Comeback for states rights

[TommH]

But did the Confederate State governments have the moral authority to act on behalf of their inhabitants? Particularly those inhabitants that were currently enslaved. Is this really a case of majority rule? Why then is it at the state level? Why not at the county or town or individual house?

I was born a citizen of my country and don't see how anyone should be able to take that away from me against my will. Once a nation is conceived and then forged, you can't vote it away. Especially when the voting is restricted to a small fraction of the population.

[Major Tom]

But did the Confederate State governments have the moral authority to act on behalf of their inhabitants? Particularly those inhabitants that were currently enslaved. Is this really a case of majority rule? Why then is it at the state level? Why not at the county or town or individual house?

I was born a citizen of my country and don't see how anyone should be able to take that away from me against my will. Once a nation is conceived and then forged, you can't vote it away. Especially when the voting is restricted to a small fraction of the population.

I think it's improtant to realize that The United States was formed by individual sovereign states, and through the Constitution those states retained almost all power, delegating little to the federal government beyond defense, foreign policy, and regulation of interstate commerce. People thought of themselves as citizens of their states first, the U.S. second.

The Federalists did a a lot to exppand and consolidate fedral power early on, but even as late as the Civil War, there remained in many people a stronger sense of devotion to state than country. Lee certainly considered himself a Virginian first, American second.

[TommH]

Certainly this is true, but then Winifred Scott was also a Virginian. There's no doubt that many in the South felt that way (as did many in the North) but that doesn't mean they automaticly had the right to succeed.

There really are two seperate ideas here. One is that a new nation is almost always formed from a previous one and is not "legal". The US itself is an example of that. Of course, the right of this new nation to exist in this case is based on its ability to remain a nation. In that sense the confederacy was perfectly legitimate, but it was also legitimate of the US to attempt to stop them. In the end in spite of a strong effort the Confederacy failed this test.

The other idea is that the US was designed so that individual states could come and go at will with no recourse by the other states or the national government. While arguments can be made for both sides, the fact is that there was no provision in Federal law to allow this. It is irrelevant what the states themselves believed in that case. Just as your county can't decide to join another state or Canada, and you can't personally.

[Major Tom]

I guess the point I was trying to make was that we tend to look at these events from our own frame of reference. We've all grown up under a strong national government, where state governments seem almost quaint anachronisms. Also, the 20th century ushered in an age of mass communication, with first radio and then television working inexorably to smooth out regional differences, and the automible obliterated the sense of distance between state lines.

When I cross the Potomac from my home in Alexandria and enter Maryland, it seems no more significant or worthy of contemplation than crossing a county line within the Virginia. Yet in the ante-bellum South, the average citizen had never been outside the borders of their own state, or possibly even their own county. For these peope, the United States of America was largely an abstraction.

Anyway, I think it's hard for 21st century Americans to empathize with that. I know I can't; I can only think about it intellectually.

You bring up the question of moral authority. I don't think anyone here has argued that the CSA had any moral authority. You have an intersting pointwith your point that most new nations are "illegal" at the moment of founding, and only attain legitimacy if they can maintain their independence thorugh force. I'm not really sure this is true -- ask Canada -- but it's certainly true in cases of revolution or civil war. It's certainly true that the U.S. revolution was an "illegal" undertaking -- but as you point out, there was some degree of moral authority there, and the ringleaders of the rebellion took pains to establish it with the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration established the moral authority of the revolution based on universal rights. The CSA's claim to moral authority was far more abstract and at the same time legalistic. Given the "peculiar institution" they fought ot protect, it's hard to have much sympathy.

[77NY]

Certainly this is true, but then Winifred Scott was also a Virginian. There's no doubt that many in the South felt that way (as did many in the North) but that doesn't mean they automaticly had the right to succeed.

There really are two seperate ideas here. One is that a new nation is almost always formed from a previous one and is not "legal". The US itself is an example of that. Of course, the right of this new nation to exist in this case is based on its ability to remain a nation. In that sense the confederacy was perfectly legitimate, but it was also legitimate of the US to attempt to stop them. In the end in spite of a strong effort the Confederacy failed this test.

The other idea is that the US was designed so that individual states could come and go at will with no recourse by the other states or the national government. While arguments can be made for both sides, the fact is that there was no provision in Federal law to allow this. It is irrelevant what the states themselves believed in that case. Just as your county can't decide to join another state or Canada, and you can't personally.

