American Civil War

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Contained within the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

So, it really was slavery that drove the Southern states to separate. Any arguments otherwise are just apologetic nonsense.

In 1860, the majority of the people in South Carolina were slaves. Their consent was never asked in whether South Carolina should separate from the Union, however much they might have had at stake in the outcome. I think that free people who were poor (including whites) were also excluded from voting.

Taney's judgment in the Dredd-Scott decision was that a black person had no rights a white person was bound to recognize.

ruveyn

Which means that any talk of "Social Contracts" with white southerners was absurd.

For purposes of a state's representation in the House of Representatives, each slave counted as 3/5 of a person. But, the slaves had absolutely no representation in the national government. The influence of Southern slave-owning states was artificially increased by the slaves whom they oppressed.

Slaves had a much greater right to rebel against their masters than Southern Whites had to rebel against the national government.

Any talk about American revolutionaries having social contracts is also quite absurd.

That being said, if we were talking about a slave secession I would agree with you. If we were talking about a North seceding from a viciously pro-slave south then I would agree with that too. Slavery is immaterial to anything I say about Southern secession as I am against slavery. The Civil war wasn't started to free the slaves though, and because of that, the pro-slave motives of the South are not very relevant, especially given that I consider issues of slavery and secession to be different issues and am not thinking about them together. I mean, an anti-slave East seceding from a pro-slave West is just as valid to me. (perhaps even more so)

As for the issue of Southern voting rights, I still would easily imagine that pro-secession southerners were a higher proportion of the population than pro-revolution Colonists, as the South formed a government and army, while the colonists were basically just a ragtag group of fighters.

The Union certainly had stake in that territory. It was part of their country. You cannot seriously expect that a sovereign nation is going to be completely fine with pieces of it just breaking off at will, flouting the established and agreed-upon political and governmental procedure when it did not go their way.


And that is a ridiculous thing to say. The South are the ones who rebelled.


AG, what the hell are you talking about here? I'm not referring to any implicit social contract. Did South Carolina ratify the Constitution, or didn't they? Did their elected representatives on their behalf join the Union when it was formed, or didn't they?

No, but it was started (by the South) specifically to prevent slaves from being freed.

It was only part of their nation if they had rejected the desires of the South to peacefully secede from the union.

As for pieces breaking off at will? A decision to do that isn't some foolish or arbitrary decision, Orwell, and you know that. By seceding, the South loses any protection of the Union military. It has to build credibility for itself on its own diplomatically. It likely will face tariffs whereas before it wouldn't. It has to reconstruct the legal/political structure of the nation. And so on and so forth. That being said though, my expectation is different than what I think is more correct. I do see it as problematic to attempt to force people to join a nation they don't want a part of. However, I expect nations to do this as they've done it many times historically. That being said, acting to bring people into joining a nation they don't want to be a part of seems rather aggressive to me.

As for "agreed-upon", nobody agreed upon this, the Constitution is relatively silent, and any body who may have agreed upon this is long dead anyway. So, yeah, I still hold to my position.


No, the South sought to peaceably secede. They did not seek to start a war. Secession isn't rebellion unless one accepts an authority and rejects that authority. The South is rejecting these claims rather than accepting them.


I am trying to anticipate what kind of philosophical underpinnings are underlying your very strong seeming opinion. I don't really know how you are justifying yourself, but you are holding to your conceptual analysis rather heavily, which means that there is an underlying framework that has to be explored in order for the situation to really be resolved.

The South Carolinean government ratified. People within the territory/state of South Carolina then later decided to leave and then acted to do this. Whether there is real continuity is a difficult question, but I consider it somewhat irrelevant since it does seem clear that the people generally occupying this territory did seek to leave this union.

Secession isn't an act of war. The war started with Fort Sumter, and this was due to the North refusing to let the South leave, and the South refusing to let the North hold part of territory that they regarded as their own.

We both know that secession could only lead to war. They may have given lip-service to the goal of "peaceful" secession, but the Southern leaders knew full well it would mean war if they tried to break away from the Union.

And yes, of course the North rejected the desires of the South. Why shouldn't they? From the North's perspective, the South's actions were illegal, and thus secession was illegitimate and would be properly regarded as rebellion.


Arbitrary no, foolish yes.


Who's talking about being forced to join? The South was already part of the Union. Much of that land was bought with Union money, and its freedom had been won and secured with Union arms. The Union was a joint venture. Backing out partway through is obviously going to cause problems, and so requires at the least a negotiated withdrawal from the Union and a settling of accounts. The South did not even attempt any of this.


The general opinion of legal scholars was that states did not have the right of secession once they had joined the Union.


BS and you know it. The act of secession itself was a rejection of the authority of the federal government. Any talk of peaceful secession was little more than a PR stunt. The South fired the first shots, and the federal troops at Ft Sumter were not there to threaten the South.


If you feel like psychoanalyzing my views here, just attribute it to a certain conservatism. You cannot make radical changes like this unilaterally. If they are to be made, they must be negotiated.

And the South wanted to leave the union for the sake of preserving slavery.

"Could only"? It is not as if the North *had to* engage the South. The North instead acted to do this. If the Southern leaders knew it could only mean war, then why did they ask for Union soldiers to leave instead of driving them out?


You yourself have already recognized that the North could very well have accepted the South as a separate nation. The British did so for the US only about 70 years ago, and while it took fighting, this fighting cannot be regarded as necessary.

