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.
Doing best Daffy Duck imitation:
"I think you're dithspicable."
Walt
Just because the affair was transacted in a disorderly and passionate manner by some people does not mean that the equities are not susceptible of reasoned analysis, which I have attempted to do, and which frankly Jefferson Davis did a better job of doing, in his inaugural address as the president of the still-provisional Confederate government, four weeks after he gave his valedictory address to the United States Senate. It's worth a read, if you haven't seen it already. It's posted somewhere here on Free Republic, as a matter of fact, in one of the other Civil War threads.
Your argument seems to involve the idea that the states are the people, the people are sovereign, therefore the states are sovereign, and the federal government is a government imposed on sovereign people and states.
Almost. I would agree with your precis, with the exception that the federal government is a government summoned into being by a Constitution agreed to by the Sovereign Peoples/States in conventions of ratification.
The other side of the coin is that the states are governments and impositions on the public as well, ....
Well, not exactly. We commonly make the mistake of confounding the States with their corresponding governments. They aren't those governments, they are those Peoples, those populi, poleis, or polities.
.....and the nation is a people as well, and "the people" that rights are reserved to under the Constitution is not "the people of the states", but simply "the people" which many would take as the people of the nation.
Unless I missed a post, that hasn't been argued here, except by you. I suggested it be bruited, but it hasn't. In my reductio ad absurdum, I tried to show that the Constitution does not contain explicit language that would establish that to be the case. If it was the intention of the Framers, I should think they would certainly have said so.
The deletion or addition of a word, in such circumstances, is very heavily loaded. For example, in the U.S. Senate's official discussion of the Tenth Amendment, which I linked to above, it is pointed out that much has been made of the omission of the word "expressly", between the writing of the Articles of Confederation in 1777 and that of the Tenth Amendment several years later, when referring to powers delegated to the United States, as opposed to those reserved to the People. The omission of the word "expressly" has been used to construct a legal argle-bargle to perfume wholesale invasions by Congress and the courts of areas of the law reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment, to the point that in the 20th century the amendment became very nearly a dead letter, as I showed. (It was my purpose to show what cavalier treatment of reserved rights and powers has looked like, as a triumphant "consolidation" movement launched by Lincoln has progressively invaded the People's rights.)
The Centrist Consolidators and imperialist Statists having made much over language, to argue that the failure to re-use the word "expressly" signals original intent to overthrow an entire theory of government, I reserve the same right, and I do not concede that I am less than they a citizen with the right to interpret the Constitution's plain language as the Framers intended everyone should have the right. Of course, that runs contrary to the new theory of government, under which attorneys on retainer to Money and Power do all the interpreting, and we have recourse only to their hired opinions, about what our rights in the law are.
Therefore I insist that the Constitution's reticence about a transfer of Sovereignty, or the creation of a new Populus and the subsumption of the extant Peoples who created the Union by a new populus or polity of the Union, is explicit and every bit as wilful and determining as the Framers' omission of the word "expressly" when referring to delegated powers. I conclude from the omission, that the intent to subsume and displace the People of the State in a People of the Nation was deliberate, and that the Unionists may not correctly infer such an intent, only because it is convenient to their larger purposes.
Of course not, not that any sort of Constitutional restriction would have bothered Davis anyway. Maybe they needed that large an army to keep all the dissatisfied sections of their new 'country' in line? Can't have anyone yelling 'states rights' and seceeding from the confederacy, could we?
The Act of 1790 recognized that the state acts were legal. Accordingly, they ceased being a state in the union.
What act?
I don't suppose the Supreme Court had ever heard of it, as they ruled in The Prize Cases of 1862 that the actions of "the so-called Confederate states" (their phrase) were rebellion against the lawful government and that the federal government was within the law to put down the rebellion.
The concept of legal unilateral state secession is null in our laws. It doesn't exist.
To buy off on such blather, we have to swallow the idea that the Constitutional Convention met, deliberated, and then changed nothing at all.
