Historical Ignorance and Confederate Generals

The Confederacy has been the excuse for some of today's rioting, property destruction and grossly uninformed statements. Among the latter is the testimony before the House Armed Services Committee by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley in favor of renaming Confederate-named military bases. He said: "The Confederacy, the American Civil War, was fought, and it was an act of rebellion. It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the U.S. Constitution."

There are a few facts about our founding that should be acknowledged. Let's start at the beginning, namely the American War of Independence (1775-1783), a war between Great Britain and its 13 colonies, which declared independence in July 1776. The peace agreement that ended the war is known as the Treaty of Paris signed by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens and by British Commissioner Richard Oswald on Sept. 3, 1783. Article I of the Treaty held that "New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States."

Delegates from these states met in Philadelphia in 1787 to form a union. During the Philadelphia convention, a proposal was made to permit the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, rejected it. Minutes from the debate paraphrased his opinion: "A union of the states containing such an ingredient [would] provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."

During the ratification debates, Virginia's 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." The ratification documents of New York and Rhode Island expressed similar sentiments; namely, they held the right to dissolve their relationship with the United States. Ratification of the Constitution was by no means certain. States feared federal usurpation of their powers. If there were a provision to suppress a seceding state, the Constitution would never have been ratified. The ratification votes were close with Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts voting in favor by the slimmest of margins. Rhode Island initially rejected it in a popular referendum and finally voted to ratify -- 34 for, 32 against.

Most Americans do not know that the first secessionist movement started in New England. Many New Englanders were infuriated by President Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which they saw as an unconstitutional act. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who was George Washington's secretary of war and secretary of state, led the movement. He said, "The Eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government." Other prominent Americans such as John Quincy Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Fisher Ames, Josiah Quincy III, and Joseph Story shared his call for secession. While the New England secessionist movement was strong, it failed to garner support at the 1814-15 Hartford Convention.

Even on the eve of the War of 1861, unionist politicians saw secession as a state's right. Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, "Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical and destructive of republican liberty." 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." The 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 extent." The New-York Times (March 21, 1861): "There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go."

Confederate generals fought for independence from the Union just as George Washington fought for independence from Great Britain. Those who label Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals as traitors might also label George Washington a traitor. Great Britain's King George III and the British parliament would have agreed.

House Armed Services Committee by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley in favor of renaming Confederate-named military bases. He said: "The Confederacy, the American Civil War, was fought, and it was an act of rebellion. It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the U.S. Constitution."

Walter Williams properly points out that in logic the American Revolution was as treasonous and rebellious as was The War between the States. Indeed, the Confederates generally regarded their war as a 2nd American Revolution. The Confederates lost the war of definitions because they lost the war.

Interestingly, the union faced a dilemma after their victory in that if they charged Robert E Lee with treason, which consists of rendering aid and comfort to an enemy state, the union would thus be admitting the Confederacy had established a sovereign state and that would be a conception contrary to a war defined as a Civil War rather than a war between nationstates. In the event, Lee was not hanged for treason and his children won an award of compensation from the federal government for the union's expropriation of the Lee mansion on Arlington Heights overlooking our national Cemetery.

When the revolution against Britain was fought, it was not thought that slaves were entitled to the same rights as whites, indeed so bereft of rights were they that they could be actually enslaved as chattel. Lincoln brilliantly redeemed our "Original Sin" skirted or even papered over by the Declaration of Independence in his Emancipation Proclamation and in his Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's brilliance was not universally acknowledged, certainly not in the rebellious South and not in many places in the North where race riots raged in New York City. Nevertheless, Lincoln's stroke converted a war which might have been regarded to be a conflict between sovereign nations into a moral crusade against slavery. Even Lincoln himself would acknowledge that he got a bit of help from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin profoundly change the culture and that ignited a Civil War which profoundly changed the Constitution.

Note: that part of the union that was ambivalent about making war to restore the union or paying the costs to emancipate slaves, was ultimately overcome because the idea of slavery became so repugnant that any constitutional question about the right of states to withdraw from a compact they themselves had made, became immoral if not indecent. Thus, was Lincoln able to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery and later the 14th amendment redefining Blacks as citizens and guaranteeing them certain human or, if one prefers, constitutional rights.

The postbellum career of Robert E Lee is one which finds him to be admonishing the students under his care at Washington College (later to be named Washington and Lee-and now to be denuded of the part of the name attached to Robert E Lee) to be good and faithful citizens of the union. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest who lent his name to the clan later worked to disband it and, remarkably, made his peace with the "Black Race" and worked for some degree of integration for them. At the end of his life, he could well be said to have reconciled himself to the result of the Civil War, the emancipation, and his God. More, he focused his efforts to advance the cause of racial harmony and was acknowledged to have done so by African-Americans at the time of his death.

Even as the acceptance that slavery at the time of the Civil War became repugnant enough to set aside constitutional issues of the right of succession, so in the aftermath of the war and up until the civil rights movement there was no moral crusade to set aside what was believed to be the constitutional reality of Jim Crow and segregation. One might observe that there was for a great portion of that time no imperative to grant women their civil rights or the vote etc.

