I am a firm believer in states rights as it was the states that created the federal government rather than the reverse.
On the other hand, I am absolutely and unalterably opposed to slavery in all its forms. Whether chattel, penal, or mental, slavery is utterly evil.
James Madison wrote, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
I think that Mr. Madison would be dismayed to see how his great work, the US Constitution has been misused and misinterpreted.
I think we need a Congress of the States to reign in the Federal Government. The implied powers of the Federal government needs to be sharply curtailed.
SpyNavy
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I don’t disagree with you about the evils of slavery and even worse, the slave trade. That said, it was a dying “institution” by the 1860s. We were taught in school that the war “about” slavery and was “necessary” to get rid of it. I accepted that for many years. Then I read more about slavery and discovered that every other country in the entire western world got rid of it without a bloodbath. So that really wasn’t “necessary” after all.
Then I started studying the issue more for myself - reading what historians from earlier generations had said. I learned about the Corwin Amendment for the first time. I learned about how the Tariff benefitted one region of the country at the expense of another AND how the fight over the tariff did not end with the Nullification Crisis and it struck me how I wasn’t taught any of this in school. I realized I had only been taught one side of the story....that I’d been given a very slanted view of things and had not been taught half the facts. It was enlightening especially given how the corporate media constantly lies about everything today to push one worldview and benefit one party at the expense of the other and at the expense of anybody they perceive to be a political enemy......
and I realized how massively we had been propagandized about our history....how it had been rewritten 1984 style to benefit one region of the country at the expense of another and how it had been slanted that way to benefit one worldview (centralized power) at the expense of another.....how anybody perceived to be an enemy of that (ie Southerners) had been and were being demonized really starting in the late 1980s by the Leftists in Academia.
I don't know if you had the time to look over the previous discussion; my main point was, whatever your view of the causes of the 'civil war', the main side effect was the near destruction of state's rights. Lyndon Johnson, a 'true' southerner, destroyed Black American cohesion and family values by instituting the welfare state and the role of 'Massa Uncle Sam' - an act of inhumanity in my view. That, plus the federal income tax, established the supreme source of power as the federal govt.
We are on the verge of another, a real civil war, to regain states' rights... states' rights and perhaps the leading issue of our time: the sovereignty of the individual!