They well knew it was a fundamental change in the relation of the states and the federal government. They accepted it because the Articles were a total flop.
I remind you again that Jefferson Davis used language in the so-called constitution of the so-called CSA identical to language in the Constitution to maintain that the federal government COULD corece the states. He disgarded totally the idea of complete state sovereignty. Was he wrong?
N/S, it's no wonder they call me Whiskey poo poo.
The record blasts everything they say.
Walt
And I should also apologize for my slowness in reply, which I can account for only by confessing that I felt the burden of your argument and thought that I ought to reply carefully, but nevertheless I was drawn off by certain red-meat challenges offered elsewhere.
In your view the states seem to be like atoms free to combine and separate, but unbreakable in themselves.
That is a fair construction, and the idea rests on the idea of a Sovereign People. In the United States, the State preexisted the Union, pace Lincoln's lawyerly (not to say Clintonesque) argument and his support by the Declarationists, and so the People of the State are the basic building bloc of government, the essential Polity that enjoys Sovereignty as a result of the American Revolution.
But the nation is more than a molecule to be dissolved chemically. There is a common national heritage to be disposed of when nations are dissolved, and doing so can be very problematic.
Agreed. But it's also true that the South had tried for 30 years to deal with Northern political aggression, and came lately, and I think overall fairly, to the reasonable conclusion that the United States was Siamese twins, two separate nations divided by speechways and folkways, by values and interests, and even ethnographically. It's easy to argue that the United States should always have been two countries -- so says Roland Garreau, in The Nine Nations of North America -- and its political leaders' early strategic decision to hang together in order to avoid hanging separately outwore its usefulness after the British threat had receded.
It's also simplistic to assume that the states are the people. A working federal system allows for the majorities and minorities in the nation and the states to have their say. Secession at will doesn't incorporate the same safeguards for all interests.
Omitting for a moment the necessary objurgation of your use of the phrase "secession at will", I am otherwise unable at the moment to assess your assertions. Is there a way to test them? My first reaction is that, in the American system as we've received it from Orville Babcock and the Whiskey Ring -- the true refounders and exponents of the Newly Industrializing American Empire and its pillars of oligarchy and access capitalism -- if you aren't a member in good standing of the U.S. Chambers of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers, you're not really a citizen anyway, but more a policy object.
Your well-reasoned argument that, had history followed the path not taken, other problems would surely have presented themselves, is correct. They would have. The more immediate problem for the historian surveying the wreckage of the Civil War and Reconstruction and all that flowed from both, is the ineluctability of the central proposition that Lincoln's Revolution unleashed what John D. Rockefeller I called "the age of combinations", viz., of the submergence of the individual by heartless and ruthless economic organizations. Something like that would have occurred in the North, no doubt, but it would not have achieved the popular legitimacy it did as the dominant culture of inequality, social Darwinism, timeclock serfdom, and the horrible diminishment of the sense of self that lies at the core of modernism, and makes modern individuals mendicant supplicants of giant, Orwellian apparatuses of one ideological stripe or another. It is no accident that this folkway, this "Gorebot" way of being, is much less common in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West than it is in "Blue Country"......and if the South had gone free, it would have been much less pronounced, I think, and the values and teaching of freedom much more prominent, in the inner life of 20th-century North America.
I don't think there are any easy formulas to solve the problem. The founders could have resolved the problem by including a means of dissolution of the union in the Constitution. That they didn't means that subsequent generations must procede [sic] with caution and not presume answers that aren't present in the Constitution or acceptable to all concerned parties.
I disagree. I say rather that silence in the Constitution leaves us at liberty, in the best sense, to proceed by our lights. I think that that is what the Framers intended......or at least, what they said they intended: as long as Hamilton was speaking, I think one needed to watch his purse -- and his throat.
Silence in the Constitution does not withhold permission to act, it permits action. Or so I think.
