Quotes Leading Up to the War

[hawglips]

"As to my own position, I hope to see the Union preserved by granting the South the full measure of her constitutional rights. If this can not be done, I hope to see all the Southern States united in a new confederation and that we can effect a peaceable separation. If both of these are denied us, I am with Arkansas in weal or woe. I have been elected and hold a commission of captain of the Volunteer Rifle Company of this place and I can say for my company that if the Stars and Stripes become the standard of a tyrannical majority, the ensign of a violated league, it will no longer command our love or respect but will command our best efforts to drive them from our state.

I am with the South in life or in death, in victory or in defeat...... I believe the North is about to wage a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the Constitution and the fundamental principles of government. They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. They are about to invade our peaceful homes, destroy our property, and inaugurate a servile insurrection, murder our men and dishonor our women. We propose no invasion of the North, no attack on them, and only ask to be left alone."
--Major General Patrick Cleburne

[hawglips]

" The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic (a voluntary union of states) to a national sectional despotism."

--November 1860 editorial in the Charleston Mercury

[hawglips]

"There is another lying back of it--with which this is intimately connected--that may be regarded as the great and primary cause. This is to be found in the fact that the equilibrium between the two sections in the government as it stood when the Constitution was ratified and the government put in action has been destroyed. At that time there was nearly a perfect equilibrium between the two, which afforded ample means to each to protect itself against the aggression of the other; but, as it now stands, one section has the exclusive power of controlling the government, which leaves the other without any adequate means of protecting itself against its encroachment and oppression."

-- John C. Calhoun, The Causes of the Endangered Union speech, 1850

[unionblue]

"Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface! Who is foolish-I beg everybody's pardon-as to expect to see any such thing? Sir, he who sees these states, now revolving in harmony around a common center, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres and jostle against each other in the realms of spave without producing the crush of the universe. There can be no such thing as peaceable secession. Peaceable secesion is an utter impossibility."

Daniel Webster, March 7, 1850.

Unionblue

[unionblue]

"It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these states together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process, and successively, that the cords can be snapped, until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important and has greatly weakened all the others..."

John C. Calhoun, The Causes of the Endangered Union speech, read by Senator James Mason of Virginia, March 4, 1850.

Unionblue

[unionblue]

"And, sir, I must take occasion here to say that in my opinion there is no right on the part of any one or more of the States to secede from the Union. War and dissolution of the Union are identical and inevitable, in my opinion. There can be a dissolution of the Union only by consent or by war. Consent no one can anticipate, from the existing state of things, is likely to be given; and war is the only alternative by which a dissolution could be accomplished. If consent were given-if it were possible that we were to be seperated by one great line-in less than sixty days after such consent was given war would break out between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding portions of this Union-between the two independent parts into which it would be erected in virtue of the act of seperation. In less than sixty days, I believe, our slaves from Kentucky, flocking over in numbers to the other side of the river, would be pursued by their owners. Our hot and ardent spirits would be restrained by no sense of the right which appertains to the independence of the other side of the river, should that be the line of separation. They would pursue their slaves into the adjacent free States; they would be repelled; and the consequence would be that, in less than sixty days, war would, be blazing in every part of this now happy and peaceful land."

Henry Clay, Feb. 5 & 6, 1850.

Unionblue

[whitworth]

One in the modern era has a difficult time supporting one's "heritage" when faced with the truth of slavery.
The right to own slaves was a constitutional right in the Confederate States of America Constitution. It was an expressed right with no provision to ban it in future years. Slavery was never included in the U.S. Constitution as a constitutional right. The Confederacy expanded slavery and its rights with secession.

The Confederacy lost the war, interestingly, because it had so much of its capital tied up in slaves. It never had the ability to logistically supply its army and navy adequately.
Without slavery, there was no need for a long and bloody war. Many a Confederate private recognized the rights of slaveholders with their reference to a -Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight. Exemptions from military duty were given to owners of twenty or more slaves.

Margaret Mitchell said it better than anyone in her book -Gone With the Wind - "Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance..."

[ole]

Whitworth:

Agree almost entirely with your insightful post. Thank you.

"Almost" in that Article IV, Section 2, Paragraph 3 states: "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

This one is the sticker. It looks like it applies to those apprenticed to a tradesman and bond-servants (those assigning themselves to labor for a period in return for some stipend -- most notably, passage), but "held to service and labor" equally applies to slaves. The acknowledgement in this paragraph of the implied ownership -- for a defined or indefinite period -- of a person's labor apparently gives slavery the benefit, at least, of constitutional sanction.

Upon this paragraph is based the slave-owners' contention that labor-ownership could not be constituionally denied in any state -- hence the clarifications issued in the Dred Scott case and the Fugitive Slave Law.

One of the sharpest bones in the pile is that a territory was not a state -- it was Federal property. As such, the government could, within constitutional restrictions, do whatever it had in mind to do until the territory became a state.

I particularly appreciated your observation that "The Confederacy lost the war, interestingly, because it had so much of its capital tied up in slaves." I've frequently maintained that the slavocracy had no currency but cotton and collateral. Anything they had to spend was borrowed based on those two factors.

And a special thanks for the quote from "GWTW." It works, doesn't it?
Ole

[thea_447]

Resuming the theme of this thread: Quotes leading up to War I offer this:

John Randolph, in calling the Constitution a dead letter said:

"I have no faith in parchments, sirs, I have faith in the power of the commonwealth, of which I am an unworthy son....
If , under the power to regulate trade, you prevent exportation; if, with the most approved spring lancet you draw the last drop of blood from our veins; if, secundum artum, you draw the last shilling from our pockets, what are the checks of the Constitution to us? A fig for the Constitution! When the scorpion's sting is probing us to the quick, shall we stop to chop logic? There is no magic in the word Union."

[thea_447]

Robert J. Turnbull published The Crisis or Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government in which he declared :

"DISUNION [he spelled it with capital letters], better that it should come now, than some twenty years hence when our trade shall have been destroyed, our policy crumbled to ruins, our citizens ruined, and our spirits broken down by wrongs upon wrongs heaped upon us, by a Government in the hands of manufacturers, fanatics and abolitionists." (The Crisis or Essays on the Usurpation of the Federal Government, by Brutus ) (Charleston, 1827)