Posted on 01/13/2004 9:01:35 AM PST by Aurelius
Dust jackets for most books about the American Civil War depict generals, politicians, battle scenes, cavalry charges, cannons[sic] firing, photographs or fields of dead soldiers, or perhaps a battle between ironclads. In contrast our book {[url=http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2XGHOEK4JT&isbn=0842029613&itm=7]Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War Mark Thornton, Steven E. Woodworth (Editor), Robert B. Ekelund[/url]features a painting by Edgar Degas entitled the "Cotton Exchange" which depicts several calm businessmen and clerks, some of them Degas’s relatives, going about the business of buying and selling cotton at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. The focus of this book is thus on the economic rationality of seemingly senseless events of the Civil War – a critical period in American history.
What caused the war? Why did the Union defeat the Confederacy? What were the consequences of the War? The premise of the book is that historians have a comparative advantage in describing such events, but economists have the tools to help explain these events.
We use traditional economic analysis, some of it of the Austrian and Public Choice variety, to address these principal questions and our conclusions generally run counter to the interpretations of historians. In contrast to historians who emphasize the land war and military strategy, we show that the most important battle took place at sea. One side, the blockade runners, did not wear uniforms or fire weapons at their opponents. The other side, the blockading fleet, was composed of sailors who had weapons and guns but they rarely fired their cannons in hopes of damaging their opponents. Their pay was based on the valued of captured ships. Historians often have argued that the Confederacy lost because it was overly reluctant to use government power and economic controls, but we show the exact opposite. Big Confederate government brought the Confederacy to its knees.
Some now teach that slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War – an explanation that historians have developed in the twentieth century. However, this analysis does not explain why the war started in 1861 (rather than 1851 or 1841) and it fails to explain why slavery was abolished elsewhere without such horrendous carnage.
We emphasize economics and politics as major factors leading to war. The Republicans who came to power in 1860 supported a mercantilist economic agenda of protectionism, inflation, public works, and big government. High tariffs would have been a boon to manufacturing and mining in the north, but would have been paid largely by those in the export-oriented agriculture economy.
Southern economic interests understood the effects of these policies and decided to leave the union. The war was clearly related to slavery, but mainly in the sense that Republican tariffs would have squeezed the profitability out of the slave-based cotton plantation economy to the benefit of Northern industry (especially Yankee textiles and iron manufacturing). Southerners would also have lost out in terms of public works projects, government land giveaways, and inflation.
The real truth about wars is that they are not started over principle, but over power. Wars however, are not won by power on the battlefield, but by the workings and incentives of men who go to work in fields and factories, to those who transport, store and sell consumer goods, and most especially to the entrepreneurs and middlemen who make markets work and adapt to change. This emphasis and this economic account of tariffs, blockade and inflation, like the focus of Degas’s "Cotton Exchange" reveals the most important and least understood aspect of war.
Perhaps no war in 1861. But war would have come nonetheless. An independent Confederacy did nothing to change the overwhelming economic and social pressures on the slaveocracy for territorial expansion.
We could not be half-slave and half free. Over time we had to be all one thing or all of the other.
But I find it interesting that in 1861, you would have allowed an illegitimate insurrection to violate the territorial integrity of the nation. If I were on your Senate jury, I would surely find that you were guilty of gross malfeasance of office, dereliction of duty, and would have voted for your impeachment.
If say California, New Mexico and Arizona unilaterally formed a Confederacy today, siezed Federal Property, and fired on Federal facilities, would you allow them to go instead of fighting?
Either the states seceded and the Articles are dissolved, or else they still are applicable. It was several years before the 13th holdout (Rhode Island & Providence Plantations) ratified the Constitution, so what was the legal status of the 12 prior? If North Carolina and Rhode Island never acceded, would the Articles still be binding?
Au contraire, what is mystical and absent, is the power to legally prevent secession, and any clause stating that it is prohibited.
Some might view changing the nature of a republic into one that coerces the parts of it to stay within it as a bigger dereliction of duty than allowing unwilling parts of it to secede.
Do you go to war when someone fires upon your fort and your soldiers?
I'm sorry to hear that. Let's alert the legal profession and have them rewrite the definitions in the law dictionaries. Apparently they have gotten it wrong all these many years.
"...the rights aforesaid cannot be abridged or violated".
P>
Can you show us what the Federal Government did in 1860-61 to cause "injury or oppression", or "abridge or violate" any rights? Violations of those causing 'secession' are in Madison's words, simply another name for revolution, while secession in the absence of intolerable oppression is nothing but a violation of a faith solemnly pledged -- i.e. an illegitimate insurrection.
What nation was destroyed? What nation sent troops into the Confederacy to subjugate her? What nation waged war against the Confederacy for over 4 years?
It doesn't look like any nation was destroyed.
