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Why are we still arguing the legalities? There are no legalities in a revolution until one side wins or loses. If you win the revolution was always legal, if you lose it was never legal.
No revolution is ever legal before it begins because by definition, the revolt will be against the prevailing authority and laws. It may be morally justified in the minds of the revolutionaries, and if they prevail, they can construct whatever laws they wish to make their revolution ex post facto legal. There is no such thing as a revolt which starts as a legal revolution because no government ever includes in its national charter, language which spells out when and how it is lawful to topple that government.
Finally, even if we conclude that the Southern states had a legal right to revolt, on what basis may it be argued that the process employed, declared secession, was the correct legal process? The government was formed by a national process, the ratification vote on the Constitution. Why wouldn't a national process be required to unmake it?
You are right, since the South lost, they were traitors against the United States.
How can people claim to be patriotic and fly a confederate flag is beyond my comprehension
Why are we still arguing the legalities? There are no legalities in a revolution until one side wins or loses. If you win the revolution was always legal, if you lose it was never legal.
No revolution is ever legal before it begins because by definition, the revolt will be against the prevailing authority and laws. It may be morally justified in the minds of the revolutionaries, and if they prevail, they can construct whatever laws they wish to make their revolution ex post facto legal. There is no such thing as a revolt which starts as a legal revolution because no government ever includes in its national charter, language which spells out when and how it is lawful to topple that government.
Finally, even if we conclude that the Southern states had a legal right to revolt, on what basis may it be argued that the process employed, declared secession, was the correct legal process? The government was formed by a national process, the ratification vote on the Constitution. Why wouldn't a national process be required to unmake it?
I appreciate your reasoning, critical thinking, logic, etc. here, thanks & respect.
Just a thought re: your question about 'why are we still arguing ...?' Perhaps some folks use past history & historical events to validate their own present day political beliefs? I wonder what we'll be saying about this particular event 150 years from now?
You are right, since the South lost, they were traitors against the United States.
How can people claim to be patriotic and fly a confederate flag is beyond my comprehension
Then a government by the people, for the people is "beyond your comprehension".
The states were colonial charters and had no inter-dependency before the formation
of the Union, which was a voluntary act. There is nothing in the Constitution which
provides the Union with the power to compel States to remain in the Union. It wasn't
until after the War Between the States that the legalities were changed in 1871.
Your entire concept of what this country is did not even exist in 1861.
You are right, since the South lost, they were traitors against the United States.
How can people claim to be patriotic and fly a confederate flag is beyond my comprehension
The people of the North who fought the war, who invested four years of blood and treasure to restore federal authority in the rebelling states, did not behave as though they viewed the revolt as treason once it had been ended.
There was no great bloodbath, no revenge killing sprees, no treason trials, only one war crimes trial, and in less than ten years following the collapse of the Confederacy, all of the rebelling states had been restored to the Union with same rights as any other state. Any former Confederate who applied for a pardon, received it.
The American Civil War was two sides fighting over rival interpretations of the same document, one which was silent on the question of secession's legality. Had the South prevailed in the war, their viewpoint would have been that it was the Northerners who had betrayed the Constitution by opposing secession.
The war did not so much settle the question of secession's morality or legality, as it settled the question of the South's ability to establish independence via attrition. Thus the question "Was this treason" was never truly solved.
Then a government by the people, for the people is "beyond your comprehension".
That's a good question. If you ascribe to the opinion that the United States was a compact between The People and not the states, then reasoning would follow that only the people would have the power to dissolve the union. On the other hand if you believe that the Union was a compact between states then we must arrive at a different conclusion.
Quote:
The states were colonial charters and had no inter-dependency before the formation
of the Union, which was a voluntary act.
Actually the states established themselves as independent political entities in 1775 and established a confederacy in 1877 a confederacy that was dissolved in 1879 with the ratification of the Constitution by The People of the United States in order to form a "more perfect union."
Quote:
It wasn't until after the War Between the States that the legalities were changed in 1871.
Your entire concept of what this country is did not even exist in 1861.
Actually the "concept' was alive and well as early as 1799 when the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions proffered by Jefferson and Madison expressing the Compact Theory of Union - the position that the Union was a compact between states - were soundly rejected by the seven states, informally disapproved by three others and went without response by the remaining four.
