I wouldn’t worry too much about a leftist cult developing around Lincoln. White male.

…”he freed not one slave.”

Apparently the author of this propaganda would have his readers believe that Lincoln had nothing to do with the 13th Amendment.

This screed is garbage.

Lincoln didn’t die for his country. He died to take my country.

Even if the sanctification of Lincoln began just at his lifetime, we shouldn’t overloook the impact of the “red decade” between 1930 and 1940. A lot of leftists who looked for a civil war (either in the U.S. or, as the Trotskyites, worldwide) found in Lincoln a role model for the effective leading of such a war. That’s why literary praise of Lincoln rose so much in this decade and erased the successes of reconciliation at the early twentieth century.

Is Thomas Dixon Jr.’s tomb empty? Just checking.

Yes, Lincoln made the rebels attack Ft. Sumter, and had the North agreed to let the South exit the Union peacefully (when has the voluntary ceding of sovereignty to a lesser power ever happened in the history of human governments?) then the South would have been happy to not advance the spread of slavery westward and northward despite their leaders’ spoken and written intentions of doing just that.

Neo-confederates may be worse than Lincoln-mythologists. They long for a time that never was, their nostalgia replaces the harsh reality which was 19th century life, and their romanticism of Dixie expunges any sense of responsibility on the part of the Confederates. They ignore free-soil politics of the day and an economic system which the majority of white men at the time favored–a system which more closely aligned with the nation’s Christian and NW European heritage. They ignore that to a white northerner, slavery was a return to the feudalism of Europe–and that a slaver society introduced fears such as an abundance of negroes who may rebel and act wild as their kind is prone to do. They ignore that slave labor cut the wages of free white labor, just as alien labor cuts into native-born American wages today. These fears are what led the North to fight and win the war.

The Lincoln myth is just that–the liberalization and lionization of a moderate (by the days standards) and ultimately pragmatic politician. Lincoln was nothing special, had he been the president preceding or following the war he’d be seen as a failure. But if you’re going to criticize the man, do so by criticizing him, not a 20th century myth.

The court historian-approved Official Line on Lincoln is that he’s The Greatest American Who Ever Lived.

Bullshit.

As revisionist–i.e., honest–historians like Thomas DiLorenzo have shown, Lincoln was a murderous warmonger. He was a Constitution-defiling scumbag. He was a statist devoted to corporate welfare and crony capitalism.

In short, Lincoln set the stage for what we have today.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about a leftist cult developing around Lincoln. White male.”

Marxists, progressives, and neo-cons have long worshipped Lincoln for fundamentally transforming the Constitution and the American federal government. They all recognize that without Lincoln they could not have made the massive progress that they have so far.

Didn’t know Jesus was a railroad lawyer. one term member of Congress, and legislator in the state of Illinois.

Well, GW, Adolf Hitler certainly admired Lincoln. He thought Lincoln was America’s greatest president. Why? Because of Lincoln’s cruel willingness to pursue war as a means to an end. Hitler got to the heart of the matter.

This is a really poor article. It’s ridiculous to state that Lincoln personally did not free a single slave, when Lincoln never owned any slaves. What matters is that, as President, his Emancipation Proclamation and fervent advocacy of the Thirteenth Amendment most definitely had the effect of freeing millions of slaves.

Much of the rest of the article amounts to nostalgia for the Confederacy – a society whose constitution was explicitly built on perpetuating slavery. The Confederate leaders not only wanted to maintain slavery where it existed, but also wanted to create a huge slave empire throughout most of Mexico and the Caribbean. This is why James Buchanan advocated for the Ostend Manifesto while he was in London, and later, as President, tried to get Congressional approval for expanding into Mexico and Cuba. It’s worth noting, however, that in his last year as President Buchanan’s attitude towards the seceding Southern states was essentially identical to Lincoln’s, in that President Buchanan repeatedly denied that a State ordinance of secession could absolve its people from obeying the laws of the United States (see, for example, his Special Message on January 10, 1861). Moreover, after he left office, Buchanan repeatedly stated that Lincoln was justified in fighting against the rebellious States. That being so, why are Confederate apologists so worked up over Lincoln?

That Catholic leaders such as Pope Pius IX were likely rooting for the Confederacy is not much to brag about, given that this Pope also rejected free press, separation of church and state, and pretty much every other American ideal.

I think you make some valid points. Counter-narrative, which often ends up being just a photographic negative of that which it critiques, can be just as simplistic as the original (or predominant) narrative. As the author of this article says, building the narrative is just a tool to evangelize for the new religion. So it is with the counter-narrative.

That’s the problem I have with Thomas DiLorenzo – a simplistic portrayal of Lincoln as a tyrant. Lincoln was just one of many of the new Republican Party – a destructive force in it’s radicalism, to be sure, but radicalism did exist in the South, too. The radicalism of the South was probably more reactionary, though – a result of northern industrialism and the rabid religious abolitionist movement (as opposed to the earlier anti-slavery movement.)

To me, Lincoln was just the man who fell out of the sky and landed in the political landscape of the late 1850’s. A divided Democratic party, third and fourth party candidates and a thoroughly confused America got him the presidency in 1860. He wasn’t a very good president – the war was unnecessary, but other Republicans would’ve done the same or might’ve been worse.

Clearly slavery is evil – RIGHT!

If not Lincoln – what? Would there be two countries? Would the South still have slavery today?

All quibbling aside – it seems that Lincoln did what hat to be done – a civil war is never civil.

p..s. Sorry, but after reading all this hate, I need a shower.

Mr. Cathey’s piece is so loathsome, so dishonest and so ludicrous, one hardly knows where to start.

First, while Lincoln has been turned into a plaster saint in some quarters, no Northerner has ever idealized Lincoln to the degree that Southern apologists have deified the arrogant, incompetent Robert E. Lee- a man who recklessly wasted men and resources he couldn’t replace and couldn’t afford to lose.

Moreover, if it’s “manifestly untrue” that Lincoln “freed the slaves,” that “untruth” is, at worst, an oversimplification. If you want to talk about blatant lies about the Civil War, start with the lie that Southerners began telling the moment they surrendered: that secession was never about slavery!

Of COURSE it was about slavery, and every prominent Southerner would have told you so PROUDLY in 1861! Confederate VP Alexander Stephens stated it publicly before the war had begun, and not one Southerner rose up to tell Mr. Stephens, “Sir, I must correct you- this is all about states’ rights.”

Finally, it is appallingly dishonest to pretend that slave-owning Southern agrarians were all about peace and small government. From the earliest days of our Republic, slave-owning Southern agrarians were trigger happy maniacs, eager to go to war at the drop of a hat. Southerners pushed for the stupid, unnecessary War of 1812, which could easily have led to the collapse of our young nation. They pushed for the Mexican War, which Ulysses S. Grant correctly called one of the most unjust a larger nation has ever waged against a smaller, weaker one. Southern agrarians never encountered a war they weren’t eager to wage. Only after getting thumped did they start pretending they were always peace-loving homebodies who just wanted to be left alone, before mean old Abe Lincoln attacked them for no reason at all.

The reason why such defenses of the Old Confederacy have emerged and why Lincoln is treated as a tyrant is because the entire South has been tarred with the slander of Slavery and Jim Crow that continues today even when slavery no longer exists and all of the old slavers are dead.

The current liberal propaganda makes it sound as if Southern slavery was a widely distributed benefit that every Southern White family enjoyed. In reality, slavery was a system benefiting the 1%, the largest plantations and the various financial and government institutions that profited from it. The average Southern white was not a beneficiary of this system.

When slavery collapsed and the blacks were “freed”, Jim Crow and segregation had to be enforced so that Southern whites could protect themselves from black violence. This again, was a necessary result caused by the machinations of the 1% in maintaining slavery to begin with, something from which the majority of whites did not benefit.

Yet, liberal propaganda tars all of Southern White people as the “dark heart of racism” that fueled slavery, instead of the economic system established to sell valuable cash crops internationally, the very thing that fueled colonialism in the first place. It’s the trade in tobacco, sugar cane and cotton that fueled slavery, along with the various mercantilist practices of European governments. That is the feet at which you lay the blame of slavery, not at the feet of White children in the government’s Ministry of Propaganda.

“That Catholic leaders such as Pope Pius IX were likely rooting for the Confederacy is not much to brag about, given that this Pope also rejected free press, separation of church and state, and pretty much every other American ideal”

Which is precisely why he was a great Pope.

Poor Dr Cathey. He touched the uberpatriotic third rail.

Believe me, Dr Cathey, it is difficult to fight the junk contained in those 5th grade US history texts. But I admire your efforts to do so.

This seems to keep getting sent to spam for some reason. I hope the third time is the charm.

Bl. Pius was sympathetic to the Confederacy and sent Davis a friendly letter, but the crown of thorns story is apparently based on a misunderstanding – it was actually woven by Mrs. Davis. Here are a pro-Union and a pro-Confederate source that both agree on this:

http://cwmemory.com/2009/09/27/update-on-jefferson-daviss-crown-of-thorns/

http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/jeff-daviss-crown-of-thorns/

It is funny that the author condemns those who compared Lincoln to Christ, yet a few paragraphs later he praises an apparent comparison of Davis to Christ. Both are equally blasphemous in my opinion.

1. Can’t believe some of the comments, suggest that people read “Jefferson Davis, American” as a starter;
2. Slavery, except under Islam, is economic in nature. Slavery was dying out as steam engines took over the work of slaves, thereby making them uneconomical;
3. Lincoln had nothing to do with the 13th Amendment, he was dead;
4. Suggest the books, “Wrong on Race”, by Bruce Bartlett, and “Face to Face on Race; a compendium of essays by those closest to it”;
5. The break up of the Soviet Union is a fine example of great States allowing lesser States to secede, as was the break up of every colonial empire during the XXth Century; &
6. [And, we’re back to the blog, Justplainbill’s Weblog where this all fits right into the “intermediate argument for secession”. No way out of the, now $83,000,000,000,000.00 (83T USD) unfunded US debt, and the now almost $19T funded debt, even though the idiots haven’t raised the debt ceiling. Secession and complete rejection of the 14th Amendment and the SCOTUS rulings based on it, and the SCOTUS rulings based on the intentional misinterpretation of The Commerce Clause. Secession!]

BTW, when Lincoln was a congressmen in the 1850’s he stated openly on the floor of the House of Representatives, that secession was legal and just. Secession was voted on by the New England Confederation, led by MA, in Stanford CT in 1814. SC voted to secede in the 1820’s as opposition to Jackon’s unconstitutional tax law, and by the 7 Deep South states in 1860, and by the 3 Border States, led by VA in 1861. The border states voted to secede in order to protect their own sovereignty as Lincoln unconstitutionally raised an army and moved to invade the border states in order to punish the recalcitrant 7.

Game, set, match Orville H. Larson.

The states are, as they always have been, sovereign entities. A sovereign entity that enters into a voluntary union has every right to voluntarily leave that union. It is hard to think of a more “un-American” notion than that a sovereign people are not free to cut the ties that bind them to other such peoples. That was the actual crux of the Declaration of Independence itself, afterall.

The Seeds of Albion are perennials.

The Italian Duchy of Modena, under its duke Francesco V (called by modern writer and historian Sir Harold Acton, “the most reactionary ruler in all of Europe”), actually recognized the Confederacy.

Quite a feat, given that the Duchy of Modena ceased to exist almost two years before the CSA came into being.