As for your example, I'd imagine a lot of Floridians would object to joining an "Antilian Confederation"....Secessionists forces will assert their own legitimacy and deny that of their opponents. Violence is likely. That is why dissolution of the union is such a grave and ponderous matter. Simply arguing that "states" can leave at will is in the end a recipe for war. There has to be much negotiation and there has to be unquestioned procedural legitimacy.
Well, I thought it was the New York bankers who threw down the gauntlet, politically, on the idea of secession -- they and Lincoln, who wanted the Southern States in the Union so he could job them. It seemed to the Southerners that remaining in the Union -- and they said so -- was the course more fraught with danger.
As to procedural legitimacy, the South tried to show it by convening as the People, to rescind their long-ago ratification, and to secede from the Union. There was nothing left for them in the Union, nobody argues seriously, North or South, that there was. And their suffering ever since, either more or less at any given time, gives the lie to Unionist propaganda, that the South would have been better off if they'd tucked their chins, gone lily-livered, and crawled for the Northerners. To this day, they are still officially suspect characters under the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and may not hold elections, ever, without the express permission of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which is really a political bureau to which the Southern states must slavishly recur every time they reapportion.
The general lesson seems to be that patience and persistence win out in the end. ... If secessionist leaders had taken that path, they would have gotten their nation or nations. We would be the worse for it, though their own generation would have been spared great losses.
I agree as to outcomes, but whether we should be worse off by another outcome depends on who "we" is. The Northern Industrialists would have lost their generations-long stream of cream gravy from the tariffs, and their captive markets and price supports. Blacks would obviously have lost, but even so there might not have been as much Jim Crow -- I can't prove that, since I've only seen a few moderate expressions of view, e.g. w/ respect to black soldiering in the Confederacy, discussed elsewhere, and white attitudes toward the idea. Smallholding or propertyless Southern whites might actually have lost, I don't know -- the equities for them and other groups are harder to calculate and speculate about.
Unfortunately, Southern political elites were mesmerized by the idea that they were struggling against some tyranny or oppression, rather than just trying to get a divorce.
Well, their milieu was a lot closer to the Revolution and the War of 1812 than ours, and no-fault divorce was unheard-of.
Therefore they had to make the federal government of their time out to be some sort of oppressor to be resisted by any means -- an evil misrepresentation that would poison the situation and have evil consequences.
Not the federal government itself, but the federal government as a tool of the Republicans. As someone has pointed out elsewhere, Lincoln represented the more reasonable wing of the Republican Party. Please remember that it was the Abolitionists who began the sectional hate-baiting.
But justifying or glorifying [the secessionists] is another matter, and excusing them while vilifying their opponents is even further out of line. ...They replaced constitutional government with violence and buried the old Republic. I might have had more respect for them if they'd shown more respect to our national venture and history and hadn't simply given up on it. That they were willing to throw away the country when, through their own folly, they lost an election, makes them unacceptable as a model for republican virtue. That they chose to cloak themselves in the garments of the Founders makes them more repugnant.
Well, that is a value judgement you are free to take for yourself. I share your opinion, I think, of their leadership abilities and political perspicuousness; there was rather less of rational forethought than e.g. Abraham Lincoln brought to the table, and rather more of the manner manorial, of gentlemanly prickliness and early resort to drastic resolutions (many of them, remember, had lived by Code Duello as a metric of personal manliness). Too, a lot of slavocrats may have been arriviste new players and apt to overdo it, in order to impress the ladies. I think you err, though, when you persist in holding the planters of the antebellum South accountable for having practiced chattel slavery, as if they were moderns and not premoderns imbued with another body of law and custom, but you are free to reprehend anyone you want to. Please don't take it as a repudiation of your moral vision if other posters demur on teleological grounds, that it isn't fair to judge Aristotle by the standards of Fermi, for the purpose of belittling Aristotle.
