It appears that Lincoln used the bayonet and gun to mandate a doctrine that Federal unity takes precedence over democracy at the state level, and therefore the people of the CSA states had no right to secede.
Two questions:
(1) Did Wilson negate or countermand the “Lincoln doctrine” with his post-WWI policy of “self-determination” in regard to independence-minded components of European megastates like the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and if so, was he aware of this contrast with his predecessor’s philosophy? (I had the impression that Wilson was quite the democratic idealist and also a Southern sympathizer.)
(2) Is President Jiang Zemin of China justified in pointing at Lincoln’s policy as a support for his willingness to use force to bring (democratic) Taiwan back into the PRC fold? Does our own history make Americans hypocrites to try to tell China to let the people of Taiwan make their own decisions? (I remember reading a few years ago that a top Chinese official tried to explain the PRC’s intransigence on the Taiwan issue by asking his American hosts, “You wouldn’t allow the people of Hawaii to advocate independence, would you?” He was reportedly confused by the reply that, as a matter of fact, Hawaiians have every right to advocate independence.)
Jab1
This if OT, but I have to take issue with you about Harry Turtledove being a very good novelist. I’ve read “Guns of the South”, his science fiction novel about the Rebels winning the Civil War, and its sequel, a non-sci-fi novel called “How Few Remain”, set in the 1880’s about a second war between the Union and the Confederacy (the premise being that Britian and Canada had joined the Souuth in fighting the Union in the first civil war, and that in the aftermath the Union wouldn’t be so tough if it had two hostile neighbors on its borders to contend with). I think both of these novels took intesting ideas and ruined them with ponderous storytelling.
I’m afraid that my disagreement with this statement is also my prime objection to the idea that slavery was not the primary motivation for the secession and civil war.
The Southern states were very happy to recognize the ultimate sovreignty of the federal government in such cases as Dred Scott where the U.S. judiciary effectively squashed the right of a state to recognize the freedom of a person who was held slave in a different state.
If the South actually recognized that states were sovereign, they should have been deploring the Dred Scott descision as an encroachment upon the rights of states. Instead they cheered the recognition by the Federal government that slavery was recognized as a supportable issue outside the territory of slave-holding states.
Leading up to Dred Scott, there was no attempt to use simple extradition procedures to return a criminal freeing the “crime” of escape. Dred Scott’s return was demanded on his status of property and his status as a free man was denied on the grounds that the state where he sought asylum did not have a sovereign right to ignore the national recognition of slavery as an institution.
I’ve heard the argument that the constitution never forbade secession, but what I don’t understand is why Article I, Section 10 doesn’t apply:
Now while not explicity saying “no secession”, it makes it illegal for a state to enter into treaties, and to coin money, which would make forming an independent country pretty tough.
JBENZ states that “I never bought the idea that Slavery was THE cause of the Civil War. The South had plenty of other cultural, social and economic differences from the North and West to push them to the point of seccession.” I would challenge him to name one, and then distinguish it from the slavery question.
Well, I can thnk if a few. Not to say that I buy all of them but a lot of Southerners did:>> JBENZ
SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”
JBNZ’s reasons stated for reasons for the Civil War all ultimately relate back to slavery. The South’s agrarian economy and class system would not have existed but for slavery; the religion/cultural issue found its distinguishing factors in the slave question. Every reason for the Civil War, even the ones JBNZ didn’t mention but are usually foisted on us as legitimate reasons, such as State’s rights and nullification, are all based on the ability of the Southern states to maintain the slave culture in face of a feared federal move to thwart it.
And tomndebb makes the best argument; the Confederacy wound up having a stronger central government than the North. Federalism suited the Confederates when they had the upper hand; when they lost the election and faced only the POSSIBILITY there slave based economic system might be changed, they took thier ball and went home. Not just unconstitutional, but damn stupidly selfish and immature.
SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”
Would you question a court if it ruled in your favor? Me neither.