And Pope Pius IX offered de facto recognition to the Confederate cause, and his sympathies were quite open

Neo-confederate sympathizers like Cathey have been arguing for 150+years that Pius IX “recognized” the Confederacy but the reasoning is embarrassingly tenuous. The only item they can adduce is that he did it by (probably inadvertently) *addressing* a letter to “Jefferson Davis, Honorable President of the Confederate States of America” but it was and is a pretty weak argument.

To Pio Nono’s credit, when he granted an audience to the CSA envoy Ambrose Dudley Mann, and the latter went on and on about the South’s “struggle for freedom,” the Pontiff did come back drily with the observation of the obvious cognitive dissonance involved–namely that the whole enterprise was clearly about several million people being denied freedom. Mann sputtered in confusion for awhile and then went on making the usual fatuous CSA boilerplate to Pius and his court.

@D.K. Keep dreaming. None (but one) of the founding fathers share your view. The one exception, of course, being Thomas Jefferson, who took no part in the Constitutional Convention, and therefore is probably the founder whose views on interpreting the Constitution should be accorded the least respect.

Jefferson’s ridiculous “compact” theory – which ignores the Preamble’s “We the people” lead-in – was not even shared by his Virginia compatriot Madison. Not one other state went along with Jefferson’s nullification theory in his 1798 Kentucky Resolution. Even Madison didn’t go to that extreme in his Virginia Resolution. Andrew Jackson also did not believe in the “nullification” theory – as evidenced by the stance he took during the Nullification Crisis. Even slave power president James Buchanan rejected the nullification theory. Give up.

From the earliest days of our Republic, slave-owning Southern agrarians were trigger happy maniacs, eager to go to war at the drop of a hat. Southerners pushed for the stupid, unnecessary War of 1812, which could easily have led to the collapse of our young nation. They pushed for the Mexican War, which Ulysses S. Grant correctly called one of the most unjust a larger nation has ever waged against a smaller, weaker one. Southern agrarians never encountered a war they weren’t eager to wage.

Not only that, but even libertarians ought to be aware that the CSA in the last two years of the war was as close to a true police state as anywhere in North America’s history. White men in civilian clothes traveling by train were required to have their tickets and draft exemption paperwork displayed at all times for inspection, “home guard” militias were everywhere, questioning military-age males as suspected “deserters”, and county “war committees” were making extra-judicial seizures of property all over the place. The mails and newspapers were thoroughly censored, not just for military secrets, but for any opinions expressed suggesting a negotiated peace that might include either a return to the Union, or emancipation, or both.

And Dixie kept spoiling for foreign wars long after 1865. FDR’s biggest bloc of congressional support for “everything short of war” and provocations before Pearl Harbor came from the South, as did most of Wilson’s support for a declaration of war in 1917. “Isolationism” was almost solely a phenomenon of midwestern and western states.

Same old conditioned thinking. Until that changes, nothing will change.

Hitler ‘pursued war’ because he was forced to.

“I believe now that Hitler and the German people did not want war. But we declared war on Germany, intent on destroying it, in accordance with our principle of balance of power, and we were encouraged by the ‘Americans’ around Roosevelt. We ignored Hitler’s pleadings not to enter into war. Now we are forced to realize that Hitler was right.”
– Attorney General, Sir. Hartley Shawcross, March,16th, 1984

“Germany is too strong. We must destroy her.”
– Winston Churchill, Nov. 1936.

“Britain was taking advantage of the situation to go to war against Germany because the Reich had become too strong and had upset the European balance.”
– Ralph F. Keeling, Institute of American Economics

http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068

‘Operation Barbarossa Was A Preventive Attack’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7999

You are a loathsome neo-Confederate nut case. I’ll offer a counter-proposal: let’s make. “Defeat of Southern Traitors Day” a national holiday, complete with urination on the grave sites of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

Things would have gone much better if a few thousand top Southern Traitor politicians and military commanders had been hanged or imprisoned after the war. Yes, I know that it probably would not have been possible with a Supreme Court dominated by Southern Traitors. Still, one could hope that a few extrajudicial executions had taken place.

An even better idea would have been to keep Reconstruction going for about another hundred years.

DiLorenzo does a wonderful job of dethroning this supposed savior. If you love the state, Lincoln is your man!

Interesting stuff about those thousands of European reactionaries who volunteered to actually fight for the CSA. To me, the only conceivable rationale for their enthusiasm would be that the US was the primary revolutionary power of the 19th Century (as it is once again today) and hence its break-up would impede the advance of revolution. Aside from that, what would Spanish Carlists, who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the pro-slavery monarchy of their own country, have in common with the slave-owning aristocracy who ruled the CSA? What for that matter, would they have in common with their fellow “Louisiana Tigers”, many of whom, I am told, were veterans of the revolutionary Garibaldi’s army and copied their distinctive uniform from that army? I do think it would have been a good thing had the CSA won their secession. The US would have been weakened as an imperial power and slavery was doomed anyway by the industrial revolution. But the interesting thing to me is the tendency to become a partisan in little understood foreign quarrels. Of course, some people are up for a good fight on any excuse.

What an absolutely beautiful article. I love the reactions it steered in the neoliberals and neoconservatives. Thus, the comments are the best proof that Mr Cathey is right. Good stuff that Unz got Mr Cathey to publish on his site. uzn.com is approaching amconmag.com and soon could exceed it on a much smaller budget. The intellectual level of such writing is the best the US can offer.

Personally, I am sure that I will never miss any Mr. Cathey’s articles.

The modern version of the Civil War is nonsense. A friend and colonial era historian, also retired chair of the history department at a major state flagship university, told me that they’d selected colonial American history over civil war history as a specialty as a Phd student because the war was then, as now, so awash in post-war and political narrative inspired mythology and fiction that my friend predicted it couldn’t be reformed for another generation or two. This was about 30 years ago.

Nevertheless Professor Livingston at Emory is attempting a corrective and Mr. Cathy is to be applauded for treading down that path as well.

This post by Livingston is a good place to start understanding the breadth and scope of the current fiction: http://mises.org/library/lincolns-inversion-american-union.

“Thomas Jefferson, who took no part in the Constitutional Convention.”

You mean aside from maintaining a continuous series of correspondence with his protege James Madison?

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/bor/madison-jefferson1/

BTW – the exaggerated meaning you give to words ‘we the people’ would be hilarious if it weren’t so absurd. Don’t go into law you’ll have to learn about statutory construction and here’s a hint, it doesn’t support your fanciful construction of the constitution.

From my blog:

Sep 5, 2011 – Congress Freed the Slaves

For some reason, I was taught that President Lincoln freed the slaves with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. I just learned that in July 1862, Congress passed and Lincoln signed the “Second Confiscation Act” to liberate slaves, but Lincoln took the position that Congress lacked power to free slaves unless Lincoln as commander-in-chief deemed it a proper military measure. Lincoln was concerned that it would cause more states to secede. A few months later, he bowed to pressure and announced that law would be enforced while taking credit for freeing slaves.

From another post:

Four slave states never declared a secession: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. They were allowed to keep 800,000 slaves during the war as they sent troops with Union armies to reclaim federal property in the South, not to free slaves. (see my Jan 2, 2011 blog for details) These states are referred to as “border states” in books, rather than loyal slave states, so as not to confuse the public.

Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to these states. Missouri and Maryland abolished slavery during the war. In Kentucky and Delaware, 40,000 slaves remained after the war, until freed by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

Do you realize that in attempting to rebut my factual claim that Jefferson took no part in the Constitutional Convention, which took place from May 25 through September 17, 1787, you provided a link to correspondence between Jefferson and Madison which began in August, 1788, and which related to what became the Bill of Rights? Do I need to educate you on the difference?

My fundamental point remains: Jefferson was abroad during the Constitutional Convention, and did not take any part in the debates at that convention. Admittedly, the same could be said of John Adams, was also abroad at the same time. But it was only Jefferson who would develop his wacky “nullification” theory in his protest essay for Kentucky in 1798 – and he couldn’t convince any other state to go along with this theory – not even his ally Madison, who made no reference to “nullification” in his separate protest essay for the Virginia legislature written at the same time. Moreover, during Andrew Jackson’s presidency Madison wrote another long essay rejecting Jefferson’s nullification doctrine during the Nullification Crisis.

Obviously, given that Madison is the “father of the Constitution,” having attended virtually every day of the Constitutional Convention (unlike Jefferson, who never attended even one day), we must give much greater deference to Madison on this point, which means that Jefferson got it wrong.

“after he left office, Buchanan repeatedly stated that Lincoln was justified in fighting against the rebellious States. That being so, why are Confederate apologists so worked up over Lincoln?” ————————-

Or put another way, why didn’t the elected delegations of the seceding states, some of which, like Tennessee, refused to secede until after Lincoln took actions though to be unconstitutional, determine to follow the older, more established and considerably more conventional construction of the constitution which posited states as operating in a voluntary union over the opinion of Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania to the contrary? Perhaps because Mr. Buchanan’s opinion on such matters was not deemed authoritative in his day nor should it have been.

“You are a loathsome neo-Confederate nut case. ” ———————-

In other words, Mr. Cathey, you are a scholar who found a way, even if small, around the firewall preserving the current orthodoxy of civil war myths dominated by Lincoln myths. Big Brother will not be pleased.

Really, Mr. Marshall should be cursing Mr. Unz. He’s the one who violated the prime directive to disallow subversive truths.

the South would have been happy to not advance the spread of slavery westward and northward despite their leaders’ spoken and written intentions of doing just that.

It’s not even a hypothetical — the Confederacy claimed the southern half of New Mexico Territory. Even if you believe in the right of states to secede, claiming a territory controlled by the federal government is an act of conquest, not secession. (It didn’t happen until the war had already started though.)

“Not one other state went along with Jefferson’s nullification theory in his 1798 Kentucky Resolution.”

You mean like when Wisconsin nullified the same Fugitive Slave Act that Lincoln would later enforce?

I’m sorry it wasn’t clear that the website I linked to included Jefferson’s correspondence to delegates during the convention as well as during the Bill of Rights debate. Here’s a sample from the convention involving Jefferson:

May 15. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson.

June 6. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson.

June 20. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison. “The negative proposed to be given them [Congress] on all the acts of the several legislatures is now for the first time suggested to my mind. Prima facie I do not like it.”

July 18. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson.

August 14. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington. Americans are “in the happiest political situation which exists.”

August 30. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams. “It is really an assembly of demigods.” However they were wrong to adopt a rule of secrecy.

September 6. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, “If the present moment be lost, it is hard to say what may be our fate.”

BTW – constitution scholars looking at Madison’s role argue he lost the debate over national sovereignty when pushing it. (See Wood, Gordon. “The Idea of America”. p. 183). And, he was first to acknowledge that the constitution was a compromise of competing positions. Wood notes that Madison’s ultimate contribution was not in designing any particular constitutional framework, but in shifting the debate toward a compromise of “shared sovereignty” between the national and state governments.[33][34]. That shared sovereignty, the tradition since 1776, is exactly what we see in the compact theory, the federal government has certain enumerated powers as long as there is union. But it doesn’t address, and therefore doesn’t change, the essential nature of the ultimate sovereignty of the states on the question of staying in union with other states. Whether it was a good idea to do so or not is one thing (Lincoln’s house), but the constitution does nothing to change the status quo which was state sovereignty on both the question of entrance and continued union. There is no major change occurring during the constitution convention changing this starting premise. There is no change in any American originating document changing this basic legal dynamic established at separation with Britain. Blow as hard as you wish, neither you nor Lincoln nor Harry Jaffe can invent one on your own.

