Except that it is different in every way conceivable.
It is not what they were born into, it was what they fought for. They could have left the United States, no one would have said boo about it. They could have stayed in the US, but went to the north, and that would have been great.
Instead, they took up arms against their country.
It’s the difference between someone who left your congregation over a disagreement, and someone who started shooting at your fellow congregants over a disagreement.
You are defending the latter by trying to make them into the victim and to be as innocent as the former.
I see this sort of assertion fairly often in discussions of the Civil War; while there’s no question that the war was some sort of watershed in the history of the country and in the relationship between the federal government and the states (“the United States are” vs. “the United States is” and all that) it still strikes me as being very overblown.
In 1850 (or 1800 for that matter) the United States of America already had an army and a navy–they weren’t large, but they were military forces under the direct and permanent control of the federal government. Even before the Civil War the constituent states were expressly forbidden from having any sort of independent foreign policy; the U.S.A. was a single subject in international law. The United States as a whole conducted foreign relations (making treaties and entering into diplomatic relations with other countries, sending and receiving ambassadors). The United States already had a single President who was seen as the political leader of the whole country and (by the 1820s at least) was elected in what amounted to a national election. There was a nationwide system of political parties (Democrats vs. Whigs) rather than each state having its own system of parties. There was a single currency, the U.S. dollar, in use from Maine to California. There was a de facto national language, English.
And the people of the United States definitely had a national identity as Americans, not just as Virginians and Pennsylvanians and so forth whose “countries” happened to be members of some sort of alliance. Antebellum politicians like Henry Clay talked of “the American Nation”. In1816, Stephen Decatur–an officer in the United States Navy–could give a toast talking about “our country” (and he didn’t mean Maryland); note too that he uses singular pronouns (“her” and “she”, not “their” and “they”):
Finally, when some of the “member states” of the U.S.A. tried to secede, it resulted in a civil war, which of course has not been the case with “Brexit”.
This is like saying the 1770s colonists could have packed up and left the thirteen colonies, maybe moved to Mexico or further west…except they decided to take up arms against Britain, so they were “taking up arms against their own country.”
I disagree. This was a self-serving argument made by the Confederates in an attempt to justify their secession. But there was no support for the argument in the rest of the country as there would have been if people at the time had believed that the United States was just an association of sovereign states. The reality is that people, then as now, saw the United States as a single country.
Even the Confederates abandoned the theory of state sovereignty as soon as they had used it once to justify secession. The government they formed explicitly denied that states had a right to secede from their new country.
The Confederacy never actually surrendered and was never offered terms. It ceased to exist as a political entity as its various militaries and paramilitaries surrendered.
And to be clear, the military surrenders occurred because the militaries were utterly defeated. Grant didn’t need to give Lee such generous terms. He could have directed Lee to release his soldiers and surrender his officers for summary trial for treason, or face utter destruction. Instead Grant offered terms that allowed everyone to return home armed and on horseback if they agreed to follow federal law.
This is, I think, one place where Southern apologists can make the case that the North only cared about human rights to the extent that abolitionist sentiment helped make the case for war to Northerners who were hesitant to go to war for political unity or tariffs. Once political reunion and abolition had become an inevitability, the North mostly left former slaves at the mercy of Southern terrorism.
Debatable, but maybe true. Lincoln could have been a unifier. I think the North had the economic means to sustain an occupation. I think they could have placated the war-weariness as was done in the Revolutionary war - by offering enemy land as bounty for their service. Thus they would be motivated to occupy and defend the subjugated states, instead of turning their backs and going about their business.
You bolster my point. They did take up arms against their country, and at the time Britain was pretty upset about this. If they had gone somewhere else, then Britain would not have had any problems with them doing so.
We don’t view them as traitors, not only because they won, but because we agree with the principles they fought for.
If we agreed with the principles the south fought for, then we shouldn’t regard Lee or Davis as traitors either, whether they had won or lost. If you don’t think of them as traitors, then that means that you agree with the principles they fought for.
You were trying to make a point that confederates were being demonized for nothing more than having a different opinion. You compared it to how some Muslims are upset over others who were born into their faith that may question or leave it.
I was pointing out that it was more than just opinions that were exchanged in the Civil War.
They will only be traitors to the side that they turned on. The side that they turned to will see them as defectors.
If the south had won, and we were still a split country right now, we’d probably not have statues to them in the north, but the south would be littered with them.
We’d be calling them traitors, they’d be calling them freedom fighters.
The debate was different in 1861 than it is today. Today we agree (through force of arms) that states have no right to secede. The Constitution is silent about it and there was an argument that the 10th Amendment through a state’s reserved powers would allow it. From 1787 until 1861 it was a very powerful political theory (one almost done by New England states in the 1810-1816 time frame.
The idea was if the states voluntarily joined the union of states, then they could just as easily resign that membership much like how joining the Elks Club or even the United Nations doesn’t require a perpetual and irrevocable membership once joined.
