Post by Die Fledermaus on Dec 21, 2009 2:07:09 GMT -4
Yesterday was the 149th anniversary of South Carolina seceding from the Union and in effect beginning the Civil War.
I happen to have written this on the 20th of December, the anniversary of South Carolina in effect beginning the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion by their illegal secession in 1860.
The secession argument I am not going around and around with over and over. The 10th Amendment references legal powers, what the Constitution contains, the ability to make laws and enforce them, not to leave the "more perfect Union". Madison said that and so did Andrew Jackson, among so many others. And blaming Lincoln for "murdering" over 600,000 is as far out and fringe as anything can be. It is not even a blip on the screen in the popular Civil War magazines I have read, the ones with busts of Nathan Bedford Forrest for sale. Not even pro-Copperhead generally anti-Lincoln academics (and there are not many of them), such as that Prof. Klement I tangled with at the NY Civil War Roundtable, even remotely come close to that kind of rhetoric.
Also, "We, the people. . .", in the Preamble of the Constitution, clearly supports the concept of ONE people, not a loose confederation of sovereign states.
The Declaration of Independence deliberately laid out a series of usurpations and abuses of the Natural rights of the people perpetrated by the King of England and his ministers, and this was of course done to command the assent of the world in regards to the American rebellion, to paraphrase Jefferson.
What is particularly noteworthy is that although Lincoln rejected the bogus "legal secession" argument, he DID support a moral imperative in justifying rebellion, and war. But it must be morally justified, as the American Revolution proved it was in the Declaration. Morally justified, owing to abuses by the controlling government or power.
Madison, in a letter to Daniel Webster (who agreed with him) in 1833, clearly differentiated between the bogus (as expressed by Madison in that letter) concept of secession at will, and justified rebellion against intolerable oppression. Jackson, in effect, concurred. Here is Pres. Jackson's proclamation to the people of South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, which he was prepared to crush by force if needed.
>> But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offense against the whole Union. <<
>> To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure. << Andrew Jackson, like Madison, a southerner.
In the Nullification Crisis, South Carolina declared Federal laws null and void in that state. Jackson received the Force Bill from Congress to take military action, in this case closing ports at his discretion, and thus forcing South Carolina to itself take military action, which, incidentally, would be Unconstitutional also. The importance of the Force Bill is that it is the first piece of legislation to publicly deny the right of secession to individual states. Its approval meant that the principle of secession was no longer in keeping with the idea of a national union.
Jackson said this also to the people of that deluded and arrogant state, South Carolina, where most human beings were brutalized slaves:
>> Recollect that the first act of resistance to the laws which have been denounced as void by those who abuse your confidence and falsify your hopes is Treason, and subjects you to all the pains and penalties that are provided for the highest offence against your country. Can (you)...consent to become Traitors? Forbid it Heaven. << Andrew Jackson.
The Force Bill was never declared Unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and was even cited by Eisenhower in 1957 in the Civil Rights strife in Little Rock when he sent in the 101st Airborne. Conversely, the secessionists' views have never been verified nor confirmed anywhere other than in their own beer hall meetings where they condemn Lincoln to the world's greatest mass murderers.
So, when South Carolina seceded following Lincoln's election, and started up its own army (also Unconstitutional) what justifications did it list, and what abuses by Lincoln did it compile and set before the people of the world?
None!
One good reason for that is that when South Carolina seceded in December of 1860 Lincoln was a private citizen, not even in government, and he was NOT the President! Lincoln had done nothing at all. There was no list to compile.
I should add that Confederate Vice President Stephens, in his Cornerstone Speech in March of 1861 in Savannah, made clear SLAVERY was the reason for it all is the closest the Confederacy had to a formal compilation attempting to justify their actions:
>> The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." << He was right.
Of course he was right. SLAVERY - and its perpetuation - was indeed the reason for it all, and slavery always met the approbation of the slave owners. Slavery, in which countless numbers of slaves were beaten, exploited, raped, murdered, mutilated, and denied basic medical care, and as it was a race-based slavery, even hope, that lasting generations and to last forever by the South's expectation. And yet the oligarchs who exploited and profited from this have themselves justification for rebellion? Owing to what? Merely tariffs that have been extant for decades? The election of a President yet to take office who merely does not want slavery in new territories north of the Mason-Dixon line? A sick irony.