Lincoln immediately became the founder and canonized “saint” of a “new” nation, in which the ideas of “democracy” and “equality” were enshrined as bedrock principles.
Indeed its a lot of myth-making, serving political purposes of many eras. The martyred saint Lincoln for example, can be invoked as a symbol of the sadness of war, but let us go on the fulfill the martyr’s legacy and so on.

Of those radical changes that came as a result of the Lincolnian Revolution and that directly affect us today, the cataclysmic effects of the (illegally passed) 14th Amendment must be highlighted.

Rather shaky. The 14th Amendment was perfectly legal- voted by the representatives of the people and certified as such, under the US Constitution. and it was a legislative Act- no “activist judges” did it. Assorted right wing racialist conservatives do not like the 14th Amendment because it actually gave black folk some civil rights’ like citizenship- a right withheld by the activist court in Dred Scott. But when activist courts were operating in favor of racialists they had no problem with it. They had no problem also with the Fugitive Slave Law, when the laws were operating in their favor. That’s the REAL issue, not any alleged legal niceties.

And it should be noted, southern states like Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, Texas and South Carolina all ratified the amendment ultimately. The final additional states at the that ratified the Amendment rendered assorted objections irrelevant.

Yet, the 14th Amendment grows directly out of the consequences of Southern defeat in 1865, in a War begun by Abraham Lincoln.

So what if the 14th Amendment came after the war? Is there some rule in the constitution saying “Thou shalt pass no amendment right after a war?” And who says Lincoln started the war? To the contrary, he strove mightily to prevent it- and his preferred solution to the slaver issue as is well documented was to ship slaves back to Africa. In fact as already noted above, he did not free a single slave, out of fear of southern sensibilities and some northern ones. Rather curious behavior for a man who “started” the war. Curiously, the role of the southern states in “starting” the war goes unmentioned above.

Certainly, there are those who would argue that the “Reagan years” or even the 1920s represented respites in this ongoing revolution.
Not really. The Reagan years saw a continuing expansion of government, including government debt. Reagan only SHIFTED the terms and directions of the expansion. He shoveled money at the government just like everyone else. As the free-market Mises Institute notes, government spending rose at a health clip- under Mr. ‘Small Government” Reagan. Says Mises:

Yet after nearly eight years of Reaganism, the clamor for more government intervention in the economy was so formidable that Reagan abandoned the free-market position and acquiesced in further crippling of the economy and our liberties. In fact, the number of free-market achievements by the administration are so few that they can be counted on one hand—with fingers left over.”

http://mises.org/library/sad-legacy-ronald-reagan-0

In my research over the years, specifically while I studied in Spain and Switzerland, and then taught in Argentina, I was struck by the fact that almost without exception, all 19 th century traditional conservatives, Legitimists, and Catholics not only favored the Confederacy in its crusade against the North, but they did so enthusiastically

Actually the Catholic Church in America remained a neutralist stance during the Civil war, even as it infuriated Southerners for its sympathy towards the suffering of the south’s slaves. On a local level . Archbishop Hughes of New York rallied Catholic northerners to his side, calling for the national flag to be displayed at churches, and advocating conscription. Reaction was mixed at times, but the point is that the Catholic Church and Catholics were no monolithic force in favor of the Confederacy- far from it. And Catholics fought on both sides- just like Protestants.

As many as 1,800 former soldiers of the old Bourbon Kingdom of Naples (Two Sicilies) arrived in Louisiana in early 1861 to offer their services to the South after their defeat by the arms of the liberal Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy. Volunteers from the Carlist Catholic traditionalists in Spain came by way, mostly, of Mexico. According to Catalan historian, David Odalric de Caixal, as many as many as 4,000 Carlists enlisted in Confederate ranks
No doubt true but these numbers are trivial in a war that saw hundreds of thousands aof men deployed on both sides.

What we are talking about is, then, the triumph in the 19 th century of a radical transformation in the way our society and our citizens look at history and change. Indeed, the result was the enthronement of the “Idea of Progress” as the norm, such that movement in history always is “progressive” or, better described, “a la Sinistra”–to the Left.
Somewhat questionable. The “idea of progress” was well entrenched long before the Civil War, and indeed formed part of the early advocacy of Western Expansion long before the Civil War. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase era is full of notions of linear progress. And it is an open question whether “progress” in that era, could be conceived of in terms of “left wing” or “right wing” in our modern era. Many “progress” boosters for example had no problem using force or deceit to dispossess the native peoples, even after solemn “treaties” and assurances had been made. It is difficult to see how this can be shoehorned into a sort of today’s “left wing” model.

MAP says:
The current liberal propaganda makes it sound as if Southern slavery was a widely distributed benefit that every Southern White family enjoyed. In reality, slavery was a system benefiting the 1%, the largest plantations and the various financial and government institutions that profited from it. The average Southern white was not a beneficiary of this system.

Actually slavery was beneficial in many ways to the average southern white. The slave plantations provided a ready market for food and other products for example, as many large plantations concentrated their resources on cash crops and found it cheaper to procure supplies to keep their labor forces alive from surrounding white peasantry.

Slavery was also a recognized route to white social mobility- the ideal being to get some land and get some slaves to work them. The accruing income could be multiplied by shrewd investments in even more land and slaves, and parlayed into the social prestige of joining the local nobility or “big men”. Slavery as also a massive engine of economic growth n t only regionally but nationally as well, with spillover that was quite beneficial to ordinary whites, aside from the cheap, coerced labor they enjoyed. In addition there was much small scale ownership, or the renting of slaves by others. Direct ownership was not necessary to profit from slave bodies. See Robert Fogel’s standard reference work in the field- Without Consent or Contract.

It’s the trade in tobacco, sugar cane and cotton that fueled slavery, along with the various mercantilist practices of European governments. That is the feet at which you lay the blame of slavery, not at the feet of White children in the government’s Ministry of Propaganda.
But all economic systems require people to maintain them and their profits. Whites in the south opted for enslaving others for multiple generations to profit in tobacco, sugar and cotton. Abstract “industry” was not wielding whips and chains- people were.

No, I mean “no other state” in 1798. The Alien and Sedition Acts were unpopular laws in many states, but only Kentucky drafted a resolution – authored by Jefferson – with the ill-considered and dangerous “nullification” idea.

I realize that in subsequent decades states in both North and South would embrace nullification in certain contexts. But the idea originated with Jefferson, and Jefferson was the least knowledgeable of the major founders when it came to interpreting the “original intent” of the Constitution. No other major founder introduced a more harmful and divisive idea into America’s body politic than Jefferson did with his “nullification” theory.

Another great moment in Lincoln, make it up as you go along, jurisprudence.

You do not know what you are talking about, I am afraid. “Nullification” was the Constitutional theory that a state, as a sovereign entity, could nullify a federal statute, within its individual sovereign domain, while remaining part of the Union. The inherent right of a sovereign state to secede from the Union altogether is a wholly separate Constitutional issue. Your inability to grasp the Constitutional difference between the theory of “nullification,” on the one hand, and “secession” as the inherent right of a sovereign state, on the other, is hereby duly noted.

Even if secession had been universally recognized as legal, there would have been war. Despite secession being voted down in Missouri and Kentucky, both these states’ pro-Confederate minorities set up “state governments” that “seceded” and sent Congressmen to Richmond. The Union would have had to do something about that, and the CS would have had to respond.

In addition, one thing that keeps getting overlooked is that secession, in the South, was popular in direct proportion to how important slavery was in the local economy. In the Appalachian and Ozark regions, secession was not popular and pro-Union guerrilla units appeared; one county in Alabama, Winston, actually counter-seceded. One of the reasons why Lee rejected the idea of turning guerrilla in the last days of the war was because he knew that they would have to base any such insurrection out of the mountains, which were crawling with Union sympathizers who did not love the flatlanders who had always run their states for their own private benefit.

You have a good point. It’s like reading the history of Spain through Anglospheric interpretation. You never get the impression that Spain was a major superpower.

How about they were concerned that the US would be transformed away from what it was, a weak union of mostly independent actors, to what it became, a highly centralized empire.

You describe determinations of statutory intent, not by the canons of statutory construction that existed at the time of the Founding and for hundreds of years prior but according to your own (I’d say developed but I know that other fabulists got there before you, Harry Jaffe in particular) idiosyncratic notions of how such ‘intents’ are determined from an historic record of a legislative act like the constitution.

Suffice it to say, keeping tabs on which founder was present the most at meetings where positions he advanced weren’t adopted and who later rejected a later related, but not entirely parallel policy, nullification, hardly constitutes a substitute for the longstanding, well-understood and conventional, to this day, notions of how one determines the meaning of a legislative decision recorded in a legislative document. That process is called statutory construction and one of its prime directives is that legislators are presumed to act with knowledge of legal conventions and precedents of the time they take legislative action and any action to reverse precedent must be done so explicitly; that determinations of intent require first and foremost an examination of the document itself not post-hoc evaluations by legislators even when such evaluations are directly on point, not tangential like nullification; that the legal arrangement going into the constitutional convention was one of sovereign states operating in congress or union together after separation from Britain; that a reversal of that convention and precedent would require clear language doing so.

As it turns out the historic record is clear that no such agreement to reverse the status quo was achieved, or ever desired by a majority of conventioneers, and the document certainly records no such reversal of precedent. Your repeated reliance on your own suppositions about attendance and desire to imagine nullification as a dispositive proxy issue to the contrary.

Secession only became popular in Tennessee after Lincoln initiated what was widely held, even by previous opponents of secession, to be an unconstitutional exercise of war powers. Even East Tennessee, often cited as a hotbed of Union sympathy (it was by comparison but mostly because it sold agriculture products to the North and therefore had trade sympathies), was split county by county and within counties. Many in East Tennessee opposed Lincoln’s overreach.

But, for people like Calhoun and his followers, it was just a short step from the right of nullification to the right of secession. Calhoun clearly based his argument on Jefferson’s “compact” theory, and his “nullification” doctrine.

Fortunately, Madison stepped in during Jackson’s Nullification Crisis and clarified that both the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were only statements of opinion, with no binding legal effect. Madison also maintained that Calhoun was using “nullification” in a different, and more dangerous, way than Jefferson intended. Finally, in letters to Trist (to be forwarded to Jackson) Madison stated in no uncertain terms that the federal union was indissoluble and perpetual.

On these issues, there can be no reasonable doubt that Madison is a better authority than Jefferson.

I wasn’t trying to articulate a new theory of statutory construction, or replace the time-honored methods you describe. But, when so many Confederate sympathizers cite Jefferson as the ultimate origin of the “compact” theory and the separate “nullification” doctrine – the two crucial planks in Calhoun’s theories regarding the right of secession – it’s worth pointing out that, of all the leading founders, Jefferson’s views on these issues are uniquely his. Since Jefferson never attended the Convention, where he could have exposed his views to rigorous debate, we are left with the conclusion that Jefferson is an outlier on these issues.

I may be misreading your comment-do you mean that if the secession of the six Gulf states, and South Carolina, had been universally recognized by other governments of the world (Great Brittan, France, etc.) that there would have still been war, or were you including universal recognition by the state governments and peoples of the north? Given that Mr. Lincoln could not have raised an army to invade the seceding states without the support of millions of northern men, not to mention their state governments and representatives in congress, I’m going to assume (I know, sorry) that you meant the wider world.

