Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
"But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new?"I guess to some, experiment means perpetual. < /sarcasm >
James Madison, Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 14, "Objections to the Proposed Constitution From Extent of Territory Answered", 30 Nov 1787
No one is suggesting that secession is not a state right.
No one, to my knowledge has ever suggested anything else.
What is complete nonsense is to suggest that it is legal under U.S. law, or that Washington, Madison or Jefferson would have sanctioned such a thing.
The slave power didn't care what the founders thought, and they duped the common people with misinformation from the pen of Calhoun and fears of racial mixing.
Poor whites didn't have much, but at least they could lord it over the slaves the way the plantation owners lorded it over them.
Washington and Madison are both strongly on the record as favoring a perpetual Union. So is Jefferson:
"It is hoped that by a due poise and partition of powers between the General and particular governments, we have found the secret of extending the benign blessings of republicanism over still greater tracts of country than we possess, and that a subdivision may be avoided for ages, if not forever."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Sullivan, 1791
"Our citizens have wisely formed themselves into one nation as to others and several States as among themselves. To the united nation belong our external and mutual relations; to each State, severally, the care of our persons, our property, our reputation and religious freedom."
--Thomas Jefferson: To Rhode Island Assembly, 1801.
"The preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration."
--Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural Address, 1801.
"It is of immense consequence that the States retain as complete authority as possible over their own citizens. The withdrawing themselves under the shelter of a foreign jurisdiction is so subversive of order and so pregnant of abuse, that it may not be amiss to consider how far a law of praemunire [a punishable offense against government] should be revised and modified, against all citizens who attempt to carry their causes before any other than the State courts, in cases where those other courts have no right to their cognizance."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1797. ME 9:424
It is a fatal heresy to suppose that either our State governments are superior to the Federal or the Federal to the States. The people, to whom all authority belongs, have divided the powers of government into two distinct departments, the leading characters of which are foreign and domestic; and they have appointed for each a distinct set of functionaries. These they have made coordinate, checking and balancing each other like the three cardinal departments in the individual States; each equally supreme as to the powers delegated to itself, and neither authorized ultimately to decide what belongs to itself or to its coparcener in government. As independent, in fact, as different nations."
--Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1821. ME 15:328
"The spirit of concord [amongst] sister States... alone carried us successfully through the revolutionary war, and finally placed us under that national government, which constitutes the safety of every part, by uniting for its protection the powers of the whole."
--Thomas Jefferson to William Eustis, 1809. ME 12:227
"The interests of the States... ought to be made joint in every possible instance in order to cultivate the idea of our being one nation, and to multiply the instances in which the people shall look up to Congress as their head."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1785. ME 5:14, Papers 8:229
"By [the] operations [of public improvement] new channels of communication will be opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties."
--Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1060.htm
President Lincoln and the brave Union soldiers put down rebellion and treason and preserved the government cherished by Washington, Madison and Jefferson.
Walt
I agree with the erosion of independence - the great tyrant answered the question of secession with a murderous war. Sovereignty and Independence swept away at the expense of the Constitution.
However, self-determination will always trump tyrrany in the end. Deo Vindice!
No former slave ever received his "40 acres and a mule", though the Southern states were all left with multi-million dollar debts incurred by the rump governments and the like of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union League. If your precious radicals had done any of what you claim they did with their "reconstruction", the communists of the NAACP wouldn't have a single thing to gripe about. As it is, the false promises and the fraud perpetrated on an entire nation by the radical republicans are still the pretext for reparations which are being demanded by the poverty pimps whose false depiction of the South you're in the habit of promoting here.
Is it as difficult to make a plausible case for your view as you make it appear? Maybe you need to step down and call in a better liar.
Do you see pink elephants too?
Is that so? Saint Lincoln and his band of angels Grant and Sherman were so holy that they delivered God's wrath? Better rethink that position.
No literate person would read it that way, pamphleteer.
