Posted on 02/11/2009 6:06:39 PM PST by Kaslin
This is the 200th birthday of the first Republican to win a national election, Abraham Lincoln. It is good for Republicans today to remember Lincoln, not to be antiquarians, but to learn from his principled defense of the Constitution.
By becoming students of Lincoln, Republicans can win elections and would deserve to win by helping America recover its constitutional source of strength and vitality.
The greatest political crisis America faces today is neither the recession nor Islamic terrorism; it's not health care, education, immigration or abortion. It is that the United States Constitution has become largely irrelevant to our politics and policies.
All three branches of government routinely ignore or twist the meaning of the Constitution, while many of our problems today are symptoms of policies that have no constitutional foundation.
If we are to recover the authority of the Constitution and the many ways it restrains and channels government power, someone or some party must offer a principled defense of the cause of constitutional government.
They must understand not only the Constitution, but also the principles that informed its original purposes and aspirations, principles found in the Declaration of Independence among other places.
No one understood that better than Lincoln.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
You like to bandy Davis’ name about on every Lincoln thread. You ought to appreciate that.
It will take a while. I'm not hip to the reb talking points so I'll have to research. I wonder if Lincoln's dungeon for judges was any better than the Dixie Sing Sing in Tuscaloosa. That joint squeezed out a lot of good loot from the scalawags into the pockets of southern patriots.
I don't have to research that one. It's the same Article and Section that makes provision for unilateral secession.
Well...except for the small matters of;
1) No mention of perpetual Union or authority concerning the matter of secession in the Constitution, and
2) Any State was equal to any other State, but ALL were superior to the general government, as that government was a creation OF the States.
That which you create, you have a right to control. It's been there since Blackstone.
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But Lincoln also made it clear that be believed the Taney court was wrong when it ruled that Congress could not legislate slavery in the territories.
Again, it's that creation thing. While it's true the general government has the authority to legislate for the territories, there was no legislative authority over the legality of slavery, so it could not make territorial laws more restrictive than those in the States. It was for the People to decide.
2. [I]t is the opinion of the Court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void;
Dred Scott v. Sandford
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If Lincoln couldn't interfere with slavery in the states where it existed then how could he collapse their economy?
By using the morality of slavery as a springboard to force an involuntary Union of States to the detriment of those in the South where slavery existed, perhaps?
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The decision for war certainly didn't work out for the South now did it?
Well, with this giant stinking carcass of a pig that Congress has hanging over our heads, I'd have to say we all lost.
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BTW: Letter to Erastus Corning and Others
Abraham Lincoln June 12, 1863 Executive Mansion, Washington
The resolutions promise to support me in every constitutional and lawful measure to suppress the rebellion; and I have not knowingly employed, nor shall knowingly employ, any other. But the meeting, by their resolutions, assert and argue, that certain military arrests and proceedings following them for which I am ultimately responsible, are unconstitutional. I think they are not. The resolutions quote from the constitution, the definition of treason,
If you show me your definition of Constitutional treason, I'll show you mine. :-)
I'm not. When you can differentiate between the LEGALITY of slavery and the MORALITY of it, get back to me.
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Are there more of you here?
Thankfully, yes.
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I can already answer the question for you reciprocally.....
There are a LOT of you here.
That's assuming that the present day is worse than what it would be had the secessionists pulled it off. Had the CSA survived, I think it was inevitable we would have had a true bloody fight to the death before now, but even at the best we'd now have two overbearing central governments in Richmond and Washington, both armed to the teeth and eyeing the other suspiciously. Considering that the men behind secession were determined to go down fighting to the last mudsill, I think the nation got through the ordeal pretty well.
Considering the People are now forced to obey [at the point of fiscal punishment or physical imprisonment] ALL, local, State, and federal rules, ordinances, amendments, regulations and other 'laws'....
I don't see your option as being all that bad.
I hear Camp Douglas was a regular resort paradise.
L
I was thinking more of prisons for domestic political prisoners, but there’s no more of an excuse for systematic abuse of POWs. They were not all saints on the Union side either. Plenty of villains to go around on both sides of the Mason-Dixon.
