The difference is that the US was attacked in 1941, it wasn’t in 1861.
The only way you can claim that the CSA had no right to secede is if you accept that the 13 colonies had no right to break away from the British Empire.
Also, with hindsight it’s fairly obvious that the CSA couldn’t have lasted, and the states that seceded would have wanted to return to the union in a fairly short time, and then would have been the time to force them to give up slavery. I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t even considered at the time, so I can only assume that Lincoln and his government preferred the option of war.
So, given that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are also defeated, I presume George W. Bush is a great president as well? Assuming “right” has nothing to do with it, only victory?
Seriously, I can understand why Americans mythologise Lincoln, among others, but I would hope that on this board there’d be a little more nuance to a discussion of him than this.
I voted Andrew Jackson, for he was a dispicable, disgusting human being who used the office to commit crimes against humanity. He shouldn’t even get a presidential dollar coin, let alone be on the $20.
The other top vote-getters are certainly worthy, especially Dubya, who did what Buchanan did to be bad AND what Harding did to be bad, with some Nixon-bad and Johnson-bad (both of them) in there, too.
Only if you insist that all justifications for rebellion are equal.
I doubt that very much - not the bit about the CSA not lasting, but the bit about them wanting to rejoin the union. More likely, you would have seen the complete Balkanization of North America. Once the principle of secession has been established, there is no longer any binding force to the concept of the Union. Inside of a few decades, the United States would entirely cease to exist as a political entity, and in its place would be a collection of independent states, and a spiderweb of agreement, treaties, and alliances similar to the one that existed in Europe prior to the Great War, with similarly disastrous results.
Ending slavery was not Lincoln’s intention - he said this explicitly, both during his campaign, and throughout the early years of the war. His goal was the preservation of the Union.
Fort Sumter was not part of the US when the shots were fired.
I think that “we no longer wish to be part of this country” is as much justification as is needed these days. I would also say that it should be a large majority of the people in the territory with that view, and they should hold it for a significant amount of time.
The binding force should be that belonging to the union is to the mutual benefit of the state and the federation, if it isn’t there’s no good reason to remain in it. Threats of force and appeals to patriotism are not, in my opinion, good reasons.
If the US would truly have ceased to exist in a few decades without the threat of force to hold it together, it would not have been serving it’s purpose. That there’s been no credible threat of secession in the 150 years since suggests that it’s serving that purpose well, and I’m not convinced that a smaller US, without the economic burden that the South became in the late 19th century, would have struggled.
You mention disastrous consequences. In the short term, for it to be worse than what actually happened, there would have to be a war or wars between these small states that killed more people than the Civil War, there would have to be no strong nation or nations rising from the split, and there would have to be parts of the North American continent without equal rights for black people by the mid 1960s. None of these are by any means certain, and I’m of the opinion that the nature of Reconstruction set back the cause of equality, and had there not been a war it would have happened sooner.
One possible consequence of no United States would be no superpower to rival the USSR, but discussion of the ramifications of that would be, at minimum, a whole new thread.
Agreed. The question is whether preserving the Union at whatever cost was necessary, or even desirable.
Incorrect. Fort Sumter was owned by the Federal Government, not the state of South Carolina. The land it was on was not only owned by the Feds, it was literally *created *by the Feds. It was on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor, built with granite quarried in New England.
This is simply an unworkable proposition. For one thing, support for secession was hardly unanimous in the South. Many counties retained loyalty to the Union. Some actively fought against the CSA. How do you handle a political situation like that? Should the South have been a country shot through with pockets of land that belonged to entirely different countries? How atomic is this right to secession? Does it devolve all the way down to the individual level? Can I declare that my house is now an independent nation, and stop paying my taxes as a result?
A system of laws (and what is a government, but a system of laws?) only works if the laws can be enforced. If anyone is free to secede from their nation, then no laws can possibly be enforced, and the laws themselves become meaningless.
If we had not fought the civil war in the 1860s, it would have been fought constantly, throughout the 20th century, possibly right up until the present day.
I shudder to think what might have happened to the black populations in the South, once slavery became economically unfeasible. I suspect there would be fewer blacks in the South right now, than there are Jews in Germany.
I suspect that ones opinion on who owned the land will depend entirely on whether you believe South Carolina had the right to secede.
So you don’t accept that there can ever be a peaceful split of a nation, or a federation? Should South Sudan not have been recognised? Closer to my home, should Scotland not be allowed the planned referendum on independence?
As to exactly where to draw the line, I would say that a nation or state should be allowed to if it has demonstrated a strong and lasting desire to. To refuse that is heading towards tyranny. So no, an individual cannot.
As to how much, if any of this actually applied to the confederate states, I don’t know. My suspicion is that their governments believed they were in the Union by choice, and could leave by choice. I don’t know of anything in the Constitution that says otherwise, but would be interested to hear if there is.
Why do you think this would have happened? It seems like a worst case scenario, not a likely one. There haven’t been constant skirmishes at the US’s borders, I don’t see that the splitting of the Union into two, or even several, nations would lead to a century and a half of war. Especially because the split would be along natural lines - that is, the borders of the states that formed the Union - not artificial ones.
Nazi comparisons? Seriously? This didn’t happen anywhere else that ended slavery. If the South mistreated blacks that badly, I have no doubt the north would have taken them in, and as the working population fell, slavery, and exploitation outside of slavery, would have become less and less tenable. Certainly it would have been horrific, but more horrific than the treatment of blacks in those state for the hundred years after the Civil War? My guess is that it would have been worse at first, but would have lasted a significantly shorter time.