So if, say, Virginia secedes from the Union, guys like Lee and Jackson were faced with a choice in which they sincerely believed that they would be committing treason against the State of Virginia had they levied war against their own state after it exercised what they believed was the State’s absolute right to withdraw from the organization that they joined in 1787.
The Civil War was a very complicated time in history and the motivations of people on both sides were different one to the other. That is why it is the most enduring war and people still study it and find it very interesting today. Yes, there are Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battlefields that are maintained by the National Park Service, but visitors to those areas pale in comparison to visitors to Civil War sites. Especially Gettysburg. You see thousands of people, many wearing either Union or Confederate hats and uniforms, slapping each other on the back and taunting the other side about a victory here or a loss there or how we’ll get you next time.
I am not a Lost Cause advocate. That is bullshit. The war was primarily about slavery. However, that is a simplistic one line version that the full picture does not fully support. So to simply say that people who fought for the South were traitors who wanted to do nothing but preserve slavery is incorrect or at the least incomplete. At the start of the war, there was no serious movement to outlaw slavery and Lincoln offered the Corwin Amendment. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union saw slaves as contraband of war and when they were captured, they were enslaved to work for the Union Army.
The narrative that the North wanted to free slaves, and the South seceded to preserve slavery and the sides slug it out for that singular purpose is simply false, but that is the one liner put out there today.
Most Americans didn’t see it that way back in 1860. The idea that states were sovereign countries that could leave the United States at will was, at best, a fringe theory.
You point out the Constitution is silent on the issue. And I say, “Yes, exactly.” If secession had been something the authors of the Constitution felt was allowed, they would have addressed it. The fact that they never mention secession is strong evidence that they did not regard it as a possibility. (And when somebody asked James Madison - a man who should be assumed to know what the Constitution meant - if there was a right to secede in the Constitution, he said there was not.)
The issue had in fact been settled before the Constitution was even written. During the Revolutionary War, the colonies were separate political entities. But then they joined together under the Articles of Confederation and that document explicitly said this was a “Perpetual Union”.
So when the Constitution was written years later, its authors felt no more need to explicitly repeat that point than they felt the need to explicitly declare independence from Great Britain. These were issues that had been settled by earlier documents.
Beyond the issue of Constitution or all that, people just don’t like the feeling of being betrayed. And they perceive the wrong as being greater if it is one of their “own” that does the harm rather than someone on the other side.
If a Russian spy comes to America and steals American intel, well, that’s just a Russian doing Russian things. But if an American secretly sells secrets to Russia, that’s perceived as much worse. Just human nature.
Yes, it is slightly more complicated than that. The South seceded to preserve slavery. But, the North didn’t oppose secession in order to free the slaves; Lincoln believed that as President he had a duty to preserve the Union–that it was a matter of upholding his oath of office. The people of the North believed they must preserve the Union in order to prevent their country from being destroyed, but not necessarily (in 1861) that they needed or wanted to fight to free the slaves. And yet, the South believed slavery was under threat–why? Because the opposition of Lincoln and the Republican Party of 1860 to slavery was well known. The Slave Power saw the handwriting on the wall–very few people in 1860-61 were talking about marching down to South Carolina and Mississippi and freeing the slaves by force, but the guy who had just been elected President of the United States of America was a guy who had talked about the need to “arrest the further spread of [slavery], and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction”. So, the Confederates decided they needed to launch a preemptive strike, and start their war to get out of the Union while they still could do so and maintain slavery–or so they thought. In reality, or course, they destroyed slavery far more quickly than anyone thought it would be destroyed–a result “fundamental and astounding”.
To steer this back to the actual topic of the thread, the Confederates were “traitors”–they were citizens of the United States of America who “waged war upon the United States”–but that isn’t necessarily what makes them evil. We may very well sympathize with “traitors” in other times and places–even when they lose–if we agree with their underlying cause.
I agree with Chronos that treason isn’t necessarily evil but it is serious.
Committing treason for the principles that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is one thing. Committing treason for the principles that “all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights” and that “the servitude of the African to the white race” should exist “for all future time” is something else entirely.
Nobody said “sovereign countries.” And, I agree, there was a debate about it for years, so unless we want to look at the documents, I’m not sure how we can simply declare that the South was absolutely wrong in its interpretation.
LIke anything not stated in the Constitution, the 10th Amendment reserves that power to the states. Period. Let’s say that you join the Elks Club and it is silent on withdrawing your membership. Should you then assume that once you have joined, you are irrevocably a member until the day you die, your protestations notwithstanding? That’s a rather extreme position to take when you joined voluntarily in the first place.
Further, the term “perpetual union” in the AOC was superseded by the language in the current Constitution. Also that is a very literal reading of the term. Corporations, for example, have an infinite life, but nobody ever interprets “perpetual” in a legal sense to mean until the Sun goes supernova. Would you suggest that the United States couldn’t dissolve by unanimous consent of all 50 states because the Union is perpetual?
Ratifying the Constitution simply meant, that the states agreed to be bound by these terms, much like the United Nations. Could we withdraw from the United Nations if we wanted? If yes, why the difference?