That said, I think you are mistaken in supposing that war was inevitable if the original Confederacy of seven states had received immediate recognition from major powers. After all, Lincoln was a cagey politician-and if Great Britain, France, or both had come out as being willing to defend a recognized CSA right away he probably would have known to back down in face of the political and military reality, which was that there was not an overwhelming amount of support in the north for military action against the Confederacy before Ft. Sumter and that the United States military was completely unprepared to fight a major power on the land or the sea. He would have been smart to use the absence of the senators and representatives from the seceded states to solidify the position of the Free Soilers and supporters of the American System.

There were not enough supporters of secession in the mid-South (TN, NC, VA, AR) or the upper-South (KY, MD, MO) to seriously threaten to take those states out of the union until Lincoln called for volunteers to invade the Confederacy-directly attacking the foundation of the original republic-so it seems unlikely that, had the original seven been left alone, there would have been “pro-Confederate” minority governments set up in any of those states if there was no war to tip the balance of support closer to secession in the first place.

Remember, a majority of voters in the mid and upper South swallowed the election of Lincoln even though they did not like it.

Madison’s own words (in the Virginia Res. against Alien & Sedition Act:

Because of Virginia’s “warm attachment to the Union of the States…it is their duty to watch over and oppose any infraction of those principles which constitute the only basis of that Union.” According to Madison, the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states by which they delegated particular powers to the federal government. “This Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties.” These powers were “limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact,” and were “no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact.” In other words, the legitimate powers of the federal government were limited to those which the states had delegated in the Constitution. If the federal government ever violates the constitutional limits on its power, however, then the states must invoke their sovereignty and unite against encroachment. “In the case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining…the authorities, rights, and liberties pertaining to them.”

Yes, Madison spoke of a “compact” among the States. But that emphatically does not mean Madison ever endorsed any argument, based in whole or in part on his understanding of this “compact,” that there was either a unilateral right in any State to “nullify” any Federal law, or that any State had the right to secede from the Union. For example, see this letter from Madison to Trist:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-nicholas-trist/

Notice, Madison describes the view of the “nullifiers” as a “colossal heresy” and also states that “the claim to secede at will should be put down.”

But let’s move beyond Madison and Jefferson. After all, they are only two of the founding fathers. If we can’t find support for the view that States have a right to nullify and/or to secede in the writings of any other major founder, then we must conclude (again) that the Jefferson/Calhoun view is an outlier, well outside of the consensus views of all the other major founders. Where, for example, can we find views similar to Jefferson/Calhoun expressed by Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, Jay or Marshall?

That Madison considers the nature of the union a compact of states, who can under extreme conditions, withdraw, is clear. “The former as one only of the parties, owes fidelity to it, till released by consent, or absolved by an intolerable abuse of the power created. ”

He’s clearly trying to walk the tightrope between possessing a right and somehow being constrained from exercising it according to a trigger of ‘intolerable abuse’ otherwise justifying a split. However, the central question for constitutional purposes is whether the union is so arranged so that power to leave resides outside the federal government in any form whatsoever. Madison say, yes, it does. His desired qualifications no doubt reflect his preferences but not the language of the constitution. But, as noted earlier, the constitution is a legislative deal where Madison didn’t get what he wanted.

To your speculative ‘outlier’ argument leading to the question “[w]here, for example, can we find views similar to Jefferson/Calhoun?”

How about in the ordinances of ratification by the states of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island? From Donald W. Livingston, “The Secession Tradition in America,” in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State and Liberty, Transaction Publishers, 1998:

“These sovereign states formed the Articles of Confederation in which, again, the sovereignty of each was asserted and mutually recognized. Although the Articles of Confederation were supposed to be perpetual and could not be changed without unanimous consent, a number of states nonetheless sought to dissolve the Union. It was agreed (though not unanimously, since Rhode Island vetoed the Convention) that if nine states seceded and ratified the proposed constitution, a new Union would obtain between the nine seceding states. This was done, and by an act of secession the Union was dissolved leaving North Carolina, Virginia, Rhode Island, and New York to form a new union or to remain separate and independent states. Eventually, though reluctantly, all four entered. But Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island declared in their ordinances of ratification that, being sovereign states, they individually reserved the right to secede, and they asserted this right for the other states. This did not have to be asserted, since everyone knew that secession was an action available to an American state.12”

It wasn’t until after the advent of the internet that I began to be exposed to facts and opinions different from the ones I was spoon fed in school. Everything regarding Lincoln was hagiographic, with Lincoln statues, streets, parks, libraries and schools everywhere. It’s nice to have one’s eyes opened up.
Let’s say secession succeeded, what would the picture have been like? We’d have had two mutually hostile countries always at war with each other or threatening it, much like India and Pakistan. Being weaker, foreign intervention might have occurred, one side or the other inviting the British or French in to help against the other. The black population was mostly in the South; how long would slavery have lasted? Once slavery ended they’d have had a huge black population on their hands that presumably they couldn’t ship out northwards, so what would the South have ended up looking like?

GW says:
had the North agreed to let the South exit the Union peacefully (when has the voluntary ceding of sovereignty to a lesser power ever happened in the history of human governments?) then the South would have been happy to not advance the spread of slavery westward and northward despite their leaders’ spoken and written intentions of doing just that.
Yes, the neo-Confederates have just as many shaky myths as the Lincoln mythologists. ANd if some of the south’s leaders had already vowed by word and letter that they supported the spread of slavery northward and westward, they should be taken at their word. There is no guarantee that a peaceful split would have prevented that. New states could have adopted slavery and then allied themselves to the Confederates. The north American continent would have been split up into slave and non-slave states.

They ignore free-soil politics of the day and an economic system which the majority of white men at the time favored–a system which more closely aligned with the nation’s Christian and NW European heritage.
It is an open question whether it aligned with the Christian heritage. It was the Christian heritge that largely produced or energized the Abolitionist Movement both in England, and in the United States. And after the Civil War, hundreds of church mission teachers laid the foundations for black education in the south- some at the cost of their own lifes.

They ignore that to a white northerner, slavery was a return to the feudalism of Europe
Not necessarily. To many a white northerner, slavery was a system to feed on for profit. The white North was deeply complicit in the system, and reaped numerous benefits, as the detailed study “Complicity” shows. See the book: Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, written by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank.

They ignore that slave labor cut the wages of free white labor, just as alien labor cuts into native-born American wages today. These fears are what led the North to fight and win the war.
Slave labor did in part suppress free wages, but that was not uniform all over. Wage drops in one area, could be offset by wage increases or job expansion elsewhere, as the division of labor and comparative advantage kicks in for different areas. The flip side is that the prosperity brought on by slavery boosted total output and trade flows and thus boosted the northern economy.

But if you’re going to criticize the man, do so by criticizing him, not a 20th century myth.
Indeed. Some attempts to link Lincoln to 20th century “liberalism” are a shaky stretch.

“[W]hen has the voluntary ceding of sovereignty to a lesser power ever happened in the history of human governments?”

What lesser power? The states were either sovereign, in their capacity to leave, or they weren’t. There was no lesser and higher power in the constitutional arrangement as far as determining sovereignty sufficient to secede was concerned. And, by way of an example, the prior Union under the Articles of Confederation was dissolved initially through an act of secession of only a portion of the states (see my response to FederalistForever at #59 above). In other words, by the Civil War the collection of American states calling themselves the United States had already engaged in two secessions. One utilizing force, against Britain, and another peacefully, when only a portion of the states dissolved the first Union.

The states are sovereign entities, which joined together in a voluntary union. The right to secede from such a union is inherent in state sovereignty. Nothing in the Constitution itself changed that fact; it did not bind the sovereign states which ratified it to the new Union in perpetuity, against the later will of the respective peoples of those sovereign states. The language of the Constitution itself is what matters– not the personal opinions of individual politicians, found in letters or diaries. If the Constitution had tried to tie states to the Union in perpetuity, explicitly, none of the states ever would have ratified it!

That’s the best you can do? I ask for a quote from a major founding father other than Jefferson or Calhoun and you direct me to . . . what, exactly? I can’t even tell if we’re dealing with the ratification of the Constitution – that you include Rhode Island suggests not, since RI did not hold a ratifying convention. If this is instead the Articles of Convention, well, that was a notoriously weak union. It couldn’t even adequately feed and maintain the revolutionary troops – we had to get outside help from France and the Dutch!

I’m also perplexed by the last line of the Livingston quote – “since everyone knew that secession was an action available to an American state.” Everyone? Per our discussion above, Madison circa 1832 would not share this view – recall he said “the claim to secede at will should be put down.” And, as a gesture of good faith, I haven’t even cited to people like John Marshall or Daniel Webster.

However, let’s say that you’re right that Madison would permit secession in the case of an “intolerable abuse.” One thing we can be sure of is that none of the seven Southern states who tried to secede before Lincoln’s inauguration had suffered any such “intolerable abuse.” Lincoln hadn’t even done anything yet! Let’s be honest: the real reason these seven states seceded when they did (with “seceded” here understood to include actions such as taking over all Federal forts and keeping all Federal gold deposits) is that, for the first time, the “cotton south” was faced with the prospect of a federal government wherein the anti-slavery element would control BOTH the House and the Presidency. This had never happened before. Far from having suffered some “intolerable abuse” in the period between Lincoln’s election and Lincoln’s inauguration, the seceding states were in fact carrying out one of the most hysterical and overwrought reactions to an electoral defeat in history!

Had it reached the point where a win by the South was inevitable the North would have likely resumed negotiations regarding greater financing (than previously expended) to make the Liberian colonization effort a success. What the railroad and commercial interests behind the war would have done is anyone’s guess. Perhaps greater investment in the South to make it more amenable to non-ag industry and less beholden to agricultural interests (and thus willing to raise tariffs as the commercial interests desired). On the other hand, for the South to have reached a point of probable success would likely have required British intervention. And, the British wanted continued cheap access to southern ag commodities.

How about asking what would have happened if someone other than Lincoln had been president? I think most anyone but Lincoln would have avoided war. The man was an unparalleled disaster for this country and proof we are never as secure as we like to think. Which is why his deification is so ironic.

et’s say secession succeeded, what would the picture have been like? We’d have had two mutually hostile countries always at war with each other or threatening it, much like India and Pakistan. Being weaker, foreign intervention might have occurred, one side or the other inviting the British or French in to help against the other.
Quite possibly. And new states could opt to be slave states and align themselves to the Confederacy, as well as other foreign powers.

The black population was mostly in the South; how long would slavery have lasted? Once slavery ended they’d have had a huge black population on their hands that presumably they couldn’t ship out northwards, so what would the South have ended up looking like?

That’s a good question. You sometimes hear various apologists saying that “slavery would have died a natural death.” Maybe but when? 100 years? 200? Its all well and good if you are not a slave, and benefiting from the system, to talk about “eventual disappearance” – even as multiple generations of other people are brutalized, and held in bondage. There was a strong possibility that had the South won, slavery might have gone on for centuries after. Indeed some historians make just this point- a southern victory would have encouraged other slave holding regimes in South America and the Caribbean, to continue business as usual. Again its easy if you are a traditionalist beneficiary on top of the system to dismiss its cruelty and brutality as something “eventually” disappearing. Sure. You would still be getting paid for generations before any “eventual” disappearance.

