Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
Under natural law, not U.S. law.
You are easily exposed.
Walt
The people of the whole United States are the sovereigns; the states are not.
--Just as Jefferson Davis indicated.
Walt
Take issue with what Lincoln -said-.
What a snooze.
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
Let's assume that you have the power beyond all other men to look in another's heart.
What was Lincoln thinking when he wrote that?
It looks pretty deep. Was it not?
It is SO easy to make you look a fool.
You'll get tired of this soon enough and the next crop of secesh apologists will be diving through the eyes of so many digital needles.
Walt
I see your argument about the long war between libertarian Jeffersonians and statist Hamiltonians. It's something the Progressive historians built on a century ago. They praised Jefferson and Jackson and demeaned the Hamiltonians and Whigs, and found good things to say for the Confederacy while criticizing Lincoln for his connections to Northern industrialists. Unfortunately for the libertarian angle, in their own time, Beard, Parrington and the other progressive historians were great fans of Bryan, Wilson, or even the socialist Debs. Conflicts and polarities persist throughout history, but their content can't always be fixed as a struggle between the same two principles.
Where I disagree is to say, first that ordinary politics alternate with crisis politics. In between critical periods like the early years of the Republic, the Civil War, the Depression and perhaps the Jacksonian and Progressive periods, there are periods of consensus, like the Era of Good Feeling, the 1840s, the Cleveland years, the 1920s and the 1950s. Partisan feelings might have run high, but political divisions were less pronounced. It's a mistake to take discussion about protection or regulations in these periods as war-like, Manichean struggles between good and evil principles. Secondly, the Civil War was our most turbulent eras of conflict, but to my way of thinking the passions of the Civil War era, had far more to do with slavery than with on-going questions of the tariff or internal improvements. Not that there weren't disagreements about these matters, but they weren't the primary focus of division.
Nor do I think it's fair to talk about "30 years of Northern political agression." Most of those years were years of normal, low-level political conflict. South Carolina had its fit in 1830, but for the most part the Compromise of 1820 held and kept the peace until 1850 or 1854. And are Southern efforts to spread slavery be regarded as "defensive" and Northern efforts to check expansion as "aggressive"? That hardly seems to make sense. If you want to get deeply into the Southern radical mindset, I guess spreading slavery was "defensive," but that was hardly the only point of view. Northern efforts to resist slavery's expansion seem to me to be more defensive, and more defensible.
What came out of the war, of course, was a shift in the country's center of gravity towards industry, the cities, the North and protection, but it would be anachronistic and distorting to ignore the real conflicts over slavery in the 1850s and say that this was what people thought the war was about at the time. That's not to say that in some sense worries about one section prevailing over another weren't involved in the beginnings of the war, but it's a mistake to overlook the real conflicts over slavery in the territories and the "defense of the peculiar institution" and make the Civil War simply an attempt by Northern industrialists to crush Southern agriculturalists.
You also seem to be applying the attributes of the later, monopolistic, inegalitarian world that came out of the war to the pre-War world. If anything, it looks like Southern politics in the ante-bellum period were far more elitist than Northern. Social elites in the North, especially outside New England, were very anti-Republican. I'll wait until I see more information, but my own impression is that Republican politics were far more driven by small towns merchants, farmers, little manufacturers, than by big bankers and mill owners. But we've discussed this before and weren't able to convince each other.
I will agree with you that Rockefeller built on Lincoln's achievement, but this wasn't foreseen in Lincoln's day. Lincoln's ideal of opportunity and social mobility was far more egalitarian and "liberal" in the old sense of the word. A society where farmers could become successful and their sons could make their way as craftsmen, merchants and small manufacturers was much more to his taste. Certainly what came out of the war would not have been forseen by many. It was technology that turned this vision sour by allowing the development of monopolies. Today we can see the connection between protection and monopolies, but for many in Lincoln's day, protection's advantages outweighed its drawbacks.
Now of course you will be able to find Southern prophets who railed against industrialism and capitalism for decades before the war. But it wasn't a choice between the rural Eden and the industrial Babylon or urban Sodom. The rural garden also had it's negative features, and it's Southern promoters carried around a lot of baggage of their own. In a nation of men who grew up like Lincoln, splitting rails and making fences, the idea of new jobs in new cities, of working to advance one's self and one's family in a free and vigorous economy must have seemed very attractive to many. If the dream has gone sour, it's still sweeter than life in much of the world.
