What a surprise
- Thread starter Gonz
- Start date
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
And you honestly think this won't get buried when the re-write happens? I can point you to one very significant historical event where the history was and still is being re-written, and I ain't heard you complain yet. Guess you prefer the re-write sometimes.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
Gonz said:
Oh really?
There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits a state from peacefully and democratically separating from the Union. Indeed, the right of secession is implied in the Tenth Amendment, which reads,
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does not give the federal government the power to force a state to remain in the Union against its will. President James Buchanan acknowledged this fact in a message to Congress shortly before Lincoln assumed office. Nor does the Constitution prohibit the citizens of a state from voting to repeal their state’s ratification of the Constitution. Therefore, by a plain reading of the Tenth Amendment, a state has the legal right to peacefully withdraw from the Union.
Critics of the Confederacy cite certain clauses in the Constitution about the supremacy of federal law or about states not being allowed to enter into treaties with foreign powers, etc., etc. However, it goes without saying that such clauses only apply to states that are in the Union. There’s simply nothing in the Constitution that says a state can’t peacefully and democratically revoke its ratification. If a state’s citizens were to vote in a legitimate democratic process to revoke the state’s ratification of the Constitution, either by direct vote or by convention, then that state would no longer be bound by the Constitution. The citizens of each state are the ultimate sovereign, not the federal government. The federal government is supposed to be servant of the people, not their master. Even Lloyd Paul Stryker, who opposed secession, admitted the Southern states had an “arguable claim that no specific section of the Constitution stood in their way,” i.e., no section of the Constitution prohibited peaceful, democratic separation (Andrew Johnson: A Study in Courage, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930, p. 447).
Critics also quote a few statements made by founding father James Madison that seem to argue against secession, but they ignore other statements that indicate Madison believed there were cases when a state could leave the Union. When Madison discussed the conditions under which a state could secede from the Articles of Confederation, without the consent of the other states, he appealed to the natural right of self-preservation and to the principle that the safety and happiness of society were the objects to which all political institutions "must be sacrificed." Said Madison,
The first question [how a state could secede without approval from the other states] is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. (Federalist Number 43)
The Union was never meant to be held together by force. The Southern states joined the Union voluntarily, and they should have been able to leave it voluntarily. A key principle of Americanism is the sacred right of self-government, that government should only govern “with the consent of the governed.” This noble idea is expressed in the Declaration of Independence. America came into existence by secession from England. There was only a war because England wouldn’t allow the American colonies to leave in peace. George Washington’s secretary of state, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, rightly said that America was founded on the principle of secession. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, said in a letter to William Crawford in 1816 that if a state wanted to leave the Union, he would not hesitate to say “Let us separate,” even if he didn’t agree with the reasons the state wanted to leave.
The principle of peaceful separation was as American as apple pie. But Lincoln, relying on an utterly erroneous understanding of the founding of the Union, declared that secession was “treason,” “insurrection,” and “rebellion.” If Lincoln had been alive during the Revolutionary War and had used the same kind of reasoning that he used against Southern secession, he would have sided with the British.
Lincoln defenders argue that secession was a hostile act because it constituted resistance to federal authority and that therefore secession was in fact “treason, rebellion, and insurrection.” This is specious, totalitarian reasoning. By this logic, all independence movements could be viewed as illegal by definition. Furthermore, if the Southern states had the right to secede, then federal authority ceased to exist in those states when they withdrew from the Union. Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon put it this way in a speech to the Senate on March 2, 1861, just days before the Confederacy was formed:
My residence is in the North, but I have never seen the day, and I never shall, when I will refuse justice as readily to the South as to the North. . . .
Sir, if there is, as I contend, the right of secession, then, whenever a State exercises that right, this Government has no laws in that State to execute, nor has it any property in any such state that can be protected by the power of this Government. In attempting, however, to substitute the smooth phrases “executing the laws” and “protecting public property” for coercion, for civil war, we have an important concession: that is, that this Government dare not go before the people with a plain avowal of its real purposes and of their consequences. No, sir; the policy is to inveigle the people of the North into civil war, by masking the designs in smooth and ambiguous terms. (Congressional Globe, Second Session, Thirty-Sixth Congress, p. 1347, in Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1, New York: De Capo Press, 1990, reprint of original edition, pp. 216-217)
In addition, the South had no desire to overthrow the federal government. The South seceded in a peaceful, democratic manner, with the support of the overwhelming majority of Southern citizens. The Southern states used the same process to secede that the original thirteen states used to ratify the U.S. Constitution, i.e., by voting in special conventions comprised of delegates who were elected by the people.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
Duty calls. See ya after lunch.
Secession amounts to an attack on the Union. The Constitution doesn't formally address it since, by its very nature, secession weakens the whole. Leaving the Union would indicate & imply removing the offending party from the protections of the very Constitution it tries to use as protection for seceeding. The federal government is required by that Constitution to protect its borders & its citizens, which is what it did.
That is a scholarly argument, worthy of further inspection. In the years following the Civil War, we have become a better nation for it's sacrifices.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
In for a penny, in for a pound eh?
So if you join a health club one day, then decide two years later that you don't like that health club any more, you should be forced at gunpoint to remain a member? Same principle, no?
I don't buy it. Show me some case law and we'll talk.
So if you join a health club one day, then decide two years later that you don't like that health club any more, you should be forced at gunpoint to remain a member? Same principle, no?
I don't buy it. Show me some case law and we'll talk.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
Gonz said:
In your opinion. There are those of us who would prefer not to be governed by what happens in Washington. We prefer our tax money spent in-state over being shipped everywhere else. We prefer states' rights over a centralized federal government.
SouthernN'Proud said:
I don't ned case law. I have a unified country.
One person leaving the health club doesn't amount to a rebellious seccesion & the general weakening of the overall health club. A large, en masse exit might...but since slavery has been abolished, they couldn't stop them...unless they were still part of a larger agreement (contract) in which they should be forced to fulfill, by law.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
Gonz said:
Keep on thinking that.
Gonz said:
So the South should have stayed because it weakened a union they wanted no part of. Brilliant, self-serving logic there pal. My heart bleeds for you. You are partially right though...without us, you guys would have been naked and awfully hungry. Can't grow cotton in Vermont.
So because a bunch of other people in other states wanted something, the rest sould be forced to do it. Wow. I worry about you.
Tenth Amendment. Repute it.
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
So by your own logic, some nutcase polution control law in California should be upheld everywhere else, right?
SouthernN'Proud
Southern Discomfort
Then they should have invaded themselves. Nobody down this way insurrected or invaded a damn soul.
And we weren't in imminent danger of being attacked?
Takes the approval of Congress, which Lincoln DID NOT have at the start of his attack on his fellow states.
Nobody tried to form a new United State. Moot point.
Thank you for making my argument for me.