Yes, it is – and one any Southern state would have invoked against any internal insurrection, white or black. AIUI, there are still Virginians who speak of the “rape” of their northwestern counties, who counterseceded to form WV.
One need only look at Eastern Tennessee or the attempted occupation of Kentucky, who were not so keen on this Confederacy nonsense.
Whatever certain states may have believed at the time of ratifying the Constitution (and I’d be interested to see a cite for your claim: not from some Civil War-era politician trying to justify secession, but from politicians and policy makers contemporary with the Constitutional Convention, a la Hamilton and the Federalist Papers) there actually was a Supreme Court decision handed down on the question of secession following the war.
The case is Texas v. White. Ironically, it was in a decision favorable to Texas (one of the Confederate states for you non-US dopers) that the court held secession was not lawful, Texas had never seceded, and therefore any actions taken by the state government in furtherance of insurrection (like selling war bonds to fund the Confederate Army, bonds the post-war state government no longer wanted to be on the hook for) were unlawful and unenforceable, while still allowing those matters made in furtherance of normal governance (eg: things like holding common criminals accountable, collecting taxes to build schools, etc.) to stand as lawful acts of the then-functioning state government.
I actually find the approach both compelling and rather novel. In their decision, the justices cited the preamble to the US Constitution, specifically the part about forming “a more perfect Union,” and then referred to the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution and noted that the Articles explicitly called for a “perpetual union” (in fact the full title of those Articles was “The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union”). So, in their reasoning, the phrase “more perfect Union” clearly expanded on that idea of a perpetual union, making it even more perpetual, if you will, and therefore completely “indissoluble.”
Which means that under the Constitution, as first written and still into the present day, no state may secede and, presumably, any act of secession would require an amendment to the Constitution to allow for such a thing.
So whatever certain state legislatures may have believed when they ratified the Constitution (and, again, I’d love to see a cite from the late 18th century if you’ve got one to support your claim), the Constitution can reasonably be inferred to have prohibited secession.
A very good source on all this is What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President, by Michael Lind. The author discusses all the constitutional/legal arguments of the time about secession. But the main point is Lincoln’s conviction that republican government was still a new experiment (established in very few nations of the time), and Union victory was essential to make it viable and attractive. After all, the USA was then the first big republic in human history – most previous examples were city-states or Dutch provinces or Swiss cantons. (The Roman Republic succumbed to emperorship because it expanded to empire-size but still had a city-state constitution – you had to go to Rome to vote.)
What? Historically slavery WAS an economic thing more than a racial thing. Imagine your competitive advantage as a company or region, if your labor costs were trivial and you had no pressure to improve working conditions? The same economic drivers that drive automation in the present day were driving slavery prior to the Civil War, namely labor costs. Even though slaves were surprisingly expensive to buy (something like a quarter of a million present-day dollars), you only had to buy them once, and they’d reproduce as well. Workers, on the other hand, had to be paid continuously, and over the course of a worker’s productive time, cost more than a slave would have.
Well, it’s easy to say that, but a pacifist is only free to be a pacifist so long as others will fight for him – if not, a more authoritarian state can easily conquer yours, and possibly draft you.
Granted, there were other factors – the Marian reforms established a full-time professional army, which was very good at winning battles – but one (probably) unintended consequence was that the new legions of the Head Count were more loyal to their generals/paymasters than to the constitution of the republic, and once the generals figured that out, the republic was doomed.
But, we do have a full-time professional army in this republic, and it has never subverted the civil government (yet). It helps, no doubt, that every officer swears an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, and that their institutional culture enshrines that as a basic principle. (Eisenhower took it so seriously that he would not even vote so long as he was in the Army. For the same reason, as president he never returned salutes – because the president, though CinC, is a civilian, and civilians don’t salute.)
Well, except for the Civil War, where Senior US Army officers like Lee engaged in open insurrection, and yet somehow we’re supposed to venerate him and his confederate cronies for being gentlemanly enough to refrain from engaging in protracted guerrilla warfare after they lost the war (and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in their noble quest to defend the institution of slavery, and that’s on top of those men, women, and children who died while enslaved). But of course there was the Klan, founded by another confederate general, so…
Oh, sure, in the same way we’re supposed to honor those courtly, dignified plantation owners from the Gone With The Wind era for being so gentlemanly that they *never *whipped their darkies more than necessary to make them behave. Never.