Stephens continued. . . >> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. . . Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. <<
That is truly the "cornerstone", of it all: virulently racist SLAVERY - the reason for the illegal secessions and the reason for the war, and efforts to assure it perpetuation were the reason over 600,000 died in that war. And the cornerstone of southern wealth were the cash crops: cotton, tobacco, rice, and previously, indigo. No slaves meant no profitable cash crops.
America was founded on principles in which everyone has the chance to rise or not based on their own industry, zeal, and effort, not by the vagaries of a fortunate birth into an upper class. And that, too, is capitalism. It promotes a vibrant society, not the indolent society deToqueville wrote about when he visited the southern slave states where industry, such as it was, was based on forcing enslaved people to work like beasts in terrible conditions for nothing other than the aggrandizement of the owner of those human beings.
But to the South, Africans were less than human beings. And that too is one of the true issues of the war, that and the strict class system in the South in which the typical yeoman farmer, illiterate and ignorant of the true issues, was kept down by that same self-satisfied oligarchy of planters.
And do not mention those tariffs to me as they had been around for decades, and the last time South Carolina tried to do something about that, in 1833, Jackson slapped them down, as already stated.
So, in effect, the Cornerstone Speech WAS the equivalent in a non-formal way of a justification for the rebellion. And that supposed justification was to perpetuate slavery - as it was stated to the roaring cheers of a rowdy and delirious agreeing crowd in Savannah.
After South Carolina seceded, six other slave states also seceded BEFORE Lincoln even became President, before he did anything.
So what then had Lincoln said or advocated that was so morally repugnant it necessitated rebellion, breaking that contract? Nothing.
Lincoln said he did NOT seek abolition nor to end slavery in the South. I will add slavery had already been long before ended in France and Britain. Lincoln said he would support a stronger Fugitive Slave Law, thus outraging abolitionists. Lincoln did, however, want stronger protections against free blacks being kidnapped and dragged into the South by slavecatchers, as commonly occurred. That issue the neo-Confeds never cared about for sure.
Note that this law was so repugnant and morally outrageous in the North major riots were not uncommon - one's moral imperative differs from place to place.
Yet Lincoln sought to placate the slave states (i.e, the South) by supporting the Fugitive Slave Law, and to have done otherwise would have been politically impossible within the newly formed Republican Party which was based on the concepts of "free soil, free labor, and free men" within the new territories.
Lincoln did not even totally rule out expansion of slavery into those territories; he was fine with slavery moving into New Mexico, but not the more northern territories, such as the Dakotas and Nebraska, as he should have been, territories north of the Mason-Dixon line, anyway.
That was it. The possible list of abuses that caused South Carolina's secession was Lincoln opposing slavery in the northern territories in the West. Why? As the territories became states the slave states would eventually lose control of the Senate, as they long had the House. They would not have seceded if Lincoln was not elected, so he was the issue for that state and then others.
Those were the rules: new states get two Senators, and House representatives are based on population. The South - with a much smaller population than the North even if black slaves were included as full people, not just "3/5" as in the Constitutional compromise - wanted to if not control the government stalemate the will of the majority. And that is not a democratic republic.
So South Carolina, not liking the way things were going, just wanted to pack up and leave: South Carolina - a state with the most oppressive and vicious laws against slaves - a state where slaves were routinely brutalized beyond even the daily brutal life of slavery, and where slave rape was routine for generations and where mulattoes, perforce, were ubiquitous for that same reason. But that is never a concern for neo-Confeds, either.
South Carolina - which had no Natural right to talk about freedom when far more than half of the people in that state were slaves! South Carolina, which was prepared to take all its slaves with it out of the Union, thus violating THEIR moral imperative. But neo-Confeds never talk about them.
