Dave “Mudcat” Saunders styles himself as the voice of the Southern Democrat, who have been abandoned by the arugula-chomping limousine liberal set, who do nothing but stereotype all the live-long day. Of course, that Saunders is…uh…stereotyping when he says this goes unmentioned, because we all know how those liberals aren’t “real” Americans.
Anyhow, Oliver Willis has a good catch about a new profile of Mudcat. Really, it’s not so much Mudcat’s regurgitated pablum, which is in full effect, but quite simply, this picture:
That’s Mudcat’s bed. Nice, colorful comforter-slash-symbol of slavery and the greatest treason ever perpetrated against the United States of America.
The Confederate Flag is a 20th century combination of the Confederate Navy Jack and the Confederate Battle Flag. Both were flown in battle by the Confederacy during their traitorous attempt to secede from the Union, so they could continue to hold slaves. The flag itself was revived in support of the right of the South to continue with Jim Crow, and support the American Apartheid system that kept African Americans mired in poverty and penury. Far from being a neutral symbol of Southern pride, it is a racist symbol, pure and simple, a symbol of white pride.
That Saunders tucks himself in at night under a racist symbol is, to put it mildly, horrific. He shouldn’t be involved in American politics, and he damn sure shouldn’t be allowed to be a voice in the Democratic Party, any more than a man who tucked himself in under a Nazi flag or a Ku Klux Klan flag. And quite frankly, if Mudcat doesn’t want himself and his ilk to be viewed as “a bunch of hillbilly heathens who go out and burn crosses and do crazy bullshit,” he might not want to be a hillbilly heathen who goes to sleep under a rebel flag.
It’s horrific, but not exactly surprising. It’s always this kind of “real American” who decides to represent himself with a symbol of rebellion against America. It makes no sense, but hey, neither does any of the b.s. he’s spewing about politics, I’m willing to bet. So at least he’s consistent in that way.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for emphasing that the Confederate Flag is BOTH racist AND traitorous. The racism of the flag should never be swept under the rug, but the treason against the United States it represents is often forgotten, and few people who fly it and claim to be a patriot get called on this contridiction. I am a proud American patriot who was born and raised in the South, and it disgusts me that that my adopted city of San Francisco is labeled un-American while traitors who fly the rebel flag get to claim to be true Americans.
Racist I have no argument with. Treasonous/traitorous is rather a stretch. Are all the friends I went to college with who would put Canadian stickers on their backpacks when traveling to Europe traitors? Is Bill Ayers treasonous? (Well, actually, I guess he is, so never mind.) How about people who oppose their government’s actions, withhold their taxes to protest (say) US imperialism, etc?
Desiring to dissassociate from a political union may be ill-advised, and certainly the reasons offered by the Confederacy do not seem compelling today. But they were compelling enough to millions of Confederates who joined wholeheartedly in the effort to secede – and I somehow doubt that those millions of people had just happened to be traitors at heart, waiting for the right opportunity to stab the Union in the back.
I can’t help feeling that if the secessionists had been opposed to slavery, and the unionists in favour, you would all be praising the former’s courage.
Do you consider the Declaration of Independence to be a treacherous document?
I somehow doubt that those millions of people had just happened to be traitors at heart, waiting for the right opportunity to stab the Union in the back.
If actually taking up arms against your country isn’t treason, the word has no meaning. The South engaged in war against the North, and attempted to dissolve the Union by force. That’s treason. There’s really no way around it.
Thank you for mentioning the DOI. I was going to use that as an example.
Yes, the Declaration od Independence *WAS* a treacherous document. And I support it 100%. The signers were committing treason against a monarchy. The very concept of a monarchy deserves it. The Confederacy was treason against a Republic. The republic *I* love. (I would like to say it was treason against democracy, but the extent to which America would be a democracy was arguably the point of the war.)
How about people who oppose their government’s actions, withhold their taxes to protest (say) US imperialism, etc?
Opposition to your government’s policies might be treason in a monarchy, dictatorship, or totalitarian state, for it is action against the soveriegn. In a democractic republic, YOU are the soveriegn, and you have a patriotic duty to oppose actions of the government you believe are wrong. It merely has to be done in the proper, peaceful way. That is entirely different from from a violent military atempt to bring down or break up the government.
