New Hampshire: "Live Free or Die!"
I think they still vote on secession periodically.
A 2-hour PBS documentary. It explores the cultural changes that happened due to the magnitude of the loss of life during the war. I like it quite a bit.
The argument then wasn't actually about Slavery, but whether the states themselves had the power and the right TO secede. Slavery is a cover which people use to disguise the fact that it actually was over whether the states had the power to secede...not over slavery itself.
Slavery was a major factor in these decision, and a major factor to create this issue, but at the heart slavery itself was not in contention (as even the Union had slavery still and had slave states, if it were the issue, these states would have surely seceded along with the other slave states).
You're partially right, and somewhat incomplete.
The Southern states made their succession declarations. (the bulk of them seceded individually and formed the Confederacy over a few months) Over a dozen of their bullet points were about slavery, but it was driven by economic issues, as all wars are.
The South seceded to protect slavery, but Lincoln fought to bind the country back together, and to stop several other secession movements that were boiling in other parts of the country, including the Northeast.
In today's dollars, slaves represented about $10 trillion of the South's wealth, out of a total of $21.1 trillion.
Regarding the Constitutionality of secession, the document itself is silent. States can be admitted, ergo, states can secede.
There's a few problems with that.
If states can be admitted with the approval of congress, they would need to be kicked out with the approval of congress.
There's a procedure for admitting states. If states could leave shouldn't there be a procedure for that as well?
It would be substantially similar to the procedure of admission, probably about the same as the same concept so recently addressed in the Independant Scotland votes/referendums.
The Declaration of Independence has within the grounds for secession, given that the U.S. is a voluntary union of sovereign states. IIRC, North Carolina voted two or three times against joining the Union before they finally signed on.The declaration of independence is a government behind the constitution. It was formed by the second? continental congress under John Hanson, our first president. The constitution replaced that, so the declaration has some ideals in it, it's not remotely legally binding anymore.
It (Declaration of Independence) is the source for the government empowered by the later-ratified Constitution. There is nothing in the Constitution about secession, making 'legally binding' rather moot it seems. If a State files such a Declaration with Congress with the intent to secede peacefully after however many successful referendums are conducted, the U.S. Congress would be hard-pressed to tell them no without getting shouted at by the public at large.
"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."We need the freedom to keep slavery!
(this sentiment was noted more than once in england...)
I'm going to ignore that for obvious reasons. ;)
Mostly in that it doesn't have much to do with secession in current times. :P
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New Hampshire: "Live Free or Die!"
I think they still vote on secession periodically.
I don't think so, unless it's some Free State Project thing that popped up recently. Otoh, I've heard about Vermont's secession movement for a while.
Are those even separate states?
Claim: Only 10% of Southerners owned slaves. The rest had no interest in slavery!
Answer: The first part is technically correct but misleading. The second doesn’t follow.
But.. but.. we're a democracy! Of course we always rule for the benefit of the majority and would NEVER trick them into doing anything against their own interests...Just wanted to comment on this:
Furthermore, in the South, only around 10% of the population OWNED slaves. IF it was purely over slavery, then only around 10% were concerned...These sorts of arguments ignore that the slave owners were generally the upper class that ran the Southern states and got to decide on Southern policy.
In short, the people actually in charge of the South were the ones that owned the slaves.
One comment I would add to Samnell's rather excellent refutation is not to discount the role that simple, old-fashioned patronage played in aristocratic societies like the South. You'll find patronage at work in any aristocratic system, as one of the basic systems the aristocracy uses to build and maintain its social power. You spend a fraction of your elite privileges on rewarding the less privileged classes of society, so that they'll keep letting you be on top.
Now, I'm not commenting on this due to a particular study of patronage in the South - so Samnell, if you have differing opinions, I'd certainly entertain them - but patronage is such a ubiquitous feature of aristocratic society that I'd be shocked if it didn't play a role.
So one doesn't necessarily need to parse this as the poor white Southerners getting tricked into supporting the elite wealthy slaveholders. I expect that, at least for some, they got paid for it, enough that it wasn't necessarily against their interests at all.
If this was similar to other aristocratic patronage systems that I have particularly studied, then the payment probably didn't necessarily come in cash, but in favors, services, social capital (invitations, introductions...), and so on.