With the civil rights movement gathering momentum in the 1960s, wholesale legislation was introduced to grant African-Americans full civil rights. In order to accomplish this cultural as well as legal revolution, a century old interpretation of the Constitution had to be discarded. For example, the idea of separate but equal could not be declared unconstitutional until Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954. The understanding of the Constitution was changed because our understanding of segregation changed. One might observe that it was changed on television as well is in the courts and legislatures.

Many argue that the civil rights movement, as necessary and successful as it was, has virtually rewritten the United States Constitution to the point where anything which can be associated with race will justify empowering the federal government. Certainly, we see today in the movement for reparations, in Black Lives Matter, and the tearing down of monuments, of riots with officials looking the other way, a culture change in all this that demands a rewriting of the Constitution, without bothering to observe the formalities of our constitutionally ordained process for changing the Constitution.

Even Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had to be ratified by a constitutional amendment but that was century and half ago. Today, who could have confidence that our Constitution will not be torn asunder by those waving the banner of "institutional racism?"

Sadly, it is not just the rubric of institutional racism which threatens our Constitution, the left has learned the potency of this stratagem and seeks to upend the Constitution with panic over global warming by way of just another example.

We conservatives tend to fight these wars as isolated skirmishes in which we must defend the statue of Robert E Lee or protect the Lincoln Memorial from graffiti but these battles are isolated erruptions of a greater cultural war grounded in new cultural realities that have tremendous power. History tells us they have the power to sweep away the Constitution.

But we have lost smaller wars and so we have no allies against these new cultural realities. We have lost the media, the churches, the bar associations and the medical associations, education from K through postgraduate, the deep state and, God help us, even the military. Donald Trump, supported by a few stalwart voices like Mark Levine or Tucker Carlson can hardly be enough to win the upcoming daunting political battles like the next election and, worse, unless President Trump can deliver a new Gettysburg address, we face cultural extinction.

Politics is downstream from culture and we have seen the Constitution is also downstream from culture.

He’s right. The Founding Fathers WERE actually traitors to the British Empire. The Confederates were not traitors to the US. The difference is the states, unlike the colonies, were sovereign. They never agreed to bind themselves forever. They expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.

“We, the delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation from the general assembly, and now met in convention, having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal Convention, and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us to decide thereon, Do, in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that 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, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will....”

“We, the delegates of the people of New York... do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the department of the government thereof, remains to the people of the several States, or to their respective State governments, to whom they may have granted the same; and that those clauses in the said Constitution, which declare that Congress shall not have or exercise certain powers, do not imply that Congress is entitled to any powers not given by the said Constitution; but such clauses are to be construed either as exceptions in certain specified powers or as inserted merely for greater caution.”

“We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected... do declare and make known... that the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the department of the government thereof, remains to the people of the several States, or to their respective State governments, to whom they may have granted the same; that Congress shall guarantee to each State its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Constitution expressly delegated to the United States.”

Furthermore, even Lincoln’s Secretary of State and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court admitted secession is not treason when there was talk of putting Jefferson Davis on trial. The context here is that Davis WANTED a trial. It would enable him to make the argument that secession was perfectly legal and in keeping with the original intent of the Founders.

“If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, July 1867 (Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3, p. 765)

“If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not a rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis] capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason” Chief Justice Salmon P Chase [as quoted by Herman S. Frey, in Jefferson Davis, Frey Enterprises, 1977, pp. 69-72]

To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can only exist by the sword?” Alexander Hamilton

“The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.” – Thomas Jefferson

“If any State in the Union will declare that it prefers separation” over “union,” “I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate.’” Thomas Jefferson

Even this guy thought secession “a principle to liberate the world”:

“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848

FACT: President Abraham Lincoln proposed ending slavery by 1900; the 13th Amendment could have been far different had Congress done what Lincoln proposed.

This is from his Address to Congress December 1, 1862...
“... In this view, I recommend the adoption of the following resolution and articles amendatory to the Constitution of the United States: “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two thirds of both houses concurring,) That the following articles be proposed to the legislatures (or conventions) of the several States as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which articles when ratified by three-fourths of the said legislatures (or conventions) to be valid as part or parts of the said Constitution, viz:
“Article -—.
“Every State, wherein slavery now exists, which shall abolish the same therein, at any time, or times, before the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand and nine hundred, shall receive compensation from the United States as follows, to wit:
“The President of the United States shall deliver to every such State, bonds of the United States, bearing interest at the rate of -— per cent, per annum, to an amount equal to the aggregate sum of for each slave shown to have been therein, by the eig[h]th census of the United States, said bonds to be delivered to such State by instalments, or in one parcel, at the completion of the abolishment, accordingly as the same shall have been gradual, or at one time, within such State; and interest shall begin to run upon any such bond, only from the proper time of its delivery as aforesaid. Any State having received bonds as aforesaid, and afterwards reintroducing or tolerating slavery therein, shall refund to the United States the bonds so received, or the value thereof, and all interest paid thereon...”

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