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
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.