendment explicitly, and by the body of the Constitution implicitly because the Constitution doesn't delegate to the federal government any power to forbid secession.

The President has no power that is not delegated to him by the Constitution.

[lentulusgracchus]

Sure it was. Anybody could propose anything! That included free blacks and, I suppose, under some circumstances blacks that weren't free. Firearms laws prohibited slaves from owning or carrying firearms, but they sometimes carried them anyway in service. And sometimes they proposed things. Denmark Vesey proposed a lot....so did Nat Turner.

[wardaddy]

I'm at best ambivalent about whether I wish the South had succeeded in seceding, nevertheless...

At best is right.....I'm not hear to refight that war but I (we) must take a stand against the do-gooders who at times lack truth or clarity. To deny one's heritage is a sign of weakness...IMHO. If the do-gooders left us alone...why should anyone care if we wish to have a Rebel flag or whistle Dixie or hang a portrait of a Confederate in our home....I do (Forrest of course). Perhaps most troubling is while they feast and sate their need to feel good about themselves on the bones of my fallen ancestors, they completely ignore their own hypocrisy by leaving out or omitting unpleasantries of their own past. Unlike them, I will be there when the do-gooders come for our shared American heritage which they most assuredly will. Something these dunderheads refuse to acknowledge or don't care either way. Lots and lots of what we in the senstive modern world call atrocities were carried out by the US of A and under said flag....reams of victims just waiting to be tapped.

[lentulusgracchus]

Your head would hurt a lot worse if the secessionists had had their way.

Incorrect -- statement directly contrary to facts. If the secessionists had won, our government, wherever we lived, would be a lot more closely based on the Constitution, not on the woolly-booger theory of federal omnipotence foisted on us by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln used the pretext of a Civil War illegally to overthrow and displace the federal model with a Hamiltonian one, melted and founded complete with millions of sets of chains, in the lower compartments of Hell.

[muleboy]

Very interesting point.

Lincoln, the supposed humanitarian with such incredible oratory and critical-thinking skills had 4,5,6 months after his election in which to devise the most effective way of "saving the union", chose to rely on inflammatory and divisive tariff increases, constitutionally questionable, unilateral executive actions (after inauguration), culminating in antagonistic use of force of arms, rather than following the example of his supposed idol Henry Clay, using his incredible skills for compromise, peace, and union.

Rather revealing when you look at it that way. Thank you for the inspiration. It seems that Mr. Lincoln had his own vision of a "more perfect union" by "any means necessary", as did the Southern Hot-heads, that precluded a peaceful solution.

Lots of food for thought, many thanks.

[WhiskeyPapa]

The secessionists argued that the right of secession is among the rights reserved by the Ninth Amendment explicitly, and by the body of the Constitution implicitly because the Constitution doesn't delegate to the federal government any power to forbid secession.

Nope. Please. Where does the word "secession" appear in the document?

What is EXPLICITLY stated in the Constitution is that the laws of the federal government are supreme over all state laws. Nothing in a state law can withstand the supremacy clause.

It is just as reasonable to ask where the Constitution forbids the executive to suspend the Writ as it to ask where it forbids secession.

You can't have it both ways.

Walt

[Ditto]

An amendment like the proposed 13th would give the Southern planters most of what they wanted.

Not really. What the 'planters' wanted was expansion and that is the only area where Lincoln could not, and would not compromise. There was no chance in hell that emancipation could have passed under Lincoln or any other president without the agreement of the South. The 3/4 state majority required for an amendment with 15 slaves states voting against made it a mathematical impossibility. (It would still be impossible today) The idea that Lincoln could somehow make it happen was pure propaganda.

What you propose may have 'pacified' the non-slaveholding whites who had been propagandized to the point of fear and loathing for the "Black Republicans" but I doubt it. The slaveocrats had done too thorough a job of building hatred and terror to roll it back that easily.

[WhiskeyPapa]

To deny one's heritage is a sign of weakness...