At the very least, it was a serious early 19th century debate with good arguments on each side. I disagree with your contention that secession was a “fringe theory.” Hell you had majorities in 11 states who not only agreed with it, but enacted it. That’s a pretty widely believed “fringe theory.” Also, states in New England were considering it years earlier.
I think this is still a bit too simplistic. If the South’s goal was to preserve slavery, why didn’t it propose to rejoin once the Corwin Amendment was ratified? That would have accomplished its purported goal without bloodshed and Lincoln would have supported an unamendable clause that slavery could never ever be interfered with.
So, if’s that is my only goal, then I have won everything I asked for. Why not then rejoin?
ETA: They did not consider themselves Citizens of the United States when their states seceded. That was a political debate that the victors declared in their favor through force of arms.
Your interpretation is not in the text. And it’s not in the original intent. It’s not a structuralist or pragmatic argument. It’s not based on judicial precedent or historical practices and it’s sure as hell not based on moral reasoning.
So can you tell me which method of constitutional interpretation you’re using here?
It is not in the text. The original intent is debatable. It is a structural and pragmatic argument. It is not based on judicial precedent (as how would there be as no state seceded before 1861) and, yes, it is a sort of moral reasoning.
It is based on how agreements work. In no other scenario that I am aware of is consent once given, then irrevocable for all time. You have avoided my Elks Club and United Nations analogies, but without reading the enabling language or contracts for those organizations, would you believe at the outset that by joining those organizations that you have forever and irrevocably surrendered the free choice you had prior? You would believe that you could quit the Elks Club or resign from the United Nations. Why shouldn’t the states which ratified the Constitution believe that they had the same right?
An argument I have heard is that no nation can survive if a part of it will just leave when the going gets tough. That’s equally applicable to the UN or the Elks Club. I mean, how can you have a functioning Elks Club if a guy just quits when he is expected to take on hard duties, or how can the United Nations be effective if a country can just resign when they are criticized or sanctions imposed? Can a state not withdraw from the Drivers License Compact?
As such, it is structural and pragmatic, and it is moral. No organization, person, or groups of people, especially a state with independent sovereignty ,forever surrenders its sovereignty by joining an organization. And as I said, the silence in the Constitution supports this position instead of, as you argue, points against it. If the states were permanently surrendering their sovereignty, then such a bold action would at least be mentioned. As it was not, then the power is one reserved to the states under the 10th.
LIke the Elks Club, if there was no clause in the membership contract that said you could never resign (if that would even be enforceable) why would anyone assume that such a resignation was not possible?
But in any event, you can disagree, but it was at least arguable. So back to the OP, every person in the South had to make a choice between treason against their State and treason against their country, the correct response being dependent upon who wins a war. And there are many reasons to say that loyalty to a sovereign and independent state is of a higher order than a compact it entered into.
Even if it had been, it would have been abolished with another amendment not long later. Slavery was a dead institution in the rest of what was, at the time, considered the civilized world. Southern leadership rightly knew that war and secession was the only way to preserve it.
In addition to what he said, the Corwin Amendment was simply overtaken by events. By the time the necessary two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress proposed it to the states, seven states had already formally declared they were out of the Union. Sure, they could have said “Oh! Well, never mind then”, but I suspect a process like secession has a certain “momentum” to it. Additionally, the Corwin Amendment did not at all address the issue of slavery in the territories, which by the time of the outbreak of the war was the aspect of the issue that was most salient (and which had already provoked a low-level civil war before the Civil War in Kansas). Even if the slave states could be divested of any lingering doubts that the Corwin Amendment could itself simply be amended away1, they were probably not keen on the idea of being in a Union with thirty or forty states which would be “deciding upon the propriety of their domestic institutions” and “denouncing as sinful the institution of slavery”–by 1860 there was a fundamental mistrust between the slave states and the free states over the whole issue.
And finally, if slavery wasn’t the motivation of the seceding states, then what the heck was? Why did the secessionists themselves repeatedly say that slavery was the cause of their secession and the “cornerstone” of their “new nation”? And why the heck would the North have tried to make last-minute compromises with the secessionists by offering a (supposedly un-amendable) constitutional amendment on slavery? Nobody was proposing any super-amendments or other grand compromises about tariffs.
1There’s an article that discusses the Corwin Amendment in the context of whether or not a regular constitutional amendment can itself alter Article V to make a new un-amendable provision to the Constitution, “Stopping Time: The Pro-Slavery and ‘Irrevocable’ Thirteenth Amendment” by A. Christopher Bryant from the University of Cincinnati law school; link to article abstract and PDF download.
I disagree with this. We know exactly what the original intent was. As I noted earlier, James Madison said that there is no right to secession in the Constitution.
I have no idea where you’re even seeing a structural argument in this issue.
The pragmatic argument was raised and refuted at the time. It was pointed out - correctly - that a democratic government can’t function if the side that loses a vote refuses to accept their loss.
Again, we agree.
You’re arguing that defending slavery was justified based on moral grounds?