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- South of the North 40
Deleware contributed something like 15k men to the US military and was never part of the CS so what is your point?
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The Imaginary Abe Lincoln
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Deleware contributed something like 15k men to the US military and was never part of the CS so what is your point?
Freddy
2nd Lieutenant
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- Dec 19, 2006
- Location
- Worcester, MA
DiLiarenzo is a professor of economics maybe that is why?
FrazierC
First Sergeant
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2012
Really? Well that would explain some things...
Georgia Coast
Sergeant
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- Feb 7, 2013
- Location
- Florida
Dang, y'all are mean.
She's 92 with one foot in the grave; he's about 58 (young! so young! since he's younger than I am). She may never have been a beauty, but he doesn't seem "all that" either! 
View attachment 12762
Freddy
2nd Lieutenant
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Thomas James DiLorenzo (born August 8, 1954) is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland.
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2005
- Location
- Ocala, FL (as of December, 2015).
To all,
I would like to present some extracts from the following, 12 page article. It used to be an online article, but I cannot find it online anymore, at least with my search engine. Fortunately, I printed out the article back in 2005 and kept it with my notes.
Why Joseph Sobran Is Wrong About The Civil War, by Timothy Sandefur, pg. 8:
"...In analyzing the "revolution" of 1861, therefore, we must have reference to the question of slavery. Why did the Confederacy fire on Fort Sumter? Why did they break the supreme law of the land by declaring themselves no longer part of the union? The answer is, in order to preserve their slave property from interference by the federal government. Or, more accurately, in reaction against the election of a President who pledged himself to halt the spread of slavery into the western territories (which he did have the constitutional authority to do). Although the Confederates phrased their arguments in terms of "freedom," it was the "freedom to enslave" that they were defending. This made the Confederacy an illegitimate government, rather like the communist coups taking place on an hourly basis in South America. When the Confederacy initiated force by firing on Fort Sumter, therefore, it became the responsibility of the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," including the supreme law of the land, by putting down the rebellion by force if necessary. (Sobran's statement that " The president is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not to 'save the Union' at all costs to the Constitution," begs the question. The president is sworn to see that the laws are faithfully executed. This includes the Constitution itself, which is the supreme law of the land, and in serving that duty, the President has all executive power.)
This is the answer to our second question: the secession of 1861 was not a legitimate revolution. Its "cornerstone" rested on the "great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." The Constitution of the Confederacy protected slavery from any government interference. The Confederacy seceded, not in response to the initiation of force, but in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln--no radical abolitionist, as other anti-Lincoln writers have emphasized--and fired upon Fort Sumter, which was federal property.
It was illegal for the American Patriots to fire on the Redcoats in 1776, but they did so because the British had violated the natural rights of Americans, and declared the right to "bind them in all cases whatsoever." The American Revolution was based explicitly on the principles of equality and the right of individuals to own themselves. The Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter, on the other hand, was engaged explicitly in the name of defending the "right of property in negro slaves." The libertarian theory of revolution is inconsistent with that practice, and cannot therefore justify armed rebellion in its defense.
To Sum Up
Sobran has made some valid points against the strong-union view. But those points are irrelevant, because under either the strong-union or the weak-union views, the Constitution is a compact between the whole "People of the United States." Only that "people" has the right to alter the Constitution or the union. They may allow a portion of "the people" to leave, but because states are not parties to the Constitution, states have no unilateral authority to intercede between Americans and their own federal citizenship. Only under Calhoun's "compact" view of the Constitution, can a state have the constitutional right to secede. But as we have seen, that view is wrong. The Constitution does not depend on the states for its validity, and cannot be negatived by the states. Various clauses of the Constitution are also inconsistent with a theory of constitutional secession.
(From another article, Liberty and Union--and Their Critics, Sandefur lists these various clauses of the Constitution that are "inconsistent with a theory of constitutional secession." They are:
The Constitution--among other things--
1) is the Supreme Law of the Land;
2) guarantees to every state a republican form of government;
3) requires the President to see that the laws are faithfully executed;
4) guarantees the privileges and immunities of citizens when they travel interstate;
5) prohibits states from entering into any compact with another state absent Congressional permission;
6) prohitits states from entering into any confederation at all;
7) preserves every state's right to two senators.
These powers would all be rendered meaningless, were a state able to secede unilaterally, within the framework of the Constitution. In any case, the states are not parties to the compact; they have no right to secede, therefore, and such a right cannot be retained to begin with. The right to revolution may be, and is, retained. But that right, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, cannot be used to justify the secession of the Confederacy.)