"Firing on that fort will inagurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen...At this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend in the North...You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it put us in the wrong; it is fatal." -- Robert Toombs, April 1861
If you had been the other 'president' would you have followed Toombs's advice? And there would have been no war, either.
If you believe this to be true, then you must think that the reasons for their rebellion were insignificant in the first place.
It was the retained right of the state in question to make that determination, as New York had written, 'the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whensoever it shall become necessary to their happiness'. It was their call.
Agreed. No nation was lost. Just a rebellion put down.
No he wasn't because Jefferson Davis did not suspend the writ. The Confederate Congress did.
Taney's opinion in the Merryman case hardly supports your argument: Taney's first point finds all of Davis' later actions on the subject illegal, as the following excerpt shows: "First, the President, under the Constitution and laws of the United States, can not suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, nor authorize any military officer to do so." In other words, Taney believed that only Congress had that power and could not legally delegate it to the President or any other agency of government.
Wrong again. Taney's words were in reference to the act of a president suspending the writ of habeas corpus on his own or directing others to do it by his own authority. That does not prohibit Congress from enacting a law to suspend habeas corpus and in that law directing the president to execute it's suspensions. In fact if it were to do so the ruling would be absurd - it would effectively mean that Congress would have to physically go out to the courts and execute their legislation themselves.
But the Merryman case was not a Supreme Court case involving interpretation by the whole court of a constitutional question. It was only a lower court case in which Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney rendered an ex-parte personal opinion. As such, it was not an authoritative statement of the law of the land.
It is true that it was not a full Supreme Court ruling but nobody here has ever asserted differently. It was issued on the U.S. Circuit Court bench, which still carries the weight of a judicial ruling especially in the event that it is never appealed to the Supreme Court. Lincoln never made an appeal, thus Taney's ruling stands.
In the final analysis, the constitutional power to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus is a carefully limited emergency power. In the late 1700s when the Constitution was drafted, and in the early 1860s, communications were difficult and Congress was not in session very many weeks in any year.
That is absurd and flat out wrong. By 1860 thanks to the telegraph, virtually every city in the country save the unpopulated left coast states (which at the time sent a grand whopping total of 2 representatives and 4 senators between them) was accessible from Washington within a minute's notice. All Lincoln had to do is put out the call and every newspaper in the country would have reported it in less than a week's time if even that. Further, the assertion that Congress only met a few "weeks" a year is a lie. The Congresses of the era typically met 7 to 8 MONTHS out of the year. In 1860 for example Congress was in continuous session from New Year's Day (and in fact the month of december before it) through June 28th and came back on December 3rd through the end of the year for a total of 7 months, not weeks. In some years (such as 1862 and 1866) they went from January through July plus December for 8 months out of the year.
Accordingly, constitutional law recognized that the President had to have strong powers to act swiftly and unilaterally in response to threats to national security arising from rebellion or invasion
Cite me one single credible piece of constitutional law from the period that "recognized that the President had to have strong powers to act swiftly and unilaterally" on habeas corpus. You cannot and will not because there are none.
and in the eyes of many people the power to suspend the writ was one of those powers
Is that so? Then you should be able to name any given one of these "many people" who believed this, excluding of course the Lincoln administration itself, which invented the "power" for obvious reasons. So go ahead and name me one. Name one single legal scholar, supreme court justice, president, political scientist, founding father, or other reasonably qualified individual who held this view on habeas corpus prior to 1861. You cannot and will not because there aren't any. They believed the exact opposite and did so in virtual unanimaty as I have shown.
(the Constitution is really ambiguous on who has that power).
"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States..."
Now tell me again. Exactly what is ambiguous about that statement from Article I?
"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States" - Article I, Section 1, opening line.
Now what was that you said about Article I being silent again?
So you would allow 3 states to peel-off unilaterally. There is a future for you at Berkley or at some ultra-left think tank. Maybe you could head-up Kucinich's new "Department of Peace". ;~))
Wrong again. Circuit Court decisions are binding in their jurisdiction as long as they are standing (and in this case the Merryman ruling was indisputably within Taney's circuit jurisdiction). That means they remain in effect as long as (a) the Supreme Court does not take up an appeal AND overturn the circuit ruling, or (b) the losing party opts against appealing the decision and permits it to stand. With Merryman, Lincoln's intentional act of ignoring the ruling may be considered as opting against an appeal. Thus he is bound to abide by it.
And further, you see it applying to all states even though it has no force of law even in New York?
Well I guess we had to keep Masser happy and he was powerful unhappy about the ol Black Lincoln fellow being elected, so by the powers vested in them by the people of New York state, Texas could seceed.
Man, that makes splended constitutional logic. < / sarcasm >
And a rebellion would be comprised of rebels, correct? From Bouvier, 'Rebel - In another sense it signifies a refusal to obey a superior, or the commands of a court.' Lincoln refused to abide by a decision of the court.
Just pondering.
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