However in the USA those who were prone to be butthurt over the fall of secession and slavery and those leaders who opportunistically rode that butthurt to sustain 100 years of Jim Crow, did turn out to be quite easy pickings for one of the polarized factions of the “culture wars” age. The ones who believe there is a “God-given” order where some people need to Know and Stay in Their Place.
So around here it still does make things worse, even if in fact there are several degrees of separation.
I always find it kind of odd that otherwise liberal people think that people should be eternally tied to an agreement made by their ancestors. It is like saying that once people are married they can never get a divorce, but going beyond that, because they are born married. I think states should absolutely have the right so succeed from the US if they so choose.
Someone really ought to have told the Confederacy that states are allowed to secede.
The Confederate Constitution - Essential Civil War Curriculum
Though the Confederate nation was born out of secession, there was no right to secede in their national charter. During the constitutional convention, James Chesnut proposed that nullification be recognized as an appropriate remedy for disputes between states and the national government, but this idea was rejected. Benjamin Harvey Hill of Georgia tried to introduce secession as remedy for such disputes after a period of waiting, with Chesnut seeking to amend the proposal to include a simple right of secession, but both proposals were tabled and never raised again.[5] If states’ rights was the principal constitutional principle and the dominant political philosophy of the Confederacy, as has often been argued by historians, the constitutional convention, and subsequent wartime constitutional cases before state courts, provided excellent opportunities to assert this principle. The rejection of a constitutional right to nullification or secession may seem contradictory given that southern states had wielded secession just months earlier as a means for leaving the Union. Yet, many Confederate framers and their constituents were confident that improvements incorporated into their new constitution restored American constitutionalism and introduced innovations that addressed antebellum constitutional conflicts and militated against a future need for secession.
Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861 (yale.edu)
Preamble
We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.
Or perhaps that the people of say, the Western part of Virginia had the right to not be forced into leaving the Union against their wishes. West Virginia - Separation from Virginia - Wikipedia.
ASL had written:
They never left the United States of America, nor could they have ever done so unilaterally. But maybe you’re right. Maybe treason is “too political.” So how about we just call it murder instead
If I’m following this correctly, he is saying that even if you set aside the political issue of treason, you can still call it murder when soldiers are killed.
I was responding by pointing out that if you set aside the political issue of treason, then there’s nothing to distinguish between Confederate soldiers killing American soldiers and German or Japanese soldiers killing American soldiers.
I think there are stronger arguments against secession.
First, American citizens have rights. That includes the American citizens who were living in the southern states in 1861. Some may have arguably voluntarily surrendered those rights and supported secession. But it was certainly not universal. So the southern state governments and the Confederate government was forcibly preventing the American government from protecting the rights of American citizens.
Another argument is that statehood is a bilateral agreement between the state and the federal government. Even if you argue that that agreement can be dissolved, it can only be done by mutual agreement not by unilateral action. A state can unilaterally withdraw from the union and the union cannot unilaterally kick a state out.
In my perfect world, states would not have rights. People would have rights. I support open borders. Now, I could support secession (at least morally) if it’s done to give people more rights, not less. But the Confederacy very much was for the latter (less rights for people of all races).
Further, to the extent I am a fan of open borders, I think one way of getting there is through peaceful unions of lesser states. Kind of like the United States of America have been for most of their history. Similarly, I lament the UK’s departure from the EU because (1) I do believe it will have the result of depriving people of rights and (2) in terms of open borders they’re clearly going the wrong way.
Oh, and please don’t accuse me of being a liberal. I am a leftist.
I think you’re missing a “not” in there somewhere.
But yes, IMO your overall point is the correct one. Any secession decision, e.g. CSA or Brexit, will necessarily involve a lot of people who voted against. Or would have voted against if given the opportunity. How are those folks’ wishes and interests to be catered for on such a large and inherently all-or-nothing decision? Hint: they can’t be. And won’t be.
You’re right. I meant to say “A state cannot unilaterally withdraw from the union and the union cannot unilaterally kick a state out.”
But which rights? There were people in 1861 who were quite sincerely invoking their right to own slaves (which was a genuine legal right at that time). Who gets to decide which rights are acceptable and which are not?
I don’t think that’s an accurate reading of American history. There have only been a couple of cases where an existing country entered the United States as a state. Most of our states had been American-owned territories that weren’t being offered independence as an alternative.
Well, since we’re talking about my perfect world and all, I guess that would be for me to decide.
And you know what? I have decided that the “right” to own other people isn’t acceptable; it’s unacceptable. How about you? Do you think it’s unacceptable? Because you’re making this seem like it’s a really hard problem without a solution, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually not.
States don’t have rights, people do, and “owning other people” isn’t one of them. Easy.
I think it’s worth noting that nine of the eleven states that seceded did so based on the votes of small conventions. Only North Carolina and Tennessee put the question of secession to a general vote. And the voters of both states voted against secession (47,323 to 46,672 in North Carolina and 68,282 to 59,449 in Tennessee). Tennessee and North Carolina then called conventions which voted for secession anyway. The decision to secede ended up being made by a total of just 1454 men in eleven states with a combined population of about nine million people.
I feel it’s not a perfect world when one person gets to make the important decisions.
I think we just established that my opinion doesn’t matter.
Or was this the part where I was supposed to say “Yes, Great Leader, I completely agree with what you said. Please don’t declare me an enemy of the people.”
Now that, I believe, was not criminal. No matter how wrongheaded the decision, or horrible their motivation, there is nothing in the constitution that expressly prohibits secession.
But when they attacked, and killed, Americans, that’s when I believe, they committed the constitutional offense of treason. (Or, if we want to be pedantic, the treason was when they authorized the attacking and killing of Americans).
I’ve always heard that the Civil War settled this question, but never thought about it too much. At least not what it necessarily implies. I mean, America - land of the Free! Home of the Brave!
Except… it isn’t a voluntary agreement? I mean, let’s say Wisconsin voters get in a snit, those fresh cheese curds start to wear on them, and they vote 98.9% to secede from these United States.
It’s just “interesting” from an abstract sense, contracts ordinarily require two willing parties, no coercion involved to be considered valid. Restrictive covenants are also suspect in many cases.
Why am I bound to some contract made 200 years ago by people that are all dead, I didn’t sign on to that, etc.
The issue, as I see it, is what would they then do next.
Do they try to confiscate federal property located within their borders? Post offices are federal land, for example - do they let postal carriers continue to go about their business, or do they arrest them? (This is akin to what actually precipitated the war - the shelling of Ft Sumter).
And what of financial obligations? Does the seceding state stop paying taxes to the federal government, or does it continue with the same funding as some sort of tribute to the U.S.? Because if they don’t, the U.S. might come to collect its debts.
And then what? That, in my opinion, is when the option of committing treason becomes ripe for consideration.
This seems contradictory. If the southern states had the legal right to secede then they weren’t committing treason by seceding.
Killing Americans isn’t treason. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor it was an act of war not an act of treason. And if the Confederates had a legal right to secede and form their own country (which you seem to feel they did) then their subsequent decision to attack Fort Sumter was an act of war not an act of treason.
It doesn’t need to be express, it is inherent in federalism and, as the Supreme Court held in 1869, the very notion of a “perpetual Union” (as established by the US Articles of Confederation) made “more perfect” by the Constitution.
Moreover, had the southern rebels felt there was a genuine question of law re: secession, they could easily have concocted a court case to see the matter resolved peacefully. They did not do so, but instead opened fire on lawfully held federal property.
That the constitutional question does in fact have an answer well-founded in both the spirit and the text of the Constitution and the Articles that preceded it is one reason that I am comfortable with the idea of calling what the rebels did (waging war against the US) treason: they were still US citizens when they did it.
This idea that there is some lingering ambiguity over the constitutionality of secession is just one more invention of the Lost Cause.
It’s voluntary to enter into the agreement. But once you’re in the agreement, you can’t unilaterally leave it. Both parties in the agreement have to say yes in order to change the agreement once it exists between them.
North Carolina’s vote was not a secession referendum; it was a referendum on whether or not to call a secession convention. Since some significant changes occurred (Fort Sumter, secession of Virginia, etc.) between the initial call for a convention and the second call, it’s hard to believe that public opinion had not changed during that time, particularly considering the number of Unionists in the state whose loyalty was conditioned on the preservation of slavery.
Tennessee put its secession ordinance to a referendum (again, after Fort Sumter) - the state as a whole voted (ETA: over) two to one in favor of secession.
Earnestly believing this:
Logically nukes any applicability of this:
If you believe that the Confederacy had the legal right to secede from the Union and that votes taken by the 1454 men from a population of 9 million as @Little_Nemo mentioned wasn’t criminal but rather an action allowed to occur under the constitution it must follow that they could not have - indeed were incapable of - committed treason. They had ceased to be part of the United States of America and were thus inherently incapable of committing treason against the USA or any other nation than the CSA. By attacking other Americans and levying war against the Union all they were doing was one country committing acts of aggression and war against another country.
That you can identify the citizens of both ‘countries’ as being ‘Americans’ means no more than the fact that you can identify the citizens on both sides of countless wars as being ‘European’, or that one can identify the parties on both sides of the Mexican-American War as ‘Americans’.