A moral imperative justifying rebellion harkening back to the Declaration of Independence? Oh yes, it existed in the South. The only people in the South entitled to partake of insurrection and rebellion by way of a moral imperative were. . . the slaves. Natural law surely granted them the right to rebellion, and to kill their slave masters - the slave state oligarchs, wealthy on slave labor, who were leading the secession movement out of their own arrogance and greed. They had no moral imperative, and certainly not against Lincoln who had not done a thing yet, except bend over backward to be conciliatory to the southern slave states in his statements and appeals.
Vice President Stephens in his aforementioned Cornerstone Speech, a racist tract even by the standards of 1861, made clear what it was all about, and that was slavery and its maintenance - and perpetuation. And comparisons to Hitler and Nazism are unavoidable.
Yes, it was impossible to adequately cite these as a moral imperative necessitating rebellion from the Federal government, especially as their bete noire, Lincoln, was not even President at time of secession.
There was no legality for secession and much against it, such as the still extant Force Bill. There was no moral imperative whatsoever for that rebellion as the Patriots had justification in 1776 as carefully delineated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln was not even President when the secessions commenced.
The only people with a moral imperative to commence a rebellion were the millions of slaves in the South. One can add that those who supported such "servile insurrection", if they be white and in the North, also had a moral imperative and thus justification for rebellion - why I honor John Brown, one of whose followers is buried in nearby Green-Wood Cemetery with Gerry, with a headstone that states he died for freedom. Captain John E.Cook always gets a flag near that headstone. And I put him online, right here: www.findagrave.com. Look him up.
"Inscription: Died for the Cause of Emancipation and Human Liberty".
So, the supporters of the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion, the slave state oligarchs, can be left with their absurd hyperbolic attacks on Lincoln, their ignoring of the "cornerstone" for that rebellion as stated by Stephens (it was slavery), and leaving pennies in urinals while living in total historical irrelevance, an irrelevance justified by the inconvenient realities they discard as they do not fit their pre-measured ideology and assumptions.
And my time is too pressed to debate much more on this, not with the true reality in the PRESENT of a rogue government ruining this nation. Not when no reputable historian would give such attacks on Lincoln a second thought.
Old Abe did what was needed to win the Civil War, and he won it, and he is hated by some for that.
I happen to have written this on the 20th of December, the anniversary of South Carolina in effect beginning the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion by their illegal secession in 1860.
The secession argument I am not going around and around with over and over. The 10th Amendment references legal powers, what the Constitution contains, the ability to make laws and enforce them, not to leave the "more perfect Union". Madison said that and so did Andrew Jackson, among so many others. And blaming Lincoln for "murdering" over 600,000 is as far out and fringe as anything can be. It is not even a blip on the screen in the popular Civil War magazines I have read, the ones with busts of Nathan Bedford Forrest for sale. Not even pro-Copperhead generally anti-Lincoln academics (and there are not many of them), such as that Prof. Klement I tangled with at the NY Civil War Roundtable, even remotely come close to that kind of rhetoric.
Also, "We, the people. . .", in the Preamble of the Constitution, clearly supports the concept of ONE people, not a loose confederation of sovereign states.
The Declaration of Independence deliberately laid out a series of usurpations and abuses of the Natural rights of the people perpetrated by the King of England and his ministers, and this was of course done to command the assent of the world in regards to the American rebellion, to paraphrase Jefferson.
What is particularly noteworthy is that although Lincoln rejected the bogus "legal secession" argument, he DID support a moral imperative in justifying rebellion, and war. But it must be morally justified, as the American Revolution proved it was in the Declaration. Morally justified, owing to abuses by the controlling government or power.
Madison, in a letter to Daniel Webster (who agreed with him) in 1833, clearly differentiated between the bogus (as expressed by Madison in that letter) concept of secession at will, and justified rebellion against intolerable oppression. Jackson, in effect, concurred. Here is Pres. Jackson's proclamation to the people of South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, which he was prepared to crush by force if needed.
>> But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offense against the whole Union. <<
>> To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure. << Andrew Jackson, like Madison, a southerner.