The argument in favor of the Compact Theory arose again in 1830 with the nullification crisis of the same years. It was during this time that the most eloquent argument debunking the Compact Theory was give by Sen Daniel Webster during the Webster Hayne debate of January 1830. So the concept that the Union was insoluble by the sections of people acting unilaterally much less the states have been in the public mind long before the Civil War much less the courts 1871 decision in White v Texas.
Are you saying that US military bases in foreign soil can be attacked and you would support that action?
They were told to leave and they refused to leave the Ft., so they left S. Carolina no choice but to fire on them. Their refusal to leave a foreign, independent State when they were ordered to was a hostile instigation on the part of the Union. They were occupying the Ft. with the interest of controlling trade. The motivations were economic, which is really the main underlying cause of the War.
Lincoln on the other hand swore he would never stop trying to re-unite the States for as long as he was President. He would not allow any of the Southern States to remain independent because the Union needed their money and their land, and he did not want the country to come apart.
Lincoln was a white supremacist like everyone else was in the USA at the dawn of the Civil War. Everyone believed that blacks were descended from the Biblical tribe of Ham and that they were therefore destined to serve the higher "tribes" including the whites. This was the justification for slavery.
Nobody fought the Civil War to free the slaves. It was about money and control of land and resources. There were as many slaves in the Union as there in the South at the beginning of the war and throughout the war, slavery remained in the Union.
Slavery was legal in the Union, and to the people in the North, it had seemed to be getting more legal every year since the founding of the nation.
The Louisiana Purchase made more territory available for the spread of slavery westward.
The annexation of Texas and the Mexican American War were seen by Northerners as another land grab to expand the territory available for slavery.
The Compromise of 1850, which erased the boundary between newly admitted states which would or would not allow slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required ordinary citizens in the North to directly aid slave owners in the capture of their runaway slaves.
The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, which for all intents allowed slave owners to bring their slaves into Northern states where slavery was outlawed, a defacto expansion of slavery to the entire nation.
And then a President was elected on a platform to contain slavery within its existing boundaries but not to abolish slavery where it currently existed...and roughly a month later the state of South Carolina seceded.
I personally have come to the hypothesis that the Civil War was the result of a break-down in communication and compromise. The North (aka the non-South) believed that a slave-power group was conspiring to extend slavery to all states in the Union. Southern slave owners believed that the abolitionist movement was wide spread in the North and would eventually outlaw slavery in all states in the Union.
In truth, most Northerners didn't give a hoot that some Southerners owned slaves, but they were alarmed by the concept that a Southern slave owner could move into a Northern state or into a U.S. territory and begin to compete economically with farms and businesses that didn't use slaves. Most Southerners didn't want to expand slavery, but, to paraphrase one delegate to the North Carolina convention on Secession, if the federal government could take away the slaves of Southerners, what is to stop them from taking away Southerner's horses, cattle, and other property?
The North managed to get a President elected who would work to stop the expansion of slavery. The power brokers of the South saw that as a threat to their way of life, and led their states out of the Union, convincing the other Southerners that the Federal government was about to violate all of their property rights.
And then it all went to hell.
I agree with your hypothesis that the Civil War was the result of a break-down in communication & compromise. In a similar way, the Constitutional Convention (1787) was the result of break-down in communication & compromise. The original intention of the Convention was to revise the Articles of Confederation in order to address the break-down & solve or resolve some of the problems in governing the United States of America. The result of the Convention was the creation of the United States Constitution. The original intention of fixing the existing government based on the Articles of Confederation was expanded, the US Constitution, in essence, created a new government.
The US Constitution & the new government created would not have been possible without communication & compromise. Problems surrounding the institution of slavery were the most difficult to resolve & were the most controversial compromises made at the Constitutional Convention.
Preventing the expansion of slavery was indeed a threat to the Slave States' way of life. Even today, neo-confederates say it is their heritage.