As for the black population I don’t think they would have sat still. Haiti offers a glimpse. Over half the black population of Haiti died off within 10 years, simply units of production to the beneficiaries of the system, who merely replaced “wastage” with fresh bodies from Africa. It was one of the most brutal slave regimes in the Western Hemisphere, producing massive quantities of wealth for white France. In a situation like this, the blacks had little to lose. What hindered them was weapons and time and opportunity to organize. The French Revolution split the whites and gave an opening. The rest is history. Under your scenario, it is quite possible one of the competing states near the victorious Confederacy might have encouraged a “people’s war” to arm the blacks. Imagine a black liberation army waging guerrilla warfare over a broad front, from Kentucky to Florida. At the very list they would tie down massive Confederate resources.

This is not some far fetched scenario. A small number of black freedom-fighters, allied to the Seminole Indians tied down the US Army in Florida for years, causing one of the most expensive campaigns of that era. If something like this was combined with an invasion from one of the competitor states, a liberation campaign against the CSA might have been feasible. Again, history shows what can be done. In Vietnam, countless Viet Cong guerrillas, allied with NVA regulars infiltrating south, tied down and defeated the US policy for Vietnam, by attritional warfare over time, forcing a face-saving pullout. In Haiti, guerrillas, operated with main force formations to defeat the French, Spanish and British.

A great hosing down of the biggest killer of Americans in history here
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/thomas-dilorenzo/the-don-fanucci-of-american-politics/

You keep trying to promote this reading of Madison as something other than a political opponent of the compact arrangement (who lost that particular battle) and extend that to imagining that Madison’s understanding of the adopted constitution is that it was not a compact. His words clearly say otherwise. You need to differentiate between Madison’s jurisprudential understanding of the constitution and his failed political desires as a convention delegate.

Madison, by his own words, shown in our previous correspondence, believed that the constitution was a compact of sovereign states who, though he fervently desired they not secede, nevertheless acknowledged that they could. Livingston and Wood, two scholars I cited before, also decline to adopt your theory of Madison’s jurisprudence as one of denying the compact theory. Livingston comes right out and says that Madison understood the constitution was a compact, something made clear from Madison’s writings.

As to Rhode Island, they adopted a ratification ordinance. Here’s a link. http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/35264.

BTW – if we are going to start citing authorities, make sure and add Justice St. George Tucker (one of the new nation’s earliest and most prominent legal minds) to that list, as one who lent his authority to what you are calling the compact theory but what people of the day simply understood to be the constitutional arrangement. Also, Livingston and others have documented the not unsurprising fact that the earliest published references to secession all treat it as Livingston describes, a given. Even in the lead up to the war there were pro-Union northern newspapers that nevertheless referred to Lincoln’s constitutional claims regarding secession as dubious.

In terms of evidence regarding the ubiquity with which the right of secession was regarded at the time of ratification, one can hardly do better than the very language of ratification ordinances. Yet this leaves you stunned somehow. Preferring, I suppose, the more ambiguous statements of people who may or may not have said precisely what you think they said and didn’t make the statements contemporaneous with ratification of the constitution. One is wise to never say never, but I challenge you to find claims contemporaneous with ratification disputing the conventional wisdom of the day, the compact theory. One reason, by the way, the language of the constitution is perfectly consistent as a legislative record of the agreement between the states to form such a compact. Because that is what the drafters intended.

“Would my critic, with equal fervor, deny, for example, the legitimacy of the Polish government in exile in London, no longer present in Poland, during World War II?”

Don’t know about your critic, but I would.
A government is that entity that claims and enforces a monopoly of force within a territory, tough to do from 900 miles away when the Krauts are in town.

The Soviets also had a Polish government. So which of the three was legit? (If I had to choose between the three I’d go with the fascist Poles in London, what the hell. By the way, did you know that Poland participated in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia and got a bit of land? Yep.) In the end, the Soviet one ruled the joint for a good half-century :/.

In his first inaugural address Abraham Lincoln made essentially the same exortion threat to the South. But as the head of a powerful government and not just a small criminal gang, his threat involved “invasion” and massive “bloodshed” (his exact words) and a war that cost the lives of as many as 850,000 Americans according to the latest research.

A bogus, laughable comparison. For one thing, the South did not have to “pay” anything, nor did it have to give up its “racket” (slavery) within its own various borders. To use the dubious “mafia” comparison, Lincoln did not ask for “a cut” to “wet his beak” with Southern money. The South could have kept its own “racket” in its own border of each state. But white southern greed wanted more beyond the racket for its territory. It wanted a full nationalization of slavery, and indeed even secured support among “activist judges” via the Dred Scott decision which held that slavery could spread into the territories even if the majority of people in the territories were anti-slavery. In short, the South in its various states, could have settled for a limited regional format, where it kept slavery, including massive, resource-rich states like Texas, now today one of the top 7 economies of he world.

And even before Lincoln took office, seven states had declared their secession from the Union. They had already decided on the secession route before “the Don” (Lincoln) had even taken office. One quarter of the U.S. Army – the entire garrison in Texas – was surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy. Credible historians show that the majority of the white South, of all social classes, supported slavery both on economic reasons and as the cornerstone of their oppressive social order, and “leaders of the secession movement across the South cited slavery as the most compelling reason for southern independence.” (Faust, Drew Gilpin (1988). The creation of Confederate nationalism). The white south wanted slavery and profited handsomely from it. It had already decided on its path, and would reap the consequences, when not only its “racket” (slavery) but its asserted independence would be destroyed.

Thanks to the author of the article, and virtually all commenters, for an exemplar of what spirited debate on the internet can be. As a lawyer, I have much sympathy for the significance both Cathey and his interrogators assign to the 14th Amendment as the principle instrument of the US Government’s evolution into a Continental (and ultimately World-bestriding) empire.

But humility requires acknowledgement of the huge role economic and technological forces (from rail and telegraph through internal combustion engines to modern broadcast media) played in requiring a single predictable legal regime for a market already sharing a common language.

I can agree that deifying Lincoln has been particularly useful to the Northern Capitalists (1866-1929) as well as their Communist opponents (1933-present). But from my own reading of his written record, I continue to believe that his assassination was a greater disaster for the South and the country than any actions he took during the war. In issues of race and reconstruction, I can imagine a much different path for the US had Lincoln served out a 2d term.

But sadly, perhaps, I don’t think the present dominance of the Federal government would be different: that, I fear, is the kind of inexorable historical trend that makes Marxism still relevant.

JustPlainBill says:
2. Slavery, except under Islam, is economic in nature.
Dubious and inaccurate. Actually slaves had quite a lot to do with Islamic economies – from mines, to farming, to urban crafts, to massive public works. And Islam had its own plantations- such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Indeed one of the biggest black slavery rebellions of all time was in the Islamic world- the powerful Zanj rebellion, undertaken by black slaves forced to drain the malarial salt marshes of southern Iraq, brutal, heart-rending work. The rebellion is credited by some historians such as Ronald Segal author of “Islam’s Black Slaves” with actually creating a deterrent to the larger scale spread of slavery, due to the massive destruction the hard-fighting black rebels wrought. The black fighters came close to capturing the city of Baghdad, then the greatest city of Islam, and even invaded Iran for a time.

Slavery was dying out as steam engines took over the work of slaves, thereby making them uneconomical;
Again dubious. Actually credible scholars show that slavery for the mass production of certain crops, was quite profitable- not perfect but profitable. See Sowell 1983. Ad slavery worked hand in hand with new technology. Slaves harvested and collected the raw material in sugar, cotton etc to feed the new industrial mills.

The break up of the Soviet Union is a fine example of great States allowing lesser States to secede, as was the break up of every colonial empire during the XXth Century; &
Shaky as well. It was more that the “great state” did not have the unity anymore or resources to wage a long, expensive war to crush the lesser states. The Soviet states were allowed to secede because the Kremlin did not have the unified purpose or will to stop them. Same for the British and French empires. The political unity and determination was not there and the costs were too high. They didn’t “giveaway” things out of the goodness of their hearts.

Lincoln unconstitutionally raised an army and moved to invade the border states in order to punish the recalcitrant 7.
Again dubious. How was the Union Army “unconstitutional”? Any credible argument to offer besides shaky personal opinions?

The Tariff?? DiLorenzo thinks Lincoln launched a vast, murderous war over a higher tariff??

And where, exactly, in the lengthy secession statements issued by many of the seceding states, do we find any detailed discussions of this abominable tariff? Other than a few paragraphs in the one submitted by Texas, there is very little detailed discussion of the tariff. But there are lengthy and extended discussions over slavery.

And when we turn next to the accounts of the various attempts at compromise which took place after the 1860 elections (e.g., with Crittenden or in Virginia) where is any serious discussion over tariff policy? Again, very little on the tariff, but a whole lot on slavery.

“In addition there was much small scale ownership, or the renting of slaves by others. Direct ownership was not necessary to profit from slave bodies. See Robert Fogel’s standard reference work in the field- Without Consent or Contract.”

Robert Fogel’s work basically argued that slavery was profitable. He was heavily criticized at the time for Without Consent or Contract and Time on the Cross.

But all economic systems require people to maintain them and their profits. Whites in the south opted for enslaving others for multiple generations to profit in tobacco, sugar and cotton. Abstract “industry” was not wielding whips and chains- people were.”

This is ridiculous. So when the system of mass immigration collapses in the US, future historians are going to argue how every American benefited from the cheap labor that abounded? Come on.

Arguing that everyone aspired to be a landed slaveholder is like arguing that everyone aspires to be a Wall Street trader. It simply is not true.

If you’ve read Robert Fogel, then you’ve read David Galenson, whose argument was that the South turned to slavery because the indentured servant market dried up. Heard that when I took Galenson’s class.

The Lincoln statue sits like an Emperor on a throne. And sadly, he occupies that place in the minds of too many Whites. I guess they are in the thrall of stories about how their great-great-great grandpappy “saved the Union”.

It’s silly when you think about it.

Could we say that the GOP has transformed itself into a treasonous segment of the US society?

“Republicans by a ratio of more than 2-to-1 say the U.S. should support Israel even when its stances diverge with American interests, a new Bloomberg Politics poll finds.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-15/bloomberg-politics-national-poll-finds-deep-partisan-split-on-israel-and-iran

I think there’s much to be said for revisionist thinking on such topics as Pearl Harbor, the a-bomb, Harding etc. have tried for years to understand the revisionist case against Lincoln. Just can’t do it .

see also, Kaminski, “The Quotable Jefferson”, and Kaminski, “The Founders on the Founders”.

The original 13 colonies banned slavery in its entirety. The King forced it upon them as Slavery was a monopoly and the King received a commission on each sale. See Hugh Thomas, PhD, Oxford Don, “The Slave Trade” for facts and stats.

fyi, William H. Freehling, PhD, has two published works which may interest you, both disappeared during the Clinton Administration. “Secession”, a collection of published arguments, mostly from the Deep South, thus ignoring Virginia’s reason to secede – ie not wanting to be invaded by an unconstitutional Federal Army (Art I, Sec 8 Cl 12), and “Prelude to Civil War”, which is a look at nullification, ie The Kentucky & Virginia Resolutions.

just an fyi, no need to reply unless you’ve a reference not posted at http://www.justplainbill.wordpress.com.

Slavery does and did have economic profitability, but only under Islam is it currently acceptable. The Scottish Reformation of the 1720’s declared that ALL humans have souls and are equal in the eyes of The Creator, hence slavery is unacceptable as it demeans God’s creatures. This was also the substance of a proposed Papal Bull in the XVIth Century, except that the French King and the Italian City states told the Pope that they would invade and emasculate him if he read it.

