Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Brion McClanahan
MemberMatt,
Sorry for the delay in my response.
The term cavalier is derived from the French word chevalier and simply means “horseman.” The royalists in England adopted the name to differentiate their cause from the parliamentarians and the name stuck during the English Civil War of the 1640s. It has nothing to do with religion.
Hope that helps.
MemberNeither the 2nd nor the 10th amendment “gives us the right” to do anything. They both protect natural rights from government interference. That is how the founding generation conceptualized both. We have a natural right to self defense and self preservation. The 2nd Amendment protects that.
MemberFreebans,
Short answer, no. See for yourself.
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/ordinances_secession.asp
Brion
MemberTwmmah,
Good question, and you are correct about Lincoln.
There were around 3.5 million slaves in the South in 1860 out of a population of 11 million give or take. In MS and SC, the black population was over 50 percent, while in DE (which was considered a Southern State) it was around 10 percent.
Perhaps one day Tom will let me do a class just on the War. I could get more in depth with several issues than I could in the short lectures for the survey course.
Brion
MemberSam Adams is great. He opposed the adoption of the Const. without amendments and was always a principled opponent of the central authority, whether it be the British government in London or the U.S. govt in NY and Phil. I have a chapter on him in my PIG to the Founding Fathers.
MemberFreebans: You don’t have to agree with the cause to agree with the principle of self-determination and secession. To say that history is complex and that there were many issues involved in the secession of the Southern States is still something that Lincoln worshipers do not understand. And putting pressure on the Lincolnites to defend his blatantly unconstitutional acts does a world of damage to their moral self-righteousness.
MemberThe issue was perhaps more theoretical than concrete for many Southerners. They recognized that the Comp of 1850 gave them little if any benefit with the exception of a stronger fugitive slave law, and knew by 1855 that pop. sovereignty was going to produce more non-slaveholding than slaveholding states.
John C. Calhoun recognized before he died that if the South wanted to maintain its strength in the govt. it needed to concede the internal improvements issue, which was beneficial for many western farmers. They did not care about tariffs or banks, but they needed roads and canals and cut the deal with the commercial North to get them. Even Madison and Monroe while vetoing internal improvements bills thought they were a good idea with a const. amendment.
Overall, if these states could be somewhat integrated with the South, the general conclusion was that they would vote with the South on important issues and keep a balance of power at least in the Senate. Like you said, I am not sure if it would have happened that way, but Southerners understood they were a rapidly shrinking minority and wanted to provide a way of creating a political hedge against what they viewed as Northern aggression (the slave power rhetoric).
Member“Secession Debated” is worthwhile, as is “Showdown in VA,” and Crofts’s book is required reading in grad school on the topic, but I would avoid Dew’s book. It is an open polemic against “neo-confederates” and his “evidence” is often cherry picked to fit his agenda, namely that only a defense of slavery drove secession during Dec-Jan 60 and 61. For example, several of these “apostles” visited Delaware in 1861 and catered their speeches to the views of that State, namely they promoted the economic motivation for joining with the Confederacy over pro-slavery sentiment. Of course, DE did not secede, but it probably would have if MD had not been coerced to stay in the Union by the Lincoln administration.
Certainly, the public declarations for secession expressly stated that Northern hostility to slavery caused the separation, but there were many Southerners uncomfortable with this position, and if the protection of slavery was the only issue, why did the South reject Corwin’s proposed 13th Amendment, which would have prohibited the central government from interfering with slavery in States where it already existed? It would have left the issue open in the territory, but according to many Southerners, the SCOTUS had already decided that problem with Dred Scott. We can argue how that would have been enforced, but many Southern leaders openly declared after 1857 that the issue was dead.
Was racism involved in secession in 1860-61. Yes. Was racism involved in Republican promotion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” from 1854 forward. Yes. Were 19th century Americans racist (including Honest Abe and most Notherners)? Yes. Did Northern theological instruction contribute to a Biblical defense of slavery in the South? Yes. When people start placing racism front and center as “the” issue in 1860 and 1861 it distorts the picture into a “good vs. bad” moral crusade won by the North, which was simply not the case. The 1850s and 1860s were more complex and should be treated as such. Many Southerns believed that abolition would bring the same results as Haiti and Santo Domingo to the South, meaning the extermination of white Southerners. They had historical examples and thought that would be the natural outcome of such a move.
