[quote]Warriorsage wrote:
The aware know that to give someone power is the ultimate power. The ability to let someone make there own decisions and live there own life requires courage and belief in ones own self. They must believe that when the one who grows beyond them and where they have been that they have given the greatest gift they can of themselves and that is the gift of self-determination. It is what we fought for in the revolution. It is what the south fought for in the Civil War. (Parenthetically, Lincoln broke almost every Constitutional law there was in place at the time, according to the constitution the states had the right to determine their own laws; No matter how repulsive we may find them today).
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Want someone to argue with your points? Try almost every historian not from well south of the Mason-Dixon line about those subjects, as well as many southern historians as well.
Don’t try to make out the Confederacy to have been some noble cause – somehow the ONLY law those states were unable to negotiate around or work within a federalist framwork were those of slavery.
The South saw the writing on the wall – opposition to slavery had been building in the rest of the country for decades, as had been predicted by many of the framers of the Constitution. Remember, they didn’t wait for the decades-long process which would have preceeded Constitutional abolition of slavery. The goddamned INSTANT an anti-slavery Northerner was elected and the South lost its de facto hold on power that it had been exercising by threatening seccession and forcing the election of candidates that would kowtow to Southern demands, they left. Frankly a few more Andrew Jacksons – who told the South that if they didn’t stop their bullying threats that he would invade immediately (they believed it and basically shut the hell up for a decade) – and a few less Buchanans – the worst president in American history, who enabled the future Confederacy to an amazing degree with his “leadership” – might have helped to allay the disaster that was the Civil War.
The Confederates were fighting not only for slavery for institutionalized anarchy, as Lincoln pointed out on a hundred occasions. Had the South succeeded, than any municipality or political entity would have been able to withdraw if they didn’t like the legislative will of the majority. So if your county, state, town government, or whatever felt like they weren’t going to win an important vote, pull out! Abolish the government because you don’t agree with even the distant threat of the majority’s disagreeing with you!
It was the most reckless, shortsighted, dangerous, morally and legally despicable decision ever taken by a group of Americans. Had the Confederates been allowed to succeed, in their wake you would not have had a CSA and a USA, you would have had the USA and the CSA and twenty different nations created after the precedent of the CSA, and the bloodshed and inernecine wars of a thousand years (see Europe).
Also, if you would like to keep arguing the “state’s rights” apologist crap about the Confederacy I am going to keep posting the “laws” which enabled seccession, in order, until you stop. I would be interested to know what “rights” had been violated, including I might add the right to own slaves (which Lincoln said he would not do anything about because he didn’t see that as the President’s job when he was first elected, and before the states secceeded).
Here’s the first:
South Carolina
"[Copied by Justin Sanders from J.A. May & J.R. Faunt, South Carolina Secedes (U. of S. Car. Pr, 1960), pp. 76-81.]
Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
Adopted December 24, 1860"