Only under the Qur’An is slavery acceptable as w/o accepting Allah, you are sub-human and forever damned to a particularly horrible section of Hell where you will be condemned, among other things, to eat feces, drink boiling water, and have boiling brass continually poured over your face. Further, steam was only the beginning. Slavery, as slavery, is now mostly uneconomical, as machinery has fulfilled Marx’s cheap labor requirement declared in Das Kapital. For more, see, Hazlett, von Mises, James Q. Wilson, Friedman, &c.

It is interesting to note that slavery was illegal in all 13 colonies until The Crown ordered it. The Crown having a monopoly on slavery and thereby making a commission on every sale, The Crown took it as an attack on its income to make slavery illegal. The Crown is the King/Queen in fact, thus the revenue went directly to the personage and was not a part of government revenue.

Ok, MAYBE the USSR breakup is a poor example, but the demise of colonialism, the breakup of Korea from China, the loss of Siam from China, the breakup of the British Empire into the Commonwealth, &c, are good examples. Britain could have used military force, as they did in The Falklands, yes, not a breakaway but an invasion, still it was the will to use force.

Regardless, the formation of these United States in 1787, as proven so many times with such things as the formation of the New England Confederation and its failure, the fact that the Senate was originally constituted of senators elected by their states’ legislatures, the fact that the states had each their own ratification conventions, the fact that there was both the 1814 Stanford Convention, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and that Lincoln said so in 1854, and the fact that each STATE has its own Constitution. OH, and there are also both the collections of essays known as The Federalist Papers, and the one known as The Anti-Federalist Papers.

Further, as shown by the fact that there were two secessions at the time, the first the 7 Deep South, and then the 3 Border States, the original secession was approved of by the stronger of the two powers, until Lincoln started to unconstitutionally raise an army in violation of Article I, and then to invade Virginia, a free state who didn’t want to be invade by an illegal federal army.

The raising of the army was unconstitutional is a clear reading of the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8, Clause 12.

Suggested Reading: The Civil War, by Shelby Foote; Ratification, by Pauline Maier; The Federalist Papers, by Hamiliton, Madison, & Jay; The Anit-Federalist Papers, by Publius et al; Economics 101, by Hazlett; The Slave Trade, by Hugh Thomas PhD Oxford University, and there are many more on the book list posted at Justplainbill’s Weblog .

Edward Meese III, Esq., is the editor of a comprehensive guide to the constitution and Kevin Gutzman, Esq., PhD, a politically incorrect guide to the constitution.

FYI the military of the United States of America has, since 1788, a two year life span. Every congress passes a military act that ends at the end of the congress and every new congress must pass a new enabling act.

In 1861, as the decades before, congress was in recess, normally sitting for December, then recess until Spring, see Article I, Sec 4 Cl 2. There was no such thing as a “lame duck” session, as congress did not sit between election certification days and being seated. This is the reason that before Lincoln, recess appointments were acceptable. In 1861 congress was not scheduled to sit until June after its winter recess – note RECESS, not adjournment.

ONLY congress may raise an army. According to the constitution, congress is in command and control of the U.S. military, see Article I, Sec 8, Cl 12. with the President subordinate to it as Commander-in-Chief. Since Lincoln, the method used to raise a large army is The Selective Service Act. Notice, it is an ACT OF CONGRESS, not an executive order. It is constitutionally mandated and specifically no army may stand for more than 2 years. Again, Art I, S 8, C 12. Note also that Lincoln had the army kill dozens of anti-draft protesters in NYC, and had dozens of innocent hostages hanged in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as that was how he “kept the peace” in those states.

Lincoln freed no slaves. Until the 13th Amendment, Delaware, Maryland, AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, had legal slavery. Lincoln was on record that the colored peoples were sub-human and were bringing the White Race down to their level. His solution to the issue of race was to have congress buy the slaves, thus legally compensating their owners and making emancipation palatable to their owners, and shipping them all back to Africa or decamped unto reservations, clearly a violation of the 4th Amendment and to which congress responded that they did not have the authority to buy slaves, and, there was no judicial procedure that would comply with the 4th Amendment. According to the 1860 census, 58% of slaves were of African origin, 37% were American Indian, 3% Chinese, and 2% were White, meaning Irish +/or Roman Catholic. ( See Thomas’ The Slave Trade for facts and statistics.)

You use the word dubious frequently, yet offer no actual references aside from the philosopher and my fellow Marine, Dr. Sowell, but don’t bother to list the specific work. Further, it is obvious that you have not read the constitution, nor The Federalist Papers, and the more important Anti-Federalist Papers.

The AFP are more important as the argument for acceptance of the 7 articles of the constitution as is, is the FP. The constitution was ratified only after10 of the demanded 13 amendments were agreed to, and this is Publius’ argument. Since we have the Bill of Rights, a proper reading of the constitution and its interpretation should be only in the light of the Anti-Federalist Papers as they explain, expand, and expound on the constitution in its entirety.

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suggested reading:

Shelby Foote, “The Civil War; a narrative”

William H. Freehling, “Secession” & “Prelude to Civil War”

Edward Meese III, “Heritage Guide to the Constitution”

Hamilton, Madison, Jay, “The Federalist Papers”

Publius, et al, “The Anti-Federalist Papers”

Calhoun, “A Disquisition on Government”

Kevin Gutzman, “A Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution”

Pauline Maier, “Ratification”

Hugh Thomas, “The Slave Trade”

Kaminski, “The Quotable Jefferson”, & “The Founders on the Founders”

Mary Leibowitz, “Not Out of Africa”

Jared Diamond (I disagree with his conclusions as exclusionary), “Collapse”

Brion McClanahan, “The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution”

Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” (2 vols.)

J. Christian Adams, “Injustice”

and if interested in the reasons behind the 2008 financial collapse, William D. Cohan’s, “House of Cards”, pp 263 – 394, as well as for similar on topic reading:

James Q. Wilson, Ludwig von Mises, James Hazlett, Milton Friedman, and Sowell’s books on the “intellectual elites” varying effects on society.

hey, excellent comment. There’s a whole section on this and Viet Nam, how the Viet Cong controlled so much of the inland area and who that was a factual if not legal government in “The Albany Plan Revisited”.

Interestingly enough, one of the main reasons for why so many West Point grads with good grades ended up in The Army of Virginia, was that the USMA constitutional law text said so. If you can get a scholar’s credential from the Military Academy, I think that it’s in one of Freehling’s works, it is rumored that a copy still exists in their protected library, but is available with special permission to accredited scholars.

Don’t know if it is true, but my other source says so.

32% of slave owners were African. The richest slave owner in Charleston SC in 1860 was a black man with 683 slaves over 7 plantations. When it was obvious that Lincoln would win, he sold all for gold, and moved north to Chicago. His name was Jackson.

The 2nd Richest slave owner in New Orleans was a colored widow, who had all of her slaves and cotton stolen by Butcher Butler, Major General, apptee of A. Lincoln, who after stealing it all, sold it for a profit to British cotton agents.

The natural death may be estimated by technology and the fact that Brazil in 1888 ended slavery. Less than 2% of the population of VA was held in slavery in 1860, similar % in MO, KY, the Indian Territories (all of them, not just Oklahoma). Also, in the 1840’s, both Illinois and Indiana ratified new constitutions, both racist and both attempting to limit the movement of colored people. If you weren’t already a citizen, you weren’t to be permitted to stay except for an expressed period of time and only for commercial reasons, (Kennedy & Kennedy, “The South was Right”)

Much senatorial debate in the 1850’s was over US expansion, in all directions. For listings, see The Congressional Record register.

Well done. Have you looked to Kennedy and Kennedy, “The South was Right”, and to Freehling’s works, cited elsewhere?

fyi, just as a thought, you might want to research the 1892 SCOTUS case, “Rector et al Grace and Holy Trinity Church, vs US”, for the end result of the John Marshall, a corrupt VA county judge elected to the House of Representatives, and elevated to Chief Justice SCOTUS by John Adams, chain of High Federalist Decisions.

And, now that Mrs Sotomayer has interrupted Justice Scalia’s queries re the “necessary and proper clause” with “who are you to decide what necessary and proper means,” a review of what both The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist have to say on THAT subject will be of interest.

Well, it has been fun, and very enlightening, to have been here, but I have to get back to work, so, it may be awhile before I can respond to your comments to my comments.

see Brion McClanahan’s, “The Founding Fathers’ Guide to the Constitution”, Edward Meese III, “Heritage Guide to the Constitution”, Kaminski’s, “The Founders on the Founders”, Gutzman, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution,” and Klocek, “The Albany Plan Re-Visited”.

Jones County Mississippi also “counter-seceded”. The border states that held the second secession, by and large, had ~2% slaves or less. Virginia specifically seceded on constitutional grounds, expressed elsewhere in this fabulous discussion.

Nullification is alive and well in 2015. Note how many states and cities have nullified federal immigration laws by creating “sanctuary cities”.

As an aside and as it just now crossed my mind, notice how Crimea has “seceded” from Ukraine, with the help of The Russian Federation. If CSA had been recognized by Britain and France, Lincoln would not have started the unconstitutional war (Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, US Constitution), for the same reasons that Obama and the EU are not getting involved. Just off the cuff, so unless you have serious references not already posted on the book list at http://www.justplainbill.wordpress.com, don’t bother.

I’m willing to be pretty reactionary by the standards of today, or of 40 years ago or more, but how many people living today even among white males with a bit of money and a bit of religion wish to live in the kind of society envisioned by 19th century Catholic royalists?

Ideology needs to be filtered by self-interest.

You wrote: “Less than 2% of the population of VA was held in slavery in 1860, similar % in MO, KY, the Indian Territories (all of them, not just Oklahoma).” What is your source for this?

Thanks for your other references.

MAP says:
This is ridiculous. So when the system of mass immigration collapses in the US, future historians are going to argue how every American benefited from the cheap labor that abounded? Come on.
But as noted by several scholars, more than just Fogel, and including Sowell, slavery was profitable for the mass production of certain crops, and there were numerous beneficial spillover effects that benefitted non-slaveholders.

Arguing that everyone aspired to be a landed slaveholder is like arguing that everyone aspires to be a Wall Street trader. It simply is not true.
Wrong there. I said acquiring slaves was an avenue of social mobility for the ordinary southern white- they aspired to it. Having slaves was the “in” thing – economically and socially for a southerner. This is one of the reasons whites of all classes so strongly supported the slave system even to the point of enthusiastically going to war- they knew the benefits that flowed from it, and craved them. This is true enough. Note- I recognize that the elites- those better positioned, or those at the top, would reap the most benefit, compared to the small man. This is so in every society to be sure.

If you’ve read Robert Fogel, then you’ve read David Galenson, whose argument was that the South turned to slavery because the indentured servant market dried up. Heard that when I took Galenson’s class.
Fair enough, but that still doesn’t change the fact that white southerners found slavery beneficial for them, and went to war to maintain that system, or “way of life.” Slavery was the ultimate bottom line. Some say no – “states rights.” But what was the central “state’s right” at issue? Slavery – same bottom line.

====================

Slavery does and did have economic profitability, but only under Islam is it currently acceptable.
True enough.

Only under the Qur’An is slavery acceptable as w/o accepting Allah, you are sub-human and forever damned to a particularly horrible section of Hell
Agreed, and the thing is, Muslims STILL enslaved other Muslims when they could turn a profit, as the history of some parts of Africa shows.

