Posted on 06/14/2004 5:16:34 AM PDT by Theodore R.
They Aren’t What They Used to Be
May 27, 2004
If I had to sum up American history in one sentence, I’d put it this way: The United States aren’t what they used to be.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s literal fact. Before the Civil War, the United States was a plural noun. The U.S. Constitution uses the plural form when, for example, it refers to enemies of the United States as “their” enemies. And this was the usage of everyone who understood that the union was a voluntary federation of sovereign states, delegating only a few specified powers, and not the monolithic, “consolidated,” all-powerful government it has since become.
Maybe Americans prefer the present megastate to the one the Constitution describes. But they ought to know the difference. They shouldn’t assume that the plural United States were essentially the same thing as today’s United State, or that the one naturally “evolved” into the other.
The change was violent, not natural. Lincoln waged war on states that tried to withdraw from the Union, denying their right to do so. This was a denial of the Declaration of Independence, which called the 13 former colonies “Free and Independent States.”
Washington and Jefferson at times expressed their fear that some states might secede, but they took for granted that this was the right of any free and independent state. They advised against exercising that right except under serious provocation, but they assumed it was a legitimate option against the threat of a centralized government that exceeded its constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, several states considered leaving the Union, and abolitionists urged Northern states to do so in order to end their association with slave states. Congressman John Quincy Adams, a former president, wanted Massachusetts to secede if Texas was admitted to the Union. Nobody suggested that Adams didn’t understand the Constitution he was sworn to uphold.
But the danger to the states’ independence was already growing. Andrew Jackson had threatened to invade South Carolina if it seceded, shocking even so ardent a Unionist as Daniel Webster. Jackson didn’t explain where he got the power to prevent secession, a power not assigned to the president in the Constitution. Why not? For the simple reason that the Constitution doesn’t forbid secession; it presupposes that the United States are, each of them, free and independent.
Still, Lincoln used Jackson’s threat as a precedent for equating secession with “rebellion” and using force to crush it. This required him to do violence to the Constitution in several ways. He destroyed the freedoms of speech and press in the North; he arbitrarily arrested thousands, including elected officials who opposed him; he not only invaded the seceding states, but deposed their governments and imposed military dictatorships in their place.
In essence, Lincoln made it a crime — “treason,” in fact — to agree with Jefferson. Northerners who held that free and independent states had the right to leave the Union — and who therefore thought Lincoln’s war was wrong — became, in Lincoln’s mind, the enemy within. In order to win the war, and reelection, he had to shut them up. But his reign of terror in the North has received little attention.
He may have “saved the Union,” after a fashion, but the Union he saved was radically different from the one described in the Constitution. Even his defenders admit that when they praise him for creating “a new Constitution” and forging “a second American Revolution.” Lincoln would have been embarrassed by these compliments: He always insisted he was only enforcing and conserving the Constitution as it was written, though the U.S. Supreme Court, including his own appointees, later ruled many of his acts unconstitutional.
The Civil War completely changed the basic relation between the states, including the Northern states, and the Federal Government. For all practical purposes, the states ceased to be free and independent.
Sentimental myths about Lincoln and the war still obscure the nature of the fundamental rupture they brought to American history. The old federal Union was transformed into the kind of “consolidated” system the Constitution was meant to avoid. The former plurality of states became a single unit. Even our grammar reflects the change.
So the United States were no longer a “they”; they’d become an “it.” Few Americans realize the immense cost in blood, liberty, and even logic that lies behind this simple change of pronouns.
Joseph Sobran
"So, the government, through the Constitution, grants us our rights? We don't have a right to anything unless it's in the Constitution? You do realize that kind of reasoning is at odds with 100% of the Constitution's framers, right?"
Our Founders weren't merely rights'granters like many of our current citizens have denigrated into. The supreme goal of the Constitutional Convention was to set up a process, a government, from which to protect people's rights.
No where do you find in the debates of the Constitution talk of how to get out of the Union. Secession is repugnant to the Founders.
Nonsense. During convention Madison - arguing to limit state militia powers - stated, '[a]s the greatest danger is that of disunion of the states, it is necessary to guard against it by [delegating] sufficient powers to the COMMON government' [emphasis mine]. The motion under debate was rejected 8-3.