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One comment I would add to Samnell's rather excellent refutation is not to discount the role that simple, old-fashioned patronage played in aristocratic societies like the South. You'll find patronage at work in any aristocratic system, as one of the basic systems the aristocracy uses to build and maintain its social power. You spend a fraction of your elite privileges on rewarding the less privileged classes of society, so that they'll keep letting you be on top.
Now, I'm not commenting on this due to a particular study of patronage in the South - so Samnell, if you have differing opinions, I'd certainly entertain them - but patronage is such a ubiquitous feature of aristocratic society that I'd be shocked if it didn't play a role.
I'm slightly gunshy to call the old South aristocratic because the word has certain historiographical baggage. The argument used to be that the South was fundamentally, self-consciously aristocratic and white Southerners with money modeled themselves on British country squires. They aimed to emulate 18th century politics and resisted the democratic movements of the 19th century. All of that is true...of particular parts of the South. It's very true of South Carolina's antebellum politics (obnoxiously so and to the point where it was a serious detriment to less radical SC pols in the 1830s), for example, and somewhat true of Tidewater Virginia's, but out in the Southwest you have a very different situation and even where the old ways allegedly prevail there's often a fair bit of tension and pushback from the less well-off whites. This manifests in things like SC getting out ahead of the pack in opening up its elections to poorer whites, something VA didn't get around to in full until the 1850s. Also the aristocracy argument is often tied up with the idea that the South was not capitalist, which is often untrue even in its hoariest corners. They could play at money not mattering to them, but if they wanted to hold on to it then they had to spend time with the books.
That said: there was certainly patronage. Quite a lot, in fact. It was a norm in the black belts that the major planters would in various ways look after (if also down at) the poorer whites. Eugene Genovese made this point back in the 70s. He agreed with the Herrenvolk Democracy thesis but added patronage as a further factor in yeoman support for slavery. I've read the article in full (after misreading it a few years ago, if anyone wants to dig into my post history to point and laugh :)), and quoted at length from it back here. I don't know that Genovese used the term himself, but it reads like what I understand a patronage network to be. Services could include an education (usually law) and introductions around for promising young boys of limited means as well as direct loans of slaves and so forth. Back in the colonial era, you'd even see public works largely done by major enslavers.
Even in the more white democratic context of the Southwest and North, there's quite a bit of patronage going on. This is always an element of party politics, but back in the 19th century there was essentially no professional civil service. Everyone down to individual postmasters and customs officials could be reappointed when the presidency changed hands. Politicians would actively campaign to have people loyal to them back home rewarded with posts in exchange for votes and continued support. The Democrats were much better at this than the Republicans, and it's key to the formation of the modern party with Jackson and Van Buren. Van Buren took the patronage system that existed at the time, where one could fire the lot and replace them with supporters but never did, and flipped that around to being the virtual norm. I forget the numbers, but I think that it changed from less than half of all offices immediately turning over to 80 or 90% of them.
The Democracy was very effective at working new immigrant groups (mainly Irish and Germans in the antebellum) into the system through city machines, which would dispense services, social welfare, and the like in exchange for votes. The Whigs and Republicans had them too, if with far less immigrants, but before the war they were less institutionally powerful and more dependent on networks of loyal newspapers. (The most famous of these is Horace Greeley.) Some of that's down to lack of opportunity, what with all of four Whig presidents and two of them soon dead, one replaced by a guy the Whigs de-Whigged, but we should also factor in that the Whigs and Whigs-turned-Republicans had a stronger elitist tendency. Part of that's old inherited Federalist stuff, but Whiggery didn't spawn directly from the Federalists. They got their start as the "we hate Andy Jackson" club and developed an ideology in reaction to him that distrusted executive power and the small-d democratic trappings that Jackson associated himself with.
Offices for votes sounds corrupt to us, because it is. Except that everybody knew this was the score. There was little to no deception about it, though you see regular complaints about so-and-so going over because he was promised this or that. (My current favorite involves a guy in Kansas who was allegedly promised a cow.) Also anti-corruption campaigns tend to have an elitist tinge to them, at least in US history. Whatever the stated intentions, they usually end up focusing on how the "wrong" sort of people have gotten hold of power...and it's rarely about the wealthy or conflicts of interest. I think it's a bit telling that some of the pushback comes from old school Carolina reactionaries like Calhoun, who declared that spoilsmen would ruin the nation because their votes could be bought and, he was sometimes willing to say outright, would be bought in the South for votes against slavery. (Every major issue in the antebellum era seems to have had someone on the losing side complaining about traitors bought off with patronage.) Thus you had to reduce the national government to the most creaking, archaic, powerless thing it could possibly be. Then only men of disinterested virtue, who had bought themselves with plenty of slaves, would take an interest.