Here are a couple of good older books that I think do a better job on secession than Freehling (an open anti-Southern historian), Dew, and Crofts:
E. Merton Coulter: “The Confederate States of America.”
Richard Taylor (son of Zachary Taylor): http://books.google.com/books?id=C3QFAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=richard+taylor+destruction+and+reconstruction&hl=en&sa=X&ei=a8HMULCUFoeC8AS40oDACQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA
Benjamin H. Hill: http://books.google.com/books?id=okUvAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=benjamin+h+hill&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qcLMUM3kO4T48wTTsoC4Ag&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA
Dwight Dumond, “The Secession Movement 1860-1861,” and “Southern Editorials on Secession.” Should be able to find both in a good academic library.
MemberHope:
Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge in the early 20th century. He, like his more famous cousin Edward Bellamy, was a utopian socialist who understood that “nationalism” and “democracy” were more palatable terms than socialism, and he believed that if you could indoctrinate children to recite a pledge at an early age, they would be fully incorporated into the nationalist agenda by the time they were adults.
He had two goals in mind: 1) as you say to erase the idea that the United States could be divided and to drive a nationalist agenda and 2) to make Americans believe that “liberty and justice for all” was one of the core principles of the United States; he stole that from the goals of the French, not American, Revolution: “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Most also don’t realize that when children first recited the pledge they gave a salute similar to that of the Nazi salute. It was only changed during WWII after FDR and other Americans figured out that it smacked of fascism (still does) so you now put your hand over your heart.
Hope that helps.
November 9, 2012 at 2:29 pm in reply to: President Obama's Acceptance Speech and Actual History #14964MemberNo, Obama thinks it was the “United State” from the beginning. I didn’t watch nor hear the speech, but this is good stuff. Nice find.
MemberMemberhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145561579X/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d1_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1BQKSDGW2YVE8WYSRQZ8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1389517282&pf_rd_i=507846 (particularly the chapter on ME Bradford).
LewRockwell.com has dozens of articles on the topic. Do a search. That will get you started.
MemberAnother worthy book is Bensel’s “Yankee Leviathan.” Good, but dense, reading.
MemberHamilton made that distinction in his defense of the BUS in 1791. Here is a link to the text: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bank-ah.asp
As for the question in the OP, this is similar to the distinction between “delegated” in the 10th Amendment and “expressly delegated” as some wanted the language to read and as it read in the Articles of Confederation.
Necessary carries the same meaning as absolutely necessary, just as delegated carries the same meaning as expressly delegated. In regard to the latter, it was argued that way. During the ratifying debates, the so-called “Necessary and Proper Clause” was one of the primary targets of Patrick Henry and other opponents. They claimed it would lead to exactly what Hamilton proposed in 1791 and were assured that the clause could never be expanded or manipulated to include powers not delegated to the Congress by the States through the Constitution. In other words, Hamilton was making this up as he went along, and was betraying his own arguments in the months leading to ratification.
MemberBritt:
Thanks. William Dunning and his students viewed Reconstruction in the long view, but since they were dubbed racists and historians liked to neatly package Reconstruction as a Southern “problem,” that view quickly evaporated. Progressive historians like Charles Beard also attached the programs of the Reconstruction period to the Gilded Age, and diplomatic historians like Walter Lafeber at least marginally recognized that Reconstruction was a larger issue in regard to foreign relations. Susan Mary Grant’s “North Over South” is a fairly recent study that attempts to show how Northern ideology dominated after the war in all aspects of American policy. It is not bad, but still misses the mark for a comprehensive picture. In other words, no one has put everything together. It needs to be done, and frankly is always one of those projects I have in mind when thinking about another book.
Good question!
-
AuthorPosts