I think so too. But it is the CSA apologists who make a fetish of it.

Walt

[lentulusgracchus]

Nope. Please. Where does the word "secession" appear in the document?

It doesn't have to, and it doesn't. That's the whole idea of the Ninth Amendment -- in case guys like you "kinda forgot" which powers were delegated to your favorite war machine or police state, and which not.

What is EXPLICITLY stated in the Constitution is that the laws of the federal government are supreme over all state laws. Nothing in a state law can withstand the supremacy clause.

Right as rain. Absolutely true. As long as you're still in the Union. Oh, and notice that you're talking about state laws and state governments. You aren't talking about the States themselves, who are the People of those States. Different league, kid -- different ball game.

Walt, the Supremacy Clause doesn't give the Prince supremacy over the Sovereign. That just isn't gonna happen, and it didn't. Except when Lincoln made illegal war on the States, and warred them down to be his slaves. The Great Emancipator, taking millions of free men captive, and making them slaves of the federal government, and the Northern Interests that owned it. What a thought!

It is just as reasonable to ask where the Constitution forbids the executive to suspend the Writ as it to ask where it forbids secession.

No, it isn't. Slothful induction. I already 'splained that to you, Lucy.

You can't have it both ways.

I'm not. The Supremacy Clause doesn't bind the People, neither the People of the United States nor the People of Virginia. You are talking about the People in a condition beyond categories, in their sublime position as Sovereign. You don't lay hands on them unless you are exactly what I said Lincoln was -- a soul-catcher, an enslaver.

But the arrangements of statal power among the organs of government are indeed the meat and drink of the Constitution. They are inferior to Sovereign power. You are confounding two different things.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Wardaddy] To deny one's heritage is a sign of weakness...

[WP] I think so too. But it is the CSA apologists who make a fetish of it.

Not really.....their activity is a response to demonization and ethnic cleansing of the hallowed halls of memory by the NAACP.

The NAACP has undertaken a course of action, seconded powerfully by liberal and black corporate executives and board members, which is aimed at driving Southern heritage underground. The NAACP leadership's motive is a smoldering, implacable hatred that they've never had to own up to......look at Kweisi Mfume, who changed his name because his given name was too white, and exchanged it for some khufikentous made-up thing, that had as its particular virtue that it was not white. That is the significance, too, of the ubiquitous "X"; and you needn't look any further for signs of this malevolence than the movie screens on which Spike Lee keeps posting his. Do the Right Thing came down to burning out a white pizzeria owner, didn't it? That was the "right thing". For guys like Mfume and Lee, two of the most important and influential men in the black community over the last ten years, there is no such thing as a good white person, who hasn't been remade and purged of his "whiteness". Liberals speak openly of "whiteness" as objectively evil: well, who the f&#k asked them to propound on it? Gunnar Myrdal, smug in his monoculture homeland of Sweden, could write books about An American Dilemma all he wanted: it was just theory to him. Well, ask Reginald Denny -- if he's recovered his wits yet, and he may not have -- what he thinks the American Dilemma is.

These secessionists you complain about are just a bunch of people who know they're better than their press, and who know a fraud is being carried forward because God gave them a sense of smell. Beyond that, they are aware of, and do not accept, Northern custodianship of the causes and effects and labels of history, and Northern triumphalist theories of government. Neither do they accept the lesser status assigned to Southerners ever since the Civil War as unclean losers, social and cultural lepers marked out by imputations of pellagra, hookworm, and lynch-law, and less than full participants in the government of their own country, reduced on merit and tolerated only when humble.

[Non-Sequitur]

Can it be that you actually think that there was anything positive or admirable about that homicidal fanatic?

No...nothing comes to mind. Brown was out of the mainstream at the time. He did what he did and he paid the price for it. In his own way he isn't much different than those people who go around murdering abortionists. One can be against abortion and still disavow their actions.

Why, did you actually think that I would support Brown's act?

[Non-Sequitur]

Yeah, right. Whatever. Have a nice lunch.