That would be a good argument if “Dred Scott” had anything to do with that issue. It was a property law case and properly decided under the property laws in effect at the time. Nobody except the slaveholders liked it very much, including Justice Taney when he wrote the decision, but this was long before the days of Judicial Activism and results based jurisprudence. Might have been a different decision if it was heard in 1965 and Warren & Black & Douglas had been sitting on the bench but Taney wasn’t crazy enough think he could abolish slavery by court decree.
No matter what the revisionists may claim “Dred Scott” didn’t decide that Scott was property and that slavery was legal. The Constitution said people could be owned and treated as property. Neither the Congress nor numerous Presidents had the interest, guts or ability to change that. It’s a litle tough to blame the Court for not doing the other guys’ job.
Of course. The Constitution and the Federal Law said Scott was property. He could no more be extradited under the law at that time than could a runaway horse. And if it HAD been a horse that had run away, nobody would have batted an eye when somebody rounded him up and returned him to the owner. If another state passed a law that said that horses couldn’t be property they would, quite properly, be laughed out of court.
Nobody was laughing and nobody confused Scott with a horse…but the Constitution, the law and a substantial portion of the population, North and South, said they were both property and subject to the same laws and procedures.
Let’s not forget that, much as we may identify with the Abolishinists today, they were a minority then. The Slave States didn’t have the number of voters or the Congressional votes to maintain slavery if the Northerners and Westerners had really wanted to abolish it. Maybe it was because they didn’t have the nerve to provoke a war, but maybe they just didn’t give a damn. Wouldn’t be the first, or last, time that the white folks didn’t lose any sleep over the plight of the black folks.
Practical geopolitics is never noted for it’s logic or consistency. And nobody ever accused Wilson of being a hard headed politician. The Versailles Treaty is a monument to his lack of clout. Then again it’s pretty hard to compare empires built on conquest and maintained by armed force to volutary associations of independent states. You could make a pretty good apples/oranges case for that one.
There has never been any logic to American policy in Asia beyond loot, getting even with the Japanese and a virulent hatred of Communism. Hard to compare Taiwan either. It started out as nothing more than a refuge for a fugitive warlord. It didn’t seccede so much as manage to not get conquered. In any event, in proportion it’s not like the Confederacy breaking out of the Union. More Key West starting it’s own nation.
It would if they were still in the Union and subject to the Constitution. They claimed they weren’t. A certain amount of unpleasantness followed shortly thereafter.
Try this one…how could Lincoln claim that the secession was ineffective and that the Confederate States were still in the Union, but only in Rebellion, and then carve West Virginia out of Virginia in clear violation of Article IV, Sec.3 (1) of the Constitution?
You gotta love the guy. You can just see him and Seward rolling on the floor over that one. The poor Rebs never had a chance.
Sorry, but I think Claudius Maximus completely overlooked the questions I was asking. My point wasn’t to highlight any inconsistency in geopolitics, it was to ask whether Wilson knew what he was doing? The fact that it was inconsistent is already the premise: what I want to know is whether the main actor was aware of the inconsistency and its implications.
One more thing:
Many might argue that this was precisely the transformation that took place in our own country with the Civil War.
As for Robocop’s answer to my second question, I’m afraid it also looks to be mainly a nonsequitur: the issue is whether we can justifiably promote “self-determination” for Taiwan, Kosovo, East Timor, Tibet, Chechnya, or anyplace else in view of our own history? Will the Civil War always be a trump card against our efforts of moral persuasion?
Dred Scott was not decided as an issue of property law. The decision handed down by a majority vote of the Court was that there was no power in the existing form of government to make citizens slave or free, and that at the time of the formation of the U.S. Constitution they were not, and could not be, citizens in any of the states. Accordingly, Scott was still a slave and not a citizen of Missouri, from which it followed that he had no right to sue in the federal courts. In so many words, the Court was saying blacks could never be citizens, or, at least, blacks who are or were slaves could never be citizens.
