Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Also, the letters from the wicked, evil, racist slaving governors of >NC, VA, TN, AR, MD, MO, KY to Lincoln after he called for troops are eye openers for those who are only used to seeing the slavery,slavery,slavery,andmoreslavery piece of the puzzle so promiscuously offered up as (the only) evidence by the pro-force union apologists. While on this vein, Maryland's State Anthem is interesting too. <
I suppose as long as I've stuck my nose into this conversation I shouldn't let this pass by unreconstructed.
ALL mid-southern states had a major political component of planters who effected state politics. VA and TN were demographically divided in their support of secession. Post sumter the pro secessionists gerrymandered the conventions and pushed their states into the Confederacy. In MD, KY and MO proseccession was the minority and at most their governments sought to by time to keep their internal affairs from being violent. All three of these states provided manpower to both sides.
NC is the one state that is the one state I feel sorry for as Zebulon Vance was a poor boy who galvanized the hill counties into a populist government. He and it were decidedly proUnion. He submitted to political inevitability in joining the Confederacy because NC had to stand in place with the rest of the South; right or wrong. Tragic.
BY law the states were obligated to defend the Union. By refusing troops to defend the Union states not declared in secession were doubly ****ed when they joined the Confederacy.
Thank you for posting the above links...all of these suggestions are invaluable to me. With respect to South Carolina's Secession Declaration Debate, am I right in concluding that the major issues presented were Lincoln's election, unjust taxation, and the slow erosion of limited free government? Have I missed anything?
I would also appreciate hearing your viewpoints on the bulk of the Cornerstone Speech.
“No confusion. Remember my nere do well musing on the nature of american political schizophrenia. Libertarian and Republican zealotry dwell in the same padded cell together…..Secessionists were escapees from their institutionalisation who had to be brought back under control for their own protection.”
I do enjoy the colourful imagery which you employ, and this is my personal favourite to date. You seem to suggest that the United States was (is?) a political lunatic asylum from which the seceding states briefly escaped, only to be dragged back, kicking and screaming, by the other inmates. I guess this casts Jeff Davis in the Jack Nicholson role from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. And Old Abe would be the hatchet-faced nurse. Mmmmn…..I find this quite compelling. Thank you.
> do enjoy the colourful imagery which you employ, and this is my personal favourite to date.<
As long as you do not imply that the Southern states didn't belong in the asylum...
Hal in a seperate thread has decided to trumpet the bugbear that the souths fiscal conservancy was a cause celebre that differentiated the two sections; and was an issue erradicated in the CSA Constitution.
I find that amusing because:
1. Louisiana Purchase; Jefferson Davis (VA)
2. National Strategic Protection of Home Industry; JC Calhoun (SC)
3. Purchase of Nuevo Mexico; James K Polk (TN)
4. TransContinental RailRoad; Jefferson Davis (MS)
All those ****ed Yankees who abused the general welfare clause of the Constitution....
Dawna: Thank you for posting the above links...all of these suggestions are invaluable to me. With respect to South Carolina's Secession Declaration Debate, am I right in concluding that the major issues presented were Lincoln's election, unjust taxation, and the slow erosion of limited free government? Have I missed anything?
I think the phrase, "...one great evil, from which all other evils have flowed, is the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States.." clearly shows what they perceive to be the root of the sectional contention.
I'd add the redistribution of Southern money northward, northern subjugation, and slavery onto your list.
Some statements that jump out at me include:
"...no longer a free government, but a Despotism."
"The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States that the Colonies did towards Great Britain."
"...the Government of the United States has become consolidated, with a claim of limitless powers in its operations..."
"The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three- fourths of them are expended at the North."
"...the consolidation of the North, to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things..."
"...if the people of the North have the power by Congress "to promote the general welfare of the United States," by any means they deem expedient - why should they not assail and overthrow the institution of slavery in the South?"
"...no power to protect itself against the rule of the majority. The majority, constituted from those who do not represent these sectional or local interests, will control and govern them."
"The Northern people have had neither the wisdom nor the faith to perceive, that to observe the limitations of the Constitution was the only way to its perpetuity."
"...the weaker section of the Union can only find peace and liberty in an independence of the North."
"All confidence in the North is lost by the South. The faithlessness of the North for half a century has opened a gulf of separation between the North and the South which no promises nor engagements can fill."
"The idea that the Southern States would be made to pay that tribute to their northern confederates which they had refused to pay to Great Britain; or that the institution of African slavery, would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South, never crossed the imaginations of our ancestors."