Slavery, as slavery, is now mostly uneconomical, as machinery has fulfilled Marx’s cheap labor requirement declared in Das Kapital. For more, see, Hazlett, von Mises, James Q. Wilson, Friedman, &c.
Agreed.

It is interesting to note that slavery was illegal in all 13 colonies until The Crown ordered it. The Crown having a monopoly on slavery and thereby making a commission on every sale, The Crown took it as an attack on its income to make slavery illegal. The Crown is the King/Queen in fact, thus the revenue went directly to the personage and was not a part of government revenue.
Didnt know this, but if true, it would show how elites benefitted the most.

You use the word dubious frequently, yet offer no actual references aside from the philosopher and my fellow Marine, Dr. Sowell, but don’t bother to list the specific work. Further, it is obvious that you have not read the constitution, nor The Federalist Papers, and the more important Anti-Federalist Papers.
I have read them, and will double check your argument in reference to them, but I am glad you provide details to support some os that you are saying, rather than, as too often on the web on these issues, people simply put forward their opinion loudly and expect that to be sufficient. As for Sowell, I gave his 1981 reference year- but the book was Ethnic America. He also makes similar observations is his books Knowledge And Decisions, Conquests and Culture, Migration and Culture etc.

32% of slave owners were African.
This is inaccurate and is a typical problem in this area, where sweeping claims are made. I notice you offer no credible citation. Show me your source where this mysterious 32% figure is supported by a credible scholar. The mainstream reference Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, By Randall M. Miller, John David Smith 1997 (250-283) for example, makes no such claim and it specifically discusses the issue. While not widely known, black slave owners are no secret, and they were a tiny minority of slaveowners, owning typically a handful of slaves, some “on paper only” as a way to gain relative freedom.

Thank you for your interesting and well-researched post. I completely share your view that any federal government action or exercise of power be sanctioned by our Constitution. If Lincoln did violate the Constitution in raising an army, that is certainly a black mark on his record.

What bothers those of us who sympathize with the North and who greatly admire Lincoln, is that the South was highly inconsistent in its invocation of the “strict construction” doctrine of Constitutional interpretation. Often, Southern leaders and other Democrats were more than happy to play “fast and loose” with the Constitution when it served to aggrandize their power. If we are really going to have a rigorous debate over which federal government actions leading up to and during the Civil War violated the Constitution, we also need to include prior federal government actions which served to aggrandize the slave power South, and which were highly questionable from a “strict construction” perspective. These include:

(1) the Louisiana Purchase, including: (i) the purchase itself, purportedly under the treaty-making power (and good thing Jefferson hadn’t destroyed Hamilton’s bank yet, and therefore had the cash ready to make the purchase!); (ii) treatment of the occupants of that area as a dependency of the Union, and so remaining until different territories were carved out and later admitted as States. (The Louisiana Purchase was the “fork in the road” for much of what followed in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Some of the High Federalists raised key objections in 1804, as described in Henry Adams’ history of the Jefferson Administration.)

(2) admission of Texas, but handled in a totally different way than the Louisiana Purchase: (i) admitted all at once into the Union through Congressional joint resolution – (almost certainly un-Constitutional!) (ii) without even passing through “territory” status, as with Louisiana – can we agree this never would have happened this way if Texas didn’t already have slavery?

(3) war with Mexico – potential new slave territory in California (below 36’30” line) and New Mexico. Did this war violate the Constitution?

There are serious Constitutional questions raised by each of the actions taken above. And let’s not even get into the question whether the slave-holding elites in the “cotton states” were complying with the prohibition against importing new slaves, as contained in the anti-slave trade legislation enacted by Jefferson and Monroe.

If the Southern leadership had in fact routinely ignored a strict constructionist reading of the Constitution when it had control of the federal government in the decades leading up to the Civil War, then it was more than a little hypocritical for them to legitimately invoke “strict construction” against actions taken by President Lincoln.

1. Hugh Thomas, PhD, Oxford Don, “The Slave Trade, a history of the North Atlantic Slave Trade”, not to be confused with a book of homo-erotic essays of the same name:
2. The 1860 Census as preserved and digitized by the Geneaological Society of the Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints, (RLDS), in Independence MO; &
3. Kennedy & Kennedy, “The South was Right”, the Kennedy’s also have a website with facts, stats, and references noticeably more reliable than wikipedia and the huffpost.

Go to the blog, http://www.justplainbill.wordpress.com for a book list. Also, the first post, posted in 2008, may be of interest on the subject of man’s impact on the climate. There is also a post on petroleum products, with references, and how they make up over 90% of our world, including aspirin.

It also has a complete reference list on the 14th Amendment with the proofs, including articles in the US News and World Report, and references. Plus, the wonders of the 1892 SCOTUS decision in Rector et al Grace and Holy Trinity Church vs US, 1892. Trinity Church is located at the corner of Wall & Church Sts, NYC and is where Alexander Hamilton is buried, along with many other Revolutionary War veterans.

Just as an aside, the 13 colonies SECEDED from the British Crown in 1776 and the CSA used the exact same set of protocols and procedures as the colonies used in 1776. If the CSA was illegal, so is the USA, by definition.

Enjoy.

There’s a deeper start. It starts in 1792, GW’s second term, when a disgusted Jefferson, turns to Freneaux to publish slanders against GW. GW looked at legislation through the centrist, I’m a slave holder Jeffersonian Yeoman and Hamiltonian Jobber all at the same time glass. Uneducated, whenever he had a constitutional issue, he asked Hamilton, Sec’y Treasury & main author of The Fed Papers, and Jefferson, Sec’y State and known anti-Federalist, who deeply regretted his not personal presences at both the Annapolis Convention, which preceded the Phila. Convention, which wrote the original 7 articles, for written opinions on the constitutionality of the legislation put forward. Hamilton, GW’s aide de camp & Lt. Col. of Artillery, won many more times than did TJ.

Abuse of the Constitution by John Adams and John Marshall, High Federalists both, started the downfall which Lincoln finished. You are absolutely correct in the rest of your analysis, my humble opinion, which is why I am a strong secessionist. There is a short argument on the blog which may be of interest.

As noted in Klocek, “The Albany Plan Re-Visited”, the two major parties are the root cause of all of our governmental problems. It doesn’t matter whether they were Federalists vs Democratic-Repbulicans, Democrats vs Whigs, Democrats vs Whigs vs Republicans, or whomever. Can’t remember the author but the title is “Throw them all out” which details the financial corruption and grafts of both parties for the last 30 years.

fyi, a fun primary on government and governing may be had in the 2 BBC series, “Yes, Minister” and its sequel “Yes, Prime Minister”. I strongly recommend the multiple viewings of the combined series.

As noted elsewhere, the seminal and very boring work, “The Slave Trade, a history of the North Atlantic Slave Trade”, by Hugh Thomas, PhD, Oxford Don, as well as the 1860 Census as digitized by the Genealogical Society of the Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints located in Independence MO, and the statistics and references in the Kennedy & Kennedy book, “The South Was Right.”

I cited to all of the above in almost every post.

I will point out that much supposed African-American History has been of the oral history kind which has been debunked by Mary Leibowitz, PhD, “Not Out of Africa”. Much of the “African-American” histories have been derived from the works of people who simply repeated what they were told. Note that “Roots” although claiming to be a family history, turned out to be stories taken from dozens of old folk, with no place in fact. Note also Jason Blair and his years of writing facts for the New York Times, and sundry others, only to learn that not only did Mr. Blair plagiarize and deceive, his mentors and editors were aware of the deceits, bowing to “The End Justifies the Means”. Note the current corruption of scruples and integrity in the women’s rights arenas over alleged rape or not rape and how it is being viewed as ‘the truth doesn’t matter as long as we discuss this issue’. The Duke Lacrosse team springs first to mind. Regardless, Prof. Dr. Thomas’ work is seminal as his research and sources are impeccable.

Your constantly use of words such as dubious, inaccurate, absurd, and personal opinion, in the face of multiple sources suggests a closed mind, one not used to controversy or research. Your use of one and only one source, a not common one as noted by the acceptance of Prof Dr Thomas’ work worldwide in conjunction with the census and the Kennedy’s work, and the fact that you do not show a reference until challenged, is inappropriate in a factual, logical, and legal debate. I note your comments in other areas prove that you’ve never read the constitution (Art I S 8 Cl 12 Lincoln raised an unconstitutional army is a matter of conlaw fact, not unsupported imaginings) much less The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers, and much, much less Trinity Church or The Marshall Line of Reasoning, (Hunter’s Lessee, &c, nor even heard of Justice Stone).

I do not mind the arguments, I do mind the personal attacks. Get back to me after you’ve read The Constitution of the United States, The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, de Tocqueville, Hugh Thomas, and Shelby Foote, at the very least.

BTW, neither I, nor anyone in my family, nor anyone whom I know, have ever owned slaves. My ancestors include Union Army Veterans, coal miners, Chrysler assembly-line workers, and until my generation, the first to attend college – of which we all paid for by ourselves – janitors and laundresses. We did not have Fulbright Scholarships, Pell Grants, nor federal loan forgivenesses. We have all paid for ourselves through GI bills, loans, and part-time jobs, mostly bartending and janitor work.

For a more complete list, with authors, Copyrights, publishers, and ISBN’s, go to http://www.justplainbill.wordpress.com.

You wrote: “The border states that held the second secession, by and large, had ~2% slaves or less.”

This source shows a much higher percentage for each border state:

http://www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/slave-maps/slave-census.htm

I cited to all of the above in almost every post.
None of what you cite disproves the scholars I cite that slavery was profitable on many counts. In fact your own guy, Hugh Thomas confirms my point. Here is what he says in his book re the trade to 1800: “Despite the high prices of slaves in Africa, the trade was more profitable than it had been in the 1780s: the average profit per voyage was probably 13 percent.” (pg 541) He also points out that intra-American/Caribbean trade on slaves also yielded some nice money. He quotes one American trader: “his transactions in the slave trade in the 1830s and or 1840s, ‘were very profitable’. It was, he said, the most lucrative trade under the sun.'(pg 725) and “There was another innovation of the traffic in the 1790s for North Americans: it became for a time profitable for traders to buy slaves on one Caribbean island and sell them to another.” (534) and many more such statistics and reports. (Thomas 1997)

I will point out that much supposed African-American History has been of the oral history kind which has been debunked by Mary Leibowitz, PhD, “Not Out of Africa”.
This is absurd. African-American History has a long track record with serious scholars, doing serious research for multiple decades, in credible forums and peer reviewed journals. Mary Lefkowitz is a classicist on Greece and Rome and not a specialist in US history or African-American History. She has little expertise in these fields, and Not Out Of Africa is only peripherally concerned with African-American History. It would be among the last books to consult if one wanted to learn about that history. It has little to say on Reconstruction, or Plessy versus Ferguson, or the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Acts, for example, key matters in any credible survey of Af-Am history.

.
Your constantly use of words such as dubious, inaccurate, absurd, and personal opinion, in the face of multiple sources suggests a closed mind, one not used to controversy or research.
Actually I have cited several scholars that debunk certain of your claims, as noted again herein.

.

Your use of one and only one source, a not common one as noted by the acceptance of Prof Dr Thomas’ work worldwide in conjunction with the census and the Kennedy’s work,
Not at all. There are several sources above listed, not just Sowell, as anyone can see above. I cite Ronald Segal and Fogel above for example.