I think it's worthwhile to make a distinction, all this said, between old school patronage and new school patronage. In the model practiced in South Carolina and pre-Jackson, there's a lot more of the dispenser of patronage setting himself up as a better. By contrast, Jackson framed himself as very much as a common man's man. In the democratic style, you listened to your constituents and took their opinions carefully into account. In the elder frame, guys would go around proudly saying that they hoped their supporters never gave politics a spare thought. The most famous example of this is probably when a crowd denounced Alexander Hamilton for supporting Jay's Treaty with the UK (where the US essentially had to beg for things it was supposed to have at the end of the Revolution) and he eventually told them, if I remember it right, words to the effect that they had no right to have an opinion.
Offices for votes/machine politics was in public, alive and well during my grandfathers' time. I suspect that in many areas it still thrives just fine.
One incident one of them described stands out in my mind, circa 1952 in Memphis, TN.
As he approached the voting booths and identified himself to the staff, he overheard one man that he recognized talking to another as voters entered.
"I recognize him. He's a good Democratic voter, he knows which side his bread is buttered on. We won't have to persuade him."
The next year he packed up grandma, my uncle, my aunt and my dad and move to the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
"If I'm going to play politics, might as well play it where it matters most."
What federal law is Lincoln supposed to have enforced on South Carolina over its objections and thus justified its secession? And to what end? I ask because SC attempted its rebellion until December 20, 1860. Lincoln did not take office until March 4, 1861.
Furthermore, this line of argument assumes it's clear that some kind of right of secession existed in the antebellum United States. That is by no means clear and was intensely controversial at the time, with Disunion being treated more as a calamity one must avoid than a practical step one must take until quite late in the antebellum. (Arguably, right up to December of '60.) If secession is not legal, then it is rebellion and the survival of the government in itself fully explains the effort to suppress it. States that allow rebellion cease to be states.
This is something that antebellum Americans, including some white Southerners, knew very well. If states really were superior to the federal government, able to ignore its laws at will, then the federal government was meaningless and wholly impotent to carry out even its most basic functions. If one party could bolt over no greater travesty than losing an election fair and square (and that's what the Lower South did, essentially) then any state could do it at any time. Every state thus gains an absolute veto and the Union becomes Poland, wiped off the map. So would pass what they imagined as the world's last, best hope for freedom in a dark age of monarchical tyranny.
The question of what law ought to prevail was, in fact, an open and shut case. They decided it at Philadelphia when wigs and knee-breeches were still in fashion. No one contested that, least of all the antebellum South. We hear from them no raging protests when Roger Taney informed the state of Wisconsin that it had no power to nullify the fugitive slave law, to list just one example.
On my DA side...what it boils down to was that the Southern states based their ability to secede based upon the right of the State over that of the Federal Government. However, this basis was not strictly Constitutional, but based upon a reading of the 10th (something that actually reflects directly some sentiments going on today in those same areas ironically, or perhaps not so ironically) and the Declaration of Independence.
In overall constituency, they felt that as per the Declaration, all states had the right to disassociate from the Government when that government overstepped it's reins of power. Upon this bases, and the 10th, they felt that there had to be a unified agreement by the States to create the Central National government and when this agreement was no longer agreed upon, they could withdraw from that agreement.
Hence for the elite of the South, as per their declarations which actually state the reason they can secede, they claim the States have this power. (and Texas further tries to bolster this by declaring itself not just a state, but a separate and sovereign nation).
Lincoln never claimed the war was over slavery during that time of the secession crisis, nor did Buchanon. The entire argument was whether it was LEGAL for secession to take place. Counter to the South's argument, they claimed that it was NOT legal, and hence the War was to preserve the Union. Of course, Lincoln could be seen to have created an excuse to start the war over the Fort Sumter negotiations/non-negotiations. However, normally in the North it was NOT a war to free the slaves, but a War to preserve the Union.
