The beginning of the Gettysburg address sums it up nicely. Lincoln starts by mentioning the founding of the US in freedom and democracy and then goes on: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure”. In other words, Lincoln claimed that secession would prove that democracy was an absurdity, that freedom meant simply that people would rebel whenever they didn’t get their way. And it isn’t just that the North could have continued on it’s own; the federal government would have been so discredited that at most the union would have become a mere alliance, which the states could ignore when it suited them. Or more likely, the federal government would have been replaced by a dictatorship that would have conquered as much territory as it could and ruled by decree. (For a long time the Southern version of the War Between the States and Reconstruction was that that was exactly what had happened.)
Pretty much all the high points have been covered, but:
:dubious:…:rolleyes:
I’m sure most folks have you on ignore, but what a load of horseshit. To be sure, it’s one of your more lengthy posts, but I can’t let it go unchallenged. As others have pointed out there were a lot of different reasons that the US freed the slaves DURING the Civil War and then continued the policy afterward (imperfectly, to be sure…mainly because of Lincoln’s death IMHO), but ‘They did not need them any more’ wasn’t one of them.
-XT
Moderator’s Note: Xtisme, I realize you didn’t say you have gonzomax on your ignore list but…please cool it. (Or take it to the Pit.)
Well, I don’t have him on ignore…not sure what I’m getting spanked for there (sure, there was snark) but I’ll cool it.
Apologies.
-XT
Well said. In the introduction to his book Founding Brothers Joseph Ellis makes a similar point. Today we take democracy as the logic end-point of government and believe that all governments will eventually become democracies. In 1860 this was not apparent. At the time the US was still the only democracy (although Britain was well on its way) and there was no guarantee that democracy would survive the Confederacy.
Let’s say that you and one roommate don’t drink, but your other roommate is an alcoholic and the fourth has a wine cooler every now and then. You and the third roommate have fought for years about the booze in the house and you are at an impasse. He can drink it in his bedroom and part of the kitchen, but no way in the living room. Roommate #4 goes along with the kitchen idea to keep #3 honest.
Then roommates #3 gets evicted. Holy shit, the whole problem is solved. Except for the roommate #4 who drinks every now and again. He wants to keep drinking his wine coolers. You and #2 tell him that he can’t. Your house has had enough problems with booze that he can go to hell with his wine coolers. No more.
A related question, hopefully not a hijack:
Forgetting the ethics of slavery, it was unquestionably legal in some states and slaves were the legal property of their owners- the most expensive property they had usually. Abolition had been around in some form for a century, but one of the problems had always been how to compensate slaveowners for their loss. The text of the amendment
implies, does not state, “from this day forward”, but it does not grandfather the law and say that "those practicing slavery 5 years ago are subject to prosecution, and of course nobody was prosecuted for formerly owning slaves.
So my question: was the constitutionality of taking away billions of dollars in property from southerners without any form of compensation ever challenged? Were the government to declare that “All of Massachusetts shall immediately revert to being the property of the Narragansett, Pequot, Wampanoag, etc., tribes, together with all improvements made to the land since 1620” without compensation to the owners of, at the very least, land elsewhere, there would have been hell to pay.
(Please no hijacking into the “it was an evil institution” as that’s taken for granted, this being about law rather than justice.)
I wouldn’t think so. Any law banning anything would deprive present owners of their value. Ban smoking in bars? The owner could say that his bar is less valuable because of decreased revenue. He gets no compensation.
Outlaw Street Sweeper Shotguns. The Feds don’t buy them back from you.
You name the law, I’ll tell you the property owner that got screwed.
And since this was a constitutional amendment, then any previous constitutional problems would have been overruled by the text of this amendment as it related to slavery.
Lincoln had offered compensated emancipation twice during the war and been rejected out of hand by the Confederate leadership, so no one in the North thought that, having been crushingly defeated on the battlefield at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, the South was entitled to compensation after April 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, also barred the U.S. or any state from honoring “any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.”
:dubious: So Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri were temperate slavers, as opposed to those slave-a-holics in Virginia, Mississippi et al?
Do you think the 13th Amendment would have read the same had Lincoln lived and been able to influence its progression in Congress? There’s no doubt he favored abolition by 1865, but do you think he would have favored something more gradual or offered some form of compensation (not $1:$1 obviously as that was impossible, but something)?
After the war I don’t think enough people would have voted in favor of compensation. Northerners would have looked at it as a just penalty for starting the war in the first place.
The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by Congress while Lincoln was still alive; he even signed it (though legally that was a meaningless action as the Constitution gives the President no role in passing Constitutional Amendments).
As jtgain wrote, the government has never had a general policy of assuming the financial burdens created by the enactment of laws.
I knew there was a flaw in my analogy. 
But, states like Delaware and Maryland had very few slaves compared to the deep south, so I guess the analogy hangs by a thread…