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.
If my friend 4CJ will permit me, that is entirely the point. You keep saying it, but the Constitution does not.
At the end of the day, the only thing that ratifies your opinion over 4CJ's and mine is the gun you keep offering to blow our heads off with. Tacitly and politely, of course. It is armed violence which is now the basis of the Union, not the consent of the governed. Oh, we get to vote.....but everyone knows it doesn't really count any more.
This is where the rubber meets the road. And as our friends 4CJ and Stainlessbanner have pointed out, this argument is anterior to all the others, and all the others, including the outcomes of the various Supreme Court cases, depend upon it.
1. As our friend has pointed out again, all the States, including Rhode Island, were indeed sovereign before they ratified the Constitution. Rhode Island, he points out, remained sovereign longer than others, while the People deliberated -- and ignored threats of retaliation from Connecticut if they didn't "git thar mahnds raht", in the ineffable line of Strother Martin.
2. Rhode Island explicitly -- and unnecessarily -- reserved the right to resume full sovereignty and secede from the Union, in her articles of ratification.
3. All the States had sovereignty, because every single State was a People, colonized, populated, and revolutionized individually and separately from all the others, and most importantly for our purposes, every State had individually and separately, and by a sovereign act taken as a People, a populus, mastering their own affairs, ratified the Constitution.
4. The People never, ever, EVER give up sovereignty, in the United States.
5. The Southern States therefore had the right, which they did not, anywhere in the Constitution, surrender, to gather together in conventions as populi, as Peoples, to reconsider the Union -- and to withdraw from it, in a series of acts of sovereignty over which the other States and Peoples had no right of supervision, much less approval, any more than they had the right, which Connecticut thought they did, to compel Rhode Island's ratification of the Constitution.
6. Please re-read No. 5 slowly, for comprehension.
7. The argument advanced here, that secession is legal only if it is approved by the other States, confutes itself. Let us consider it.
Suppose Florida, citing language and cultural differences, wanted to secede and join the Antilian Confederation. Suppose Florida took her case to the Union for "approval", as the Unionist apologists, who favor the "Suitors of Penelope" theory of ratification, indicate she should.
To whom does Florida apply? How can Florida apply? Florida has no sovereignty, and is a subordinate political unit of an undivided United States. Does Florida apply to Congress? Does Florida ask the other States to go into Convention to consider her appeal? Does the Florida legislature do this, or the governor? They can't, they're bound by the Supremacy Clause. They can't touch it. So Florida must convene a State convention, and pass a plebiscite for disunion, and submit it.......to whom?
What constitutes a sufficient response by the other States, under the Suitors of Penelope Theory? Suppose 40 States go into convention (remember, their state governments can't touch this either -- they're bound by the Supremacy Clause, too) and approve, five States convene and say no, and the other five don't even bother to hold a convention or reply? What then? And what does the United States Government do? Is the United States Government a party to resolving this question? Careful with your answer -- it'll reflect on Lincoln. Does the President of the United States simply forbid Florida to leave the Union, relying on his Executive powers to see that the laws are executed? That's what Lincoln did. But in that case, the Government is talking down to the People -- and therefore the People are not sovereign, but the Government is sovereign instead.
And that, Sir, is Lincoln's Revolution.
Lincoln may have felt himself justified in making that revolution -- as he himself said about Robert E. Lee, it's always the best men that do the most damage -- and he may have been utterly convinced that he had to square a circle, in order to eliminate slavery, which he saw as a blot on America's escutcheon that undermined our exemplary role in the world. At least that is what Donald Douglas, in Lincoln, says was Lincoln's primary motivation in eliminating slavery -- and I believe him. But by ending slavery the way he did, he also ended the American Experiment in terms congenial to the cynics of the Old World, and gave the lie to the Founders, who said that a People could rule itself, and not be ruled by men of power.
8. Therefore, the Southern States were within their rights to withdraw from the Union when they saw that their differences with the majority in the North were irreconcilable, and that the champion of the anti-Southern faction had emerged triumphant in contol of the apparatus of the United States Government. They were within their rights to secede, and by overthrowing them by armed violence, Lincoln enthroned Government as the Sovereign over the People, and made the People the plaything of politicans and generals. In so doing he laid the groundwork for National Greatness politics, the Gilded Age of access capitalism and government by pocketbook, socialism, and eventually world empire.
Some historians think that A. S. Johnston was the more grievous loss, who was killed at Shiloh. He was the shining star in a Western campaign that, on the Confederate side, was blotched with poorer leadership than was available in the East. Poor, uncooperative, or incompetent generals like Braxton Bragg and Leonidas Polk abounded, and the more energetic generals tended to get shot by sharp-eyed Western farmers in blue uniforms, as at Pea Ridge and Shiloh. Someone pointed out the mismatch between the average Southern soldier in the East in 1862, and the shop clerks and sutlers who were poured into blue uniforms and sent south to soldier for Irvin McDowell and George McClellan. Well, it wasn't quite the other way around in the West (U.S. Grant shook several bullets out of his own uniform after the first afternoon of Shiloh), but as things turned out, the Southern leadership talent was killed in the early going, leaving Grant, Rosecrans, and Sherman a relatively easy time of it.