This was also seen as such by the elites in the South, that the North wanted to enforce their national government on States that had already left that agreement and were using their own State governments.
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Stepping out of my DA for a second...but just for a second...I did want to say...many of the elites DID say it was about states rights and would argue that it was till their dying day.
The clincher though is NOT what the elites stated...if you asked many of the poor or common man in the South who were fighting...you find many of them outright say it was over slavery. That's pretty positive evidence on what the REAL reason was...but....
Now back to my role as DA
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What's more is this is the stuff that's still taught in much of the South to this day. In effect, you also see the same arguments starting to come out in regards to many other items from the South over the idea of States Rights vs. Federal rights (inclusive of that 10th Amendment item!) in regards to other items...currently foremost would be the LGBT advances in the recent months.
In some ways...you can see history repeating itself in regards to What the South felt then...and what the South feels now.
Outside my DA role...
I would like to add, when you think of it, slavery as it was in the South was an absolute corrupt system. Politically speaking...
You LITERALLY could buy votes...
A Rich slaveholding person's vote was LITERALLY worth more than other people's votes.
All men were NOT created equal, even among those who could vote.
That 3/5 compromise had to be one of the most corrupting items in Southern Politics one could imagine.
People talk about corruption and money in politics now...just imagine if you could get 3/5 more of a vote for owning someone!
I actually have a rather bad distaste for how some of history is taught in the South, and I feel there's actually still quite a bit of underlying racism in some of those that teach these items in this way...
But one thing from history is that you have to look at it from all different points of views and perspectives. In history they teach that you cannot say it's just one way...that history is far more complex than one simple answer. This is why I'm playing the DA here, to give that complexity (as any basic history major should know, the more advance degree...even more so). The biggest thing are the primary sources...and each shows a different perspective. To make it more complex is that each professor or author interprets those primary sources differently, making as many different opinions on the subject as there are those that study and write on it!
Of course, in the field that I majored in (The Crusades, before I went all legal eagle type stuff)...it's a tad harder to find primary sources (They still exist...but not quite as abundantly as Mid 19th century). If my arguments seem not as robust...remember...I'm no expert in American Mid 19th Century...I took the requisite courses I needed for my major and that was it! I'm not a Huge US history buff...(which is the other irony of historians...most get specialized in one area and may actually not know all that much about other areas of history once they start focusing on their specialty).
Still, it's something to wonder about the political problems in the US currently and seeing the regional divides, if some of that is caused by how those different areas were taught and view history. I hear quite a bit of resonances in today's arguments that sound very similar to the same arguments that you would hear back from history...at least in my little knowledge of Americana from that period.
The declaration of independance is a government behind the constitution. It was formed by the second? continental congress under John Hanson, our first president. The constitution replaced that, so the declaration has some ideals in it, its not remotely legally binding anymore.
Not even that. The Declaration of Independence was never legally binding. It was basically pure agitprop.
That's true, what actually established the existence of the United States was the articles of confederation and the treaty with Britain that ended the war and recognized the new nation.
You LITERALLY could buy votes...A Rich slaveholding person's vote was LITERALLY worth more than other people's votes.
All men were NOT created equal, even among those who could vote.
That 3/5 compromise had to be one of the most corrupting items in Southern Politics one could imagine.
People talk about corruption and money in politics now...just imagine if you could get 3/5 more of a vote for owning someone!
My understanding is that this isn't correct. The 3/5 compromise applied only in the allocation among votes between/among the various states, for example, in deciding how many representatives West Carolina got as compared to Old Jersey.
The actual elections were decided on a one-man/one-vote system. So Old Man Travers got one vote, his son Young Travers got one, and Jim the Town Drunk also got one.
BUT..... if those three were the electoral role for the town, and there were also 500 slaves in the town, then the town as a whole counted for 303 people.
But Young Travers and Jim could still outvote Old Man Travers.
You LITERALLY could buy votes...A Rich slaveholding person's vote was LITERALLY worth more than other people's votes.
All men were NOT created equal, even among those who could vote.
That 3/5 compromise had to be one of the most corrupting items in Southern Politics one could imagine.
People talk about corruption and money in politics now...just imagine if you could get 3/5 more of a vote for owning someone!
My understanding is that this isn't correct. The 3/5 compromise applied only in the allocation among votes between/among the various states, for example, in deciding how many representatives West Carolina got as compared to Old Jersey.