Lincoln's vision was to free the ambitious and industrious from brute labor on unprofitable farms. Eventually he also took action against even more oppressive ways of life. Being shackled to a time clock or cubicle or gouged by the taxman is also a kind of servitude. But absolute freedom is not of this world, and there are always gradations. Perhaps there is a happy medium that is most satisfying, but I can't help comparing what we have to what one can see in other parts of the world or in periods of our own past and thinking it better.
Jefferson based his system on the possession of thousands of acres of unused land, a frontier open to all. With the end of that frontier, the kind or degree of freedom his generation knew would necessarily be lost. Jefferson said as much. But freedom itself wasn't lost. And it still offers us much.
IF true, what would that make the document they ratified? You are easily exposed.
Ask Chief Justice John Marshall, from Sturges v Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122, (1819):
When the American people created a national legislature, with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor proper to define the powers retained by the States. These powers proceed, not from the people of America, but from the people of the several States; and remain, after the adoption of the constitution, what they were before, except so far as they may be abridged by that instrument.What was that Court case? McCullough v Maryland? From Marshall again:
No political dreamer [except Walt] was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments.See, I didn't even leave your line out. Something later perhaps? How about Justice Thomas, In US Term Limits v Thornton, 514 US 779, (1995):
To be sure, when the Tenth Amendment uses the phrase "the people," it does not specify whether it is referring to the people of each State or the people of the Nation as a whole. But the latter interpretation would make the Amendment pointless: there would have been no reason to provide that where the Constitution is silent about whether a particular power resides at the state level, it might or might not do so. In addition, it would make no sense to speak of powers as being reserved to the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole, because the Constitution does not contemplate that those people will either exercise power or delegate it. The Constitution simply does not recognize any mechanism for action by the undifferentiated people of the Nation.The people of the differentiated states are the sovereigns - not the people of the whole United States en masse.
You tickled a memory. In Sibley's Confederate invasion of New Mexico, Union troops did make a mule bomb. They tied boxes of howitzer shells to two old mules, lit fuses, and whipped the mules across the Confederate line. They were hoping to stampede the Confederate cattle herd to deprive the Confederates of meat.
Suddenly the mules turned around and came back toward the Union soldiers. The soldiers then ran like crazy and the mules followed. Finally, the soldiers got far enough ahead of the mules that they weren't hurt when the shells exploded. The Confederate cattle barely stired.
Source: Civil War in Texas and New Mexico Territory by Steve Cottrell.
I use these terms because they are the language of political science, which would have been understood by the Founders in similar language and with similar concepts. The concepts came down from classical usage for the most part -- Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero would have been familiar to the educated men among them, and likewise the dark musings of Tacitus on the subject of how tyranny grew up in a great republic, and how the morally and politically downfallen condition of his own countrymen contrasted bleakly with the vigor and virtue of the free Germans, whom he professed to admire. These lessons will absolutely not have been lost on the Framers, who were very conscious of the Aristotelian life-cycle of societies, and who were educated in the received vocabulary of political science.
Madison was famously concerned with faction, from his knowledge of the English parliamentary system and from Polybius, who particularly condemned the bad influence on Athenian policy of the demagogues. Of course, Pericles was a demagogue, too, but Polybius likes to overlook that when currying favor with his Roman masters by comparing them to Pericles and deprecating the Athenian model in favor of the Roman.
Madison believed very much as the Bush family do, that politics ought to be a hobby of the idle (but educated) rich. I don't agree with him all that much, except in this, that a republic dominated by combinations of schemers is a Bad Thing. I catalog Faction among the diseases of Republic (along with straight-ticket voting and The Lobby, among others). But I'm enough of a Jacksonian to think that the country was better off when ordinary men paid close attention to politics, and made strong demands on the ethics of their politicians. The memoir of Davy Crockett that someone posted to the Internet -- I think here on FR -- was a small classic, and the kind of thing I want to see more of, in which an honest farmer gave his congressman a stern lesson in ethics and showed him why he shouldn't have voted for a pork appropriation. Madison never contemplated such a scene: he was above correction by mere yeomen. So I take many of his lessons, but I reject his classism and country-squire comfort with the idea that "people like us" would run the country, and all the rest of us fall down with gratitude at their transactions on our behalf.