I think the romance dulls a bit when you consider the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" aspect of the ACW and analyze it as a struggle between two historic economic power centers: one industrial/financial "nouveau riche" and the other agricultural built on slavery. The romance of the war is that the "War of Northern Aggression" threatened to sweep away the "Southern way of life" and culture.

This is to say, when you strip away the poetry and gallantry there is just a street fight by proxy between one set of people who made money with whaling ships, coal mines and factories that employed children and required 12-14 hour days and another set of people who used slave labor to produce cotton. The money and the future was with the factory owners and their bankers.

So the "issue" wasn't as noble or abstract as Jeffersonian "states' rights," I don't think. The issue was that the plantation owners and cotton factors saw the writing on the wall and knew that their cheap unlimited labor was going away very soon if they stayed in the Union. This because a lot of wealthy northerners and their wives attended religious services (yes, Yankees used to go to church, too ) often led by abolitionists.

For an interesting example of someone at the hub of these forces, see Henry Chandler Bowen, a New York City publisher and merchant. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1989/7/1989_7_140.shtml

Bowen, like the good social climber that he was, married the boss's daughter. His boss was a wealthy NY silk merchant and antislavery activist. Bowen went on to found The Independent, a prominent abolitionist newspaper and co-found the Congregational Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn. This is the church where Henry Ward Beecher (the "Beecher's bibles" Beecher)was minister, brother of some woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe (heard of her? :neener . Bowen was one of the driving forces behind-the-scenes who arranged to bring Lincoln to New York to deliver his famous Cooper Union address in February of 1860, in which Lincoln "brought the house down" and won over many converts among the New York intellectual elite.

Which brings us, believe it or not, back to the question of this thread, states' rights. Here are some of Lincoln's thoughts on secession from the Cooper Union address in 1860:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

But you [southern states] say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty;" but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

So, for what it's worth, the Republican position articulated at the time by Lincoln, a consummate politician, certainly suggests that the southern states' constitutional interpretation/legal authority was a bit suspect. And he accuses them of not being content with being left alone but of actually wanting to impose acceptance of slavery on the rest of the country, thereby bringing the issue to a head -- "rule or ruin." There's some pretty fancy political tapdancing in this speech and it's well worth the read if you're not familiar with it. Good stuff. http://www.nps.gov/liho/historyculture/cooperunionaddress.htm

Personally, I think a number of Lincoln's points were disingenuous and merely rhetorical. But this is one hell of a good speech. Barack Obama's got nothing on this guy!

I apologize for the length -- please chalk it up to my enthusiasm for this time period -- but I just wanted to throw some things out that, at least for me, tell a bit about the socio-economic context of the war by mentioning some of the powerbrokers who were making things happen in the North and what their agendas were.

[TommH]

Like any huge upheaval in human events the ACW can be analyzed from many different points of view. Each tells a part of the story. Certainly there was a aspect of political power with the balance inexorably tipping towards the "North" or to be more precise the "Free states" mainly due to massive immigration. Very few immigrants went to slave states.

The South had been able to hold a very strong position, with the majority of the US presidents being souther for instance. So it was hard for them to stomach losing that power. This was compounded by the fact that slavery as a economic system required new areas so that slaves would maintain their value as capital.

[TheDoctorKing]

Tomm's got a very good point. Marx pointed out that capitalism needed to grow in order to live, through colonialism and through bringing "underdeveloped" countries into the capitalist fold. But the slave society of the American south also needed to grow in order to live. The rapid rate of population growth meant that there was an oversupply of slaves in the older established centers of the plantation complex in North America (the Chesapeake, the Carolina and Georgia low country) after the middle of the eighteenth century. Some of this excess was taken up by freeing favored slaves, mistresses, mixed-race children, and so forth, but this solution undermined the racist logic of the system. Some of the excess was taken up by using slaves in non-productive ways, as superfluous hordes of house servants, similarly undermining the racial division the system relied upon. But there were still more slaves than could be put to work. So the plantation complex had to grow. The rapid expansion of the slave system to the states of the lower south has been explained as a result of the invention of the cotton gin, and this did have something to do with it, but the supply of reasonably-priced slaves "sold south" from the old plantation zones was an essential component of the formula. By the 1850s, the new areas were filling up and southern elites could see where they were heading if new plantation zones could not be opened up. This is why there was such a push to annex various parts of Central America and the Caribbean (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, northern Mexico, etcetera). The only part of Spanish America they actually got wasn't well-suited to plantation agriculture for the most part, but I can imagine slave-worked plantations in California. After all, landholding there was in conveniently large chunks, and although Mexicans were pretty much uniformly opposed to slavery (they had abolished the institution soon after gaining their independence in 1821). A rail line across the southern United States (a plan supported by Jefferson Davis) and presto!