And you'll not be able to show Lee meant anything else.
I already showed you that Lee was mistaken. As 4CJ inconveniently showed you just now, the word "perpetual" was not used in the Constitution, with precision. Ergo, Lee was mistaken, and as I noticed to you, Lee was thinking about the Articles of Confederation, and his own Unionist sentiments (following Washington), and misunderstood what the Constitution actually said -- again, as we have pointed out to you.
Read the 9th Amendment, Wlat, and weep for your theory of the Civil War as "justifiable homicide 'cuz I told him he couldn't". It isn't supported by reading the Founders, but only the novels of Abe Lincoln and his latterday Declarationist defenders.
Whose values do we here at FR now support?
Excellent Point. Ironic how many of the Southron bashers live in the South - must be a wretched life to stay in enemy territory when you are free to move. Many people identify with the South's agrigarian culture and her strong tradition of family and Christianity. We are a proud people!
Never mind that you will not agree, but one can, on very sound grounds, take the position that the South fought a defensive and hence just war while the North fought an offensive and agressive and hence unjust war. That in particular is my position and it is the one and only reason that I stand with the "neo-Confederates".
[4CJ] Do you see pink elephants too?
He sees pink, all right. But he's filling in my picture of the moral universe he inhabits.....he equates the wrath of God with the displeasure of the Beechers and William Lloyd Garrison. Foolish me, I always thought the South lost because Abe Lincoln called down two million bayonets on it, and that God was very, very far away during the whole endeavour.
Signify to us, Sult. Do you really think that all the slaves lived in the way, and bore the stripes, that the runaways did whom the Beechers saw and were told about? Do you really think that they had any sort of true picture of conditions in the South?
You got one point right, that the "efficiency" of slavery meant lower wages for hire labor and less ability for the freeholder to get a crop. You can't compete with bond labor, but then we knew that ever since Gibbon demonstrated it about the Roman Empire, when he wrote about the decline of Italian agriculture in the later Republic and early Empire. But you want to lay waste an entire country, and a whole people, over the issue -- 140 years after the issue was settled. Doesn't anything bother you about that? Don't you get any red warning lights on your mental dashboard when you start to tic violently whenever anyone tries to say something nice about our Southern ancestors? You aren't dealing with a bunch of Holocaust deniers here. So what's the monkey on your back?
[Born a Texan; butting in where I probably oughtn't; and being cheekier than I should be at the end of a teaching week- - - ]
Does anyone north of lower-hoootn-hollllar really care?
A few of us are trying to become at least slightly addicted to LIVING IN THE PRESENT.
Thank you both. I may take your advice and repair to the verandah --- if not with a mint julep, then perhaps a frozen Margarita and a well worn copy of "The South Was Right."
Well, we know that Lincoln made sure Lee was brought to Washington DC so that Scott could offer him the Unionist command. Why did he do that, unless it was politically useful to him to have a Virginian, a Southerner, at the head of his columns?
And he did offer him rank. Lee was a colonel -- and Lincoln offered him three stars, just like that.
And as I thought I explained about Lee's choice, he made the honorable choice to go with his neighbors, whom he always mentioned as the real reason he resigned his Union commission as soon as Virginia voted secession.
If other Southerners didn't go with their states, then either they were now citizens of Northern States, or else they let their politics overcome their loyalties. And they must bear the mark for having done so.
All you did was cast slurs without offering the slightest bit of support.
Did not. I quoted Lee down the line and explained his timing and motives in refutation of Wlat's slur, that Lee was two-faced and a traitor. I expounded Lee's loyalties, and how he let his loyalties determine his direction, even though his personal political opinion appears to have been fairly strongly opposed to the majority of his fellows.
But that cuts no ice with you, I see -- the South's scalawags must be lionized and comforted because they fought for the Union; and as for the Confederates -- get a rope!
Well, excuse me for demurring.
ROTFL! Visual imagery at it's best!
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