Pardon me, but isn’t this exactly the same logic you use to argue that, because other nations ended slavery peacefully, the South would have eventually ended it peacefully, too?
Well, it couldn’t, because land can’t walk. And as long as you have a slave country sharing a very long border with a free country, and the free country refuses to return escaped slaves (and it would be reprehensible not to refuse), it looks like they’ll go to war sooner or later anyway.
Yes, a fringe contingent.
You continue to use the quotations of Southerners and Southern sympathizers railing against, (or special pleading against), the North to make your claim for what motivated the North to reject secession and go to war to prevent it. This is rather like quoting segregationists in the 1960s to discover what motivated integrationists to “invade” the South, instead of looking at the words of the people who actually worked within the Civil Rights movement to discover their motivations.
Southerners could be as mad a they wished about tariffs, but using their words to identify the source of Northern motivation is nonsense. If you want to persuade us that the North only held onto the South for purely economic reasons, then you need to provide us with the words of Lincoln, Greeley, Seward, Chase (of the Treasury), Vanderbilt, Gould, Fiske, Cooke, Drexel, and others declaiming or discussing the economic hardship that secession would inflict on the North–as well as showing that that hardship, and not dissolution of the union, was the most important aspect of their concerns.
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
The only thing that could be described as states leaving the Articles of Confederation was when a bunch of them got together to set up a stronger federal government (that is, the current Constitution).
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Yes, exactly. My point was simply that the precedent was there, and while you are quite correct that they did so to form a stronger union (a ‘more perfect union’), afaik there was no specific language forbidding a state from withdrawing…though the implication certainly seemed to be that they wouldn’t. It was a question though, and one that was only completely settled by the Civil War and it’s outcome.
Well, my recollection might be faulty then…my understanding was that it was that there was some question and doubt about whether states could leave the union of states, but if your quote ‘Confederation and perpetual Union’ is correct that seems to leave little room for ambiguity.
-XT
People ought to remember that the Confederates didn’t refer to “the Tariff Republicans” but to “the Black Republicans.”
Similarly let’s remember that Alexander Stephens, the Confederate Vice President, when he made is famous “cornerstone” speech at the Confederate Convention didn’t refer to “no tariffs” as the cornerstone of their civilization, but referred to “slavery” as the cornerstone of their civilization.
For those of you attacking WillFarnaby’s statements on the grounds that the South seceded to support slavery, please note that he has not argued the opposite.
While I think he has utterly failed to establish his point, I will note that he has been addressing the issue of why the North refused to permit secession. Even though he is completely wrong, pointing to the actions of the South is a straw man argument, since he is not addressing that issue.
On the other hand, is it legitimate to assume that people will always put their case forward in the best possible light, and that only their opponents will speak the cynical truth about their true motives? In other words, is what C.S. Lewis coined the word “Bulverism” to describe sometimes correct?
Yes, except that as we’ve pointed out to Will, it was the Confederacy not the United States that started the war. So it’s southern motivations that are the key factor in the causes of the civil war.
By attempting to reapply Fort Sumter, Lincoln was refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Confederacy. Reapplying a fort in foreign territory was perceived as a hostile action and the South took necessary defensive action.
Even if South Carolina and the other southern states did have the right to unilaterally secede (which they didn’t) Fort Sumter has still the property of the United States of America. If the Confederacy starts shooting at American soldiers in an American fort, it’s an act of war just as if Canada or Mexico did it.
A country refusing to accept your legitimacy is a diplomatic issue not a cause for war. The United States didn’t recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. It didn’t recognize the People’s Republic of China until 1979. But this didn’t lead to war.
Nonsense. By this “logic”, every supply delivery to Gitmo is a rejection of the legitimacy of the Cuban government.
“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” - John Harrington
Finally. Finally, you have stumbled across the reason the North was fighting. If it makes you feel better you can even say that it was complete “bigger stick” tactics and just because they won they got to write the rules. Might makes right in this case. Over a million people died over whether the seceding States were a real country or just rebels taking up arms against their fellow countrymen. It was settled. The Confederacy was never a real country. It received no international recognition and it held no territory as a separate sovereign entity. The United States couldn’t take foreign action there because it was never foreign. It is and always was part of the United States of America, even if the people living there tried to pretend otherwise for a while.
Hindsight is, of course, always 20-20. In the long run, it was good the Union was preserved.
But I can’t help but wonder just why it was so godawful important to preserve the Union at the extreme cost that eventually resulted? Why didn’t the North just accept the fact that some states didn’t agree, and let them do their own thing? They wouldn’t have been prevented from future persuasion in a democratic manner. The North wouldn’t have had to raise an army and take a risk that they lost and the South would have been satisfied with succession and co-existence, at least for a while.