The actual elections were decided on a one-man/one-vote system. So Old Man Travers got one vote, his son Young Travers got one, and Jim the Town Drunk also got one.
BUT..... if those three were the electoral role for the town, and there were also 500 slaves in the town, then the town as a whole counted for 303 people.
But Young Travers and Jim could still outvote Old Man Travers.
you're probably right (as I said, only took the requisite courses that I had to in American History)...but that still is ripe for total and complete corruption.
It could make one go hmm...seeing some of the old Southern States county lines are along the old plantation lines, I wonder if at times electoral votes went along similar lines in the Old American South?
It could make one go hmm...seeing some of the old Southern States county lines are along the old plantation lines, I wonder if at times electoral votes went along similar lines in the Old American South?
That wouldn't surprise me. My understanding is that 19th century state governments had a lot more leeway in drawing electoral districts than they do now.
But my understanding is that the social structure (as so eloquently described by Samnell) also provided enough of control to make sure that Old Man Travers got his way in "his" county. Sure, people could have gotten together and voted someone other than his hand-picked cronies, but would they have? Travers would certainly have been able to make their lives miserable in other way if they did.
Do remember however in votes for the Presidency, the popular vote means squat.. It's the winner takes all Electoral College which can elect a President that comes in second in the popular vote, a situation which has happened at least twice.
Also remember that the mass of the electron is 9.10938356 × 10-31 kilograms. I mean, as long as we're remembering things that aren't really relevant to the discussion, why not remember all of them?
The electoral college is normally divided on a state-by-state basis -- e.g., if 51% of the voters in East Dakota vote for the tall guy with good hair, the TGWGH gets 100% of the East Dakota slate. It's the size of the slate that matters, which is determined by the population. If the state population is a million people, half enslaved, then effectively 500,000 people vote for enough electors for a state of 800,000 people, so everyone in that state has roughly 1.6 votes per person. That's the electoral effect of the 3/5 compromise, and it applies not only to the presidency but also (of course) to the House.
Of course, 19th century America was notorious for further restricting the vote, so those 500,000 people included 250,000 women (who of course couldn't vote), and probably 150,000 men who didn't make the property cutoff, etc., but that wasn't something limited to the American South.
On my DA side...what it boils down to was that the Southern states based their ability to secede based upon the right of the State over that of the Federal Government. However, this basis was not strictly Constitutional, but based upon a reading of the 10th (something that actually reflects directly some sentiments going on today in those same areas ironically, or perhaps not so ironically) and the Declaration of Independence.
Ability to secede, but not reason for secession. And then we're right back with slavery. :) Absent the latter, we're back to a South that chose to secede for no reason other than the pure hell of it. But the sources don't support the position that they did it on a whim or to prove some esoteric constitutional point, whether we look in 1860-1 or we go into deep cuts back in 1854, 1850, and in less extreme form even further back with Nullification, the Missouri Controversy, and even the disunion threats at the Constitutional Convention.
And, of course, you have to go looking at postwar writing to find any southerners in any position of influence arguing that slavery was anything but the overriding, controlling concern.
Lincoln never claimed the war was over slavery during that time of the secession crisis, nor did Buchanon. The entire argument was whether it was LEGAL for secession to take place. Counter to the South's argument, they claimed that it was NOT legal, and hence the War was to preserve the Union. Of course, Lincoln could be seen to have created an excuse to start the war over the Fort Sumter negotiations/non-negotiations. However, normally in the North it was NOT a war to free the slaves, but a War to preserve the Union.
Quite so, but that's all after the fact. There's no war absent secession and no secession absent slavery and fears for its future. Agreeing with the South's constitutional commitments is hardly compulsory, then or now. There's quite a strong, if often ignored, line of Constitutional thinking exactly to the contrary or all the states rights this, secession that tradition. So far as the rest of the nation is concerned, the Confederate States opened fire on an unarmed US ship, after besieging US property and illegally seizing others. If that's not rebellion, nothing is.
What's more is this is the stuff that's still taught in much of the South to this day. In effect, you also see the same arguments starting to come out in regards to many other items from the South over the idea of States Rights vs. Federal rights (inclusive of that 10th Amendment item!) in regards to other items...currently foremost would be the LGBT advances in the recent months.
I've noticed. :) Also noticed that's not really the idea at stake, but rather the method by which real ends are pursued. Just like all the other times.
