Were the Southern States wrong to secede?

[ponderingturtle]

IIRC, Tennessee was the last to leave, and the first to be readmitted. It probably didn't hurt that Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson was a Tennessean.

And clearly a traitor by the standards of the day. Not following his state.

 

[Cayvmann]

This is anecdotal. I have no evidence to back it up:

I took an honors history course, and the professor told us that after their secessions, and before the first shot on Ft Sumpter by the confederates, the confederate states complained because the north cut-off mail sevice to the south.

I don't know if it's true, but it symbolizes the utter lack of a sense of proportion on the part of the rebel states.

Keep your filthy government hands off of my medicare?

 

[Paulhoff]

Keep your filthy government hands off of my 'filthy government' medicare?

That's better.

Paul

 

[kmortis]

Nobody in this thread has even hinted that they believe that secesion or nullification or anything else is tolerable or even possible today.

OK then, I will. I think that it's the state's right to secede from the union if it's people wish. My basis for this?

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I don't see the Union as a sacred thing. It works in many ways, but if it were to become intolerable to a majority of the People (aka the Soverign) why can't they decide to leave? While I'm pleased that the CW turned out the way it did, I think it's a shame that it had to be done that way.

Now, does this mean that I want any particular state to leave? No. It's just I think it's an atrocity that for a nation with the 10th admendment to say that the states do not have that right, IF IT'S PEOPLE VOTE FOR IT is living a lie. The US was formed in a war that was fought on the idea that a People have the right to choose their own political unions. To say otherwise is to spit on that ideal.

Of course, we could always tear up the Constitution and rewrite it so that it doesn't allow for state secession...

An earlier poster brough up Quebec. They have a referendum from time-to-time posing the secession question. It always gets voted down. AS for them joining the US, I don't think that's what the Quebecois have in mind, but that's an idea for another thread. Maybe one where we can get some of the Quebecers and Quebecois on the forum to weigh in.

 

[themusicteacher]

OK then, I will. I think that it's the state's right to secede from the union if it's people wish. My basis for this?



I don't see the Union as a sacred thing. It works in many ways, but if it were to become intolerable to a majority of the People (aka the Soverign) why can't they decide to leave? While I'm pleased that the CW turned out the way it did, I think it's a shame that it had to be done that way.

Now, does this mean that I want any particular state to leave? No. It's just I think it's an atrocity that for a nation with the 10th admendment to say that the states do not have that right, IF IT'S PEOPLE VOTE FOR IT is living a lie. The US was formed in a war that was fought on the idea that a People have the right to choose their own political unions. To say otherwise is to spit on that ideal.

Of course, we could always tear up the Constitution and rewrite it so that it doesn't allow for state secession...

An earlier poster brough up Quebec. They have a referendum from time-to-time posing the secession question. It always gets voted down. AS for them joining the US, I don't think that's what the Quebecois have in mind, but that's an idea for another thread. Maybe one where we can get some of the Quebecers and Quebecois on the forum to weigh in.

That quote you mention is from the Declaration of Independence and is not a legally binding document of any kind. It has no more relevance to the real governance of this nation than does the oft-cited quotation from the same document regarding "our creator." What that document refers to and the section quote is revolution. The founding fathers knew full well that they had no legal right to secede and war was inevitable because of their declaration. Secession is the peaceful breaking off from another state in a legal manner.

There have been several rulings since the CW that have said states do not have the right to secede. The 10th amendment has been construed by those unhappy with the federal government to mean that if they don't like what's going on at a federal level, they can just go about their merry way but the courts have said otherwise. In other words, the states themselves are part of the United States of America, not "free agent" countries that happen to be loosely connected to the US, picking and choosing which laws they will follow and what they will contribute to the union and choosing to leave when it becomes convenient to do so (the Constitution cleared this up from the much looser Articles of Confederation). Now, if a state would like to commit to revolution, they may elect to do so but they would be in open rebellion/sedition (as much as the founders of this nation were to England) and would be put down very quickly.

 

[Loss Leader]

I don't see the Union as a sacred thing. It works in many ways, but if it were to become intolerable to a majority of the People (aka the Soverign) why can't they decide to leave? While I'm pleased that the CW turned out the way it did, I think it's a shame that it had to be done that way.

Now, does this mean that I want any particular state to leave? No. It's just I think it's an atrocity that for a nation with the 10th admendment to say that the states do not have that right, IF IT'S PEOPLE VOTE FOR IT is living a lie. The US was formed in a war that was fought on the idea that a People have the right to choose their own political unions. To say otherwise is to spit on that ideal.