Sobran's purported "reservations" have not panned out; the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were resoundingly rejected--even one of their authors admitted that they mischaracterized the federal union--and Sobran's latest invocation, the Resolutions of the Hartford Convention, came nowhere near defending the compact view of the Constitution; even the instrument calling for that Convention acknowledged that the federal union was a sovereign government of the whole Americna people..."
To be continued...
I would like to present some extracts from the following, 12 page article. It used to be an online article, but I cannot find it online anymore, at least with my search engine. Fortunately, I printed out the article back in 2005 and kept it with my notes.
Why Joseph Sobran Is Wrong About The Civil War, by Timothy Sandefur, pg. 8:
"...In analyzing the "revolution" of 1861, therefore, we must have reference to the question of slavery. Why did the Confederacy fire on Fort Sumter? Why did they break the supreme law of the land by declaring themselves no longer part of the union? The answer is, in order to preserve their slave property from interference by the federal government. Or, more accurately, in reaction against the election of a President who pledged himself to halt the spread of slavery into the western territories (which he did have the constitutional authority to do). Although the Confederates phrased their arguments in terms of "freedom," it was the "freedom to enslave" that they were defending. This made the Confederacy an illegitimate government, rather like the communist coups taking place on an hourly basis in South America. When the Confederacy initiated force by firing on Fort Sumter, therefore, it became the responsibility of the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," including the supreme law of the land, by putting down the rebellion by force if necessary. (Sobran's statement that " The president is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not to 'save the Union' at all costs to the Constitution," begs the question. The president is sworn to see that the laws are faithfully executed. This includes the Constitution itself, which is the supreme law of the land, and in serving that duty, the President has all executive power.)
This is the answer to our second question: the secession of 1861 was not a legitimate revolution. Its "cornerstone" rested on the "great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." The Constitution of the Confederacy protected slavery from any government interference. The Confederacy seceded, not in response to the initiation of force, but in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln--no radical abolitionist, as other anti-Lincoln writers have emphasized--and fired upon Fort Sumter, which was federal property.
It was illegal for the American Patriots to fire on the Redcoats in 1776, but they did so because the British had violated the natural rights of Americans, and declared the right to "bind them in all cases whatsoever." The American Revolution was based explicitly on the principles of equality and the right of individuals to own themselves. The Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter, on the other hand, was engaged explicitly in the name of defending the "right of property in negro slaves." The libertarian theory of revolution is inconsistent with that practice, and cannot therefore justify armed rebellion in its defense.
To Sum Up
Sobran has made some valid points against the strong-union view. But those points are irrelevant, because under either the strong-union or the weak-union views, the Constitution is a compact between the whole "People of the United States." Only that "people" has the right to alter the Constitution or the union. They may allow a portion of "the people" to leave, but because states are not parties to the Constitution, states have no unilateral authority to intercede between Americans and their own federal citizenship. Only under Calhoun's "compact" view of the Constitution, can a state have the constitutional right to secede. But as we have seen, that view is wrong. The Constitution does not depend on the states for its validity, and cannot be negatived by the states. Various clauses of the Constitution are also inconsistent with a theory of constitutional secession.
(From another article, Liberty and Union--and Their Critics, Sandefur lists these various clauses of the Constitution that are "inconsistent with a theory of constitutional secession." They are:
The Constitution--among other things--
1) is the Supreme Law of the Land;
2) guarantees to every state a republican form of government;
3) requires the President to see that the laws are faithfully executed;
4) guarantees the privileges and immunities of citizens when they travel interstate;
5) prohibits states from entering into any compact with another state absent Congressional permission;
6) prohitits states from entering into any confederation at all;
7) preserves every state's right to two senators.
These powers would all be rendered meaningless, were a state able to secede unilaterally, within the framework of the Constitution. In any case, the states are not parties to the compact; they have no right to secede, therefore, and such a right cannot be retained to begin with. The right to revolution may be, and is, retained. But that right, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, cannot be used to justify the secession of the Confederacy.)
Sobran's purported "reservations" have not panned out; the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were resoundingly rejected--even one of their authors admitted that they mischaracterized the federal union--and Sobran's latest invocation, the Resolutions of the Hartford Convention, came nowhere near defending the compact view of the Constitution; even the instrument calling for that Convention acknowledged that the federal union was a sovereign government of the whole Americna people..."
To be continued...
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2005
- Location
- Ocala, FL (as of December, 2015).