The constitution does not specify who can suspend it while the militia act of 1793 does grant the president extrordinary power to among other things, supress rebellion, when Congress is not in session.
The congress, btw, when it returned to session, approved every act, including suspension of the writ, that Lincoln took in the days after Ft. Sumter.
Assorted lunatic ravings and distorted history from Lou Rockwell's anarchist fever swamp.
Kind of tough for most 18 year old kids who got drafted into the Confederate Army to come up with enough cash to buy slaves, but if they had managed to buy 20 of them, they would have been exempt from Jeff Davis' draft.
Which means that secession should be allowed, and the only question is what manner it should be accomplished.
2) Any State was equal to any other State, but ALL were superior to the general government, as that government was a creation OF the States.
True, which means that your view that only the seceding states had any rights or interests to be protected and that the remaining states had no say in the matter is rather ridiculous. It puts a whole Orwellian 'all states are equal but some states are more equal than others' spin on your arguement.
That which you create, you have a right to control.
If true, then with the exception of the original 13 Congress created every state that was admitted post 1787. So they have the right to control them?
Again, it's that creation thing. While it's true the general government has the authority to legislate for the territories, there was no legislative authority over the legality of slavery, so it could not make territorial laws more restrictive than those in the States.
Why not? Article IV says "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States." There is nothing sacrosanct about slavery. The majority of the states had banned it within their borders buthe time of the rebellion. And while I agree with you that Congress couldn't touch it in states that still chose to legalize it, there is no reason why Congress couldn't regulate it or outlaw it in the territories they directly controlled. Many people certainly felt that way, Chief Justice Taney and his miserable Scott decision notwithstanding. So you can be assured that had the rebellion not broken out, legal challenges to Scott v. Sanford would have been forthcoming from many directions.
By using the morality of slavery as a springboard to force an involuntary Union of States to the detriment of those in the South where slavery existed, perhaps?
The morality of slavery had been discussed worldwide for decades prior to Lincoln's election, and the South had shrugged its shoulders and turned its back on all of it. Southerners did not brook any interference from outsiders in its beloved and cherished "peculiar institution". Lincoln could have raged against slaver and I can't see where he could have forced the South into an involuntary anything. Short of the South launching and then losing their rebellion, that is.
Well, with this giant stinking carcass of a pig that Congress has hanging over our heads, I'd have to say we all lost.
Which you do so love to lay at Lincoln's feet while ignoring all the work done by both Roosevelts, Wilson, Johnson, Jackson, Jefferson, and all the presidents before and after him that were more responsible for the mess of a government we now have. You all love to believe that your blessed confederacy would have grown into some kind of small-government nirvana, and the only way to do that is to completely ignore the precedent that Jefferson Davis set through his actions, and to insanely assume that none of his successors would have followed his path.
You made no such differentiation. You argued that the mere possibility that the US, operating under its constitution, would use the political process to eliminate slavery (presumably once the western states came into the Union) justified the south's fight to succeed, because that would destroy their agricultural economy. That necessarily implies that you believed that the South both needed slavery and was entitled to retain the institution of slavery as long as it wished to, and that any effort by the nation as a whole to eliminate it would be illegitimate, wrong and a basis for war.
That is even farther than those who claim it was all about state's rights usually go. You posit that slavery was essential to the south, and the south was justified to defend slavery, not just the principle of states' rights.
You are sick.
Slavery can be understood as an institution that had existed throughout human history, and which had come to be prevalent in the south as a result of certain economic policies out of London, labor needs in a sparsely settled colony, and a market run by Arab traders. It can be explained, and our ancestors can be excused for being products of their time and age, but by 1860, in a civilized society, everyone with any sense of morality knew that slavery was a wrong that had to be phased out in some way. Hell, they knew that in 1776 and in 1789, they just didn't want to face the fight yet, and thought they could put it off a few decades. They thought that in 1820, too. The north knew it was wrong, and hoped to get it solved eventually; the south knew it was wrong and so started coming up with excuses and justifications so that they could sleep at night. They dehumanized themselves as well as their slaves in order to live with it.
