Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Best Defense of Southern Secession I have ever read.

Lincoln's Inversion of the American Union
03/01/2013•Donald W. Livingston

https://mises.org/library/lincolns-inversion-american-union

Excerpt:

Slavery was more secure in 1860 than it had ever been. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, had declared that Africans were not citizens; and Congress approved a constitutional amendment that would take the regulation of slavery forever out of the hands of the central government. Lincoln said that he had no authority and no inclination to interfere with slavery in the states where it was legal. He could tolerate slavery as a means of controlling what nearly everyone saw to be an exotic and alien population. What he could not tolerate was a dissolution of the Union, loss of revenue from the South, and a low-tariff zone on his southern border. This was the consistent thread running through Lincoln’s policy from 1860–1865. He would not recognize the conventions of the people of the southern states, and he would not negotiate with their commissioners. He would go to war immediately to coerce the states of the deep South back into the Union. And it was this act that Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas could not tolerate. They had been opposed to the radicalism of the deep South, and their legislatures had voted firmly to stay within the Union. But they would not answer Lincoln’s call for troops to coerce a state into the Union; this they considered not only unconstitutional, but immoral. And in this they were correct. But so strong is the Lincoln myth and so interwoven with American self-identity that Americans have never been able to confront the stark immorality and barbarism of Lincoln’s decision to invade the South and to pursue total war against its civilian population.

To this we may add that the modern prejudice against secession has also served to occlude the immorality of the invasion. Here was a union of sovereign states only seventy years old. These states had originally asserted their sovereignty in acts of secession from the British empire, and the Union itself had been formed by an act of secession from the Articles of Confederation. Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island reserved the right to secede in their ordinances ratifying the Constitution, and secession was a part of public discourse in all sections throughout the antebellum period. This union, through conquest, purchase, and annexation, had, in fifty years, swollen to some ten times its original size. The Republic of Texas, having seceded from Mexico, had been in the Union only fifteen years. Secession is destabilizing in that it suddenly produces new majorities and new minorities. But annexation is destabilizing in exactly the same way. Rapid expansion led to rapidly shifting majorities and minorities and to conflicts of great and important interests.

By 1860, a choice lay open between either re-negotiating the compact between the states in order to form more perfect unions, as John Quincy Adams counseled should happen, or a powerful section would have to conquer the whole and reconstruct it into its own image, subordinating all else to its own interests. Everything in the older American tradition of the self-government of peoples points to the former path. Lincoln chose the latter path, and in doing so was in step with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trend of industrial society to consolidationism. Southerners, at great sacrifice, sought to defend that older American notion of self-government, a notion which was pushed to the margins of American consciousness after the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox. But it has not been extinguished, and has greater purchase in the world today than ever before as the consolidated leviathans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being called into question. The Russian invasion of Chechenya is widely regarded as barbarous, but the Russians have a better title to rule Chechenya than Lincoln had to coerce eleven contiguous American states into the Union.

This broader experience enables us to take a fresh look at the morality of Lincoln’s decision. It has been said that, although the Union was originally conceived as a compact between sovereign states entailing a right to secession, it evolved into the notion of an indivisible, organic Union from which secession was impossible. This notion, however, was late in arriving, and was not universally received by 1860. Southerners obviously did not believe it, nor did many northerners. There was tremendous opposition to Lincoln’s invasion of the South. To maintain power, he was forced to suspend the writ of habeas corpus throughout the North for the duration of the war, netting tens of thousands of political prisoners. Some 300 opposition newspapers were closed down. Democratic candidates, critical of the war, were arrested by the military, and the military was used to secure Republican victories at the polls, including Lincoln’s election in 1864.3

Moot point, as there aren't any Mulligans in war, particularly 151 years after the war ended.

Winners write the history books.

The writer goes on about morality yet says nothing about the morality of slavery. Might be writing with a bias. Legal and moral aren't always the same thing.

Read "The South Was Right" by Ronald and Donald Kennedy. It's more excellent reading on this subject.

Another thing ignored is the sheer numbers of men fighting for the South that did not own, nor had ever owned a slave. miles

We look at things with different ideas and backgrounds than our ancestors did. I am not trying to say that slavery was right, but it was practiced in lots of the world at that time. It would have went away on it own, given time, simply because of equipment modernization. The cotton gin had already started it on that path. Before the gin, slaves picked the seeds out of cotton by hand during the winter months. The gin made it so there was not work to be done during that time, that could be done inside in bad weather. It would be financially better to have share croppers that they did not have to feed during times of slow work. It would not have been overnight, but it was coming. miles

There are plenty of people behind bars today who didn't actually commit a crime, but they were accessory to it and therefore just as guilty.

There was no crime, slavery was legal. My people defended Virginia just as the men of North Carolina fought to defend their state. For non natives of the south it's a concept many can't get their minds around.

So, wonder when "they" will take Lincoln's picture off money, and replace him with black women? Maybe start tearing down his statues?

Lincoln is the one guilty of a crime

Yep!

AMEN!

The wrong side won that war, for sure.

The Civil War essentially ended the concept of "states rights" as was originally intended in the formation of the Union.

It has progressively gotten more stifling & overwhelming to the point today where virtually no state's rights exist that cannot be, or have not been, completely erased via the federal law & government.

Under the current concept, there's really no reason to ahve states anymore as they have, essentially, become moot.

Under Lincoln's concept & (illegitimate) thought process, Great Britain could have never exited the European Union.

MM

+1

Would have been interested to see how it all turned out if the South hadn't started shooting.

When the North invaded Southern territory.

I've said it on this board many times, but it is like speaking to a brick wall, regardless of the reasons the other seven Confederate states cited as their reasons for secession, it is plainly evident by demonstrable historical fact that Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia did not secede because of slavery.

“...I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass