Where’s the “Oh Jeez, not this sh*t again” guy when you need him?
Those electoral college votes would be sorely missed by the Dims.
If the South fought for states rights then why did Southern politicians expand the size and scope of the federal government in the run up to 1860?
The Fugitive Slave Act attacked states rights by creating a branch of slave catchers who acted as quasi-secret police to hunt down escaped slaves in free states. Doesn’t seem like respecting the states rights of free states.
Three Southern ambassadors, including later president James Buchanan, got together in 1854 to draft the Ostend Manifesto, a plot in which the US would attempt to buy Cuba from Spain and, if rejected, would invade to add Cuba as a slave state.
Dred Scott was perhaps the first major case of judicial overreach. Roger Taney basically told Congress that they could no longer regulate the spread of slavery in the Western territories because slaves, as property of their owners, could not be restricted, for to do so would violate the Fourth Amendment. Dred Scott only legislated this in the territories, but it was very clear that the same could easily be applied to Free States.
The South didn’t care about states rights. The South was controlled by a semi-aristocratic clique of slaveholders who sought to oppress the Northern white working class. This is the lesson that is most applicable to today. Your average Union soldier who fought against slavery wasn’t necessarily fighting to free blacks, but he was fighting against the corrupt slaveholders. Every acre of land in the West given to a slaveholder was one less acre available to a free white man. Every job that was given to a slave was one less task for a working class man.
The pro slavery Democrats of the 1850s resemble the pro immigration Democrats AND Republicans of today. Cheap labor express is nothing new to American History. Just look at George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh believed that slavery was the best way for socialism to succeed in the 1850s. He thought that blacks should do all the manual labor in the country while whites would be free to be intellectuals. Fitzhugh also supported the enslavement of poor whites on top of blacks and wrote a book, the Failure of Free Society, criticizing John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.
David Wilmot was one of the founders of the Republican Party and echoed the point about the white working class being negatively impacted by slavery.
Now, we shouldn’t be taking down Confederate statues and the average Southern soldier wasn’t fighting “to defend slavery” as their primary motivation, but to act like the Confederacy was somehow justified or morally superior to the Union is garbage.
It always comes down to money. It did then. It does now.
Also elaborating on the point he makes in the article that war wasn’t inevitable, he’s wrong.
The South had maintained a long practice of filibustering- sending militias into areas in Latin America that rampaged around. This is the reason why Lincoln said that he opposed extending the Missouri compromise line all the way to the Pacific. The slaveholders of the South would have just started doing informal military campaigns using these mercs to spread slavery all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.
Not only that, but the South would have definitely used these against the Union. A war would have been inevitable. There were pro slavery sentiments in Southern California both in the state itself and in the Confederacy. Border disputes would have been common and another Bleeding Kansas could quickly happen if Confederates swarmed an area or used a filibustering campaign. The Confederate Army also would have started pillaging islands in the Caribbean, which would’ve caught the attention of the British. Many Confederate intellectuals were also sympathetic to the idea of reopening the slave trade, which would have definitely kicked off a war.
California has already seceded.
The concept of secession was first put forth in the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812 by the NE states that were being affected economically by the war. Actually this was treason but because the NE are hypocrites it is buried in the history books. The Federalist Papers explain that the committee on style made the inference that secession was not a possibility by the changing of the wording of “We the people of the United States” from “We the people of the States of.....” because of brevity. If states acceded then the opposite is true.
Everyone should read this well written article.
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I think it is important to remember how close the Civil War era was to the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. Robert E. Lee’s father Light-Horse Harry fought in the Revolution. To me, what follows from this is a certain closeness to the meaning of the Constitution and thoughts about revolution and secession that are difficult to fully appreciate today. It is hard today to imagine learning about the founding of the country from parents and grandparents with direct knowledge of the events rather than from a book or teacher or someone whose thinking was formed very remotely in time. I also think we tend to forget how the concept of nationality was at least for many not as locked in solely on the USA as it is today; that is many people had a loyalty and attachment to their native state which compelled them to fight for it regardless of how they might have felt about the merits of the disputes that led to war. Thus, the most common explanation for Robert E. Lee switching to the Confederate military after serving 30+ years in the US Army is that he was unwilling to raise his sword against his fellow Virginians. Anyway, just some thoughts FWIW.
We’d care after it became a giant failed state/nation/whatever and/or aligned with hostile nations. Same situation as with the Confederacy. To let it exist was to almost assuredly sign our own death warrants or best case kick the can down the road to different problems later.
“The bigger question is would anybody actually care if California left?”
“I bet the Social Security and Medicare recipients of California might care when their benefits stopped.
Can the US go to war against the California Democrats/Communists calling for Calexist/Reconquista?
The idiocy of the idealism is stinging!
I believe they had the right to secede. I believe it ought to be a very last resort.