[wardaddy]

A number of states had clauses about treason even after the WBTS. Mississippi's 1890 Constitution has a clause recognizing such . The US Constitution mentions specifically that a person charged with treason in one state who flees to another should be returned or "delivered up"...

As far as individuals who are non-residents charged and executed by the state (or nation for that matter)for treason , there are plenty of English examples from history....(the Papal assassins sent to kill QEI). Here in the US, hmmmm...I can't think of one offhand but I have not been able to find any prohibition of non-residents tried for treason

[Non-Sequitur]

He was definitely the idiot at the Wheat Field but he commanded a division at Antietam, not a brigade. Give you an idea of the kind of guy he was, he lost his leg at Gettysburg. He had the amputated leg skinned and kept the bones and after the war he gave the leg bone and the cannon ball that took it off to what is now the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Bethesda, MD. He used to visit them every year on the anniversary of the amputation and you can still see it on display in the hospital museum. And people thought that Stonewall Jackson was eccentric.

On the other hand, prior to the war Sickles also murdered Philip Barton Key, son of the author of the Star Spangled Banner. Key was having an affair with Sickles' wife. Sickles got himself off by pleading temporary insanity. Maybe it wasn't so temporary after all?

[wardaddy]

I think so too. But it is the CSA apologists who make a fetish of it.

Damn Walt, the only fetishes I know of involve leather and latex.

[wardaddy]

BTTT.....nicely done!

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

However, when the south tried to push slavery into the north, they stepped way over the line.

Dred Scott simply read Article IV of the Constitution into a fugitive case. The Northern States weren't playing fair with respect to Article IV: they wrote unconstitutional ordinances, and then abolitionists organized rings to help runaways. Not exactly calculated to help intersectional relations, ya know. And the South's interest in acquiring territories to the west that the planters could move to was always lively since before the annexation of Texas. Okay, the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest, fine. But just as the anti-slavery faction politicked for that Ordinance's passage, so pro-slavery people in the South politicked to get Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act passed into law in 1854. Are you saying they shouldn't have been allowed to do that?

When the Supreme Court upheld slavery as constitutional, they were correct, as this was an issue that needed a constitutional amendment to correct.  However, the way they ruled implied that the anti-slavery laws in the north were illegal.  Rather than back off and take the victory just handed to them by the Supremes, the south almost immediately tried to force slavery into the north.  Are you saying that the anti-slavery laws and sentiment in the north was illegal?  Also note the fact that prior to the war and even in the first year or two of the war, the abolitionist sentiment in the north was the minority viewpoint.  The majority were unionists and felt that eventually slavery would die by itself.  For purposes of representation, the south wanted their slaves to be counted as 3/4 of a free man even though they owned them completely.  So to be technically correct, the Supreme Court could have just as well have declared the slaves to be 3/4 free.

I'm not saying that the pro-slavery crowd should have not been allowed to politick for slavery states.  However, New Mexico came into the Union as a slave state due to the machinations of Texas, even though she was overwhelmingly anti-slave.  So the fault is not on one side by any means (although the violence offered by mobsters to anti-slavery people in Missouri and Illinois far exceeded anything that was done by to the pro-slavers).

Especially since northern states didn't have the same slave-holding traditions that the south had when the Union was formed.

Slavery was just as legal in the North as it was in the South in the colonial period and under the Articles of Confederation. Some of the early slave-revolt conspiracies were hatched in New York City in the 18th century.

A strawman, since it is the Constitution which applies, not the Articles of Confederation.  Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that slavery is legal.  The legal status of slavery was left to the individual states to decide.  Under the Constitution, however, states had to respect the laws of other states.  So while slaves couldn't be freed, they could be kept from living in states where slavery was illegal.

Furthermore, even though there were slaves in the North, it wasn't nearly to the same degree (40,000 in 1790 vs 385,000 in the south) that it was in the south.