Whatever their failings, and their failures, the leaders of the Old South had recognized an attempt on the Peoples' liberty, and had attempted to remove their Peoples beyond the reach of the aggrandizing and triumphant faction. Madison and Calhoun had never solved the problem in the Old Republic, of what to do about avaricious or ambitious Factions -- of which the Republican Party, in its aspect in 1860, was surely one, a fact we can recognize easily from the rapidity and ease with which it entrenched itself in four years' incumbency, even in time of war.
If there was no road map for dealing with such ideologically- and greed-driven.... drivenness, can you be so sure of yourself in condemning the Southerners for trying to avoid a contest they felt they would lose, by contracting the ambit of the Republic they would be willing to participate in? Theirs was a not-unreasonable response, even if they failed signally in the carrying forward of their attempted remedy.
Very noble. Exept for the 3.5 million slaves. Weren't they southern people too?
Walt
Pardon me for differing, but I preferred the Second National to all of them -- it's a knockout, frankly.
I have some two dozen flags, all American flags save one or two colonial and pre-independence Texas flags (the 1824 flag is really a Mexican Constitutionalist banner), including three or four Confederate ones. I would like to add to the Confederate collection and to my collection of U.S. National patterns (I have 31- and 34-star flags from the Civil War era; the 34-star is the big star-and-circle pattern in the Union). I would like to find a copy of Polk's corps flag, and the reversed-colors flags used in Texas and Kirby Smithdom. There are also a couple of Revolutionary War patterns I'd like to find -- in lightweight prints, of course, since I'm not prepared to spring $30-70/flag.
Operative word, "advice".
--"Our Sacred Honor" p. 92, by William Bennett
"This government, the offspring of own own choice uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberatin, completely free in its principals, in the distribution of oits powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. ....The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and alter their system of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people is sacredly obligatory upon all."--George Washington, 1796
Washington got it partly right. What he didn't get right is that the Constitution and its powers flow from the People, not vice versa. The People are Sovereign, and merely use the laws to govern themselves: the laws are not the Sovereign, and the People may unmake them. The bit about "the whole people" meaning all the Peoples of all the States is just GW's opinion -- if he and the Framers really meant that and had agreed to it, those words would have been in the Constitution itself as a necessary clarification -- since it would have represented a fundamental change from the status quo ante in which the Peoples of the several States were Sovereign, and retained Final Power under the Articles of Confederation, as clearly stipulated in Article II of the same. Furthermore, such a change, if agreed to (and it wasn't), would have been written into the document in plain, inescapable language. It wasn't.
"It is a fatal heresy to suppose that either our State governments are superior to the Federal or the Federal to the States." --Thomas Jefferson, 1821
But Thomas Jefferson never met Abraham Lincoln.
And then you quote Lincoln. Beautiful.
"Must a government, of neccessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existance?" A. Lincoln, 7/4/61
Well, I guess he showed us the answer to that question, didn't he?
The secessionists were ....
Yeah, right. Keep mumbling.
But thanks for the link/cite.
Close. Read the 10th. The federal government has powers which have been delegated and enumerated, and those that the states are forbidden from exercising. Madison, in Federalist 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite."
Those powers are delegated by the constitution to the federal authority.
Wrong. The powers were delegated by the STATES (derived from the people of each state), and from the states to the federal government via the Constitution. The states existed before the union, they created the federal government. Or else you'd have to assert that the union created itself from the non-existing states.
No state can usurp them. But by seceding, the southern states were doing exactly that.
Wrong. No state in the union can usurp them. A seceded state is no longer part of the union. The states possessed those powers originally and delegated them to the federal government. They are not usurping the powers - they returned to the state when the political bonds between them and the federal governemnt were broken.
Again, I note that no state laws (including secession ordinances) can possibly take precedence over the constitution given that Article VI, clause 2 says that all state laws are subordinate to the constitution and that no amendment overrules the supremacy clause.
