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.
Re Neil's 2145. I have before pointed out that JC Calhoun's instigated Nashville convention proved a political disaster for it's fireeater attendees who were repudiated by their states. Jefferson Davis being among those recalled and ruined. So in 1850 the impulse to antifederalism and disunion did not hold sway in the south.
What forced the shift? Disposition of the newly obtained territories and heated arguments over whether they would join the cavaliers or the roundheads became the foci of ill will between the sections.
Was this a debate for yeomen? Hardly. It was a battle for the gentry, the press, and the intellectuals who fed the public the fuel for hate, distrust and violence.
The point of impact was the extension of slaveholding influence into the new states in order to maintain a balance of interest at the national level to keep slaveholding a secure enterprise. States rights was not an issue; other than being Constitutional veneer for the real arguments of the distribution of power and the supression of abolitionist instigators.
Was sectional parochialism a basis for a fair and equitable and just division of a sovereign state? Nuts...
Was sectional parochialism a basis for a fair and equitable and just division of a sovereign state? Nuts...
If you are going to divide a nation into subordinate parts – because the will to live together no longer exists – the division will perforce be parochial, in the sense that “local” interests are involved. Is that a bad thing? Depends on your point of view. You can’t get more parochial than the American Revolution.
>If you are going to divide a nation into subordinate parts – because the will to live together no longer exists – the division will perforce be parochial, in the sense that “local” interests are involved. Is that a bad thing? Depends on your point of view. You can’t get more parochial than the American Revolution. <
Your point being, Messr Bill???
Review the 1784-1860 timeline and the national will to power is as evident as the scrapes over form and function. A wishy-washy President in 1860 might have played into the disolution of the United States. We got a Lincoln who summoned the spirit of American Destiny as seen by Washington, Monroe, and even Jefferson when he wasn't to busy trying to impress himself with his liberalism.
As we have previously mentioned in our brief tete-a-tetes, the Empire tried to sustain control over the colonies with force. They didn't give up because of enlightened benificence; they simply failed and found prologation of the war too expensive.
Everything in life is selfishly parochial. So the matter of american schism or civil war came down to constitutional values by section or by nation. The nation won.
Review the 1784-1860 timeline and the national will to power is as evident as the scrapes over form and function
“The will to power”. Now, there’s a phrase. Sounds to me like the title of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films (which wouldn’t be all that inappropriate, since we know what happened to the untermenschen with slow, drawling accents whose inconvenient ideas about self-government got in the way of the national will to power).
But, of course, the will to power is one of Nietszche’s concepts:
Will to Power
Undoubtedly, one of the most significant, profound, and disturbing of Nietzsche's contributions to Western thinking is his concept of the will to power. For Nietzsche virtually every becoming, indeed everything that "lives," is a manifestation of this indomitable will. He says:
A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power. BGE 13
For Nietzsche the will to power holds an absolute value. Acceptance of the will to power in all its sublime manifestations, both beautiful and ugly, is at the core of Nietzsche's modus vivendi. It's easy, however, for us to accept the aspects of the will to power that have been coded as "positive" by our cultural value systems. Perhaps it is for this reason that Nietzsche goes out of his way, in passage after passage, to emphasize the will to power's more "unpleasant" features--so that we can hear what he has to say, that all life is a product of the will to power, which is explained by Nietzsche, more often than not, as a will to dominate, to rule, control, and force one's will upon others.
Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.
I’m grateful to you for a nearly perfect definition of the Union cause: the appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.
We got a Lincoln who summoned the spirit of American Destiny
The spirit of American Destiny…is this the same as Manifest Destiny? The idea that God told you all that it was okay to steal other people’s land? If you take “the will to power” and combine it with the notion that your people and The Almighty are on first name terms, what do you get? A sort of Fascism for Calvinists, I suppose.
I can’t say it appeals to me, David, but thank you for nailing your colours firmly to the mast.
Spirit of American destiny must mean rising to power to be a mouthpiece for corporate America. As far as I can see that was what Lincoln summoned. To speak of Jefferson trying to impress himself is funny though. I wonder who is really trying to impress himself.
Thank you Bill for this explanation of will to power and its origin. This pretty well sums it all up, doesn't it?