"That equality in the Government between the two sections of the Union which once existed, no longer exists." (If you read Calhoun's speech, you'll note that he singles out this as the cause of the endangered union.)
"...we are vindicating the great cause of free Government, more important, perhaps, to the world, than the existence of all the United States." (I think David and Neil will like this one.)
David: Hal in a seperate thread has decided to trumpet the bugbear that the souths fiscal conservancy was a cause celebre that differentiated the two sections; and was an issue erradicated in the CSA Constitution.
I am flattered that I am on your mind, but I think you must be mistaken. I have no recollection of any such trumpeting of bugbears.
Bill,
What you call colourful imagery I have been thinking of as merely prolix pedantic mendaciousness. I preferred your turning his analogy to the realm of truth with the Cuckoo's Nest.. I hereby submit my own analogy presented as simile. There is a saying here used a fair amount, even when it is not spoken the ideology is shoved in your face: "America. Love it or leave it." But when the Southern states said ok and actually tried to leave, like a spurned husband too insecure in his own manhood to make it on his own with his fragile ego, the Union hunted them down and killed them for having the temerity to dare actually leave him. And the carcasses were brought back in triumph to feed off of. Becoming gluttonous and bloated, the kleptocracy benignly allowed the South to groak in the maggot-ridden remains, then crawled on top of the cadavers and proclaimed it was all the South's fault and in fact it was for their own good. Shucks, I guess we ort to knuckle our forelock and say Please sir, may I have another. Gosh-a-gorry. Sure are lucky to have such kind hearted All-Knowing-Higher-Latitude-Placed-Persons-Living-On-Continent-Of-North-American to show us poor ignorant souls the error of our ways and to help us see the apotheosis of manhood that was their leader, Lincoln.
Bill, I grant you that yours is far more clever than mine but I think my is apt. I also look forward to photos of your trip. I envy you enormously getting to go...except for the cycling.
In my efforts to be succinct, I fear I may have trivialzied the brunt of the debate, and in particular I used Lincoln's election as a representation for other issues, including slavery.
I'm struggling with the last statement, as I did when I first read it in the debate, but I expect that David and Neil will articulate this so much better than I.
When you have time, I look forward to your opinion on the bulk of the Cornerstone Speech.
>What you call colourful imagery I have been thinking of as merely prolix pedantic mendaciousness.<
So I'm an overeducated, narrow minded, liar because I don't embrace the notion that such a thing as Southern tribal unity and slaveholding should have domain in a Constitutional Republic that claims maximum enfranchisement to all its citizens to pursue life liberty and happiness in the context of the Union of its states?
Obviously William C Davis is a race traitor in your neck of the woods.
Facts concerning the ante bellum south do not paint the fawningly pristine picture you would have people accept. JC Calhoun perpetrated a great lie in his writings when he painted a picture of an overbearing majority milking the poor ole south of its precious and dearly won wealth.
60% of the richest families in the US in 1850 and 1860 were southerners. Since less than 15% of all slave owners and less than 8% of all national industrialists in the USA were southern the concentration of wealth was pretty narrow.
Southern governments collected the least taxes and ran the greatest deficits of any of the states of the Union. This laissez faire practice of tight fisted politics was fine for those who had capital wealth. Kept them pesky politicians bare foot and starving.
The typical whine about the Yankees looting the southern economy of its hard earned dollars is a joke. Who forced southern oligarchs to send their kids to Harvard and Princeton? Who prevented southerners from developing their own clothing mills to produce end products out of their own cotton? What was the whine about tariffs effecting profits on Cotton all about? The English weren't stupid. They wanted cotton. They tariffed corn.
As posted previously it is deliciously contrary to note that the same southern leaders who yowled about progressive national government exceeding its constitutional authority were the very men who devised and executed the programs they complained about.
DeBow's Journal complains of the souths lack of initiative and overindulgent commitment to the easy money of slaves and cotton.
Sorry, I think the Union and Constitution as written is worthy of maintaining the integrity of the United States. I think A Stephens was right in his address before the Georgia assembly when he cautioned his fellow Georgians that modifying their own political mantra to maintain the Union was the wisest and most lucrative option to be exploited by southern states.
The Union would not go to war to end slavery. The Union was even willing to acknowledge the economic dependency of the nation on slavery. But the Union was not going to declare itself a slave state and the time had come when the Union wanted the limits of slavery contained.
A little creative politicing and spin doctoring by the slaveholding leadership could have milked slavery and its profits for another generation.
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