Will preserving the Union at whatever cost always be necessary?
Fillmore. Fugitive Slave Act was not cool. And the kicker is I’m related to him – and yet, I hate that fucker. I guess I’m also related to Chinaguy, on preview, but he seems pretty chilled out, and he was never President, so he’s cool in my book.
Alternatively, the US declared war by remaining in Confederate territory without permission. Really, whether you think the southern states had the right to secede or not, that is clearly an aggressive act.
Incidentally, why didn’t the states have the right to secede? My understanding of the Constitution is that any powers that the Federal government doesn’t explicitly reserve are held by the states. Where in the constitution, or other law, does it say that the Federal government reserves the right to decide whether a state may secede?
The US has certainly acted like that on a number of occasions. Many of the Presidents mentioned in this thread as the worst are the ones who’ve done just that.
Yes, yes you did. Do you really feel that there is no more discussion worth having about the causes and outcomes of the Civil War than that?
I should point out that I’m not saying that the southern states were right to secede - obviously it would have been the optimal outcome for them to remain in the Union and to give up slavery freely.
Whatever happened to the GD project to discuss our presidents individually and chronologically? I loved those threads. And until they’re done, I refuse to vote.
Truman was absolutely despised when he left office. That’s why he didn’t run for a second term. The sacking of MacArthur pretty much did him in. (Despite the fact that he was in the right)
Jesus, Qin, you’re starting to scare me. Annexed Mexico? WTF??? And do you know anything about Watergate, anything at all? Why don’t you try reading All the President’s Men? It’s a pretty good book – and pretty frightening. The fact that Nixon WAS an intelligent man is one of the things that makes it so disturbing. The guy was a paranoid wreck.
Well, you got me there. But considering that he was one of the early guys, he should have known better. I mean, WTF, dude?
No matter what George W Bush did or did not do, he is not comparable to a man who ordered ethnic cleansing in direct defiance of the Supreme Court or a man who let the American Civil War happen under his watch.
The Articles of Confederation speaks of “perpetual Union” and the Constitution itself proclaims a “more perfect Union”.
Korea could and did develop without Japan while Mexico clearly has failed to do so and is a burden upon America,
I wasn’t completely being serious and 2. if one compares San Diego and Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez and El Paso (which has one of the lowest crime rates in the US) they will see what I mean.
I know. What I am saying is that there were other Presidents who did bad things comparable to Nixon.
Right next to the bit about a Perfect Union (in the preamble by the way, which assigns no powers to anyone) is “insure domestic tranquility”. Why is it obvious that the perfect union trumps domestic tranquility?
The small amount of reading I’ve done on this suggests that revolution by a state would be legal, but secession not so. That seems… odd.
I think the artillery fire made domestic tranquility a moot point.
Seriously, the Southern states did not have a legal leg to stand on. And legal argument they could have made to justify secession would have been met with a stronger American counter-argument. If there had been some neutral world court to judge the issue, it would have ruled in favor of the United States.
And the southern states knew this even if they didn’t admit it. If they had really believed they had a legal right to secede, they would have introduced a bill in Congress and voted themselves out along with settling all of the issues about who owned what. But they knew they didn’t have legal grounds, so they just walked out and started building an army to settle the issue by military means.
Not particularly. Certainly, not if you want to argue that the Federal Government had no right to come in and take Carolina from the Carolinians, then they certainly had no right to take, without recompense, a structure constructed and wholly owned by what they were then claiming to be a foreign government.
Why not the individual? What part of the reasoning behind secession by a state or nation, does not apply to secession by the individual? Or if not the individual, what about the town, or county?
The borders that formed the states are, in many cases, artificial ones. And there haven’t been constant skirmishes at the nations borders largely because there are only two nations on our borders, which makes for a much more simplified diplomatic situation as compared to a situation in which there are as many as fifty independent states jockying for position.
As for why there would be war - in the lead up to the Civil War, there was significant violence, on both sides, over the disposition of territories that were angling for statehood. Read up, for example, on Bleeding Kansas. And this was when the parties were at least partially constrained by loyalty to the same over-arching polity.
Fuck yes, seriously. Nowhere else instituted a brand of chattel slavery that was as intensely brutal and dehumanizing as that practiced in the United States.
The North, contrary to popular opinion, was not a haven of racial enlightenment. During the war, there were riots in New York City over the Emancipation Proclamation, during which free blacks were lynched from lamp posts in the street. The abolitionist organizations in the North would certainly have continued to exist, and done what they could to help refugees from the South, but the chances of any sort of national program of aid to fleeing slaves were virtually nil.
Meanwhile, in the South, the economic situation is going down the shitter. Slavery is no longer profitable, but what do you do with all these slaves? You have this huge underclass of people who are quite literally seen as subhuman, and they’re competing with “real” people for an increasingly limited number of jobs - and, being shut out of those jobs in favor of white people, frequently falling into criminality and substance abuse, as is common with people trapped on the lowest rungs of any society. How long do you think it will take until people start looking for a “final solution” to the “negro problem?” Remember, we’re talking, at this point, about a nation that was literally founded on the principle that black people are disposable property, and was more than willing to fight a war to prove it. Once the black population becomes surplus to their needs, the next logical step for that culture is their liquidation.
