The Constitution. You know that Chief Justice Chase who Benson quoted? Look up what he had to say on the matter. Texas v White, 1869.
That was after-the fact.
How about before hand?
That ruling was about the repatriation of monies taken from the treasury, not about the right of secession.
Quote the part of it that forbids secession. I'm genuinely interested. It's not in any part of it that I can find.
The Constitution. You know that Chief Justice Chase who Benson quoted? Look up what he had to say on the matter. Texas v White, 1869.
As somebody whose ancestors had no dog in the Great Unpleasantness and as somebody that tries to see the issues as contemporaries on both sides saw it at the time, namely, in 1861 ......
Would it not have carried more weight for the Supreme Court to have made a ruling on the legality of secession BEFORE 600,000 Americans had died rather than AFTER 600,000 Americans had died and a retroactive legal justification was needed for the bloodbath?
How can the men living in 1861 be blamed for not following the reasoning of a Supreme Court ruling made in 1869?
Just wondering.
If the issue of the legality of secession was so black and white, could not the Supreme Court have ruled on the matter in 1861 before the rivers of blood started flowing?
There is no doubt in my mind that it was best that the Union was preserved.
However, prior to the time that the Parrott shells started flying and for four years after they stopped flying, nothing in the U.S. Constitution and nothing in any Supreme Court ruling stated in plain English that secession was illegal.
It seems to me that the entire issue of secession was one of those issues that the Founding Fathers simply forgot or neglected to address.
Sh!t happens.
Even to the Founding Fathers.
The reasoning of Texas v. White went like this:
The Articles of Confederation's described the American Union as "perpetual". The Constitution stated that it wanted to create "a more perfect Union" thereby suggesting that the United States was now more perfectly perpetual.
That is word play right up there with the "penumbras" of Roe v. Wade.
It can just as easily be argued that nobody but God is "perpetual" and that a "more perfect" Union would be a Union less blasphemous to God and therefore not claiming the Godly power of perpetuity. A nation cannot be "perfect" if you are blaspheming God by engaging in the ultimate hubris of claiming the Godly power of being "perpetual", can it?
How is the reasoning of Texas v. White or my reasoning or the reasoning of Roe v. Wade not wading waaayyy deep into "penumbra" territory?
In my view, if the Constitution is supposed to "say" something, I want to see it in plain English and not have a Supreme Court Justice playing word games with the Constitution as if he were a High Priest at the Oracle of Delphi reading chicken entrails or Justice Douglas divining "penumbras and emanations".
Is plain English too much of a bother to avoid the loss of 600,000 American lives between 1861 and 1865?
Is plain English too much of a bother to avoid the loss of the lives of millions America's unborn children in the past 34 years?
the next act of secession, will be the American Southwest. and it will be annexed to Mexico. The U.S. will lose 1/3 of their country without a shot ever being fired...
interesting...