Withholding taxes as protest, if you do so openly and are willing to accept the consequences – go to jail – is civil disobidience, and not treason. A person committing civil disobidience is accepting the government’s authority, they are just refusing to take part themselves in what they see as wrong.
I have no idea about the motives of the Canadian sticker thing. There is no attempt there to bring down the U.S. government, so I cannot imagine how it could be treason.
Jeff explained that better, faster, and shorter than I did.
The Confederacy tried to secede. They wanted to be a different country, not to destroy the existing country. Nor did they attempt to dissolve the Union; they tried to leave it. (If you decide you don’t want to blog here anymore, are you trying to dissolve Alas?) There were plenty of states – more than half – that didn’t secede, including the majority of the population and all of the industry that mattered.
And at the time, their legal position was significantly stronger than it would be today. The Union was barely more than a half-century old, and it was formed, not by the mass populace, but by a collection of independent state entities, most of which at the time of the Civil War maintained their own military forces. The Constitution doesn’t say you can’t secede or leave; it’s silent on the question, and for good reason – if it had said you couldn’t secede, it would never have been ratified. Many of the states that joined were pretty on the fence about it. At the time, although the cultural balance was shifting, people generally thought of themselves as citizens of their particular state, not of the country as a whole. Famously, Robert E. Lee opposed secession, but felt that his first duty was to Virginia. Not everyone, but certainly a majority of the population, felt the same way about their own states.
We can argue all day long about whether a political entity ought to permit secession; certainly, at this late date, we know what the answer is for our own country. But at the time the question was not nearly so clearly decided. History is written by the victors.
All that said – if you could please get all the other Obama-friendly bloggers to start talking about the Confederacy being a group of traitors and the Confederate flag being the symbol of treason, that would be great. Gotta be worth five points in Virginia, and my team can use it.
The Constitution of the United States clearly states that it is the supreme law of the land, above the laws and constitutions of the various states. Logically, a state could not through its own laws, declare itself no longer subject to the U.S. Constitution. Had they campaigned peacefully and democratically to be given permission to secceed from the U.S. government, that would not be treason. Still wrong, in my opinion, but not treason. But actually taking up arms against the authority of the U.S. government? As Jeff says, if that is not treason, the word has no meaning.
Individuals can give up their citizenship and leave peacefully. How can an act of personal will be possible for a person, but not a state? If everyone in California decides they are no longer US citizens, are they traitors?
This is a fair look at the question.
Again – we solved this problem with the civil war, and defeated the arguments of Calhoun with bullets rather than ballots. That’s OK – you can’t solve everything democratically. But at the time, the argument was very much alive, and very much undecided. If I honestly believe that I have the right to do something, and you honestly believe that I don’t, and we end up going to war over it, does your victory in the subsequent battle mean that I wasn’t honest in my belief?
Because that’s what the treason charge means – that the south not only didn’t have the right to secede, but that they didn’t actually believe that they had that right, and just wanted to start a big hairy war to smash America. Nobody, as far as I know, seriously subscribes to that view of history.
The power of secession is not prohibited by the Constitution to the states. The Tenth Amendment explicitly grants to the states (or to the people, which makes no sense in this context) powers not prohibited to them, therefore under the Constitution as amended, the southern states had the right to secede.
Having seceded, they were no longer part of the US, and consequently were not treasonous in defending themselves from US aggression. The only treason was that of the US against its own Constitution.
Why should they get permission to exercise their tenth amendment power?
I can’t help feeling that if the secessionists had been opposed to slavery, and the unionists in favour, you would all be praising the former’s courage.
can’t speak for Fecke, but for myself : abso-goddam-lutely. I don’t consider the secession itself to be the evil thing, but seceding over the right to keep humans as chattel (and please don’t waste anyone’s time arguing that the Civil War was about anything else) was unequivocally evil.
It is hard to imagine how anyone can claim that the US citizens who levied war against the United States during the Civil War did not commit treason – technically and specifically. The right to wage war against the United States is a right very explicitly excluded in the Constitution. There is no tenth amendment right for US citizens to engage in war against the United States, since the right to punish citizens for waging war against the US is specifically granted to the Federal government by the Constitution.