In the Nullification Crisis, South Carolina declared Federal laws null and void in that state. Jackson received the Force Bill from Congress to take military action, in this case closing ports at his discretion, and thus forcing South Carolina to itself take military action, which, incidentally, would be Unconstitutional also. The importance of the Force Bill is that it is the first piece of legislation to publicly deny the right of secession to individual states. Its approval meant that the principle of secession was no longer in keeping with the idea of a national union.
Jackson said this also to the people of that deluded and arrogant state, South Carolina, where most human beings were brutalized slaves:
>> Recollect that the first act of resistance to the laws which have been denounced as void by those who abuse your confidence and falsify your hopes is Treason, and subjects you to all the pains and penalties that are provided for the highest offence against your country. Can (you)...consent to become Traitors? Forbid it Heaven. << Andrew Jackson.
The Force Bill was never declared Unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and was even cited by Eisenhower in 1957 in the Civil Rights strife in Little Rock when he sent in the 101st Airborne. Conversely, the secessionists' views have never been verified nor confirmed anywhere other than in their own beer hall meetings where they condemn Lincoln to the world's greatest mass murderers.
So, when South Carolina seceded following Lincoln's election, and started up its own army (also Unconstitutional) what justifications did it list, and what abuses by Lincoln did it compile and set before the people of the world?
None!
One good reason for that is that when South Carolina seceded in December of 1860 Lincoln was a private citizen, not even in government, and he was NOT the President! Lincoln had done nothing at all. There was no list to compile.
I should add that Confederate Vice President Stephens, in his Cornerstone Speech in March of 1861 in Savannah, made clear SLAVERY was the reason for it all is the closest the Confederacy had to a formal compilation attempting to justify their actions:
>> The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." << He was right.
Of course he was right. SLAVERY - and its perpetuation - was indeed the reason for it all, and slavery always met the approbation of the slave owners. Slavery, in which countless numbers of slaves were beaten, exploited, raped, murdered, mutilated, and denied basic medical care, and as it was a race-based slavery, even hope, that lasting generations and to last forever by the South's expectation. And yet the oligarchs who exploited and profited from this have themselves justification for rebellion? Owing to what? Merely tariffs that have been extant for decades? The election of a President yet to take office who merely does not want slavery in new territories north of the Mason-Dixon line? A sick irony.
Stephens continued. . . >> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. . . Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. <<
That is truly the "cornerstone", of it all: virulently racist SLAVERY - the reason for the illegal secessions and the reason for the war, and efforts to assure it perpetuation were the reason over 600,000 died in that war. And the cornerstone of southern wealth were the cash crops: cotton, tobacco, rice, and previously, indigo. No slaves meant no profitable cash crops.
America was founded on principles in which everyone has the chance to rise or not based on their own industry, zeal, and effort, not by the vagaries of a fortunate birth into an upper class. And that, too, is capitalism. It promotes a vibrant society, not the indolent society deToqueville wrote about when he visited the southern slave states where industry, such as it was, was based on forcing enslaved people to work like beasts in terrible conditions for nothing other than the aggrandizement of the owner of those human beings.
But to the South, Africans were less than human beings. And that too is one of the true issues of the war, that and the strict class system in the South in which the typical yeoman farmer, illiterate and ignorant of the true issues, was kept down by that same self-satisfied oligarchy of planters.
And do not mention those tariffs to me as they had been around for decades, and the last time South Carolina tried to do something about that, in 1833, Jackson slapped them down, as already stated.
So, in effect, the Cornerstone Speech WAS the equivalent in a non-formal way of a justification for the rebellion. And that supposed justification was to perpetuate slavery - as it was stated to the roaring cheers of a rowdy and delirious agreeing crowd in Savannah.
After South Carolina seceded, six other slave states also seceded BEFORE Lincoln even became President, before he did anything.
So what then had Lincoln said or advocated that was so morally repugnant it necessitated rebellion, breaking that contract? Nothing.
Lincoln said he did NOT seek abolition nor to end slavery in the South. I will add slavery had already been long before ended in France and Britain. Lincoln said he would support a stronger Fugitive Slave Law, thus outraging abolitionists. Lincoln did, however, want stronger protections against free blacks being kidnapped and dragged into the South by slavecatchers, as commonly occurred. That issue the neo-Confeds never cared about for sure.
