It sounds to me like the founders did set up a way for states to leave.
They created the amendment process, and while I do not see anything in the constitution that would allow a state to leave, that doesn’t mean that something couldn’t be added to the constitution in order to allow a state to leave.
So, all they had to do was to propose an amendment that lays out how a state can leave the union and get it ratified. Then they could follow the procedures that they have laid out.
But they didn’t do that. Instead, they took up arms against their own country.
It was fairly hypocritical of them, really. They relied on provisions in the Constitution that required that free states cooperate with catching and returning slaves, but then abandoned the Constitution once it seemed as though they would not get their way.
To be fair, them being slave holders is a worse sin than hypocrisy, but their hypocrisy was in the support of continuing slavery, so it’s pretty reprehensible.
Of course not. That is goalpost shifting. We were not talking about slavery. We were talking about the right/power of a state to secede. The underlying issue is not relevant to the discussion. Just like if you want to quit the Elks Club, you can do it for a good reason or a bad one.
You are contravening the plain text of the 10th Amendment. A state does not need a positive grant of power in the Constitution in order to act. The power is reserved to it if not mentioned.
The South would have just as soon left peacefully, but the North “took up arms” against the South to keep them in the Union.
On the question of withdrawing from the UN, it may not be possible:
I couldn’t quickly find anything about withdrawing from the Elks club, but it’s probably permitted specifically. Or, if you quit playing your dues, you’re probably kicked out.
That’s one man’s opinion. The constitution was written by a committee – how do you know the rest of them would have agreed with him?
How is it not in the text? “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
The Constitution does, in fact, prohibit unilateral succession. According to the plain text, the Constitution and the laws passed under it are the supreme law of the land. If it were possible for a state to pass laws changing that, the supreme law would not, in fact, be supreme.
Secession was and still is legally possible. It just has to be done under the terms of that supreme law. Certainly an amendment could do it, and I don’t actually see any reason why an ordinary law (in conjunction with an amendment of the state’s constitution) couldn’t do it. But that’s not the route the South chose.
And if the South were willing to leave peacefully, then why did they start a damned war? Remember, it was the South, not the North, who opened fire at Ft. Sumter.
I’m not shifting the goalposts. The underlying issue is central to the moral reasoning method of interpretation.
Do you understand how the moral reasoning method works? The idea is to judge the legality of an action by the outcome it produces. So you can argue an action should be legal if it produces a good outcome and should be illegal if it produces a bad outcome.
So when you claimed that secession was justified based on the moral reasoning interpretation, you were saying you felt secession was justified because it produced a good outcome - which was defending slavery.
Or you were saying you didn’t understand the question.
That’s not what happened. The Confederacy took up arms against the United States. To be more explicit, they attacked the United States. (And let’s call it like it is. They attacked the United States of America. Not “the North”.)
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
If I may junior-mod a bit, I think we are veering far from the OP’s intent (a general question about treason in general - which could be treason in a hundred different locations and contexts) - and turning this into yet another Civil War South-vs-North thread, of which we already have several running on this message board.
Back to the OP then – the argument about whether or not their being traitors is to be applied to the monuments, is a matter of what is acceptable to society. It has become intolerable to continue to celebrate them. They have to go. Hey, they had a good run.
And, BTW, going back to the example of Benedict Arnold, he even provides IMO a counter to some of the arguments for preserving the monuments to seccessionists: we do not have plazas and avenues in his name with monumental statues to him, right? BUT… we all know who he was, right? Even more, many of us are aware he once was a hero at Saratroga, before his turnaround, don’t we? So, we do not celebrate him but at the same time he was not “erased”. He is, though, denounced as a traitor and that’s why he is not celebrated – which he would be as a minor hero if he had merely resigned and buggered off to private life upon becoming disgruntled.
(damn, edit window closed) And as what is so bad about treason, it’s a matter that a fundamental premise in any rule of law is that merely because the policies enacted are inconvenient or distasteful to you, does not justify taking up arms against the state. It is branded “treason” to indicate the severity of the offense and is the only constitutionally defined crime because the founders were too aware od the tendency of prior regimes to apply it to any dissent, or in the case of so-called “high” treason to merely pissing off the king. But still, rising up in arms under circumstances other than the impossibility of lawful redress is considered a grave offense because it imperils the stability of the rule of law and of the organized state. The citizen has rights AND duties; his rent for having a life other than nasty/brutish/short thanks to living in society is to sustain and support the legitimate authority of that society unless it becomes intolerably tyrannical.
And to be frank, after every succesful revolution one of the first laws passed is that anyone rebelling against the revolution will get it where it hurts.
Okay. I don’t want to go out in the weeds about the Corwin Amendment. It could be a good debate for another thread. But you see the issue of saying that the Civil War was only about slavery when the North offered an unamendable Constitutional Amendment to forever and ever preserve slavery if you just come back?
Again, not a Lost Cause subscriber. But I cringe every time I see someone come off with the simplistic one liner that the war was something of a religious crusade, the brave men of the North off to free the slaves. That is a myth, just as much as the Lost Cause is a myth.
I disagree. For example, privacy in our homes is a good thing. I might use that privacy to study on how to better race relations, invent a cure for cancer, or I might use it to drink a gallon of vodka for breakfast or to beat my kids. But still, regardless, the moral and right thing to do is to allow free citizens to have privacy in their homes. Likewise, the right of a state to secede should be judged by a neutral principle, and not on the particular reason a state seceded.
Had the North recognized the right of South Carolina to secede and just left and said goodbye and good luck, there would have been no hostilities. Who fired the first shot is meaningless when the ultimate issue is we are not letting you leave.
If you come to my house for dinner and I refuse to let you leave, does it matter if you threw a punch first or if I grabbed you first? Those are semantics. The underlying wrong and the need for force was because of the refusal, not because of warmongering by the South.
Because the south didn’t just want to preserve slavery within its own borders. They wanted to expand slavery to new territories, and they wanted to compel the north to participate in fugitive re-enslavement. They wanted to preserve representational parity in Congress by admitting one free state for every slave state.
Lincoln was never going to budge on this, and neither was the south, and that’s why the south saw Lincoln’s election as a point of no return for their political power.
This is why so much of the pre-war violence and controversy centered on events and decisions outside of the south… fugitive slave laws, the admission of Kansas, Dred Scott decision, etc. This is why you had southerners with bizarre fantasize like the Golden Circle which imagined annexing the entire Caribbean and the countries around it to be admitted as slave states.
They couldn’t be content with keeping their own slavery, they had to expand it halfway across the hemisphere. That’s why they went to war and that’s why they had to be smashed.
A small point but many people don’t realize it wasn’t just Lincoln the south found unacceptable. People were also saying before the election that they would secede if Douglas were elected. The southern states had pretty much decided that anything less than control of the federal government was unacceptable to them.
If you are using the privacy of your home in order to keep people there against their will, then the moral and right thing to do would be to invade your home and allow your prisoners to leave.
You don’t get to disagree with facts. I explained what the moral reasoning method is. You can decide if you want to use it or not. But you can’t come up with a new definition for what it is.
Just like you can’t say the Corwin Amendment was ratified or say that the United States started the war.
You’re a lawyer. What happens if somebody tries to win a case by presenting evidence they made up?