What, you think that if you repeat it a million times I'm finally going to agree with you? Pursuant. Don't forget the word. And exactly where does the supremacy clause state that no amendment can override it? Isn't an amendment part of the Constitution?
In your mind, and only in your mind.
To be sure, Sam Adams would approve of your picture, and maybe Patrick Henry, but not Washington, Hamilton or Madison. One can already see a national consciousness developing then. Washington certainly allowed states a free hand in the areas reserved to them, but I think the idea of a state as a tribe or city-state or absolute sovereign was something he disapproved of and wanted to get beyond.
I used to think Madison was wrong, and regretted the loss of smaller communities with their own traditions and culture. It certainly must have been more colorful when the different states had their own distinctive memories and practices and nice to actually meet people who worked in the distinctive industries we learned about as kids, rather than just people who worked at the same sort of jobs from one end of the country to the other. But looking at what's happened in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and remembering what's happened throughout history makes me think that greater standardization wasn't the worst thing to happen.
The ancient city could be a terrifying place, as Platonists and anti-Platonists could both tell you. The weight of the city's cult and civic solidarity fell very hard on outsiders and non-conformists. A larger union allowed individuals greater freedom to live and work without having completely to accept the views of the local authorities on every question. This does open the door to greater power for the federal or union government, but I hope it's not an either-or exclusive choice between federal or state tyranny.
I don't have time to respond to the rest of your posts now, but I will make two comments. First, Rockwellites want us to believe that had the nation fragmented into smaller countries committed to laissez-faire policies it would have developed economically pretty much as it did in our reality. But it's not clear that such new countries would have been committed to laissez-faire, or that laissez-faire would have spurred development as fast as protectionism did. In the back of their minds the Rockwellites presume that the free trade conditions of the late 20th century would have prevailed in the 19th. In fact, dog-eat-dog was much more the rule in the late 19th century. One could expect trade wars, and those that weren't prepared to engage in them might sink into subordinate, neo-colonial status.
Secondly, the Republican party was in many ways a faction. But that was also true of the Breckenridge party and the secessionists. Factionalism was the essence of the age politically, and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil. I suppose one could say something similar about Southern radicals who saw themselves as organizing to defend their own "institutions." Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.
I could have sworn it was Lincoln who said that. I would admit that he had a kind of low criminal cunning, but I certainly wouldn't call him smart - and least of all "wise".
1). A state joins the Union.
Three states explicitly reserve the right to leave.
2). By so joining, she gives up her sovereignty and accepts the constitution as the supreme law of the land.
Only where the states have delegated sovereignty to the federal government.
3). Any laws that she makes from ratification onwards are subordinate to the constitution. This includes any secessionist ordinances since they are also laws.
Only where the states have delegated sovereignty to the federal government.. The ratification agreements were not laws - secession ordinances are not laws - they simply rescind ratification. They are public acts of the state. Think of it as another ratifcication vote, only this one fails to accede.
4). Any secessionist ordinance is a blatant attempt to put state laws above consitutional ones. This is because the state is trying to usurp the powers reserved specifically to the federal government in Article I of the constitution.
Nonsense. Once seceded, the state is no longer a member of the Union, and not bound by any restrictions. As noted previously, secession ordinances are not laws.
5). The southern states admitted in most of their secessionist ordinances that they had no sovereignty under the constitution.
So? That doesn't change anything, even if true.
6). Using your arguments would mean that it would be legal for one person to secede (with all of his property) from the state and the Union and set up his own country.
No. That's an issue for the state itself to decide, and is covered by the state constitutions and laws.
Sorry, but your arguments don't wash. ... Neither the 9th nor the 10th nor any other amendment or article of the constitution overrule the delegated federal authority listed in Article I. And that is exactly what a secession is trying to do.
Sorry, but your arguments don't wash. The 9th & 10th are part of the Constitution. The delegated authorities do not include a clause granting the federal government the ability to prohibit secession. The prohibitions enumerated do not include a clause limiting the states power to rescind their ratification.
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