Continued from above...
Why Joseph Sobran Is Wrong About The Civil War, by Timothy Sandefur, part II, pg. 9:
"...Now, the foregoing has explicitly relied on certain legal fictions--concepts like sovereignty, social compact, state's rights, or "a whole people for certain purposes." These legal fictions, however, are instrumental to understanding the Constitution, which was based on them. If those who defend the Confederacy wish to hang their theoretical hat on a rejection of social compact, or of legal fictions in general, they may. But I do not think that libertarianism is inherently opposed to such useful theoretical constructs. What's more, since the Confederate Constitution was also based on a social compact theory, such a defense would ultimately prove self-contradictory.
I have also tried to make clear what I am not saying. I am not defending the military draft, which Lincoln instituted in response to Jefferson Davis' institution of a draft for the Confederate Army. I am not defending paper currency, the income tax, or the suppression of freedom of the press. Most importantly, I am not defending the Whig program of internal improvements, or the modern welfare state. These things are routinely invoked in the Civil War debate as a way to (in a popular phrase of the post-Civil War era) "wave the bloody shirt." The implication is that whoever thinks secession is unconstitutional must be a New Dealer. Of course, even if it could be shown that erecting the welfare state was the price America paid for ending slavery, that would still have been a bargain--defenders of the south have no business waving the bloody shirt.
But of course, the welfare state was not a consequence of Union victory. That allegation is the result of a simplistic view of history which searches through the past for some bogeyman on whom to pin the blame for America's Fall. (I even know some libertarians who think it all went to hell with the Louisiana Purchase!) But the regulatory welfare state is much more a legacy of the Populist and Progressive movements of (roughly) 1880-1920--which rejected natural rights entirely, and sought refuge in bureaucracy and direct democracy--and of their descendants in the New Deal and Great Society. There have always been, and will always be, those who think that government should run our lives, and that federal bureaucracies are somehow more effective than state authorities. There have always been abuses at the state and federal levels--lynch mobs and segregationists hiding behind state's rights, and welfare statists promising federal chickens in every pot. If it had not been for Woodrow Wilson, someone would still have clamored for a Federal Reserve, and there would still be those demanding a Department of the Interior had Teddy Roosevelt never been born. Yet, to read the statements of libertarian defenders of the Confederacy, one might imagine that, if only Stephen Douglas had won in 1860, we would all be living in Galt's Gulch.
While it's true that the federal-state relationship was never the same after the Civil War, it does not follow that the Union's victory caused the modern federal bureaucracy, and even were that true, how would this conclusion help us? Our energies are far better spent in understanding how state's rights really work--how federal sovereignty is really constituted--and how we can prevent the further growth of federal (and state!) bureaucracies. One can believe in both federal supremacy and state's rights; one can believe that the north was right, and that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers. By focusing on irrelevant outrages like the draft, or by searching through history to find "where it all went wrong," we fail to appreciate the complicated issues of Constitutional theory, and end up distorting our understanding of the past.
Whose False Idol?
I'm intrigued by Sobran's statement that for Lincoln, the union was like a "golden calf." This could mean one of two things. According to Exodus, the golden calf was a false god, for which the Israelites clamored when they grew impatient for Moses' return from Mt. Sinai. By kneeling to this idol, they betrayed their First Commandment duty to worship only the One True God. "Oh," said Moses, "this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold." So Sobran could be saying that Lincoln venerated government while betraying his fidelity to higher principles. But it was the Confederates who knelt to the idol of state sovereignty, while betraying the principles of liberty and equality which, according to the Declaration, are the only legitimate basis of sovereignty--who sought to sacrifice the liberty and lives of millions, to preserve the autonomy of states--who chose to break up the nation, rather than face the prospect of working for their own bread, or acknowledging the humanity of black Americans. It was they who embraced the idolatry of state power, and renounced the only principles which can legitimize the state. As Lincoln said, it is strange that the name of a merciful God should be invoked on behalf of those who sought to earn their living through the sweat of other men's faces. Surely the south worshipped a god of gold..."
NOTE: TO ALL...