So those who claim that the South seceded due to states rights are in the untenable position of having to defend the Souths' violations of those same states rights, when they tried to get slavery legalized in the north.

So not true! Article IV was in the Constitution from the git, and the language of its Section 2 was crystal-clear. Repeat, the South didn't try to "get slavery legalized" in the North. Their legislators legislated on the subject of slave versus free in the Territories, and the compromise was Popular Sovereignty, which the South signed off on -- but the North had a problem with! (So much for having a vote!) What did happen was that two individual slaveholders who were deprived of their property by state ordinances in contravention of their property rights confirmed by Article IV, went to court. One was the Dred Scott case, prior to which SCOTUS had ruled in Prigg vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1842 that a Pennsylvania law forbidding seizure of fugitive slaves was unconstitutional. The Northern States had responded to Prigg by passing a raft of fresh anti-slavery statutes, basically asserting State sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment against Article IV. The third case was the Lemon case in New York, referred to by David Donald in Lincoln (1999), which appeared to Lincoln and the other freesoil Whigs, Republicans and Free Soilers like a companion piece to Dred Scott, but I don't think it was ever taken up for review by SCOTUS. This is the real issue.

If you are talking of the Kansas-Nebraska act, the south felt that they held a decided edge (as they did in Varina, Idaho, which later became Virginia City, Montana), so indeed they rejoiced.  Both sides only rejoiced in popular sovereignty if it was to their advantage.  The south squawked at California and New Mexico (and actually sabatoged New Mexico to boot) so the south wasn't nearly as squeaky clean as you make them out to be.

Not to mention the fact that the South opposed the Free Soil Act (even though it was open to southernors as much as northerners) because they felt that it would harm the institution of slavery.  So much for southern respect for a democratic vote.

It is interesting seeing the southern apologists twisting themselves in knots explaining the right of slave states to seccede, but the northern states lack of right to ban slavery within their borders.

Until the South pushed it in the 1850s, the issue, though very real, was a dying issue as far at the North was concerned.

No, I'm sorry, that isn't true. John Quincy Adams and the Abolitionists fought like hell all through the 1830's and most of the 1840's to keep Texas out of the Union (first request 1836), and as I mentioned, many of the Northern anti-slavery statutes in the North dated to the 1840's. So a Northern apologist bears the burden, which I've never seen your side taxed fairly with yet in these threads, of explaining why slavery was the issue, and not anti-slavery, over which the Civil War was fought. Given Lincoln's actions with respect to the South, clearly the latter is the case.

True, there was much bitter heat in the latter end of the 1830s and up through the mid 1840s about the slavery issue.  It was, after all, a pro-slavery mob which killed Elijah Lovejoy (a presbyterian minister and anti-slavery editor who was run out of Missouri) in Illinois in 1837.  If the Mormons weren't run out of Missouri by mobs, it is doubtful that that state would ever have become part of the CSA.  But from about the mid-1840s to 1850, the issue, although important, was dieing down.  Even so, most northerners were Unionists, not abolitionists.

But as far as taxing the "northern apologists" as you state about anti-slavery, this is just so much hoo-haw.  The Southern states were well aware of the anti-slavery feeling of the northerners.  Most of the northern anti-slavers were unionist who were suspicious of both abolitionists and slavers.  They willing to let slavery run its course.  Very few northerners were out-and-out abolitionists until around the second year of the war.

So basically, the Unionists (a majority of the North) wanted to keep the Union together slave or free.  While the South wanted to have only a union of like-minded slave states (read their secession documents.  They are quite enlightening, I assure you).

So I guess the question that the Northern side has to answer is why they wanted to keep the Union together at all costs.  OTOH, the question that the south has to answer is why did they want to remain slavers at all costs.  On the whole, I'd rather have to answer the first question...

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Technically, I should have said "Elizabethan English."

[Non-Sequitur]

Well, keep looking. Let me know if you find something. The idea of trying someone for treason against a state he holds no allegiance to is still ridiculous. IMHO, of course.