[77NY]

Doctor King & Tommh: This is why I am enjoying this forum so much. I never knew that. Thank you for that insight about the economics of slavery and the surplus.

Playing this game and real-life current events have inspired me to look more deeply into the economics of the Union and CSA during the war than what I learned in school. Although like nearly everyone here I'm a history and war buff, my main focus in studying U.S. history has been from a political science/legal perspective and not so much economic history. It's good to be reminded that there is a lot to be gained by broadening one's horizons.

What is so compelling to me about your point is that it adds an exclamation point to the economic war between the plantation capitalists and the industrial capitalists that we learn about in school. We learn that the political fighting over the status of Missouri and Kansas was to preserve a balance in the U.S. Senate (control of the House was hopeless due to northern population growth even with the 3/5 compromise). But I never considered that the fight was also over a new slave market opening up in arable farmland in the prairie states. Good stuff!

[TommH]

TheDoctorKing is right and on a more micro level there was the issue of debt and collateral. Due to a variety of reasons virtually all plantation owners were in debt. Invariably their single largest source of capital was their slaves. They could be sued as collateral or sold to raise money.

In order to maintain this value though the demand for slaves has to remain steady or increase. But in general slaves made more slaves so existing plantations couldn't provide this demand. Only opening new areas would fit the bill.

Southern "gentlemen" then had a powerful incentive to see slavery spread, but it was clear that the North and the West were turning their eyes ever more westward and not south. The only way the south was going to have a consistent imperialist policy to extend slave holding areas would be to have their own.

[Le Ricain]

Another problem faced by the South was soil exhaustion. Growing single crops such as tobacco and cotton soon exhausts the soil causing decreasing yields. The modern solution to this problem is using crop rotation and fertilizers. In the 19th century, the solution was to keep moving to new fields in the west. This is the main reason for the Americans to settle into east Texas. If you prevent westward migration, you choke slavery to death was the plan of the North and the fear of the South.

[Barker]

It is a very good conversation but isn't this thread about States Rights making a come back? For example in South Carolina today not 150 years ago, Obama wanted to bailout states. There is specific mandates in the money clause that if you take the money you must abide by a mandate to change states laws. Will give you 5 billion to help your unemployment but after 1 year you must pay for the mandate yourselves. If you don't agree you don't get the money. There is stipulations about pork (literal) in this about manure and pig aroma control in Iowa. Why should I care if pig feces stinks in Iowa? That is a state issue and should not be mandated to other states to pick up the tab at their residents demise. I am proud to say Gov. Sanford has declined the money and kept the integrity of the 10th amendment. This is what states rights is about a governor deciding by discussing with the state legislature what do we need to be prosperous.

[Mangudai]

I think the romance dulls a bit when you consider the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" aspect of the ACW and analyze it as a struggle between two historic economic power centers: one industrial/financial "nouveau riche" and the other agricultural built on slavery.

That is a valid point of view, but a minor one to my mind. The elites in Boston and Charleston could have accepted a divorce from one another. Other groups could not.

Some of my ancestors were a lot like Lincoln. They were corn and hog farmers in southern Illinois, with family roots in KY and TN, they were dependent on the Mississippi river for commerce with the outside world. Union was both a family matter, and a matter of economic necessity.

[Brochgale]

The Civil War was just contract litigation by other means.

I rather like the idea of Lawyers taking pot shots at each other as long as they leave the rest of us out of it - imagine all the money we would save in litigation and legal costs etc

Oh and if New Hamphire does go its own way could it take city of London with it

I am curious about the extent to which the Southern States were dependent on Tobacco and Cotton and Slave worked plantations for thier "economic" viablity. Well I just wonder if no shots had been fired on Sumpter and by implication no events occurred that drove Virginia, Tennessee, NC Arkansas into Confederacy, how long would that Confederacy have lasted?

Indeed how long before those Southern States themselves fought a civil war between themselves? Seems to me like they were a fairly cantankerous lot?

Afterall from what I have read in the forums the Confederacy was not a collection of economically homogenous States. As I have read the post in relation to Northern California would those same ideas in 1860s America led to several states splitting apart internally - Tennessee and perhaps even North Carolina - assuming that Lincoln could have contented himself with letting sleeping dogs lie and had removed US Federal force from Sumpter.

It is another what if? Only the real flash point between Union and CSA occurs further west - but Virginia, Tennessee and NC had been kept in Union fold as Sumpter did not happen?