Because in a democracy it’s indispensable that when a free and fair vote has been cast and tallied, the losing side gracefully concedes. If the losing side revolts every time it doesn’t get it’s way, how can you have a democracy?
Not possible if the USA wanted to remain a country. Letting States in and out as they wanted destroys any power the Federal government has. It can’t negotiate with other nations, because resources available one day may not be there the next. It can’t promise any action, because there’s no guarantee someone won’t leave rather than do it. It can’t promise to stop anything, because it can’t enforce it.
Letting States back in afterwards is even messier. Can they pop in, grab some quick Federal grants, and pop out on the next contrived pretext? Do they owe back taxes? It’s way too messy.
This does seem to be Will’s preferred model, but it’s worth noting that it’s been explicitly rejected twice. First with the Articles transitioning to the Constitution and then with the Civil War.
Letting the southern states leave was basically the biggest loss the North was ever going to take. Even if they wanted to the seceding States couldn’t have taken any territory in the North and they knew it. Their entire goal was simply to hold on long enough for the Union to give up. The North pretty much had nothing more to lose on this one.
Peaceful coexistence was never going to happen. You’ve shifted the finish line for escaping slaves a long way south. It’s lot easier to flee Virginia for Maryland than it is Quebec. Remember that the northern states were required to return escaped slaves prior to the Civil War, so anyone aiding escaped slaves had to at least be circumspect about it. If the secession had been allowed to stand the antagonism over slavery would have driven them to war before too long anyway.
To be honest I don’t think the Confederacy could have lasted more than a generation in any case. They were trying to maintain an agrarian plantation lifestyle in the face of the Industrial Revolution. I suppose it’s possible the Union could have just waited out the collapse, but I think then an, “I told you so,” attitude would have made the Reconstruction even more complicated than it already was. I hate to say a million dead was a good thing, but considering other outcomes, well, I think it was best that events happened the way the did. There’s some small changes that could certainly have improved things, but by the time we got to the Missouri Compromise I think all of this was inevitable. It was terrible, but I can’t really see any alternative that wouldn’t have ended up worse for me now in 2012.
You can have a democracy just fine at the state level. Remember, back then, state levels were more important than federal, which caused the Civil War in the first place.
I just don’t see the great harm in having two countries divided along ideological lines. After all, it would have been possible for the 13 original colonies to form 2 or even 3 countries instead of one. I don’t think it would have spelled doom for all of them if that had happened.
Remember, Canada didn’t join the 13 colonies, although it could have. Any argument that says that dividing the USA into South and North would be super bad will have to explain why keeping Canada separate from the Union was so good.
Really? What happens when counties declare they have a right to secede because they’ve been victimized by a “tyrannical” state government?
Actually, as someone of a libertarian bent I wouldn’t necessarily see this as a bad thing; I just don’t see any viable intermediate point that wouldn’t end up dispensing with coercive government altogether.
Not if you don’t accept Lumpy’s statement and in an election the loser doesn’t to concede but can revolt instead. How would it have been different if during the last election for governor the southern counties of Wisconsin decided they’d rather be in Illinois? Or the southern townships in a single county? Or a neighborhood in the southernmost township?
They hadn’t been since the Articles of Confederation, not really anyway. It just took a while for the idea that they weren’t to sink in. The aftermath of the Civil War did not involve any new language being added to the Constitution about who had more power, the States or the Federal government.
It works fine if you’re creating new countries from scratch, although ideologically opposed countries sharing a border are a recipe for war. It’s breaking apart an existing country that gets messy. Has anyone besides Czechoslovakia ever done it without incident? And they were operating under a unique set of circumstances completely unlike the US Civil War.
Except none of that happened.
The British colonies could have formed thirteen separate countries when they won their independence - but they didn’t.
The anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution when it was proposed said that enacting the Constitution would be the end of state sovereignty. So take them at their word. The Constitution was enacted despite their objections, which means that the states were not sovereign.
And when South Carolina and ten other states seceded, they didn’t form eleven new countries. They immediately banded together into a single country.
The main issue was that the United States had an obligation to its citizens. They were entitled to rights and protection as American citizens. And the position of the United States government was that a local rebellion was preventing the American government from ensuring those rights and protection to several million Americans.
It was not simply a theoretical matter or a fig leaf to justify a war. There were a lot of people in the seceding states who hadn’t supported secession. The counter-secession of West Virginia was only one example of this.