You LITERALLY could buy votes...A Rich slaveholding person's vote was LITERALLY worth more than other people's votes.
All men were NOT created equal, even among those who could vote.
That 3/5 compromise had to be one of the most corrupting items in Southern Politics one could imagine.
People talk about corruption and money in politics now...just imagine if you could get 3/5 more of a vote for owning someone!
Well, theoretically. But it would take a pretty massive slave purchase for any individual to kick a state's slave population up enough to win another seat in the House and electoral vote.
That's not to say that there weren't lots of ways that slaveholders screwed over nonslaveholders at the state level, of course. One of the more popular ones was taxing slave property at extremely reduced rates compared to other property. Plus the usual shenanigans about requiring property for office. (SC explicitly required owning X number of slaves.)
But one thing from history is that you have to look at it from all different points of views and perspectives. In history they teach that you cannot say it's just one way...that history is far more complex than one simple answer. This is why I'm playing the DA here, to give that complexity (as any basic history major should know, the more advance degree...even more so). The biggest thing are the primary sources...and each shows a different perspective. To make it more complex is that each professor or author interprets those primary sources differently, making as many different opinions on the subject as there are those that study and write on it
True enough. Been there. Did that. Got the t-shirt. :) I think there's a very common misconception that slavery is in itself a fundamentally simple thing, isolated and alone on the end of a vine or whatever. But slavery isn't just a system of labor, or economics, a mode of production, a system of social values, a means of racial control, a source of identity, a wellspring of freedom (for whites), a police state, a system of violence and plunder, a massive financial investment, a source of wealth, or any of the other things I could list. It's all those things together and all of them were, to the understanding of the secessionists, deeply imperiled by the election of a Republican president. For some of them, it might even have held of Stephen Douglas won instead.
And there's not a lot of debate about that in the field. Hasn't been for decades now. It's not about if secession caused the war and slavery caused secession, but all the multitude of ways that slavery caused secession.
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That's true, what actually established the existence of the United States was the articles of confederation and the treaty with Britain that ended the war and recognized the new nation.
This is the case. European states refused to deal openly with the United States while they were engaged in nothing more than insurrection (since that's a bad precedent for them at home) and no way in hell were they going to do treaties with thirteen separate polities. Once they got together in the Confederation, then Europeans could say they were intervening in a war between proper states rather than supporting dirty traitors. ...even as they supported dirty traitors. The Declaration isn't entirely irrelevant in all of that, but it's still a purely rhetorical document. It was also not a major feature of American patriotic or constitutional thought in the antebellum. That revolved more around memory of the Revolution and details of the Constitutional form of government.
The Articles specified that the union they created was perpetual. The Constitution, as an improvement of and inheritor to the Articles union, carried over the permanence. That's the basic nugget of the anti-secessionist argument, though we can go into a lot more details. It's a bit complicated to study because one can't read 1860 back into the Constitutional Convention or any of that. It's a different set of players and, mostly, circumstances.
However, we do have founders telling each other in private letters that they understood ratification as an unconditional and permanent act (in toto and forever, in Madison's phrasing) on the part of states. They also deliberately chose to repose sovereignty in the people (We, the) rather than the states. This was a line of attack Patrick Henry took in opposing ratification, as it happens.
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My understanding is that this isn't correct. The 3/5 compromise applied only in the allocation among votes between/among the various states, for example, in deciding how many representatives West Carolina got as compared to Old Jersey.
The actual elections were decided on a one-man/one-vote system. So Old Man Travers got one vote, his son Young Travers got one, and Jim the Town Drunk also got one.
BUT..... if those three were the electoral role for the town, and there were also 500 slaves in the town, then the town as a whole counted for 303 people.
But Young Travers and Jim could still outvote Old Man Travers.
You have it right, basically. The 3/5 Compromise involved congressional apportionment, and though it electoral votes, not individual ballots. The math was done after the fact and then seats assigned at the state level. States would then cut up the districts how they liked, with essentially no national involvement until the Civil Rights Era. Some even did it all at large. Then the Warren Court stepped in.
This led to things like states refusing to redraw their districts in order to keep the more enslaved areas safely in control of the state government. In some cases, districts would not be redrawn for decades. Some states opted to elect everything at large. It was kind of a mess. Virginia was pulling tricks like agreeing to make voting easier to please white belt yeomen, but then keeping their districts based on a census from back when the heavily enslaved areas had the majority of the population.