Secession is repugnant to the Founders.
Really? See above. What explains their secession from the Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union.
Secession is repugnant to the Founders.
"Really? See above. What explains their secession from the Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union."
Yes. Really.
You have simply stated a point for State sovereignty. I have never argued against that and neither did the founders.
The Articles of Confederation were a failure and thus the stronger national government required - that really.
My point is that absolutely nowhere is the right to secede brought up in the debates or finalized in the Constitution. Issues and problems were meant to be solved within the Constitution.
Disunion, under the Constitution during the debates, IS secession. Madison wanted to prevent disunion by granting the federal government the power to prevent - by force - the secession of a state or states. That was rejected.
The 10th Amendment explicitly reserves to the states the powers NOT delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states. Secession is finalized in the Constitution.
The motion by Gouverneur Morris to create a national government - via submission for ratification by the people of the states in unison - did not even receive a second. What was created was a federal government.
"Disunion, under the Constitution during the debates, IS secession. Madison wanted to prevent disunion by granting the federal government the power to prevent - by force - the secession of a state or states. That was rejected.
The 10th Amendment explicitly reserves to the states the powers NOT delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states. Secession is finalized in the Constitution."
Your 10th Amendment argument is not a full argument and it certianly doesn not finalize Secession by any means. If you believe this please provide a full argument.
As I said before your Madison point simply affirms sovereignty of the states. It does not affirm secession.
Madison makes his view on secession clear in Federalist No.58:
"Federalist No. 58: (Madison)
LASTLY, it would facilitate and foster the BANEFUL PRACTICE OF SECESSIONS; a practice which has shown itself even in States where a majority only is required; a practice SUBVERSIVE of all the principles of order and regular government; a practice which leads more directly to public convulsions, and the RUIN OF POPULAR GOVERNMENTS, than any other which has yet been displayed among us."
Going to a baseball game and will be glad to debate this in detail when I get back.
My experience is that behind hatred of 'damnyankees' is a longing for good old days of mint juleps and someone else doing your work for you at gunpoint.
Oh, horsespit.
We've known from the days of Moses that slavery is evil.
The Southrons who declared independence rather than put up with northerners who disapproved of them were acting out of a desire to destroy criticism of a system they all knew in their hearts was totally Satanic. And they paid the price for their folly.
No need to refight the Civil War. We won, you lost, get over it.
Lincoln destroyed the concept of free and independent states>>
No, Lincoln destroyed the "illusion" of "free and independent states", one that kept one american in 10 in bondage to the South. And a good thing, too, otherwise this conversation would be in German.
I want to know what it would take to secede from a state, or how to form our own county
Some old boys tried that in the last few years here in Texas.
Didn't seem to work out too well for them.
You might see what you can Google up on it and study what they did...and then don't do it that way.
Northerners were heavily invested in the rum and slave trade in the 18th Century. Slavery was legal in the northern colonies until 1774, when RI became the first to free its slaves. Slavery continued in DE and MD until 1865.
Northerners were the first to consider secession, at a convention in Hartford, CT, in late 1814, to protest the already ending War of 1812 and the decline in the fortunes of the Federalist Party.
Secession was considered constitutional until the force of arms stamped it out.
Lincoln's notion that the union preceded the Constitution is is without historical foundation, but it has been accepted to justify the war. My understanding is that the South paid 2/3 of the tariff receipts prior to 1860, and that was Lincoln's principal motivation to prevent secession.
"Secession is repugnant to the Founders"
4/30/1839......At the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of President Washington, ex-President John Quincy Adams delivered an address which was received with great approval by the people. In that speech Mr. Adams said:
"But the indissoluble union between the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right but in the heart.
"If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interest shall fester into hatred, the bands of political asseveration will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint.
"Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect union by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the
law of political gravitation to the centre."
It is very evident that Mr. Adams and the people of New England generally regarded these views as the correct interpretation of the original compact, which bound the people together.
The founding fathers were secessionists themselves......British citizens who seceded from Britain.
