Secession and why the war happened

Tobiasstorm

Private
Joined
Jul 17, 2015
second time poster been following you all for a few months now.. A nub about the Civil war .. I came across some information and wondered what your thoughts might be and how much of this is true. They say everything you see on the Internet is true lol but we all know better than that ..






Secession Would Destroy the United States

The claim that, by seceding, the Southern states would have destroyed the United States has never made any sense to me. In 1776, Great Britain had 20 territories and colonies in North America. Although 13 of the 20 seceded on July 4, 1776, I'm not aware of anyone who claims that Great Britain or even the British Empire was "destroyed" by the secession of the 13 colonies.


And throughout history there have been any number of countries besides the United States that were formed by seceding from a mother country or empire. Off the top of my head I can think of several: The Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836; Mexico, the countries of Central America, and the countries of South America seceded from the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century; Belgium seceded from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830; Norway seceded from Sweden in 1905; Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Lithuania seceded from the Romanov empire in 1918 and then Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991; and most recently South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011. But Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, and Sudan all seem to be doing just fine - none has been "destroyed" by secession.


Was Secession Constitutional?

I have similar problems with the claim that "In seceding from the Union those states declared the U.S. Constitution dead." The central question of the war is whether states, as one of their reserved rights, had the right to secede from the Union. Those who take the position that secession was prohibited to the states always have to gloss over the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution that supports their claim.


Before the Constitution was ratified, the colonies were united under a document which is usually called the Articles of Confederation, but the full title of which is The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Although the Articles are much shorter than the Constitution, they declare 5 times that the union being formed is perpetual. And yet, nowhere in the Constitution is it stated that the union being formed is perpetual. Do you think that they just, somehow, forgot to mention it?


It was during the federal convention in Philadelphia in 1787 that the delegates fully realized the problems of a "perpetual" union, a "perpetual" union that had lasted only 6 years. Congress had authorized the delegates to meet "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation," but, under the terms of the Articles, they could only be amended by a unanimous vote of all 13 republics - and Rhode Island refused to participate - which made it impossible to amend the Articles. Much of the opposition to the new constitution was due to the fact that the convention had violated the Congressional resolution authorizing the convention as well as the specific provisions of the Articles themselves. Read the 40th essay of the Federalist Papers to watch as James Madison twists and turns, trying to justify the actions of the convention.


The Articles of Confederation had been an experiment: an experiment which had failed. The convention delegates regarded the Constitution as another experiment, an experiment which also might fail. They had no more reason to believe that the union under the Constitution would be any more perpetual than had been the one formed under the Articles. And by avoiding any mention of perpetuity in the Constitution, if at some point in the future another experiment had to be tried, that convention wouldn't face the same problems the one in 1787 had.


Finally, I would point out that the decision of each of the 13 republics as to whether or not to ratify the constitution and become a member of the new confederation was solely up to the residents of each republic; the people of the confederacy as a whole had nothing to say about it. When George Washington was elected president in 1789, 11 of the states were confederated under the Constitution and two of them - North Carolina and Rhode Island - were confederated under the Articles of Confederation and did not vote in the election because thery were, essentially, a separate country.


One further note: three of the republics - Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island - when they ratified the Constitution, specifically reserved the right to secede. And since all members of a confederation have equal rights, by extension, all of the states had the same right.


Lincoln started the war based on his rationale that secession was unconstitutional, but that was merely his casus belli, his WMDs, his Tonkin Gulf. He had no constitutional basis to support his contention that secession was prohibited but, as Aesop pointed out, any excuse will serve a tyrant.


Was Coercion Constitutional?

Did Congress or the president have the power under the Constitution to use force to coerce the states? The Constitutional Convention in 1787 considered this very question but rejected the idea of giving the federal government the power "to call forth the force of the Union against any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof."


On November 17, 1860, President Buchanan asked his Attorney General Jeremiah Black of Pennsylvania to prepare a legal opinion as to whether the federal government could constitutionally use force against a state. Echoing the delegates to the constitutional convention, Mr. Black responded: "Whether Congress has the constitutional right to make war against one or more States, and require the Executive of the Federal Government to carry it on by means of force to be drawn from the other States, is a question for Congress itself to consider. It must be admitted that no such power is expressly given; nor are there any words in the Constitution which imply it. . . . All these provisions [Article I, Section 5] are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve their peace, and not to plunge them into civil war. . . . If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the Union. Being treated as an alien and an enemy, she would be compelled to act accordingly. And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the 'domestic tranquility' which the Constitution was meant to insure, will not all the States be absolved from their Federal obligations? Is any portion of the people bound to contribute their money or their blood to carry on a contest like that?"


The Two Waves of Secession

I would also point out that it is not true that "eleven southern states seceded from the Union in protest against federal legislation that limited the expansion of slavery . . ." I've already pointed out that there was no such federal legislation but the statement suffers from a further problem.


There were two waves of secession. Between December 20, 1860 and February 1, 1861, the seven "deep South" states seceded. During the second wave, between April 17, 1861 and June 8, 1861, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded. Missouri and Maryland would have seceded but their constitutionally elected governments were overthrown by US troops, which also intimidated Kentucky into "neutrality." But why did these states secede?

In January or February of 1861, the legislature in each of these states had extensively debated - and rejected - the call for secession. But on April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling on the states to provide 75,000 troops (and setting a quota of troops for each state) to invade and conquer the seven seceded states. The reaction of the other Southern states was immediate.

As Gov. Letcher of Virginia wired: "I received your telegram of the 15th, the genuineness of which I doubted. . . . In reply to this communication I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object - an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795 [the first Militia Act] - will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South."

The governors of Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas responded similarly. In each case, their protest was against Lincoln's illegal and unconstitutional coercion of the seceded states.

There was not a single "protest against federal legislation that limited the expansion of slavery." Nor is there in any of these states' ordinances of secession. And their refusal was not without historical precedent. During the War of 1812, President Madison called out the militia but the governors of the New England states (which were treasonably providing the British troops with food, supplies and money) refused to call out their militias.


On the day that hostilities commenced at Fort Sumter (12 April 1861), as we know only the seven states of the Deep South had seceded, there were more slaves within the Union than outside it and Lincoln hadn’t the slightest intention to free any of them. Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation inDemocracy in America(1835-40) remained true: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”


On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Attempting to stitch together a nation mired in a bloody civil war, Abraham Lincoln made a last-ditch, but carefully calculated, decision regarding the institution of slavery in America.

By the end of 1862, things were not looking good for the Union. The Confederate Army had overcome Union troops in significant battles and Britain and France were set to officially recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation. In an August 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln confessed “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Lincoln hoped that declaring a national policy of emancipation would stimulate a rush of the South’s slaves into the ranks of the Union army, thus depleting the Confederacy’s labor force, on which the southern states depended to wage war against the North. Does this sound like Lincoln was fighting for the slaves , or was he just using the slaves in his own way to win the war at any cost ??
 
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