[starsmodelmgmt]

Did the Militia Act of 1792 give Mr. Lincoln the authority to call up 75,000 troops in 1861?

[swalsh81]

it would seem that some of this lies in the status of the south at the time that he called for conscription. according wikipedia, he can call up troops “whenever the United States shall be invaded, or be in imminent danger of invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe.” or “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act”.

Once the south seceded, which was perfectly legal, they were their own country. Thus, he could only have sent troops into the south if they were threatening invasion of the north, since, in regards to the second provision, they were no longer states subject to federal laws.

As far as whether those acts legalize conscription in the first place, I am unsure in the wording.

[maester_miller]

But wasn’t Lincoln’s entire premise that secession is illegitimate and that the south is NOT their own country? I mean, he sure seems to adopt that rationale in the emancipation proclaimation.

[gutzmank]

The constitutional issue was that it was for Congress, not for the president to raise an army.

[swalsh81]

“But wasn’t Lincoln’s entire premise that secession is illegitimate and that the south is NOT their own country?” well sure he didnt seem to think it was legitimate but Lincoln’s opinion did not change history and the fact that secession was a legitimate option to a sovereign state.

And, in relation to Prof Gutzman’s comment, My original comment was written even assuming Lincoln had called up troops with the consent of Congress

[gutzmank]

Then it depends whether secession was in fact insurrection. I infer that you think it wasn’t, which is also my understanding. (That’s not to say that I look kindly upon the Deep South states’ secessions.)

[thestein51]

(That’s not to say that I look kindly upon the Deep South states’ secessions.)

What other viable alternatives did they have to practically achieve their ends? Nullification of the tariff?

[gutzmank]

The tariff was not the Deep South states’ chief concern. That was the future of slavery under a Republican administration, which they expected to take constitutional steps–such as delivering the mail–to undermine it. For details, see Dew’s APOSTLES OF DISUNION.

[porphyrogenitus]

I think what trips people up is a conflation of chief concerns; they assume that if Tom DeLorenzo’s argument that slavery was not Lincoln’s (and the Republican’s) chief concern, then the South must have been acting in response to the things that were Lincoln’s (and the Republican’s) chief concerns.

But the future of slavery was among Lincoln’s, and certainly the electoral base of the Republican Party’s concerns, and so the Deep South states acted primarily (though not exclusively) in response to what they thought Lincoln’s election indicated.

This does not mean they weren’t also concerned with the Republican Party’s position on, say, tariffs; and certainly the Republican Party’s position on slavery had implications for state sovereignty generally; but it is extremely (extremely) unlikely they would have seceded had they not felt the ‘peculiar institution’ was directly threatened by the election of Lincoln.

In other words, Tom DiLorenzo can be correct without it at all suggesting that the Deep South’s secessions were not motivated chiefly by slavery. This is why the position of people like him and Tom Woods has always been whether it was strictly required to engage in a massively destructive war that killed over 800,000 people and destroyed Federalism in order to get rid of slavery (especially since that wasn’t necessarily the topmost concern of the people waging the war), given that it was eliminated in all other countries without such slaughter and devastation. Even an independent Confederacy would have had to eliminate it sooner or later – and who knows – it is hard to make counterfactuals – but while in such a case it is hard to imagine the freed slaves facing no discrimination after the end of slavery, perhaps there would have been no Black Codes, Jim Crow, “Separate but Equal,” and the like. Again, in few other countries were the status of freed slaves entirely equal, but their situation wasn’t as bad, and part of how bad it became can partly be attributed to counter-reaction to how the end of slavery was felt to be forced violently upon the south through the war & reconstruction. (Note to point this out is not at all to excuse it, and I’m certainly not claiming “all would have been daffodils and magnolias and the brotherhood & sisterhood of all humanity in the South, it would have become a land of egalitarian fellowship of equality under law by 1870 if it wasn’t for that darn Lincoln fellow and his Radical Republican brethren messing with the natural evolution of things”).

(Feel free to correct me if this is wrong).

[gutzmank]

The Republican Party’s position on tariffs had been the Whig Party’s position on tariffs, and yet no one seceded after Harrison’s election in 1840 or Taylor’s election in 1848. Deep South secession was about slavery. Again, see Dew.

[tckinkead]

If the Deep South secession was all about slavery, how does the proposed Corwin Amendment fit in?

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