But, indeed, the evil of the Confederacy is not primarily in shelling Fort Sumter and starting a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, nor is it in treason. The evil of the confederacy is primarily in being a nation founded for the express purpose of preserving slavery as an institution in perpetuity. The evil of the confederate flag as a symbol is not that it is the flag of treason, but that it is the flag of racists segregationists, willing to maintain racist oppression through violence. The sorrow of the confederate flag is that it is also the symbol of regional pride for many White Southerners (and even some Indian Southerners), who are more interested in holding to a symbol that offends the hated Northerners than concerned with holding to a symbol that offends the disliked Black Southerners.
Because US citizens are not constitutionally empowered to engage in armed insurrection over disputes concerning legal rights. If I believe I have a tenth amendment right to not pay property taxes, I am not thereby legally empowered to take a machine gun and shoot anyone who comes to claim my property for back taxes. I may make my claim in a court of law, I may take to the streets in civil protest, I may run for office, or petition my representatives, but I may not rise up in violent revolt to demand my rights.
Southerners dominated the legislature and the Court system at the start of the Civil War. They had other options than warfare.
Also, Daran, it is kind of bizarre and revolting to see you arguing for the right of the ruling elite of the Southern states to draft hundreds of thousands of young men to send them out into the country side to kill each other. Glee in slaughter I can understand in Robert (it’s his shtick), but I don’t understand why you are white washing the decision of a small elite to engineer the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young men.
I very much agree with kth and Charles’ first comment. My belief is that secession may be legal, but violent secession is not.
It’s not all that often I quote from a conservative site to agree with it, but I agree with this, from Ilya at Volokh:
Regarding Charles’ second comment, just because Daran thinks the South had the Constitutional right to secession, doesn’t mean that he thinks they were morally right to do so. An act can be simultaneously Constitutional and immoral.
True. I think I was over-reacting to the faintly snide tone of Daran’s first comment.
Daran, I apologize for suggesting that you were defending the right of powerful elites to send hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths to protect the interests of the elites.
For myself, I would not defend the right of the Northern states (after the Dred Scott decision) to start a war to separate themselves from the stain of Southern slavery. I do not actually support the right to violent uprising as a legitimate means of achieving mere self-determination (as opposed to violent uprising as a means of resisting extermination). The border cases (oppression short of extermination, but much greater than denial of self-determination) are harder for me.
The evil of the confederate flag as a symbol is not that it is the flag of treason, but that it is the flag of racists segregationists, willing to maintain racist oppression through violence.
100% correct. So why drag treason into it, and tell 100 million southerners that their brave great grand-pappies, that 90% of them understand (tacitly or openly) to have been misled and wrong in what they were trying to achieve, were traitors?
Hardly anyone will defend racist segregationism (thank you Jesus for THAT change). Nearly everyone will defend an attempt at self-determination, when it applies to their kin. Why in God’s name frame the argument that way? In history class, or a book on theory-of-constitutional-governments class, fine.
Robert – I find it weird how the word ‘southerner’ (as in, ‘100 million southerners’) can one minute be used simply to describe someone (like me, I guess) who lives south of the Mason-Dixon line, and another minute be used to describe a very specific ethnic and cultural group. There are not a hundred million people who have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. Offhand I doubt there’s a hundred million white people in Dixie, and many of those are descended from more recent immigrations.
There are not a hundred million people who have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.
You’re probably right. But it’s a big number, whatever it is.
The South engaged in war against the North, and attempted to dissolve the Union by force.
My impression (caution: I went to school and took US history in Texas) was that the South attempted to secede through legislation and then tried to violently evict the foreign troops (aka Union soldiers) who were hanging out without permission in their territory. So I’m not convinced that they were wrong to try to secede or wrong to shell the foreign troops who wouldn’t leave, but they were still scumbags for their racism.
If you want to see how the events would have been spun if the South had won, just look at the Alamo and other relics of the Texas revolution some time. The Texas Revolution was even more treasonous than the South’s secession. The Constitution was entered voluntarily by each state with an implicit agreement that they could exit the same way. The Anglo settlers in Texas swore to become citizens of Mexico and abide by its laws when they entered the country. And they broke their word because Mexico, like most of Latin America, banned slavery. Yet the Anglos are considered the “good guys” in the Texas Revolution and the idiots who died defending the Alamo are considered martyrs to freedom. Despite the fact that they were fighting for the right to own people. Shows what winning can do for your rep.