Fellow forum member and friend, jmb57, has just found the website for the above article by Sandefur. You can read the entire 12 page article at the following website.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050504141128/http://www.geocities.com/sande106/sobranreply.htm
Thanks again, JB, I really appredciate you providing this, for me and the forum.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
Why Joseph Sobran Is Wrong About The Civil War, by Timothy Sandefur, part II, pg. 9:
"...Now, the foregoing has explicitly relied on certain legal fictions--concepts like sovereignty, social compact, state's rights, or "a whole people for certain purposes." These legal fictions, however, are instrumental to understanding the Constitution, which was based on them. If those who defend the Confederacy wish to hang their theoretical hat on a rejection of social compact, or of legal fictions in general, they may. But I do not think that libertarianism is inherently opposed to such useful theoretical constructs. What's more, since the Confederate Constitution was also based on a social compact theory, such a defense would ultimately prove self-contradictory.
I have also tried to make clear what I am not saying. I am not defending the military draft, which Lincoln instituted in response to Jefferson Davis' institution of a draft for the Confederate Army. I am not defending paper currency, the income tax, or the suppression of freedom of the press. Most importantly, I am not defending the Whig program of internal improvements, or the modern welfare state. These things are routinely invoked in the Civil War debate as a way to (in a popular phrase of the post-Civil War era) "wave the bloody shirt." The implication is that whoever thinks secession is unconstitutional must be a New Dealer. Of course, even if it could be shown that erecting the welfare state was the price America paid for ending slavery, that would still have been a bargain--defenders of the south have no business waving the bloody shirt.
But of course, the welfare state was not a consequence of Union victory. That allegation is the result of a simplistic view of history which searches through the past for some bogeyman on whom to pin the blame for America's Fall. (I even know some libertarians who think it all went to hell with the Louisiana Purchase!) But the regulatory welfare state is much more a legacy of the Populist and Progressive movements of (roughly) 1880-1920--which rejected natural rights entirely, and sought refuge in bureaucracy and direct democracy--and of their descendants in the New Deal and Great Society. There have always been, and will always be, those who think that government should run our lives, and that federal bureaucracies are somehow more effective than state authorities. There have always been abuses at the state and federal levels--lynch mobs and segregationists hiding behind state's rights, and welfare statists promising federal chickens in every pot. If it had not been for Woodrow Wilson, someone would still have clamored for a Federal Reserve, and there would still be those demanding a Department of the Interior had Teddy Roosevelt never been born. Yet, to read the statements of libertarian defenders of the Confederacy, one might imagine that, if only Stephen Douglas had won in 1860, we would all be living in Galt's Gulch.
While it's true that the federal-state relationship was never the same after the Civil War, it does not follow that the Union's victory caused the modern federal bureaucracy, and even were that true, how would this conclusion help us? Our energies are far better spent in understanding how state's rights really work--how federal sovereignty is really constituted--and how we can prevent the further growth of federal (and state!) bureaucracies. One can believe in both federal supremacy and state's rights; one can believe that the north was right, and that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers. By focusing on irrelevant outrages like the draft, or by searching through history to find "where it all went wrong," we fail to appreciate the complicated issues of Constitutional theory, and end up distorting our understanding of the past.
Whose False Idol?
I'm intrigued by Sobran's statement that for Lincoln, the union was like a "golden calf." This could mean one of two things. According to Exodus, the golden calf was a false god, for which the Israelites clamored when they grew impatient for Moses' return from Mt. Sinai. By kneeling to this idol, they betrayed their First Commandment duty to worship only the One True God. "Oh," said Moses, "this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold." So Sobran could be saying that Lincoln venerated government while betraying his fidelity to higher principles. But it was the Confederates who knelt to the idol of state sovereignty, while betraying the principles of liberty and equality which, according to the Declaration, are the only legitimate basis of sovereignty--who sought to sacrifice the liberty and lives of millions, to preserve the autonomy of states--who chose to break up the nation, rather than face the prospect of working for their own bread, or acknowledging the humanity of black Americans. It was they who embraced the idolatry of state power, and renounced the only principles which can legitimize the state. As Lincoln said, it is strange that the name of a merciful God should be invoked on behalf of those who sought to earn their living through the sweat of other men's faces. Surely the south worshipped a god of gold..."
NOTE: TO ALL...
Fellow forum member and friend, jmb57, has just found the website for the above article by Sandefur. You can read the entire 12 page article at the following website.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050504141128/http://www.geocities.com/sande106/sobranreply.htm
Thanks again, JB, I really appredciate you providing this, for me and the forum.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
dvrmte
Major
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2009
- Location
- South Carolina
Wow, I quit reading when I saw the above. If you believe this guy, then the US is an illegitimate government because it recognized and protected the freedom to enslave.
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2005
- Location
- Ocala, FL (as of December, 2015).
dvrmte,
And yet, this is not what he says about the US government, nor does he excuse what he thinks were mistakes by Lincoln and the federal government.