By 1860, it could be stomached no longer. Enough was enough. Republicans did not pursue immediate elimination of slavery, they just didn't want it extended. Nothing in the constitution required slavery to be extended into territories, that was a political battle that Republicans were winning. Rather than lose under the rules set forth in the Constitution, the South said no thanks, it would pull out of the Union instead.
The right to secede as a theoretical proposition is debatable, and there are lengthy arguments on both sides, which have been well-written in this thread. What is not debatable among rational people is that Lincoln's decision to fight to preserve the Union, to declare that there is no right to secede, to defeat the southern confederacy, and in the process eliminate slavery as an institution, was the right decision as a practical matter and in the end saved this entire nation and its soul. We would not be a strong, unified nation that could have defeated the Kaiser, the Nazis and the Soviets had this issue not been resolved and had the Union not been preserved. (I have written elsewhere how I believe it likely that the Continental US would now be at least 3 or 4 balkanized states, with a history of war and rivalry, and the technological and economic progress we have made during this time would be significantly set back.)
To suggest that the institution of slavery not only could have, but should have, continued indefinitely into the future reflects a depravity and lack of empathy that can only be characterized as evil. If a professed love of states' rights resulted in 30,000 witches being hanged every year, or the enslavement of all Indians, or the gassing of all Jews or the serfdom of all Scotch-Irish, it would have been no less evil and no less deserving of extinction.
People who grew up with slavery, and in an environment where it was propagandized can have the excuse of not knowing better. You do not. It's been 150 years! I wish we could transport your kind back in time and put you under the lash. Then extend that existence for another 50 or more years. Then extend it to your children and then to your grandchildren. We cannot, so instead, all we can do is point out your ignorance and vileness, and keep your kind from having sway anywhere ever again. You disgust me.
And of course there was Club Andersonville, or the all inclusive resort at Belle Isle, and various other rebel death camps.
“If it is not enumerated in the Constitution it is then left to the individual states and the people.”
You are correct it is not enumerated, but I think the fact the States cannot secede is self evident. How can you have a document that protects individual rights and at the same time a document that can be rejected by any state at any time. The power of the constitution is zero if any state can decide it won’t follow a decision of the Supreme Court by the simple act of seceding. With your logic, any county of any State could also secede from a State and declare itself an independent country whenever it chooses to.
“You think the people of a state are going to ask their representatives to secede from the Union because they no longer want freedom of speech?”
In fact, there was censorship of abolitionist tracts in the South before the civil war, so clearly the South, on some level, wanted restrictions of freedom of speech. That’s not to say there weren’t efforts in the North to censor, but the Northern states would have been required to submit to any decision by the Supreme Court on that issue. The South, by threatening secession was sending a message they didn’t have to submit to the bill of rights.
The rights the South believed were being violated had nothing to do with the constitution. They knew that with the election of Lincoln they likely would not be able to continue dividing future states into slave and non-slave on an equal basis, thus weakening their power in the Senate, and threatening the existence of slavery. To claim your rights are being violated because you aren’t allowed to violate the the most fundamental rights of another group of people (blacks) seems like a rather spurious argument.
Yeah, so instead of that alternate history, we are now looking at it as a likely near-future.
Republicans need to re-enforce the idea that this is a Republic and Obama and the democrats have strayed away from that and they have done it on purpose.
Mine is "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." What's your's?
And since Davis, Lee, et.al. certainly waged war against the United States then I suspect you agree that they were indeed a traitorous lot.
You may be right about that, although if it happens now, it would likely result in only 2 nations, one Constitutional Republic, and one Socialist Workers Paradise. I have also written that there is a distinction between the secession that the south tried in the Civil War, which could not be founded on a failure to follow the Constitution, and our current situation, in which the Federal government refuses to follow the rules set forth in the Constitution and exceeds its authority.
This has happened since at least the New Deal, it has just lately gotten to the point where we despair of restoring the Constitution through the political process. In states where the people still do want to live by the rule of law, instead of under the thumb of all-powerful judges and federal bureaucrats, they can and should claim that breach of the Constitution justifies the state in refusing to follow the Fed's dictates any further. I don't advocate immediate secession or civil war, just laying the foundation for like-minded states to begin the process of restoring the Constitution. I refuse to live under a socialist authoritarian state.
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