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It could make one go hmm...seeing some of the old Southern States county lines are along the old plantation lines, I wonder if at times electoral votes went along similar lines in the Old American South?
The Constitution gives electoral votes to states, with no further direction than they need to vote for President and VP. South Carolina just had the legislature vote every four years, which was more common earlier on but by 1860 they were the only ones who still did so routinely. More often it happened when a new state lacked the time or cash to run an election.
But my understanding is that the social structure (as so eloquently described by Samnell) also provided enough of control to make sure that Old Man Travers got his way in "his" county. Sure, people could have gotten together and voted someone other than his hand-picked cronies, but would they have? Travers would certainly have been able to make their lives miserable in other way if they did.
:)
If Old Man Travers was rich enough, then yes. One of the norms was that if you wanted to lynch someone or otherwise run him out of town (in the antebellum, political lynching focused on whites) was that you were supposed to let them go if they made it across the county line. Then he became someone else's problem. There are exceptions, including times when someone was seized by people in one county and taken to the next over to lynch them. William Phillips was taken from Leavenworth across the river to Missouri for his tar & feathering, riding on a rail, shaving, and auctioning by a free black man for a half cent. But that wasn't the norm. When you crossed the county line, you had a different group of local players.
Right, I set out to write about elections and got something else. Let's call that bonus content. Here's how an election worked in 19th century America:
You would go to your polling place. They'd have a ballot box set up. A number of officers would be present to run the polls. Usually the officers were themselves prominent men in the community. If the officers didn't all appear, or refused to serve, then the people on the scene would elect replacements. The judges of the election would have a list of qualified voters to check you against. If you didn't appear on the list, they could let you vote anyway if they recognized you and/or if you swore an oath that you were qualified.
But wait, there's more: You provided your own ballot. You would use one pre-printed by a party, with all the correct votes included. (If the party didn't have a printer willing to take its business in your area, you were out of luck.) Parties customarily printed their ballots on different colors of paper and in different sizes, so it was really obvious who voted for whom. AND on election day a fair number of people would just hang out around the polls. Often there's only one place in a county (or sometimes more) so people come from some distance away and usually want to have a good time while present rather than running straight home. So everybody knows how you voted and if it wasn't correctly, you could be in a world of pain. The crowd might attack you or obstruct your path to the polling place. They could outright attack you. By converse, people who voted correctly could sail right through. In one case I've read about (in Kansas where there were a lot of election shenanigans) they actually picked a proslavery voter (the "correct" vote in this case) and carried him on their hands over the crowd blocking the polls from antislavery voters. Then he pulled out the wrong color of ballot and they were less happy with him.
States rights. The South argued that each state had the right to secede–leave the Union–at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners (including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual union.[31] Historian James McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other non-slavery explanations:
While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.[32]
While I actually agree with Samnell on the reasons...as a proper DA...I should point out the problem with the theory here.
One is supposing and placing the entire cause of War upon the Confederacy.
In truth, War requires two parties. Lincoln was not about to go to war over slavery. The US that had not seceded was not about to go to War over Slavery. In fact, they had the opportunity under Buchanan to act in that manner, and did not. He directly addressed the matter of secession, but felt that though it was illegal, there was no legal recourse to prevent it. He addressed that slavery would be the cause of the difficulty, but the difficulty that was to be dealt with was not slavery itself, but whether the South would secede over such an issue. Buchanan felt that there should be a Constitutional amendment confirming the rights of slavery in the US...and though it was a cause of the crisis itself...it was not the root problem that was going to be dealt with.
The trigger was Slavery, but it was not the reason for the War itself.
The reason for the war was the actual attempted Secession of the Slave States that combined to create the Confederacy.
I suppose we could observe more recent events for a parallel. Why did the US go to War in Afghanistan in the past score of years. Was it because of the attack on 9-11, or was it because of the causes behind that attack? I would say the reason the US went to war was because it was attacked on 9-11, an event remembered to this day in great horror at the evil men can do to each other.
There were multitudes of reasons that created that attack on 9-11, but all of those existed PRIOR to that attack on US soil, none of which prompted the US to declare war. They could be seen as catalysts in the actions the US took afterwards, but overwhelmingly it was due to the rise of the Taliban and Al Quaida and their activities against the US that prompted the US to finally go to war against them in response to 9-11.