The larger nation allowed more free play for groups to combine and work for common goals.
But that's Faction!
It also allows greater stability as divisive issues, powerful interests and the political ambitions of politicians and their followings are diluted in the larger sea of national life. The result is more freedom for the individual from those who would dragoon him or her into this or that local army or party.
I don't know whether I agree. Sure, Boss Tweed and Joe Pendergast and corporate actors like the Central (Southern) Pacific Railroad in California and the Mellon Bank in Pennsylvania suborned and seduced people's officeholders to their own agenda. But now we see the same thing happening at the national level, and we hear of similar initiatives being transacted across national borders by conspiracies of corporations, NGO's, and semi-governmental groups from terrorist groups to transnational bureaucracies and secretariats.
One can already see a national consciousness developing then.
Well, sure -- among people who thought they were going to drive the train and ring the bell, and among people who wanted to. But saying so doesn't tell us whether a national consciousness is better than a local one. It is the prejudice of history that wider is better, but then historians are toadies to power who'd like to have been players themselves, so I think we should regard their point of view as treacherous, and not a good indicator of where the best interests of the people lie, but only the enthusiasms of students of Machiavelli.
I think you are referring to the Roman Empire; I can't think of another state in antiquity that took such a latitudinarian view of other people's belief systems. But I think you confuse mere broadness or size of the polity with the consequences of conscious policy. The Romans were systematic in their acceptance of extant cults where they found them (even importing them; a large temple of Isis stood near the Pantheon), but they were not indiscriminate in their acceptance, as the Christians found out to their sorrow. Paul of Tarsus was tried for spreading the beliefs of Christianity, and the complaint of the Jews against him was in part that he was spreading mere superstitions and cultic practices that were not accepted, or acceptable (enter here several canards about Christian practice), within the broad guidlines of Roman policy.
Notwithstanding the prejudice of modern historians and students of politics against "particularisms", I don't think you can correlate the size or multiethnicity (imperial spread) of a state with toleration. The Soviet state extended through what, eleven time zones? And yet it was an intolerant state with regards to belief and opinion.
Yes, that's a good point. I've been a little surprised at how the Democrats splintered into three big pieces, none of which were able individually to compete nationally. Of course, Lincoln wasn't competitive nationally either. Why the Democrats failed to cooperate maximally among themselves in the face of the threat of Black Republicanism, but instead tried to blackmail one another and ended up falling out, is a good book by itself. What I said earlier about political perspicuousness applies here.
....and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil.
Yes, I agree. Donald and other biographers have always agreed, that Lincoln struck his position on containing slavery in sympathy and common cause with Illinois freeholders who anticipated migrating west some day, and who were reasonably concerned that, if slavery were allowed in the Kansas Territory, they would be shut out of the best lands. That's just what happened when Texas was settled, and T. R. Fehrenbach, in Lone Star, describes how slaveholders like Jared Groce (one of the Old Three Hundred who came in the first wave of Texian settlers) were able to use their slaves to multiply the mercedes and labores they could receive from the Spanish Crown, by applying to the empresario (usually Austin) in the name of each and every slave in his household. The "peach bottoms", the good black river-bottoms, of the Brazos River valley and other coastal rivers were preoccupied in this way. Freehold farmers were generally located much farther inland, or on the second-quality land on the Pleistocene terraces on either side of the rivers (which still wasn't bad -- and they didn't have to put up with fire ants!).
Over the longer term, the freeholders still had to deal with the force that drove them off the land eventually -- the effects of economies of scale, and of selling into oligopsonous "free markets" in Chicago and elsewhere. It's ironic: Lincoln won the issue, but the farmers he espoused lost their war to stay on the land.
Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.
Despite his historic failure to bridge the widening divide, Stephen Douglas deserves credit, like Clay, for having tried to split the differences and come up with something everyone could come up with. Actually, if you think about it, his "popular sovereignty" idea subtly favored the freesoilers, since the slaveholders couldn't do under popular sovereignty what they'd done under the Spanish land-grant program in Texas in 1821. If only the Redlegs hadn't held the Lecompton Convention, and packed it with Missourians (I'm accepting the freesoilers' accusations at face on that point without corroboration), and put the fat into the fire.
There is nothing inconsistant with perpetual union here. There is nothing here that would allow unilateral state secession.