This is not a fantasy account by DiLorenzo or the Kennedy Brothers, this has some history and law backing it up, with loads of references.
To sell it short is about the same as demanding dark sun glasses on an Artic night.
Read it all, as I have done with DiLorenzo's, The Real Lincoln, and then come back and shred it.
I'll respect you in the morning, I promise.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
PS I read CSA Today's Sobran posted article, and then I decided to post this one in response.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2011
- Location
- Birmingham, Alabama
If someone wants to go down the libertarian path like this, the simplest way is to argue that the CSA took 4 million folks away from freedom to a state of less freedom or from less state Control under the USA constitution to more state control under the CSA one.
dvrmte
Major
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2009
- Location
- South Carolina
dvrmte,
And yet, this is not what he says about the US government, nor does he excuse what he thinks were mistakes by Lincoln and the federal government.
This is not a fantasy account by DiLorenzo or the Kennedy Brothers, this has some history and law backing it up, with loads of references.
To sell it short is about the same as demanding dark sun glasses on an Artic night.
Read it all, as I have done with DiLorenzo's, The Real Lincoln, and then come back and shred it.
I'll respect you in the morning, I promise.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
PS I read CSA Today's Sobran posted article, and then I decided to post this one in response.
Oh, you know I'll read it, I had to give the standard response, "I quit reading when I saw this", I think it might be a law, as much as I've seen it used. I've never read all of anything that DiLorenzo has wrote. I do go over his articles and use some of his sources as I have the Kennedy Brothers. That's usually how I read most books anyway; it takes me forever to read one because I read all the footnotes and look them up if possible. I want to know how they formed their opinions. I have yet to find an historian not tainted with bias, I don't think they exist. I get their material and taint it with my own bias.
KeyserSoze
Captain
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2011
- Location
- Kansas City
Dang, y'all are mean.
She's changed a bit.
Expired Image Removed
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2009
Well, then using that logic I guess Lee is complicit on the kidnapping of free blacks and of violating even the state laws of his beloved Virginia...Thats how silly and troll-like your argument is..
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2011
- Location
- Laurinburg NC
My point was a reply to another poster who attempted to make the case that Delaware's 19% free black population was representative of a so-called free state.
"Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray"
Nelson Winbush
Battalion
Banned
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2005
Strange opinion. The United States upheld slavery.
Not only that, the Constitution of the United States legalized the trans-Atlantic African slave trade.
Probably the only constitution in the history of the world to do so.
NO revolution is legitimate.
This was from a speech by VP Alexander Stephens. It's not an official document of the Confederate government.
If you count such statements as official doctrine then here's some statements by another Vice President-
"Our position is unquestionable. We stand in defense of free soil and resist aggressive slavery, and we demand enactments for the protection of free soil against this aggression. We will not disturb that institution, but we will stand in defense of the freedom of our soil as right in principle and beneficial to free white labor in all parts of our common country."
"If the North will not unite now to vindicate their rights and constitutional freedom, they will not only deserve to be slaves, but they will be. The small minority in the Senate will stand manfully by their rights and the rights of the free white men."
-Hannibal Hamlin
This would be true if the American Revolution had abolished slavery and the African slave trade.
It didn't.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2011
- Location
- Birmingham, Alabama
The Slave Trade and the Constitution
Apparently this was desired by the South as a condition to sign the Constitution. Thus the South made the US Constitution contain that unique phase.
Likewise when the South wrote it's own Constitution, it went the US one better. The only Constitution to mandate slavery.
Not if you win
The "Cornerstone speech suffers from 2 problems: no official copy and not an official document. However, Stephens corrected the copy recorded and did not challenge it for 50 years.
OTOH it conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. It was from the the vice president of the CSA and presidential contended. It can hardly be dismissed as if it was from a random ordinary citizen.
Hannibal Hamlin seems to present the majority view of the Union and is only of interest in Strawman type arguments where someone wants for rhetorical reasons to pretend the Union was motivated by freeing the slaves.
It took killing insane numbers of men to get the South to go alone, but it did in the end the Country created by the American Revolution managed to abolish slavery and the African slave trade.
Edit grammar
OpnCoronet
Lt. Colonel
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2010
Yes it did, it only took four score and ten years for the Federal gov't to abolish slavery.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2009
Are you trying to say that Deleware was a southern slave state?
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2009
And what states pushed the most to ensure that the United States supported slavery?
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2011
- Location
- Birmingham, Alabama
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