They then proceeded to secede from their own first government, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
No one doubted their right to do so.
The very idea of an ‘indivisible’ Union was in direct opposition to the founding fathers’ ideas of freedom and self-government.
President Thomas Jefferson publicly supported secession from the U.S. several times by any state who wanted to.
At that time, there was no such thing as a U.S. citizen; there were no income taxes, and there was no standing army; people were citizens of their States, and ruled from their State capitals.
The sovereign States were held together in a voluntary Union by the strength of common interests: common money, a common navy, common trade practices, and open borders between the States.
The Constitution, an agreement whereby the sovereign States delegated only a few limited powers to the federal authority for the good of the whole, was widely understood.
"My point is that absolutely nowhere is the right to secede brought up in the debates."
Since the bulk of the debates were not made public information, you do not know that to be true.
We do know that the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had some debates on the right of secession. We know this because the outcome of the debates resulted in an attempt to pass legislation to permit the government to use force to resist disunion.
We do know that the convention refused to grant the federal government the power to use a military action to prevent secession. So, it had to be discussed.
What is also known at the time was that Vermont was in a state of active secession while the Convention and ratification process was occuring. All the delegates knew of this, and the consequences of secession. They chose not to prohibit secession or disunion.
The 13 states' peoples and their delegates knew about, discussed, and debated scession and its impacts. They all knew it.....Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton.......they all knew of the right of disunion. They had done it twice already.
My understanding is that the South paid 2/3 of the tariff receipts prior to 1860, and that was Lincoln's principal motivation to prevent secession>>
Is your understanding that the earth is flat too?
Utterly contemptible.
Lincoln said prior to 1863 that the end of slavery was not his motivation for war.
I believe the South paid more like 3/4 of the tariffs, but I put 2/3 to be safe. Maybe it was all about money, instead of the ending of the "excreable commerce," as Jefferson once called slavery.
Why was slavery ended peacefully everywhere else in the world (with a few places in
Africa still having chattel slavery) but required a war in the USA? I don't know the answer. Wouldn't it have been cheaper for the North to pay southerners compensation for all their slaves to avoid a war that physically destroy nearly half of the country?
Your experience is obviously different than mine, I never tasted a mint julip, but I'll have to admit I do like to
have someone else do my work for me. Thats a good idea making them work at gunpoint, that'll save me enough money to try one of those mint julips.
In March of 1787 Mdison wrote to Jefferson regarding the upcoming Convention: ".. I have sought for middle ground, which may at once support a due SUPREMACY of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be SUBORDINATELY useful." ..........This is exactly what the Delegates succeeded in doing.
If there is any "right" to secede it is extra Constitutional. But when the State Reps signed the Constitution, they affirmed it as document of governmental order. Without the Constitution and solving problems by its' order you have anarchy...one could even imagine counties seceding from states and towns from counties, and individuals from all of the above.
What part of Supremacy and subordinate is hard to understand here?
It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences.
The secession addressed is the withdrawal of a faction - they run and flee to prevent a quorum ("a practice which has shown itself even in States where a majority only is required"), not the secession of the state.
Irregardless, the Federalist Papers are NOT the Constitution. The are not part of any legal document ratified by the people of the several states.
Your 10th Amendment argument is not a full argument and it certianly doesn not finalize Secession by any means. If you believe this please provide a full argument.
Amendment X - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.Please post the relevant section of the Constitution that GRANTS the federal government to power to prevent a state from leaving. If you cannot do that, please post the section of the Constitution that PROHIBITS the states from seceding.
Please note, the Supremacy clause applies to elected officials and judges, not the people of a state so desiring to change their republican form of government, which IS contitutionally guaranteed.
Furthermore, per the Constitution, the federal government can only come to the aid of the states "on Application of the [state] Legislature, or of the [state] Executive (when the [state] Legislature cannot be convened)".
Secession is repugnant to the Founders.
Repugnant, but sometimes necessary. Perhaps you remember reading about their little act of secession that occurred in 1776.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.What part of "which shall be made in Pursuance thereof" do you have a problem with? The Constitution is not a blank check of powers.The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
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