"In the case now to be determined, the defendant, a sovereign state, denies the obligation of a law enacted by the legislature of the Union...In discussing this question, the counsel for the state of Maryland deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the Constitution, to consider that instrument as not emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent states. It would be difficult to maintain this position....
--Chief Justice John Marshall, majority opinon McCullough v. Maryland 1819
"That the United States form, for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation, has not yet been denied. In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people. In many other respects, the American people are one; and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects, is the government of the Union. It is their government and in that character, they have no other. America has chosen to be, in many respects, and in many purposes, a nation; and for all these purposes, her government is complete; to all these objects it is competent. The people have declared that in the exercise of all powers given for these objects, it is supreme. It can, then, in effecting these objects, legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory.
The constitution and laws of a state, so far as they are repugnant to the constitution and laws of of the United States are absolutely void. These states are constituent parts of the United States; they are members of one great empiure--for some purposes sovereign, for some purposes subordinate."
--Chief Justice John Marshall, writing the majority opinion, Cohens v. Virginia 1821
"The constitution of the United States was ordained and established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the constitution declares, by "the people of the United States."
-Justice Story, Martin v, Hunter's Lessee, 1816
The sovereignty of the United States rests on the people, not the States.
I know I am a brainwashed drone of the NEA. But Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Story were not.
Walt
- Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, June,1857
In point of fact, southerners controlled the federal government for decades prior to the ACW. What they couldn't abide in 1860 was the outcome of a fair election.
Walt
So why would the assume one position in one case, and a different position in others. Or in McCullough claim both? Could it be that when federal issues are discussed, we are one group of people due to federal representation? And yet thanks to dual sovereignty, the people cannot act as one common group, but must act as a group within state boundaries? The state of Tennessee cannot prevent Georgia from doing anything affecting the citizens of Georgia, and vice-versa. Whatever actions the states want to take with respect to their union or the federal government, the state controls it's own destiny, it cannot force or legislate anything to compel another by it's actions. The ratification of Georgia did not bring Tennessee into the union, and the dissolution of that same political band did not deprive Tennessee of it's position in the Union. As Justice Thomas pointed out so elegantly, "the Constitution does not contemplate that those people will either exercise power or delegate it. The Constitution simply does not recognize any mechanism for action by the undifferentiated people of the Nation."
As I have told you many times "In your eyes only." In the eyes of people who understand what is going on, the fool and idiot is you. But live happily in your self-delusion, arsehole.
"The record blasts everything they say."
The derision that is directed at you is not a result of the effectiveness of your argument, which is basically null and void, it is in response to your unique offensiveness - the only quality that distinguishes you on this forum.
When I am wrong I sdmit it, there is also, of course, your profound stupidity.
When I am wrong I sdmit it, there is also, of course, your profound stupidity.
In a nation larger state different interest groups or parts of the population have to cooperate and work together. They come to realize that they can't have everything their own way and that it's not a zero-sum game. I would not call this faction. I'd think of it more as the beginnings of a party system. I don't think one can really get around such division and coalition building and have effective government in a democracy or representative republic.
Maybe when the "interest group" side of things prevails over the "parts of the population" side you do get faction. If all the industrialists were aligned against all the farmers or workers, on might be able to speak of faction. I'd still find this to be less common in larger units, than in smaller ones. Factions could also be created along regional lines, or around charismatic leaders.
I'm fuzzy on ancient history, but I'm thinking of the death of Socrates and the ferocity some ancient city states brought to civic virtue and the defense of the civic cults. You can see some of this ferocity in Sparta and Rome. The freedom of the ancient city was very different from modern freedom, or even from the freedom of the empires which replaced them. It relied much more on civic virtue and on the freedom of the community to maintain it's cult and culture than on the freedom of the individual from external constraint. The freedom of the ancient city meant a tumultuous and often violent civic life filled with alarms and crises, though the Roman Empire was hardly free of such troubles, at least for those at the top.
I think one could understand Madison as trying to cope with this problem, to weigh or reconcile two concepts of liberty. His federal solution has had many noticeable successes. Individuals are still quite free in their personal lives, and have great mobility and a wide sphere of activity. Those who are attached to local cultures and their autonomy may regret Madison's ideas and the Constitutional system, but there was a trade-off between the autonomous or sovereign, self-contained community and the free and mobile individual. What the 20th century made of the Constitution is another matter, though. It reimposed regulation and regimentation at the federal level.
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