Posted on 03/26/2002 10:38:41 PM PST by kattracks
Do states have a right of secession? That question was settled through the costly War of 1861. In his recently published book, "The Real Lincoln," Thomas DiLorenzo marshals abundant unambiguous evidence that virtually every political leader of the time and earlier believed that states had a right of secession.
Let's look at a few quotations. Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address said, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it." Fifteen years later, after the New England Federalists attempted to secede, Jefferson said, "If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in the union ... I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.'"
At Virginia's ratification convention, the delegates said, "The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression." In Federalist Paper 39, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, cleared up what "the people" meant, saying the proposed Constitution would be subject to ratification by the people, "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong." In a word, states were sovereign; the federal government was a creation, an agent, a servant of the states.
On the eve of the War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Maryland Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel said, "Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty." The northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace.
Just about every major Northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South's right to secede. New York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): "If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): "An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful could produce nothing but evil -- evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content." The New York Times (March 21, 1861): "There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go." DiLorenzo cites other editorials expressing identical sentiments.
Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, "It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense." Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives "to the cause of self-determination -- government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth." Mencken says: "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves."
In Federalist Paper 45, Madison guaranteed: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." The South seceded because of Washington's encroachment on that vision. Today, it's worse. Turn Madison's vision on its head, and you have today's America.
DiLorenzo does a yeoman's job in documenting Lincoln's ruthlessness and hypocrisy, and how historians have covered it up. The Framers had a deathly fear of federal government abuse. They saw state sovereignty as a protection. That's why they gave us the Ninth and 10th Amendments. They saw secession as the ultimate protection against Washington tyranny.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Contact Walter Williams | Read his biography
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Other than that, good article. Only I wouldn't call Lincoln "ruthless" -- other words come to mind, but I think that one is too dark. He was, however, very determined, and I think he did take everyone on a trip they'd have refused, had they known in 1860 what he had in mind for 1861. In my humble opinion.
Please post your favorite paragraphs as soon as possible.
The book must see the light of day as soon as possible. Really.
Cheers,
Richard F.
How much black label you drank when you said this laffer:
In fact, President Lincoln preserved the government that the framers created.
This hooting and snorting makes you look foolish and does FR no good.
Cheers ... and read the DiLorenzo book!
Cheers,
Richard F.
You've posted a lot of examples of Republican repudiation of the position Williams describes -- but to achieve elenchus, you'll have to demonstrate real unanimity within the GOP, not the proclaimed unanimity of the GOP platform, which was written before the secession conventions sat.
I agree with you that the national Republicans, being under the titular leadership of Abraham Lincoln from the moment be was nominated, opposed secession and promulgated the formula seen in the Ohio resolution, which we can call simply Unionism. If the Republican Party generally, and not just its victorious faction, felt the same way as shown by competing resolutions that weren't adopted, and by contemporary records and letters, then you will have refuted Williams as regards the Republican Party.
The question remains, was this Unionist sentiment and platform shared among the GOP, or was it a position laid down and held to by the Lincolnian faction? Did Lincoln leverage this position thrice, in order to make it the political religion of the United States and the shibboleth of centralizers and Statists everywhere?
The language of the GOP platform is revealing.....the last graf appears to call for the suppression of free speech, as well as of States' Rights. Very interesting. It would seem to offer essential evidence of Republican extremism before the fact, with respect to an appetite for suppressing and repressing the South. If I were a Mississippian contemplating my options in 1860, I should certainly have seen that sentiment as a gun pointed at my head, in the event of a Republican political victory. Again, very interesting. Thank you for that post.
Now just a minute ole hoss; please restate your contention explicitly in regard to what DiLorenzo said that you contend is false.
Regards,
Richard F.
Thanks
We have not needed to wait for the book to settle this matter. DiLorenzo cites, not just carelessly but upon a challenge to his thesis, the Lincoln Douglas Debates and the Peoria speech as two places where Lincoln reveals his passionate support of Whig economics. Upon inspection, the passages prove to be about slavery. When this is pointed out in a second column, he refuses to acknowledge that the passages in question are simply not about economics.
I won't attempt to predict the reaction of the President when the first state secedes within this decade. My guess is that he will offer a show of force, but before any blood is shed, he will let the state go in peace. Who will ever forget Boris Yeltsin's stand? One man faced down the Soviet Union's military might led by a column of tanks. How would it look for the United States to kill one sitting in the capital of the seceded state? How will it look to all Americans and the rest of the world for a President and the United States to declare war on a non-violent seceding state acting under the Declaration of Independence?
Is the United States prepared to be beseiged by terrorism of its own citizens making on a growing and unprecedented scale. My own bet is that the US will not use force or resort to war. If they can not contain the secession with local police/national guard without blood shed; I don't think they will resort to military action. If the seceding state used any show of force, violence or confiscation of US property or detained any US citizens against their will, it would be completely the opposite. The revolt would be ended with whatever military force was required.
The determinging factor will be the statements of the seceding state, that the action is not only non-violent but clearly peaceable without malice or infringement on the rights of any who did not wish to participate in the secession.
I'll meet your request when I get back.
Best to you,
Richard F.