.
and the fact that you do not show a reference until challenged, is inappropriate in a factual, logical, and legal debate.
Actually I have put several credible references up front in my posts, such as Fogel. Your new claim about Mary Lefkowitz and African-American History is also wrong by the way.

.
I note your comments in other areas prove that you’ve never read the constitution (Art I S 8 Cl 12 Lincoln raised an unconstitutional army is a matter of conlaw fact,

I asked you earlier- quote: “How was the Union Army “unconstitutional”? You have produced some sources arguing this point, and that is fine. But other sources argue just the opposite- citing the president’s powers under the constitution to do so. Indeed at the time, several states held that Lincoln was within his rights to rise those troops and enthusiastically supplied them, sometimes more troops than were asked. In any event, Congress afterwards sanctioned Lincoln’s acts and indeed authorized 500,000 additional volunteers. ( Lankford, Nelson D. Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War) It may well be Lincoln’s army raising was unconstitutional before endorsement by Congress. I do not endorse the counter-arguments, but just asked you what evidence you had in support of your initial assertion.

.
Note- In addition, you make several dubious and inaccurate statements. such as:

–Slavery, except under Islam, is economic in nature.

–=Slavery was dying out as steam engines took over the work of slaves, thereby making them uneconomical;

–Much of African American history is oral history debunked by Mary Lefkowitz

As I have already shown in detail above, these claims are yes, dubious, or inaccurate. On some other points we agree.

The Shawcross speech “quote” is a blatant fake:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/WesternGermany/SirHartleyShawcross.html

The Churchill quote cannot be located in any reputable source.

The Institute of American Economics was a fascist vanity press:
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_American_Economics

And Buchanan? Really?

You never learn, do you?

“Slavery was dying out as steam engines took over the work of slaves, thereby making them uneconomical”

Somehow I don’t recall ever seeing a steam engine pick cotton. 🙂

(Mechanical cotton pickers were introduced in the 1940’s, but they weren’t powered by steam engines.)

Is Race Following Gender in Becoming a ‘Fluid’ Identity Construct?
April 16, 2015 5:52 am / 11 Comments / victorhanson
Among many careerists and politicians, tweaking one’s ethnic identity is becoming increasingly widespread.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

1. Just as an fyi, the Prof. Dr. Hanson post is to prove the point that oral histories are hearsay, w/o exception, and therefore, useless;
2. It is obvious that in the short time mentioned, no one went out, bought, read, and digested Prof. Dr. Leibowitz’s book, “Not Out of Africa”. The most that you did was to google her name, learn that she is a classicist, and dismiss her work. This is both disingenuous and dishonest. It proves the fallacy of all of your comments, references, and claimed research, as it proves that you do not read, digest, nor understand any of it, you just copy over the titles;
3. The original comment on slavery, which you insist on combating, if you read it, states clearly that slavery is economic in nature. The fact that you keep angrily and aggressively agreeing with it, res ipsa loquitor;
4. Your insistence that the constitution does not clearly state in Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, that ONLY congress may raise an army, and that somehow, magically, Article II, where you cannot tell me where, allows the executive dictatorial and unilateral military power, again, res ipsa loquitor; &
5. And, I now understand why so few of my colleagues and peers indulge in commenting on blogs, &c. Instead of googling something, reading the headers, and then dishonestly claiming to have enough information so as to comment, go READ the books on the book list. At the very least, before commenting on something, learn something about it.

justplainbill says:
1. Just as an fyi, the Prof. Dr. Hanson post is to prove the point that oral histories are hearsay, w/o exception, and therefore, useless;
But “oral history” has nothing to do with the point at hand, nor does Mary Lefkowitz for that matter. In any event there is plenty of written history on African Americans so your point fails from the get go.

2. It is obvious that in the short time mentioned, no one went out, bought, read, and digested Prof. Dr. Leibowitz’s book, “Not Out of Africa”. The most that you did was to google her name, learn that she is a classicist, and dismiss her work. This is both disingenuous and dishonest. It proves the fallacy of all of your comments, references, and claimed research, as it proves that you do not read, digest, nor understand any of it, you just copy over the titles;
Laughable assumptions. And its Lefkowitz not Leibowitz by the way. And no one needs to run out and buy her book. Has it ever occurred to you that people already read it? Duh dude.. I have personally read several of her books including Not Out of Africa, which is why I know what you are saying is complete nonsense.

3. The original comment on slavery, which you insist on combating, if you read it, states clearly that slavery is economic in nature. The fact that you keep angrily and aggressively agreeing with it, res ipsa loquitor;
No, you are now trying to backtrack after I called out your nonsense. Let me quote you again:

“Slavery, except under Islam, is economic in nature. “

^^This claim, as any credible scholar shows is complete rubbish. Rather than admit it you keep trying to justify it, and keep failing.

4. Your insistence that the constitution does not clearly state in Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, that ONLY congress may raise an army, and that somehow, magically, Article II, where you cannot tell me where, allows the executive dictatorial and unilateral military power, again, res ipsa loquitor; &

NO I did not “insist” that the constitution etc etc. I even admitted the possibility that Lincoln’s action did not pass constitutional muster. The point at issue was the credible sources to back up your claims- rather than mere opinion. Let’s quote what I actually said- rather than your laughable attempts to cover your failures. QUOTE- April 18, 2015 at 3:21 am GMT:

“I asked you earlier- quote: “How was the Union Army “unconstitutional”? You have produced some sources arguing this point, and that is fine. But other sources argue just the opposite- citing the president’s powers under the constitution to do so. Indeed at the time, several states held that Lincoln was within his rights to rise those troops and enthusiastically supplied them, sometimes more troops than were asked. In any event, Congress afterwards sanctioned Lincoln’s acts and indeed authorized 500,000 additional volunteers. ( Lankford, Nelson D. Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War) It may well be Lincoln’s army raising was unconstitutional before endorsement by Congress. I do not endorse the counter-arguments, but just asked you what evidence you had in support of your initial assertion. “

5. And, I now understand why so few of my colleagues and peers indulge in commenting on blogs, &c. Instead of googling something, reading the headers, and then dishonestly claiming to have enough information so as to comment, go READ the books on the book list. At the very least, before commenting on something, learn something about it.
LOL, Perhaps you do not comment a lot on blogs because you do not know what you are talking about, as I have exposed in detail above. It appears its you who are reading mere headers and thought you could spin some BS from that, but have been caught out. And as already noted above, I have actually read Mary Lefkowitz, so I know you are spouting nonsense.

I’m not sure what political meaning “left” has for this writer, but as a definition of Lincoln and his legacy it isn’t helpful or even coherent.

Surely the only rational analysis of Lincoln is as the progenitor of the latently fascist modern American state, in which virtue is assumed always to lie at the heart of the presidency and its instruments, and where opposition to authority is – therefore – always evil? The American Civil War was the blueprint for all modern US military engagements in that it used an avowed moral crusade (in this case ending slavery) as a cover for overt militarism, war crimes and conquest. It was the moment when “the union” became not a voluntary thing but a moral essential, deviation from which was and is a thought-crime.

Another thing about Lincoln: His oldest son Robert sat out the war at Harvard. In early ’65, Lincoln privately requested Grant to let Robert serve on his staff. Robert was commissioned a captain, and served as an aide-de-camp to Grant. During Robert’s “service” with Grant, he never saw any action. Shortly after the war’s end, Robert resigned his commission.

Dishonest Abe kept his own boy safely away from shot and shell. Fighting the war was for other people’s sons, not his.

Surely the only rational analysis of Lincoln is as the progenitor of the latently fascist modern American state, in which virtue is assumed always to lie at the heart of the presidency and its instruments, and where opposition to authority is – therefore – always evil?
Dubious. Why would it be the “only rational” case to see Lincoln as a proto-facist of a modern fascist American state? If suppression of people is the criteria, then the Confederacy excelled in “fascism.” A case can certainly be made that Lincoln gained somewhat dictatorial powers during the war, but it is a real stretch to see him as the precursor of some sort of American Adolf Hitler, as is popular in some neo-confed quarters. As one rather more balanced scholar notes:

“President Lincoln’s understanding of constitutionalism within the context of a perpetual union permitted him to act in the first years of the War with considerable latitude regarding citizens’ civil liberties during America’s greatest constitutional crisis. Once the crisis receded, Lincoln rescinded orders in the field that violated civil liberties. As president, Lincoln infringed upon the citizens’ civil liberties to a degree commensurate with the crisis confronting the Union. President Davis was likewise committed to the survival of his country, and would sacrifice civil liberties to preserve the Confederacy.”
— Michael Powell, Ph. D, J.D., Professor of History at Frederick Community College and co-editor of Mid-Maryland: A Crossroads of History (2005) and Mid-Maryland History: Conflict, Growth, and Change (2008).

http://www.crossroadsofwar.org/discover-the-story/civil-liberties-in-crisis/civil-liberties-in-crisis-full-story/

Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy, though not as open as Lincoln, also exercised a number of authoritarian powers suppressing dissent. When he wasn’t doing it officially, an assortment of Confederate “patriotic” or “vigilance” groups accomplished the same thing. In many parts of the Confederacy, it was a danger to life and limb to dissent from the ruling regime’s party line, or speak in favor of the Union. quote “self-constituted vigilance committees sprung up all over the country, and reign of terror began” according to one contemporary survivor. (Wartime Dissent in America: A History and Anthology By Robert Mann). Some dissenters had their possessions seized, or were imprisoned, squashed or killed.

Even prior to the passage of the Sequestration Act during the summer of 1861, Confederate and local authorizes were active confiscating the property of pro-Union citizens. In various parts, Confederates scrutinized poll lists in order to “identify everyone who had voted against secession.” Those who had “were the first have farms, horses, wagons, and forage taken by the Confederates.” A magistrate in Lovettsville wrote to Governor John M. Letcher, objecting that the Southern soldiers were “’taking by impressments and otherwise, the property of our people, in an illegal and rebellious manner, leaving in some cases our citizens almost without the necessities of life, and without horses, thus depriving them of the means for making a living.’”

As Professor Powell also notes, the Confederacy,

“also passed the Alien Enemies and the Sequestration Acts in August 1861. The former required the deportation of all United States’ citizens living in the Confederacy who were fourteen years and older and who would not declare that they intended to become citizens of the Confederate States, while the latter authorized the seizure of Northern-owned property in retaliation for the United States’ First Confiscation Act. These acts provided justification for private citizens and the Confederate army to impinge directly upon the civil liberties of local inhabitants.

In short, the Confederate regime was also a suppressor of dissent and civil liberties. In addition, it ruthlessly suppressed ANY voice or rights for 20-45% (depending on the state) of the people living within its borders. They were called slaves. But hey, the war “had little to do” with slavery as much neo-confed revisionist history laughably claims.

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It was the moment when “the union” became not a voluntary thing but a moral essential, deviation from which was and is a thought-crime.
The Confederacy also made it a thought-crime to not play along with the party line on slavery, or “state’s rights” (which comes back to the state’s right to have or interest in slavery) and was no paragon of allowing people independence. For one thing it suppressed a huge proportion of the people living in its borders- hardly an entity to talk about anything being “voluntary” or not.

Quote from from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession:

“Our cause is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world.”

John Wilkes Booth was 4 years too late.

Lincoln lover’s dilemma–am I defending/promoting Lincoln, or modern American fascism?

“Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy, though not as open as Lincoln, also exercised a number of authoritarian powers suppressing dissent.”

Are you aware we are talking about Lincoln? This a pointless comparison.