Your impression is partially correct, Dianne. The Confederacy did things peacefully and by the book up until their attack on Union troops at Fort Sumter. The turnover of Federal property in Confederate states was peaceful up until Fort Sumter (then-president Buchanan declared that he didn’t believe the Confederacy had the right to secede, but was unwilling to fight a war to stop them); the Confederacy even offered to pay for the appropriated facilities but were rebuffed by Lincoln, who had taken office in the interim.
I wonder what would have happened if they had seceded and then stood down and let Fort Sumter be. It appears – although it is bloody difficult to untangle the threads – that the Union would have eventually invaded the Confederacy; four states didn’t join the Confederacy until the Union started mobilizing and moving troops south. But who really knows.
Ampersand:
Charles:
Thank you both.
Ampersand:
I agree with Dianne. The southern States did not violently secede. Secession was the illocutionary result of declaring secession. From that point onward, they were resisting a foreign occupier. It was their violent involuntary reincorporation into the Union which was illegal.
Charles’s property tax analogy is a false one. If Charles is correct about his tenth amendment right not to pay property taxes, his decision not to do so doesn’t remove him from the jurisdiction of the Constitution. If the Southern states were correct about their right to secede, then the act of secession did so remove them.
I don’t agree. It takes two to tango, and it takes to to secede. If a secession isn’ t acknowledged by the government you’re seceding from, then it didn’t happen — or at least, not without a revolution.
Putting it another way, I have the Constitutional right to free speech. But what happens if a cop prevents me from speaking, in a situation in which I had the Constitutional right to free speech? Then I don’t succeed in speaking.
Furthermore, although my rights have been infringed upon, that doesn’t give me the right to blow up the White House. I don’t have a Constitutional right to defend my Constitutional rights by the means of violent attacks on the government.
But even if you’re right, and it was illegal in some sense for the North to refuse to accept the South’s secession, the North still did the morally right thing. (Even if they didn’t do it for the right reasons.)
Daran,
Okay, so instead of refusing to pay property taxes on my house, what if I secede my 10 acres from the United States, and set up the People’s Republic of Charles? Now that I am no longer living in the US or a citizen of the US, am I within my rights to shoot the invading armies when the local sheriff comes to evict me after my property is seized for failure to pay taxes? The constitution is silent on secession, so it seems to me that it is just as likely to be a personal right as a right of the states.
On the shelling of Fort Sumter, even if we agreed that the individual states had the right to secede, I’m not sure how that gives them the right to violently seize land owned by the United States Government.
I don’t agree. The tenth amendment explicitly recognises and preserves the rights of States, however “The People” appears to be a term of art that doesn’t necessarily apply to individuals.
Even if you did have an individual right to secede, it’s not clear that you could take your land with you. It’s not part of your being, in the sense that a State’s territory is part of its being. Sucession, for an individual might just amount to the renunciation of your US citizenship.
I don’t know what international, Confederate, or Louisiana State law says (or said) on this subject. International law tends to legitimise what those nations with the most influence in formulating it actually do, and what they do in times of war is seize assets belonging to the enemy. The Confederacy probably didn’t have a lot of law of its own, unless it explicitly adopted some corpus of US law, (which it might have done, so as to give itself a standing start. Does anyone know?)
Unless you can identify a law applicable in the time and place, I don’t see why the Confederacy should not seize United States assets on its territory.
I believe the Confederates started from scratch, Daran, although they had their own state laws, which would have been voluminous. The whole US code was probably two books at that point in time; huge Federal lawmaking is a relatively recent innovation. Either way, the Confederates started minting their own laws quite quickly.
Fort Sumter is in South Carolina, btw.
And, it wasn’t a war until the Confederacy started it, so the whole “seize assets in time of war” argument rather falls flat when it comes to those properties. The Confederates agreed; they offered to indemnify the US government for the forts that Buchanan handed over.
I bet a case can be made that Buchanan’s pusillanimous conduct towards the Confederacy emboldened them.
You seem to be confusing your legal rights with the practicalities of excercising them. If a cop unlawfully imprisons you, he has physical custody over you, but he does not have legal custody.
If secession needs to be recognised by the Federal Government in order to have legal effect, then it isn’t “reserved to the States”, contradicting the tenth amendment.