This being the main issue, Chief Justice Taney included a lot of extraneous material as obiter dicta. These opinions went beyond the actual point to be settled to the extent of asserting that Scott, having originally been a slave and therefore a mere chattel, might, according to the law of Missouri be taken like any other chattel, anywhere within the jurisdiction of the U.S. (this may be where JBNZ is getting his property issue, but it was dicta and had nothing to do with the legal issues argued before the court, and was only extraneous commentary that was not legally binding); that the Missouri Compromise was in violation of the Constitution; and that slavery could not be prohibited by Congress in the territories of the United States.
It were these maters of dicta that so incensed the North. But the bottom line issue was the Dred Scott case decided that a slave or former slave had no constitutional rights. It is feasible to read the opinion to conclude that blacks had no constiutional rights, and only the 13th and 14th amendment finally oveturned the weight of this decision.
SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”
Which is fine, except that the majority opinion by Taney specifically addresses the issues of state sovereignty at least five times. I did not imply that Dred Scott had any effect on the legality of slavery. My point is that the rejection of Scott’s plea was based on the notion that the U.S. Constitution (with its acceptance of slavery and the “property” condition of blacks) overrode the right to claim a difference because of differing rules within various states–which was a key portion of Scott’s plea.
No one would expect the South to protest the verdict in the case. However, had the South had any real interest in “States Rights” (as they later claimed), they should have at least deplored the verdict which dwelt so heavily on establishing the limited sovereignty of the states, insisting that the court should have simply refused to hear the case, citing stare decisus regarding Strader et al. v. Graham (as Taney ultimately did).
Uh oh. Let’s not open up that particular can of worms in this thread.
Suffice it to say that the issue of whether the 2nd Amendment’s protection extends beyond the needs of the militias is not as cut-and-dried an issue as it might first seem. There are some old Great Debates threads about gun control in which this issue is addressed, and for which it is far better suited.
A major cause of the South losing the Civil War was given by Rhett Butler in the movie version of Gone With the Wind: “There is not a single cannon foundry in the South.” Actually, this was not true – there were two, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia and another in Birmingham, Alabama. However, the overwhelming industrial capacity of the North as opposed to the South was an important factor in the Union victory.
One reason that the Confederacy lasted as long as it did was the poor quality of Union General officers. The South had generals like Lee, Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The North had generals like Halleck, Burnside, and McClellan – if McClellan had been willing to take the slightest risk during the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, he could have shortened the war by YEARS. Admittedly, the South did have people like AP Hill, and the North did have Grant, and Meade did show some talent (but not at Antietam)but on the whole, Southern officers were better than Northern officers.
Remember the term “manifest destiny”? Had the south suceeded in seceding (say that 10 times!), they would have eventually either “willingly” re-joined the union or they would have gone the way of the American Indians and Mexicans that got in the Union’s way.
I dunno. If they had succeeded in getting Britain to support them and had fought the North to a standstill, it might have simply meant that they would have gone industrial in the 1870’s instead of the 1960’s.
A war-weary North (with potential enemies in Canada and the Confederacy) might have simply focussed more directly on the West. Conflicts would then have arisen if the Confederacy tried to lure New Mexico, Colorado, or Kansas into their fold. The outcome of those conflicts would have been determined by all the same unknowns that affected the first war.
A successfully divided U.S. might have been ripe for further regional factionalism, with California (and, perhaps, Washington and/or Oregon) attempting to establish separate nations in the West and different agrarian states choosing to “get free” of their industrial neighbors as disputes over currency and money arose.
I think that it would be difficult to establish that any one scenario would have occurred. Manifest Destiny was a wonderful tool to encourage Congress to support expansionist goals–but only as long as they were not frightened by other serious dangers at home.
Here is a thought that goes counter to the original post:
The South waited TOO long to secede.
Accepting as true the idea that the South lost the war mostly due to lack of industrial capacity and resources compared to the North, what would have happened had the split occurred in 1820? At that time, there was less of a gap in the industrial capacities of the two regions.
Kick THAT around while I go grab the text of Dred Scott and put together a ‘definitive’ reply on that red herring to the thread.