As for my mention of chasms, etc. in the D of Ind., Neil, I was particularly referring to state sovereignty. As I've stated repeatedly, I do not for one MINUTE believe that the Southern States would have embroiled themselves in a Union which would have deprived them of the right to withdraw if they felt such a union was injurious to their interests. Taxation further down the road would show them injury, among other encroaching movements by the North.
There is a reason why Southerners consider the WBTS the Second American Revolution.
Also, if it weren't for their encroaching maneuvers why wouldn't the North just let the South go? On the front end, this is very simplistic, but post war sentiment wants to put complete emphasis on the nobility of ridding the country of slavery. (It makes a good read for the winners who wrote it and continue to do so, but it "just ain't so.) No, I think it was their all consuming need for power,for expansion, more railroads, etc. and they needed cash to finance it all. And where had the cash been coming from? You guessed it.
As for the Federal government not having any power before this war, Lincoln clearly showed that HE didn't see it that way when he ran rough-shod over the Constitution, called up troops without approval from Congress, and did all those other dastardly things he did without so much as a bye your bye to legality. For those states sitting on the fence post, he had a quick fix: martial law and for judges, legislators who protested any of his actions, outright defiance or jail.
Seems to me he had that will to power thing down cold.
__________________ Thea
No one has permission to use any material from any of my posts on any CWT forum, the archives, or any other forum without my express written permission.
>“The will to power”. Now, there’s a phrase. Sounds to me like the title of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films (which wouldn’t be all that inappropriate, since we know what happened to the untermenschen with slow, drawling accents whose inconvenient ideas about self-government got in the way of the national will to power).
But, of course, the will to power is one of Nietszche’s concepts: <
Nietsche was a classical moralist with very little political sense. The political sense of morality I speak of is a product of Hegel and Napoleon, not F Nietsche. Try reading Walter Kaufmann's commenteries rather than some tripe about Nietsche the NAZI.
I don't ascribe to a notion of the Confederacy as poor, put upon victims. If anything the rhetoric of secession was very much a manifestation of an angry political will to resist democraticization that required concensus and cooperation. The southern states were not fundamentally bothered in their relationship to the Union; the arguement was on the national enfranchisement of slaveholding and the future protection of King Cotton. To the extent that the Republican party appeared to be the latest and clearest threat to the welfare of slaveholding the southern states repudiated the Union and the parliamentary form to exercise it's own will, and the devil take the Union.
Since Calhoun and Jackson we as a nation had expended a great deal of energy undermining the basic national interest with internecine backbiting over apportionments of expansion. Most of the rhetoric coming from the sections was so much dillygas.
The fact of the matter is that the United States was inebriated with slave profits, which included an eight fold increase in the slave population in the Republican period, and nobody had the gumption to put a stop to a practice Jeffersion sanctimoniously called perfidious while he maintained his own addiction.
Very few responsible national leaders seriously expected the southern slaveholders to abolish the institution of slavery. But a lot of serious people did want to see a light at the end of the tunnel; some end game that would eventually break the cycle. Secession as an act of political will repudiated the Union for its failure to protect and embrace and defend slaveholding; not as a right of property for states, but as a national policy to be adhered to by all states and sanctioned in developing teritories.
Spare me the insinuation that a will to power was the exclusive veniality of the Unionist. The egoism was demonstrable to both warring parties.
Nietsche was a classical moralist with very little political sense. The political sense of morality I speak of is a product of Hegel and Napoleon, not F Nietsche. Try reading Walter Kaufmann's commenteries rather than some tripe about Nietsche the NAZI.
Fair enough. But you brought the phrase into the discussion so, as you evidently have something other than the standard definition in mind, it would be helpful if you explain precisely what you mean by it.
>Fair enough. But you brought the phrase into the discussion so, as you evidently have something other than the standard definition in mind, it would be helpful if you explain precisely what you mean by it. <
????
Really thought that what followed this paragraph did just that.
The Civil War wasn't about minority victimization. It was a power struggle between interests unwilling to concede anything on issues revolving around the slave question. Not the morality of slavery. The enfranchisement of slavery. The continued growth of slavery. The continued forced parity of the constitutionally protected additional votes granted to slaveholders. etc.
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
Linear Mode