No, but if a cop unlawfully attacks you, you have the right to self defence.
It’s very questionable whether either side “did the morally right thing” in going to war over this. The main difference between the two sides was the right of rich men to own slaves. But it wasn’t rich men who did the fighting and dying. It was poor men on both sides.
Slavery was a great evil. But so was the war. I have a big problem with statements of the moral rectitude of substituting one evil for another.
Then it is a fairly safe bet that there was no Confederate law against the Confederacy seizing US assets.
That is true, and they would certainly have laws pertaining to US and foreign properties on their territory. Arguably any laws pertaining to their relationship with the US would have been repealed (or applied to the Confederacy) by the declaration of secession and the formation of the Confederacy.
I doubt that the States had a law preventing the Federal Government (i.e., the Confederacy) from seizing hostile assets in time of war.
I know. I don’t know why I wrote “Louisiana”. Both girls names, I guess.
If the Mexican or Canadian military today rolled over the border without permission, and refused to leave on demand, and US defenders start shooting at them, is the war started by the US defenders?
The Confederacy was right to indemnify the US government for forts handed over. Failure to leave when asked was the act of war.
It takes two to tango, and it takes to to secede. If a secession isn’ t acknowledged by the government you’re seceding from, then it didn’t happen — or at least, not without a revolution.
So then how do you feel about the unilateral and violent secession of the American colonies from the British empire? (I am, BTW, just poking this statement to try to clarify the underlying rule, i.e. if you believe violent secession is an evil unto itself, always and everywhere, or if you believe that the Southern secession was evil simply because it was undertaken for evil reasons, i.e. to continue slavery. If the discussion is getting uncomfortable, just tell me to shut up already.)
Dianne, I honestly don’t know enough about the history of the just-pre-revolution colonies to make a judgment.
I believe that violent secession — all war, in fact — is an evil unto itself, always and everywhere. That doesn’t mean that it’s never the lesser evil.
I’d have to believe that the colonies were really very bad off, and being treated with great brutality by the British, before believing that starting a violent revolution is justified.
But at the same time, I’d have to believe that some incredibly important moral issue is at stake before I could believe that fighting against a rebelling colony — rather than just allowing the secession to take place peacefully — is justified.
I agree with that, but…
I’d need to be really, really certain that evil A was less than evil B before I would consider it justified to actively substitute evil A for evil B. Moreover, the greater the two evils, the more certain I’d need to be.
Where evil A is starting a war, I’d want to be sure that a) The right side was going to win it, b) that winning it would prevent evil B, and c) that evil B would not go away on its own for less cost than evil A.
I hope you don’t regard yourself as a “plain text”-er after this little doozie. It’s worth noting that the Second Amendment has the exact same “term of art”, and that pro-gun control Courts have similarly interpreted “the people” to mean only the states. (i.e. the “Well Regulated Militia” means the state National Guards, and that’s that.)
You’re hard enough to place that I don’t know what your position on the Second Amendment would be, but as for me, I believe that for both the Second and Tenth Amendments to have any meaning, it has to pertain to individuals on some level as well. The Fourteenth Amendment makes it clear that the Constitution recognizes that State governments can be tyrannical, and for the Constitution to have any value it must fulfill the purpose of protecting citizens from the spectre of tyrannical government – including tyrannical State governments.
I find the concept of a “plain texter” incoherent. Anyone who disagrees with the SC’s interpretation of the Constitution is themself disregarding the plain text of Article III, which vests “Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact” in the SC “to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution”.
The Second Amendment has way too many commas to make clear sense of. Individual-gun-rights advocates disregard the first and third in their interpretation. Another reading might be “A well regulated Militia … shall not be infringed”, with the two central clauses being treated as parenthetical, rather than the first two.
It’s worth pointing out that “The President shall be Commander in Chief … of the Militia” (Article 1 Section 2), that authority for “organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia” is vested in Congress, and “the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress” is vested in the States, (Section 8). So while there is considerable separation of powers, there is no provision for private militia. If your “militia”‘s officers aren’t appointed by your State, or if it won’t accept the command of the President, or the discipline of Congress, then it’s not the real militia. It’s the insurrection that the real militia may be called forth to suppress.
I think it’s virtues are best appreciated from a distance. I find the width of the Atlantic to be about the right distance.