But at that point, they stopped being part of the U.S. Army.
Lee at first wavered on which side he would fight on. When Virginia joined the Confederacy, that decided him – he was a Virginian first and foremost. I doubt any officer today has that kind of attitude.
If it was all about the money, why weren’t white people enslaved in the United States?
It was easier to keep black people enslaved. If you enslaved white people or natives, they had the option of making a run for it and disappearing into the larger population. Black slaves had much less chance of successfully escaping because free black people were relatively rare and therefore noticeable. There was no crowd for a runaway black slave to blend into.
This doesn’t ring true at all. Indentured labour, or even a regular poorly paid worker in a town where the main business runs the stores, slave labor and shit broke labor probably run pretty close in costs. You realize that slave owners still had to feed, clothe and house slaves, right?
An indentured servant will eventually become free - and then, he’s a competitor, for land, for sales and for employees.
Partly because the Union won the war. The Southern aristos would have enslaved whites if they could – and in many cases, they effectively did, antebellum. One effect of Reconstruction was that it extended the franchise to previously disenfranchised whites.
And those "darkies’ happily lined up to dig trenches to help their kind Southern Masters win the war. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Not really at their own expense. The slaves could be expected to grow their own food and build their own shelters and make their own clothes.
Only if the US Army accepted their resignations (Did they? I actually don’t know). Otherwise they’d be AWOL, insubordinate, you name it.
As I understand it, it was mostly a historical quirk. Early on, the Europeans happily enslaved each other, but at some point stopped.
But… with the advent of New World plantation-style agriculture- specifically sugar cultivation in Brazil and the Caribbean and cotton farming in the colonial US, slaves were needed to make it profitable; this continued until roughly the early 19th century in those areas- even the US abolished the importation of slaves in 1807, but unlike most of those countries, did not abolish the institution of chattel slavery at roughly the same time.
Part of the reason that Africans were enslaved in the 16th-19th centuries was because they were obvious at a glance, part was because they had some natural resistance to malaria, and probably most importantly, they’re what was being sold at the world’s slave markets at that time.
It was all economic… all that BS about “the Negro’s proper place” was just ex-post-facto rationalization and attempted justification for why they enslaved a specific “race”.
My understanding of it is that with Enlightnement philosophy spreading, you had widespread acceptance of the notion that “All Men are created Equal,” which is something you didn’t have back in the days of the Greeks and Romans. They simply had no problem saying ‘we won the war, you’re a slave, now back to the field’, or ‘we won the war, we’re taking this land’ and had only practical concerns (primarily avoiding slave revolt) with things like limiting the treatment of slaves. This also meant that slavery was just a temporary condition, it was something you might be stuck in but there was no particular reason for it to attach down generations. While there was plenty of bigotry in ancient times, it tended to be tied to culture and language, not skin color, and there’s evidence that Greeks and Romans considered the lilly-white Scandinavians about as different from them as darker Africans.
The ‘problem’ for post Enlightenment Europeans was that it was still quite profitable to enslave people or to conquer them and take over their lands, even though you had the beginning of strong legal and moral arguments against doing so. They were able to solve the problem by ‘discovering’ that the races they wanted to enslave were inferior, and so came up with the modern idea of racism. Once you’ve determined that the ‘lesser’ races are not fully ‘Men’ to be treated equally, you can enslave and loot with a clear conscience. But this also meant that slavery wasn’t just a temporary condition that someone was subjected to, it was permanently tied to their fundamental being, and there was now a clear marker for ‘inferior’ vs ‘superior’ in skin color. Since following this belief system resulted in lots of profit, it spread quickly, and once entrenched no one really wanted to acknowledge that it was really just a rationalization in the first place.
I believe officers had the legal right to resign their commissions at any time. NCO’s and enlisted men were legally obligated to complete their term of service.