As for illegality, you know as well as I do that there aren't explicit rules dealing with secession. That being said, the legitimacy of Southern actions is linked to the legitimacy of American founding actions, so it is hard to regard one legitimate while regarding the other illegitimate. Thus meaning that your position seems to require inconsistent beliefs.


Eh, I think I misstated myself there anyway, so maybe we are on the same page.


The issue is that you aren't really a member if you don't identify as one. As for Union money and Union arms, the same can be said with the American Revolutionary war, as the British are the ones who cleared the Indians out of the surrounding territory. As for backing out, I can see your point if all you are saying is that the South should have paid some costs, but unless it can be shown that the refusal of the North to withdraw is a matter of Southern refusal to pay rational Northern claims, I am still going to side more with secession.


Law isn't a science and legal scholars continue to disagree on these matters, even about whether law *can* make these absolute claims.

I have a few legal scholars right here who make their own claims about secession. http://volokh.com/2010/02/10/why-the-is ... t-settled/
http://volokh.com/2010/02/10/the-suppos ... ppomattox/


Not BS and you know it. The act was a refusal to accept that authority, not both rejecting AND accepting an authority. In order to be a rebel, somebody has to be King and you have to know that and reject their king-ness. The South was denying that the Union was king outright by saying that relations were dissolved.

The South fired the first shots AFTER the North refused to evacuate the base. That being said, the federal troops there would have no business being there if Southern secession was accepted, and certainly no attempts to fortify would reasonably be made unless there was a desire for war.


You can make radical changes unilaterally and people do it all the time. Negotiation is good, but you don't have to accept the terms that you don't accept.

That being said, I am not trying to psychoanalyze, but rather explore foundations. You see, rationally, each conclusion rests on a number of premises, and these premises themselves can be evaluated, where differences in premises are the reason for differences in conclusion. Now, this is a false model, but on some level it *has* to have some validity if we are to take our talking seriously, as we have to be "rational" in order to represent anything more substantive than a mood.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 20 Mar 2010, 9:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ok, but the Civil War wasn't a war by the North to save the slaves. That is still a significant factor when evaluating even the morality of the actions. If we say that "The North hated slavery and fought the war to save the southern slaves" then this makes the North seem more virtuous. If the North was just rejecting Southern secession, then secession has to be evaluated on it's own grounds between the two actors, and the issue of slavery isn't something that can play as much of a part as it was not part of the Northern decision to accept or reject Southern actions.

What is the point that you are trying to make? That the South was virtuous? That the North lacked virtuosity?

The Southern states chose to leave the country for the sake of preserving slavery.

The Northern states, for whatever reason, were motivated by a desire to keep the Southern states within the country.

Why did the Northern states want to keep the Southern states within the union? For the sake of ending slavery? Or, what was it? A matter of national pride, since the USA was in an expansionist mode, had only recently taken over one-half of Mexico, and didn't want to lose anything? The southern states have proven to be rather troublesome over the years.

And, anyway, whether the North entered the war for the sake of ending slavery or not, the fact remains that it was federal troops who finally put an end to slavery.

The Civil War was neither good nor bad. It was necessary.

ruveyn

Because it is customary to make such requests before actually commencing hostilities, in order to have a pretext for claiming that you are waging war justly. You can go and read all the telegrams sent between the German and Russian governments immediately before WWI and you will see similar behavior. Germany requested that Russia cease mobilization rather than just immediately declaring war, even though they knew they would have to go to war anyways.


Well, it is somewhat different as the Constitution and the federal Union were arrangements entered into voluntarily by elected representatives, rather than by monarchical decree. If pressed, I will admit that the grounds for the American Revolution were illegitimate, but I still maintain that they were much different from the situation that led to the Civil War. For instance, the US did not actually declare independence until we were already at war with Britain. We could hardly be expected to be loyal to someone who was actively attacking us.


The North rejected secession, and the South seceded, that is ultimately the cause. The Union was maintaining a fortress that it regarded as legally its, and the South attacked. The South did not attempt any sort of diplomatic resolution of the issue, instead they attacked federal troops. That is unambiguously an act of war.


Accept AND reject an authority simultaneously? You're being silly. They had previously accepted the authority of the federal government, and the Constitution was still the binding law of the land. You can't merely wish away laws when they become inconvenient for you.


The point is that secession was NOT accepted, and there is no reason from the North's perspective why it should have been. Thus, the North had every right to refuse to evacuate the base, and the federal troops still had business there. Further, Lincoln indicated in advance to the CSA that he was only sending provisions to Ft Sumter, not arms, and that if the Confederates did not start a fight they would not have one. He was not fortifying it, only making sure the troops did not starve. A previous attempt by Buchanan to send provisions to Ft Sumter was met with Southern violence. There is absolutely no way you can regard the South as guiltless in this whole affair.


OK then, you cannot unilaterally make radical changes that affect other people and expect them to accept those decisions. Happy now?

Ok? Federal troops put an end to slavery... um... fine? The point I was really making was that the issue of Southern secession has to be evaluated as a secession, not as a fight to end slavery. As such, the pro-slave, anti-slave, etc attitudes are less relevant.

Because of that, the real issue is just secession. And... well.... a lot of the arguments that seem to be made are such that "any and all secessions" are evil by those kinds of arguments. This, however, invalidates the possibility of a just secession.(which might be possible) Heck, the kinds of thinking often seem so state-oriented that they ignore the possibility of good rebellion. (Screw you Luke Skywalker and your rebel friends!) Now, is this to say that the South had a good reason to secede? No. Is this to say that anybody who rebels must have a great reason? No. But... a view that categorically denies such freedom seems kind of imperfect.