Unfortunately the Eleventh Amendment has the opposite effect.
So you know quite a bit about the controversies surrounding the US Constitution. In the other thread, I just posted a reply that assumed that you did not know what “plain text” referred to. Mea culpa. Though, since you did know, I do not see why you’d inject it into a discussion that had nothing to do with the Constitution.
Hmm. In all my time, I must have missed that – I have always interpreted the Second Amendment’s primary purpose in defending the right to private militia. Will have to rethink that.
The Eleventh Amendment prohibits citizens of another State from taking it to court, does it not? I can see how this could potentially let States get away with stuff they wouldn’t otherwise get away with, but it’s specific whereas the Fourteenth is sweeping. I don’t see it as definitive as the latter.
Also, let’s not forget the Ninth Amendment, which has always been the tricky “final boss” for those who wish to minimize the Constitution’s provision of individual rights. Of course, it also contains the term of art “the people”, so there’s that.
In that thread, my remark was tongue-in-cheek.
According to the plain text, to US court. It doesn’t appear to prevent them from taking a State to its own or another State’s court. Neither does it appear to prevent citizens from taking their own State to US court. Nevertheless it has been so interpreted.
Also – to illustrate the absurdity that “plain text”-ism might lead to – although the Eleventh Amendment prohibits a citizen from suing one State, it doesn’t stop them from suing two or more States.
Unfortunately the Eleventh Amendment gives US citizens no recourse in the event of a violation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Amp: But at the same time, I’d have to believe that some incredibly important moral issue is at stake before I could believe that fighting against a rebelling colony — rather than just allowing the secession to take place peacefully — is justified.
Independence sounds wonderful, and the armed put down of movements toward independence sounds brutal, but unity has some peculiar advantages of its own that may make it worth defending. Unity is strength, and war is, for the most part, initiated by powerful nations against weaker nations. They attack when they feel it is likely they can win. When one nation that might be unconquerable splits into multiple nations, a greater possibility exists of being vulnerable to that kind of predatory act.
For example in history, a unified US entered the war late, after it was attacked and only after it was already well under way. The war was won after many deaths.
Suppose one alternate version of history where there was less unity; a Northern United States and Southern Confederacy existed. What if only one wanted to help?What if one sided with the Axis? Would the war have been won? Would we have lost? Or achieved a stalemate in which th Nazi Party still dominates Europe?
On the other hand, suppose another alternate history where there was greater unity; where the US and Canada never left the British Empire? It is widely believed that Hitler and the Japanese were encouraged to act by their belief that the US would choose not to get involved. If Britain and the US had been under one flag at that time, it is a reasonable position to take that the Axis would have been hesitant to challenge it, or that their challenge would have been delayed, or that the war would have been much shorter.
Is that logical?
Suppose one alternate version of history where there was less unity; a Northern United States and Southern Confederacy existed. What if only one wanted to help?
One might predict that the Confederacy would be more sympathetic with the Nazis than the allies. However, if the CSA and the USA were wrapped up in each other enough to stay out of WWI then WWI might have ended in a stalemate and therefore WWII might never have happened. (No victory for the allies in WWI*, no punitive treaty of Versailles, no reason for Germany to ever let the Nazis into power.)
*If US involvement was, indeed, the deciding factor. Which is highly debatable.
I’d have to believe that some incredibly important moral issue is at stake before I could believe that fighting against a rebelling colony — rather than just allowing the secession to take place peacefully — is justified.
But what is an incredibly important moral principle and what is not? A modern person would probably say that then the North was justified because an important moral principle was involved (ending slavery) whereas the British were not because the moral principle involved (ensuring cheap raw materials for Britain) was not incredibly important. But I’m not sure an 18th or early 19th century person would see it that way. The survival of Britain might have depended on its ability to obtain raw materials and aid from its colonies (i.e. to fight France in the Napoleonic era or Germany in the early 20th century). Isn’t the survival of the entire country and all its dependents more important than the liberty of a few people that all at the time (including all but the most “crazed” abolitionists) agreed were inferior?
Dianne, I don’t think the presense of the US in WW I was the deciding factor in the punitive reparations made against Germany either, but you make a good point in that it is a difficult chore indeed to speculate on what might have happened. What matters, I think, is that unity is a state in which no possibility of war exists between its parts. It is a state in which harm to one part is considered harm to all parts, and it is a state in which aid flows from haves to have-nots easily. It is also a state that requires some sacrifice by all parties to maintain.