Well, let's proceed on this line a little further. I've told you what I think........what then, did the States give up at the moment of ratification? Do you subscribe to Lincoln's "Suitors of Penelope" construction: that once they ratified, the doors slammed shut and were bolted behind them, and the Many Unintended Entrained Consequences set in motion? Do you think Rhode Island's reservations were valid, or is there language in Article VI, Article VII, or George Washington's covering letter, that precludes Rhode Island's taking a reservation?
Do you think the States bound themselves thereafter helplessly to the United States Government, regardless of what they had intended, under the theory that They Should Have Known? That the People's assent to government is not "perpetual", i.e. continually given, but that it is a one-time, instant decision on the threshold, that binds them forever and forever to the discretion of United States magistrates and the Chief Executive?
Is the United States Government the Sovereign of the U.S.A., its Lord, Master, and God Emperor? Well?
Sorry, but I'm a naturalized Southerner, and in the 1960's Lint'n Johnson showed us what rights the states had.....by sending troops to any state that even looked at one of his orders funny.
So, tell me what rights you think the states have, or had, before the Chief Justice, in an exercise of judicial activism from the right, began calling up state-sovereignty cases for review. Tell me what rights the states (notice I'm using a lower-case "s" now) had when Landslide Lint'n was president, and liberal university professors (when I challenged them) admitted that they looked on the Tenth Amendment as a dead letter, because now we were all modern and evolved and stuff.
I don't concede that at all because that is not the fact of the matter with the overwhelming majority of Supreme Court decisions. When the court issued it's ruling in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education did they say that those areas practicing 'separate but equal' policies could go ahead and continue while no future instances would be allowed? When the court issued their decision in Furman v. Georgia did they say that Georgia and the other states could go ahead and execute those already on death row, but had to alter their laws for those they would try in the future? No, to both cases. The court ruled that actions made in the past were illegal and that they could not continue. It voided those actions and required changes be made based on those decisions. Likewise in Texas v. White. Chief Justice Chase didn't say that secession was illegal as of now and don't you ever try it again. He said, "Considered, therefore, as transactions under the Constitution, the Ordinance of Secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the Acts of her Legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law." The actions taken were as invalid and illegal in 1861 as they were in 1869.
Impossible and invalid in US law.
An ordinance or act of secession is a "thing" in the laws of a state which is clearly blocked by the Supremacy clause.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 requires that controversies between the states be submitted to the Supreme Court.
Read it and weep.
Walt
How hard is it to understand? Words that are completely missing ("perpetual", "permanent") can be divined by them in a heartbeat, but the literal and plain meaning of a statment is ignored or overlooked.
Be my guest, my esteemed friend. When you are thru, please take a moment to join us on the verandah for your pick of mint juleps, brandy and cigars.
Article IV, Section 1 of our Constitution requires that the public acts of each state shall be given "Full Faith and Credit" in every other State.
As you well know, the supremacy clause holds that the Constitution is supreme over mere legislative acts.
Read it and weep.
I don't know any such thing and you don't either; who are you trying to fool?
The supremacy clause clearly states that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance are the supreme laws of the land.
Do you give the lurkers so little credit, that they don't know how the clause reads?
And men have to administer the document. And someone, or group of people, have to have the final say. That group of people is the Supreme Court. It's a real document, made for real situations.
That is what you neo-rebs deny, and that is why your argument is SO lame.
Walt
I'm sure lurkers wait with baited breath for every word that flies from you fingers. But if you haven't been following the thread, a certain poster who holds the opinion that "pursuant" is nit-picking.
And men have to administer the document. And someone, or group of people, have to have the final say. That group of people is the Supreme Court. It's a real document, made for real situations.
Then file suit if you disagree.
That is what you neo-rebs deny, and that is why your argument is SO lame.
Article IV REQUIRES that the public acts of the states be accepted by the others. The federal government did have the ability to prescibe the rules of what was acceptible, and they did in 1790. And accordingly, under those provisions, the Declarations of Seccesion are valid. The states had seceded according to the rules, fair and square.
That is what you neo-cons deny, and that is why your argument is SO lame.
I don't doubt for a second that he wrote that; I credit you entirely. However:
1. He's wrong.
2. He's handling matters above his pay grade. He has no standing whatever to judge acts of the People in Convention assembled. When the People assemble as the People, they can take back every delegated power, every decision, nullify every ordinance, law, discretion, appropriation, and court decision ever made. The People answer to God. Period. Or don't you believe that?
3. With the words, "Considered, therefore, as transactions under the Constitution", the Justice fibbed. They were not undertaken "under the Constitution". They were undertaken by the People, who are above Constitutions, as witness the fact that they may assemble at will, and change the Constitution at will. The Constitution is their creature, not the other way around.
Unless you're a Lincolnian, in which case, the Justice had to earn his pay by subjecting every person in the United States to the Government, and enthroning the Government as Sovereign.
Why, thank you, suh. It being yet morning, I do believe I'll stick to the brandy -- thank you verr' kindly, suh.
Not when the People sit as the People; it isn't "in" the laws of a state, but their acts are above the State itself.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 requires that controversies between the states be submitted to the Supreme Court.
Another statute. In the ordinary course of things, it would be a useful law.......as long as the States were still in the Union, and hadn't been taken out by their Peoples.
Next time you decide to amuse yourself with that "read 'em and weep" stuff, and by otherwise pulling the wings off flies, Walt, better make sure that fly isn't an eagle first.
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