If you don't see the Union as sacred, why would you see the state as sacred? First, you talk about the right to secede being inherent in the people, calling them sovereign. Later, you claim that it's the states that have that right.

What if a unit of people smaller than the state wanted to secede? What if everybody in Marin County, California voted to secede from the Union? Do you believe they should be able to? If not, explain how the cohesiveness of a county creates less sovereignty than that of a state.

What if the people in a state are not unanimous and cannot be separated by geography? If 73% of Texas voters want to secede, why should their political will be more important than Texans who don't? Should the minority be marched to Oklahoma and thrown out or made subservient to the will of the majority of voters? By what right are the majority acting in throwing out or ignoring the minority?

Similarly, what if 51% of Texans want to secede but 93% of all Americans don't want them to? Why should the happenstance of state borders dictate the size of the unit that that gets to decide on secession? If most Americans don't want Texas out, why should we ignore their political will only to focus on the will of the people who happen to have been born slightly north of Mexico?

Why should a "state" even be a political entity? There's nothing inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty to even suggest such a thing.

 

[Metullus]

Yup. Anything that means I´m not associated with those crazy Bavarians...

Hows the weather?

Chaos am I off-base in my understanding of the Bavarian v Prussian v German thing in early 20th century Germany?

 

[John Jones]

So based on how the army was organized is the reason that they were primarily loyal to their state?

I can't parse that string of words with a question mark at the end. Are you asking me a question or something?

You are just taking alternate historical views as to their motives.

Is there an orthodox historical view as to their motives that I have missed?

 

[John Jones]

And clearly a traitor by the standards of the day. Not following his state.

Why do you consider President Andrew Johnson a clear traitor by the standards of the day?

 

[John Jones]

That's sort of the point I was trying to make. Right and wrong have very little to actually do with (inter)national politics.
The british felt they were right to use force against a rebellious colony and yet I doubt you'd have found many northerners who agreed with that point of view during the civil war, even though they also denied that right of the southern states to secede.

You made your point well. I got it.

 

[drkitten]

The civil war ended in 65. Glad there was a decision on the right or lack of right to secede four years after the war was over, but I was talking about the law as it existed BEFORE the war.

Er,.... I think you're confusing "the law" with "the set of cases describing the law."

We can't fault the southern states, at least in a legal sense, for doing something which the law did, at the time, allow them to do or at least not prohibit them from doing, even if the law changed afterwards.

Not relevant. The law had not changed between 1860 and 1865. Actually, it hadn't changed in this respect since 1781.

Analogy for example :

2010 : The city of Springfield passes a law making it illegal to keep goats as pets.
2011 : I decide to keep a goat as a pet (in Springfield).
2012 : I'm charged with violation of that particular law.

Can we fault me for keeping a goat? Hell, yes.

The law in 1860 prohibited states from seceding. The law in 1789 prohibited states from seceding. (Actually, states had been prohibited from seceding since 1781. That was the holding of the SCOTUS.)

Just because I seem to have a particular idiosyncratic view of what the Springfield local pet ordinance requires doesn't mean I can't be faulted for breaking it.

 

[drkitten]

That's sort of the point I was trying to make. Right and wrong have very little to actually do with (inter)national politics.
The british felt they were right to use force against a rebellious colony and yet I doubt you'd have found many northerners who agreed with that point of view during the civil war, even though they also denied that right of the southern states to secede.

But I don't think that many of the Founding Fathers felt that they had the "right" to rebel. They were pretty clear in their understanding that what they were doing was treason against the Crown.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Even the Declaration admits that it is not an appeal to legal rights, but to world opinion : "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ..." And again, they recognize that they're (literally) putting their lives at stake in this declaration -- "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

 

[kmortis]

That quote you mention is from the Declaration of Independence and is not a legally binding document of any kind. It has no more relevance to the real governance of this nation than does the oft-cited quotation from the same document regarding "our creator." What that document refers to and the section quote is revolution. The founding fathers knew full well that they had no legal right to secede and war was inevitable because of their declaration. Secession is the peaceful breaking off from another state in a legal manner.

No legal, but a strong moral right to secede. I know full well that the DOI has no legal standing, however it does lay out a very strong moral argument as to when secession is to be expected and undertaken (notice, I didn't say "allowed").

There have been several rulings since the CW that have said states do not have the right to secede. The 10th amendment has been construed by those unhappy with the federal government to mean that if they don't like what's going on at a federal level, they can just go about their merry way but the courts have said otherwise. In other words, the states themselves are part of the United States of America, not "free agent" countries that happen to be loosely connected to the US, picking and choosing which laws they will follow and what they will contribute to the union and choosing to leave when it becomes convenient to do so (the Constitution cleared this up from the much looser Articles of Confederation). Now, if a state would like to commit to revolution, they may elect to do so but they would be in open rebellion/sedition (as much as the founders of this nation were to England) and would be put down very quickly.