If we make it a simple matter to separate ourselves politically from those who we feel are too poor for us or too racist for us, or too racially tolerant for us, or too religious or too irreligious or too liberal or too conservative, then we will choose to break apart whenever we deem it advantageous (to us) and for a little while gain some small slice of “paradise” where everyone thinks the same or looks the same or acts the same, to which our loyalty (so long as the New Regime remains pure) can be heartfelt and unequivocal. But while the New Regime is unlikely to remain “pure” forever, the benefits of the mutual protection, support and peace that are found in unity are lost forever.
I believe the North and the South have benefitted greatly from that peace in unity for a hundred and forty three years, not the least benefit of which was the ability to end slavery in the South. As problematic as the South still is with black-white relations, if the South had separated and solidified their ideology, a 21st-century CSA might be a hundred years behind the 21st century Southern USA in race relations today. The compromises we’ve learned to live with, the violent and near-violent disagreements we’ve had over all kinds of social issues, without losing our national unity have been remarkable. it is the kind of thing that makes global unity and an end to (international) war look possible. So what I was trying to say was that even if the South had wished to secede over something other than the right to keep slaves, like (say) as a calculated strategy for tax and trade optimization, it may still have been worth it to sacrifice lives to maintain the union.
Good point. That slavery is a great evil – or that it’s an evil to begin with – is a judgment call. That preservation of the British Empire is not the greater good, or that it’s a good to begin with, is the same.
There’s a tendency, and my gut tells me it’s uncommonly pervasive in countries of the Anglo-empiricist background, in equating all that is good with what is logical, and all that is logical with what is good. There’s a yearning for some set of precepts by which we can universally declare slavery bad, soundly and rigorously. Many take the “all (wo)men are created equal” as the precept, deduce that slaves are by definition not equal to non-slaves, and therefore slavery is wrong. Which is all well and good, except that the decision to declare equality an axiom was an emotional, not logical, decision. We want to be able to say that it’s logical to be moral, but it isn’t. Logic is by its nature amoral.
Ultimately it’s our emotional, empathic, and mushy side that keep us from (or enable us to) degenerating into monsters. The punch card database used to identify and track Jews during the Holocaust, for instance, was the epitome of applied rigour and logic.
Sorry if this is a bit of a tangent, but I felt like it applied here. There’s no way to discern what’s an important moral issue or not; we can only say what feels right and what feels terribly, terribly wrong. And unfortunately, that’s the most reliable system we have.
An equally valid conclusion is that freedom is wrong.
The fallacy here is that the political unity of the US is the reason it has had internal peace for so long. But if, hypothetically, The United States had only ever consisted of the Northern States, with the Southern States forming their own confederation without ever having been a part of the US, then it’s possible that the Civil War would never have been fought. The North would not have had ‘preserving the Union’ as a motive, and it’s a lot less likely that it would have attacked a foreign nation whose sovereignty it recognised, solely to end slavery. More likely it would have applied diplomatic pressure and perhaps economic sanctions, and slavery would eventually have died a death, later and at perhaps less human cost, than fighting the war had.
By this hypothesis, the two states would have had peace, both internally and between them, for longer than the hundred and forty three years since the Civil War, just as there has been peace between the US and Canada for longer.
Daran: The fallacy here is that the political unity of the US is the reason it has had internal peace for so long.
In the recorded history of the world, there is one type of culture that has reliably and consistently avoided the spectre of war. The type of culture that has no other culture to war with. The native tribes of Greenland, who have to march for five days across sheet ice to reach another settlement, and who would find nothing at their destination that they didn’t already have right where they were, or couldn’t find on almost any uninhabited stretch of coast, are unsuprisingly one of the least warlike cultures on Earth, and even they have warred with one another.
But if, hypothetically, The United States had only ever consisted of the Northern States, with the Southern States forming their own confederation without ever having been a part of the US, then it’s possible that the Civil War would never have been fought. The North would not have had ‘preserving the Union’ as a motive, and it’s a lot less likely that it would have attacked a foreign nation whose sovereignty it recognised, solely to end slavery.