Note that this law was so repugnant and morally outrageous in the North major riots were not uncommon - one's moral imperative differs from place to place.
Yet Lincoln sought to placate the slave states (i.e, the South) by supporting the Fugitive Slave Law, and to have done otherwise would have been politically impossible within the newly formed Republican Party which was based on the concepts of "free soil, free labor, and free men" within the new territories.
Lincoln did not even totally rule out expansion of slavery into those territories; he was fine with slavery moving into New Mexico, but not the more northern territories, such as the Dakotas and Nebraska, as he should have been, territories north of the Mason-Dixon line, anyway.
That was it. The possible list of abuses that caused South Carolina's secession was Lincoln opposing slavery in the northern territories in the West. Why? As the territories became states the slave states would eventually lose control of the Senate, as they long had the House. They would not have seceded if Lincoln was not elected, so he was the issue for that state and then others.
Those were the rules: new states get two Senators, and House representatives are based on population. The South - with a much smaller population than the North even if black slaves were included as full people, not just "3/5" as in the Constitutional compromise - wanted to if not control the government stalemate the will of the majority. And that is not a democratic republic.
So South Carolina, not liking the way things were going, just wanted to pack up and leave: South Carolina - a state with the most oppressive and vicious laws against slaves - a state where slaves were routinely brutalized beyond even the daily brutal life of slavery, and where slave rape was routine for generations and where mulattoes, perforce, were ubiquitous for that same reason. But that is never a concern for neo-Confeds, either.
South Carolina - which had no Natural right to talk about freedom when far more than half of the people in that state were slaves! South Carolina, which was prepared to take all its slaves with it out of the Union, thus violating THEIR moral imperative. But neo-Confeds never talk about them.
A moral imperative justifying rebellion harkening back to the Declaration of Independence? Oh yes, it existed in the South. The only people in the South entitled to partake of insurrection and rebellion by way of a moral imperative were. . . the slaves. Natural law surely granted them the right to rebellion, and to kill their slave masters - the slave state oligarchs, wealthy on slave labor, who were leading the secession movement out of their own arrogance and greed. They had no moral imperative, and certainly not against Lincoln who had not done a thing yet, except bend over backward to be conciliatory to the southern slave states in his statements and appeals.
Vice President Stephens in his aforementioned Cornerstone Speech, a racist tract even by the standards of 1861, made clear what it was all about, and that was slavery and its maintenance - and perpetuation. And comparisons to Hitler and Nazism are unavoidable.
Yes, it was impossible to adequately cite these as a moral imperative necessitating rebellion from the Federal government, especially as their bete noire, Lincoln, was not even President at time of secession.
There was no legality for secession and much against it, such as the still extant Force Bill. There was no moral imperative whatsoever for that rebellion as the Patriots had justification in 1776 as carefully delineated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln was not even President when the secessions commenced.
The only people with a moral imperative to commence a rebellion were the millions of slaves in the South. One can add that those who supported such "servile insurrection", if they be white and in the North, also had a moral imperative and thus justification for rebellion - why I honor John Brown, one of whose followers is buried in nearby Green-Wood Cemetery with Gerry, with a headstone that states he died for freedom. Captain John E.Cook always gets a flag near that headstone. And I put him online, right here: www.findagrave.com. Look him up.
"Inscription: Died for the Cause of Emancipation and Human Liberty".
So, the supporters of the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion, the slave state oligarchs, can be left with their absurd hyperbolic attacks on Lincoln, their ignoring of the "cornerstone" for that rebellion as stated by Stephens (it was slavery), and leaving pennies in urinals while living in total historical irrelevance, an irrelevance justified by the inconvenient realities they discard as they do not fit their pre-measured ideology and assumptions.
And my time is too pressed to debate much more on this, not with the true reality in the PRESENT of a rogue government ruining this nation. Not when no reputable historian would give such attacks on Lincoln a second thought.
Old Abe did what was needed to win the Civil War, and he won it, and he is hated by some for that.