So all court rulings are correct? Jim Crow was right? I think not.

Besides, what do you expect a Federal court to rule? That the CW was fought for specious reasons? Pshaw! (Hrm...this CT stuff is kinda fun...)

If you don't see the Union as sacred, why would you see the state as sacred? First, you talk about the right to secede being inherent in the people, calling them sovereign. Later, you claim that it's the states that have that right.

The People are the Soverign in the US. The States, and the Federal Government for that matter, draw their authority from the People. That is the very foundation upon which the US is founded. That it doesn't play out that way as a practical matter is a discussion for another day. My point is that if a majority of the People agree that State X gets to secede, the it should secede. If Texas, say, felt so strongly that it's needs were not being met by being pat of the Union, then they should be allowed to secede. This doesn't mean that it's neighbors have to engage in trade with them, mind you, or follow any of the reciprical laws (marriage etc) that are afforded them as part of the Union.

What if a unit of people smaller than the state wanted to secede? What if everybody in Marin County, California voted to secede from the Union? Do you believe they should be able to? If not, explain how the cohesiveness of a county creates less sovereignty than that of a state.

Never thought about it, but I'd probably come down on letting them make a go for it. They'll be back soon enough once the utility rates go through the roof due to tariffs with the State of California, grocery bills do the same etc etc.

What if the people in a state are not unanimous and cannot be separated by geography? If 73% of Texas voters want to secede, why should their political will be more important than Texans who don't? Should the minority be marched to Oklahoma and thrown out or made subservient to the will of the majority of voters? By what right are the majority acting in throwing out or ignoring the minority?

Hrm....another from hypothectical land. Ok, we can play the "what if" game for a while. It won't change the fact that there's nothing explict in any governing document that forbids a state from seceding.

Well, once Texas (in this example) secedes, then those that are unhappy would probably migrate to the neighboring states. OK, LA, NM and Mexico would all problably see a bump in population. Those who stayed would propbaly work to get it back in the Union. As for if it's right? That's for one who's more of a philosopher than I, but it's allowed by our system. Was it right for the founding fathers to rebel against Great Britian? Probably not from a legal sense....

Again, stop thinking that this is done over trivial matters. To get that many people to agree on the disolution of political ties with the rest of the US enough that they'd actually act (as opposed to just pissing and moaning about it) would take a situation much like we saw leading up to 1776.

Similarly, what if 51% of Texans want to secede but 93% of all Americans don't want them to? Why should the happenstance of state borders dictate the size of the unit that that gets to decide on secession? If most Americans don't want Texas out, why should we ignore their political will only to focus on the will of the people who happen to have been born slightly north of Mexico?

Well, then the 93% can petition their representatives to not trade with the new Republic of Texas.

Why should a "state" even be a political entity? There's nothing inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty to even suggest such a thing.

Yeah...ok...for that matter why should a "nation" even be a political entity? There's nothing inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty to even suggest such a thing. At what level do you want to deal with this? We can play this game all over the place. All political bounaries are well established fictions. Go to the boarder of New York and Pennslyvania and other than the street signs, there are no real indications that there's any difference, is there? It's a collective agreement made hundreds of years ago. If we, today, do not agree with those reasonings, cannot e change them?

Now, having said all that. I don't think this would ever, in a million years¹, happen, for some of the reasons that I alluded to before. If things were so contentious that Texas left, how much to you think that the rest of US would want to deal with them? Probably very little, especially at first. So, if Mexico didn't make them a good offer, they'd probably come back and petition for statehood.

Oh, and one final thing. If statehood is such a great thing, why has Guam and Porto Rico turned it down? Why don't the Feds just march in there and force them to join the Union like Lincoln did to the Confederacy? Granted, they're territiories which makes their status a little different, but if we're saying that you can't be part of the US without being a State, why not Guam and PR?


1 "in a million years" in the coloquial sense. A lot of things can happen in a literal million years.

 

[kmortis]

But I don't think that many of the Founding Fathers felt that they had the "right" to rebel. They were pretty clear in their understanding that what they were doing was treason against the Crown.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Even the Declaration admits that it is not an appeal to legal rights, but to world opinion : "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ..." And again, they recognize that they're (literally) putting their lives at stake in this declaration -- "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

Absolutly correct. They thought that they had to rebel because the situation was so intolerable that they no longer desired to be part of GB.

 

[Chaos]

Hows the weather?

Warm and sunny... relatively speaking.