If, hypothetically, Cain had not killed Abel… what is your point? First, they didn’t form two separate countries. Second, by forming one country it was still possible that the civil war would never have been fought. Third, while it is true that two countries cannot fight civil wars, they can still fight… wars. 143 years is time enough for a dozen of them. Fourth, there are the border states whose loyalty to each side was sharply divided, even within the same family. There was no possibility of a clean and unambiguous division with them, North and South would have no choice but to compete for them. Fifth, you are correct it is unlikely that the North would have attacked a wholly-separate South to end slavery. The United States had an obligation to end slavery in the United States. It had no obligation to end slavery in the Confederacy just as, for instance, it has no obligation to end famine in Africa right now.
More likely it would have applied diplomatic pressure and perhaps economic sanctions, and slavery would eventually have died a death, later and at perhaps less human cost, than fighting the war had.
Sure. Let them secede peacefully so they can keep slaves, then starve them into giving up their slaves with economic sanctions. That wouldn’t have triggered a war.
By this hypothesis, the two states would have had peace, both internally and between them, for longer than the hundred and forty three years since the Civil War, just as there has been peace between the US and Canada for longer.
Canada is not a competitor or a threat to the US, militarily or economically, and hasn’t been for two hundred years. And the ACW was an impetus for Confederation (unity) in Canada to defend against American expansionism. Furthermore, the border between America and Canada was still governed from Britain (a lesser unity, but still unity). Challenging that border would have meant challenging the British.
But while Canada was not a threat and had British allies, a Confederacy would have been a threat and crossing their border was none of England’s business. It is highly likely, but not a given, that at some point they would have developed mutually incompatible interests in areas other than the right to keep slaves, with predictable results.
Your hypothesis is based on events that didn’t happen, and supposes the best possible outcomes of every choice, and supposes that if we give people what they want (in this case, secession) there would be no war. But, even if everything unfolded exactly as you described, and Canada, the Union and the Confederacy coe-existed without war (giving up their slaves because of diplomatic pressure with an “aw, shucks, ok.”) the body of people we think of as the North and the South would still have been more vulnerable in the global community as separate states than as a Union. Think of what the US has done in the 20th century in science, space exploration and atomic power. The leadership role our democracy had taken in these areas was barely ahead of those of other, more belligerent nations. Not only has that leadership been of great benefit to us personally, the early command of these sciences by a country that, (by and large), does not believe in conquest was, in my opinion, a major stroke of good fortune for the modern world.
A North and South, dividing their resources into competiton and protectionism for the last century, even if they never fought one another (and that is not a given) is unlikely to have achieved those advances first.
I was rebutting your claim that the “North and South benefitted greatly from that peace in unity” brought about by the forcible reincorporation of the South into the Union. Benefited compared to what? If the South hadn’t been forcibly incorporated? If hypotheses are to be ruled out of order, then your own claim falls.
Benefited compared to what? If the South hadn’t been forcibly incorporated?
Exactly. No civil war at all would have been best of all, of course.
I endeavoured not to make absolute claims about what each side may or may not have done, only to define what have been true about their conditions and obligations to one another as separate nations compared to what they would be as a unified nation, and provide some examples of alternative ways history might have played out if the balance of circumstances had been different.
For instance, I wouldn’t claim the Soviets would have looked on a divided US as an easy target and launch a territorial ground war in North America via Alaska. Nor would I claim that the Confederacy would have sided with the Axis in WW II. Nor claim that the North would have made no diplomatic effort to end slavery in a separate South, nor withhold aid to a separate South in times of disaster.
What I would claim is that a divided US would look like an easier target than a unified one to a hostile government, that a Confederacy would have been perfectly free to negotiate a separate peace with the Axis if it wished, and that the Union would have had no obligation whatsoever to end slavery in the Confederation or any obligation to provide her aid in times of disaster. Use your own judgement about what each player might have done under those circumstances.
On top of that, where open war not an option between the north and south for 143 years, open war would have been an option for 143 years. The South proved it was willing to go to war to keep slaves. It in fact did go to war to keep slaves. Not exactly my idea of a culture that promises our coexistense would have been a harmomious one.
So, the consequences of unity sounds better to me. What’s your take? The civil war was the inevitable result of including the South in the Union in the first place? We should have learned our lesson? That a fragmented US would have weathered history’s challenges better and more peacefully?