First, referring to Lincoln as a "cockroach" only illuminates your odium of him and his program, and it doesn't do anything to persuade anyone that Lincoln was wrong in what he did, but only that you are very hostile to him, which makes it harder to accept your arguments -- in just the same way that John Nicolay's partisanship makes it harder to trust or accept his "history" of the beginnings of the Civil War, or his recounting of the issues that launched it. There is such a thing as being too angry to argue about something.
While I think Karl Marx may have been correct in his surmise of Lincoln as "‘the single-minded son of the working class’ who led his ‘country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.’", in your quotation of McPherson's quotation of Marx, nevertheless that doesn't establish that Lincoln was in fact a Socialist, much less a Marxian one. In fact, the numerous litmus tests used by Lenin to subdivide and "purify" (if that's the word) the doctrinal program and cadres of the Russian Communist Party tend to weigh against your assertion: only three points of convergence? Hardly enough to satisfy a real 20th-century Marxist.
Furthermore, some of the points of convergence are at least as Whiggish as they are Socialist, particularly the railroad infrastructure scheme, which echoes the Erie Canal, and the idea of establishing land-grant colleges (at one of which I was educated: truth in advocacy). The latter would not, I think, be recognized by anyone studying Marxism in the 20th century as a peculiarly Marxist position, because which came first? The Whiggishness of the land-grant idea, or its embrace by Socialists? I don't know; you tell me. I suspect the former.
I would tend to regard the presence of failed revolutionaries of 1848 in the Union army as a demographic accident; given that these men might have had to flee before their victorious adversaries, where should they have gone, that gave them a semblance of Europe, but without the secret policemen? I shouldn't be surprised to find such men in Australia and South America as well. A fair assessment of whether Lincoln's cause was a particular magnet for these men would have to review both the distribution of '48 revolutionaries in the aftermath, and the correspondence of the Union Generals like Schurz and Sigel themselves. Otherwise, all we have is a demographic fact of life.
I've heard the assertion about Joshua Speed before, and I don't know what to make of it; it could easily be a mischaracterization. Burlingame's book sounds like the kind one reads after 1 a.m., after everyone else has gone to sleep; I would want someone else to tell me whether Burlingame is "for real" before I would touch his book with a ten-foot pole, frankly. I would also tend to regard Lowry's book the same way, as a titillating sort of work, unless of course he Lowry turns out to be a credentialed researcher. I would want to know a lot more about both authors before cracking their books. The main trouble with assertions like theirs is that they constitute an extended ad hominem argument about Lincoln, until and unless someone can credibly show how his policies arose from some psychosexual well of discontent. I should be skeptical of such an argument anyway, but since Garry Wills shrank Richard Nixon to loud applause in Nixon Agonistes, I have been game to see sauce for the goose applied to the gander as well.
As for the Sandburg quote, are you saying, or is someone saying, that Sandburg is writing proto-gay code?
On the whole, stripping the marble off public figures is a necessary exercise for the student who wants to learn more than the accepted public pieties. Such efforts at revision are now underway for Robert E. Lee and Franklin Roosevelt as well, and I hope we all learn something from them. However, nobody benefits if the object of the exercise is just to throw mud. It may be true, but it also needs to be germane to hold our attention.
Are you seriously referencing whiskey papa & claiming to be a scholar at the same time?!?
I'm about convinced that you're as big a joke as he so obviously is.
It's the FR thread on Quackenbush's column, including the column itself.
If this isn't satisfactory, let me know.
cheers,
Richard F.
Of course not.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there any mention of the union of the states being permanent. This was not an oversight by any means. Indeed, when New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia ratified the Constitution, they specifically stated that they reserved the right to resume the governmental powers granted to the United States. Their claim to the right of secession was understood and agreed to by the other ratifiers, including George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention and was also a delegate from Virginia. In his book Life of Webster Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge writes, "It is safe to say that there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton to Clinton and Mason, who did not regard the new system as an experiment from which each and every State had a right to peaceably withdraw." A textbook used at West Point before the Civil War, A View of the Constitution, written by Judge William Rawle, states, "The secession of a State depends on the will of the people of such a State."
Quackenbush takes Lincoln's comments on central banking out of context to accuse me of inaccuracies. As I show in my book, "The Real Lincoln," Lincoln was devoted for 30 years to the Whig agenda of the federal government's monopolization of the money supply – so much so that he even had to bring it up in his comment on the Dred Scott decision, as Quackenbush admits. He was a passionate supporter of centralized government through money monopolization for his entire political career.
Quackenbush is unequivocally wrong when he says that he cannot find "a single word in any of the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates, that refers in any way, to an economic agenda." To be charitable, I will assume that, despite his claims of being a world champion Lincoln expert, Quackenbush never got around to reading the July 17, 1858, speech of Lincoln's in response to Douglas in Springfield, Ill., in which Lincoln says: "You remember we once had a national bank … the Supreme Court decided that the bank was constitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General [Andrew] Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank."
Yes, Lincoln is also discussing slavery in this speech, but it is relevant that he made it a point to insert his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party's opposition to central banking as well, and to devote considerable space to it. This sounds like an economic agenda to me, despite Quackenbush's refusal to acknowledge it.
To see how tendentious this response is, one must read the speeches in question. Quackenbush's summary is correct ... Lincoln references the Bank to make a point about the Dred Scott Decision, and for no other purpose at all in his argument.
Cheers,
Richard F.
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