States Right's is a vague term. The South supported some states rights and not others as did the North. One state right that both sides supported was the right for each state to decide whether slavery was legal or not. Regardless of what you think, the North supported slavery just as much as the South. Sure, there were Abolitionists (God bless them), but not enough to sway public opinion and certainly not enough to start a Civil War.. Slavery ended in the North because it was not profitable, not because the Northern states had some Epiphany. Northern factories owners could save MONEY by simply paying low wages to immigrant workers vs having to house, feed and cloth slaves.
I don't believe that many plantations owners in the South were very concerned about slavery west of the Mississippi. They were certainly concerned about taxes which was determined by the balance of power in Washington and there is the Rub. I don't think that Southern plantation owners were concerned about the end of slavery. Lincoln did run on a platform to end slavery, in fact quite the opposite. No doubt that slavery being outlawed in the North impacted the way the South wrote their constitutions but that alone didn't warrant a Civil War because there was no immediate threat to Slavery.
In my opinion, using slavery as the cause of the Civil War is a simplistic view. It's an easy excuse to defend a war costing over 600 thousand mens lives. I don't think slavery was used as a single reason for the war in 1870 but over the years it has become the only reasonable reason since it was the single 'good thing' that came out of the war.
I get that the Confederacy is some kind of EVIL Empire in some folks eyes but the North doesn't get to turn its nose up and wash its hands of all guilt. Slavery is a black eye on the US of A, not the SOUTH and SOUTH alone!
States Right's is a vague term. The South supported some states rights and not others as did the North. One state right that both sides supported was the right for each state to decide whether slavery was legal or not. Regardless of what you think, the North supported slavery just as much as the South. Sure, there were Abolitionists (God bless them), but not enough to sway public opinion and certainly not enough to start a Civil War.. Slavery ended in the North because it was not profitable, not because the Northern states had some Epiphany. Northern factories owners could save MONEY by simply paying low wages to immigrant workers vs having to house, feed and cloth slaves.
I don't believe that many plantations owners in the South were very concerned about slavery west of the Mississippi. They were certainly concerned about taxes which was determined by the balance of power in Washington and there is the Rub. I don't think that Southern plantation owners were concerned about the end of slavery. Lincoln did run on a platform to end slavery, in fact quite the opposite. No doubt that slavery being outlawed in the North impacted the way the South wrote their constitutions but that alone didn't warrant a Civil War because there was no immediate threat to Slavery.
In my opinion, using slavery as the cause of the Civil War is a simplistic view. It's an easy excuse to defend a war costing over 600 thousand mens lives. I don't think slavery was used as a single reason for the war in 1870 but over the years it has become the only reasonable reason since it was the single 'good thing' that came out of the war.
I get that the Confederacy is some kind of EVIL Empire in some folks eyes but the North doesn't get to turn its nose up and wash its hands of all guilt. Slavery is a black eye on the US of A, not the SOUTH and SOUTH alone!
I have to disagree. Maybe individual owners were not personally concerned, but as an aggregate the Southern political view was that banning slavery in the territories threatened the practice in the southern states. Lincoln and the Republicans knew they could not ban slavery in the states, but banning it in the territories and repealing the Fugitive Slave laws put pressure on the slave states, both politically (balance in the Senate) and on the ground (more opportunities for runaways to go without being caught).
From a review of The Scorpion's Sting by James Oakes:
"Republicans believed that slavery could be abolished without war and without direct attack by the federal government (which everyone agreed the Constitution did not allow) by withdrawing all federal support for slavery. Stop promoting slavery’s spread, the argument went. Stop allowing it to flourish in federal places like territories, the District of Columbia and U.S. military installations. Stop committing federal resources to individual slaveholders’ recapture of runaways. Stop coddling slaveholders and start surrounding slave states with free ones “as a cordon of fire,” lawmakers insisted, and “slavery, like a scorpion, would sting itself to death” (p. 20) via state-by-state emancipation, starting with the Border States and working down."
States Right's is a vague term. The South supported some states rights and not others as did the North. One state right that both sides supported was the right for each state to decide whether slavery was legal or not. Regardless of what you think, the North supported slavery just as much as the South.
BS,
the articles of secession of The South clearly state that the main reason to secede was that the North was passing state laws (state rights) that violated the Constitution's "Fugitive Slave Clause" that says that slaves should be returned to their owners.
If that doesn't prove that the North was anti-slavery and pro-state rights, I don't know what else would
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