Chaos am I off-base in my understanding of the Bavarian v Prussian v German thing in early 20th century Germany?

No, you´re essentially right.

 

[Darth Rotor]

the Constitition makes NO provisions for states to secede.

It doesn't, or didn't, need to. See IX and X amendments, wherein the states and people reserve all other rights.

One major problem for the CSA was that in more than one state there was Federal property, and they failed to negotiate the disposition of same. Lincoln was right to act on that basis, among others.

Whether or not Lincoln was Constitutionally justified in choosing to preserve the Union isn't clear to me, but it's what he did, and the outcome was, in the long term, generally of benefit to all Americans. I had an 8th grade English teacher from Alabama who put it this way: the South won by losing, as they got to remain (or become again, after Reconstruction) Americans.

If nothing else, by fighting to preserve the Union he was looking after the concerns of any and all Americans who were anti-secession in the seceding states, a decent justification: to act on their behalf.

@ drkitten: you appeal to AoC doesn't make sense. The AoC were deemed unsatisfactory by the States, and so a better governmental framework was to be worked out, that was satisfactory. They didn't amend the AoC, they replaced the AoC.

This new framework is what you and I know as the Constitution. In many cases, the provisions of the Constitution changed or rendered void the AoC, to the point where the AoC wasn't listed in the Constitution ... or am I missing a spot in the language of the Constitution that stated "the following AoC paragraphs are still applicable?" I don't believe that language is in the Constitution. What they wanted to keep from AoC was imported in one form or another into the Constitution, and the rest discarded.

If you can show me otherwise, I'd be keen to see it.

With that in mind, perhaps the legal opinion offered on secession after the fact of the civil war is a piece of post hoc reasoning.

DR

 

[drkitten]

@ drkitten: you appeal to AoC doesn't make sense.

It's not my appeal. It's the majority opinion of the Supreme Court, and as such, the highest legal authority in the United States.

The AoC were deemed unsatisfactory by the States, and so a better governmental framework was to be worked out, that was satisfactory. They didn't amend the AoC, they replaced the AoC.

Not according to the Supreme Court. They incorporated and extended the AoC into a new document.

or am I missing a spot in the language of the Constitution that stated "the following AoC paragraphs are still applicable?"

You are. It's the part about forming a "more" perfect union, which implicitly incorporates the perfective aspects of the AoC. How could a dissoluble union be "more perfect" than one that was explicitly indissoluble?

Hence the Constitution is also indissoluble.

 

[WinstonCountyWildman]

Why?

I'm from Tennessee, and I never had any say in it. Neither did my relatives back to my great grandparents if not earlier.

My ancestors on my mother's side were from the "Free State of Winston (county) Alabama - which met to secede from the state of Alabama until the organizers were all arrested.

This may be only peripherally significant, but only 5% of southerners were slaveholders in the states where slavery was legal according to the 1860 census. Men were called to protect their state from the invading north.

Small world. I live in "The Free State of Winston"

The main reason they were all for becoming a free state within the state of Alabama was because like about 99 percent of the south they were poor farmers who had never owned nor would have ever owned a slave and they did not feel like they should have to send their men off to join a pissing contest between the north and the south.

Slavery was allowed in northern states after it was abolished in the south. Some of the greatest northern Generals etc owned slaves. This fantasy that all states above the Tenn and South Carolina was a paradise for disenfranchised slaves and blacks is pure bunk.

 

[John Jones]

Small world. I live in "The Free State of Winston"

The main reason they were all for becoming a free state within the state of Alabama was because like about 99 percent of the south they were poor farmers who had never owned nor would have ever owned a slave and they did not feel like they should have to send their men off to join a pissing contest between the north and the south.

Slavery was allowed in northern states after it was abolished in the south. Some of the greatest northern Generals etc owned slaves. This fantasy that all states above the Tenn and South Carolina was a paradise for disenfranchised slaves and blacks is pure bunk.

If you're a Wilson or a Cox, we're probably related then.

 

[Michael Redman]

It doesn't, or didn't, need to. See IX and X amendments, wherein the states and people reserve all other rights.

One major problem for the CSA was that in more than one state there was Federal property, and they failed to negotiate the disposition of same. Lincoln was right to act on that basis, among others.

***

DR

I agree with both these points.

If the great majority of the people of the South were unhappy being part of the USA, I believe they had a moral right to negotiate their separation and independence. Of course, knowing how widespread this desire was would require asking the almost 40% of the population who were slaves, the opinion of whom the confederacy was not about consider. In my opinion, that made it impossible for the confederacy to claim a moral right to secede, even though I acknowledge that I'm applying modern values to a different historical world.