In the same way, even though we look at the South, we must also look at the North, for their event (parallel to our modern one) was no less shocking to them when it occurred at Fort Sumter.
Lincoln did NOT declare war immediately, though the reasons were clear. He DID hold onto Federal holdings in the Confederacy...and when they fired upon the Fort...that was their 9-11, that was their reason to go to war. However, even than, that war was NOT over slavery, but over Secession and preserving the Union.
If we resort to Slavery as the cause, in that same light we'd have to revert to items beyond what most realize about 9-11 in regards to saying why the US went to war. Are we going to say the US went to War because we left Afghanistan void of really any purpose, but with many troops that we trained and their attempt at finding purpose is what caused the Recent War that the US waged there? Or are we going to list it as more applicable items to why we went there...the activities of Al Quaida and the Taliban and their hostilities towards the US which led to the Attack on 9-11.
In the same way, we see the North in Lincolns time addressing the issue. It was the Secession and dispute over lands and Federal law vs. State law in regards to property that led to their Fort Sumter.
The reasons for the North going to war in some ways are even more applicable in regards to WHY the civil War occurred, as most of the War they were actually on the offensive as opposed to the Southern States. As such, it was their reasonings of why they were advancing onto the Confederate States in War as to WHY that war was occurring.
It is at least equal, if not more pertinent, to What the Civil War was about than anything the Sons of the Confederacy may think now...or what the South may have thought at the time.
PS: Outside the DA role, just so you know, this is more academic than anything else. Not putting you on the spot, your post just had a good jumping off point. You had good points...
Do remember however in votes for the Presidency, the popular vote means squat.. It's the winner takes all Electoral College which can elect a President that comes in second in the popular vote, a situation which has happened at least twice.Also remember that the mass of the electron is 9.10938356 × 10-31 kilograms. I mean, as long as we're remembering things that aren't really relevant to the discussion, why not remember all of them?
The electoral college is normally divided on a state-by-state basis -- e.g., if 51% of the voters in East Dakota vote for the tall guy with good hair, the TGWGH gets 100% of the East Dakota slate. It's the size of the slate that matters, which is determined by the population. If the state population is a million people, half enslaved, then effectively 500,000 people vote for enough electors for a state of 800,000 people, so everyone in that state has roughly 1.6 votes per person. That's the electoral effect of the 3/5 compromise, and it applies not only to the presidency but also (of course) to the House.
Of course, 19th century America was notorious for further restricting the vote, so those 500,000 people included 250,000 women (who of course couldn't vote), and probably 150,000 men who didn't make the property cutoff, etc., but that wasn't something limited to the American South.
Given the way the EC breaks down, you can get enough electoral votes to win first-past-the-post and the presidency with a mere 22% of the popular vote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k
GreyWolfLord,
An interesting analysis. For what I understand, you are saying that even though the overaching reason for the southern states leaving the union was slavery, the actual cause was the attack on fort sumnter and the succession.
I believe that is backward. A trigger is the actual event that initiates another event. A cause is much longer in duration and deeper in creating the event.
The issue of slavery had dominated and divided the united states for nearly 100 years - since the constitutional convention itself. It was the fear of Lincoln's supposedly antislavery government that triggered the succession. The confederate constitution enshrines slavery - no state in the confederacy has the right to abolish slavery every.
So in my view- slavery is the major cause of the war, the actually succession is the trigger of the war.
Why is it called the civil war? It sounds like it was anything but...
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Why is it called the civil war? It sounds like it was anything but...
Old joke.
If you're asking "for serious," a "civil war" is defined as "a war between political factions or regions within the same country," as opposed to a more conventional war which is between two countries. Implicitly, a "civil war" is also usually defined as one where the breakaway faction loses, because otherwise (since history is written by the victors) it turns into a war for independence or a revolution or something like that.
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Why is it called the civil war? It sounds like it was anything but...
It's the standard term for such struggles. It's civil as in "civil strife," not civil as in "everyone is polite."
James Ford Rhodes decided that was the best name back in the early 1900s. Before that, it went by several other names. The Late Unpleasantness was one. Official documents had largely converged on The War of the Rebellion.
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If you live in VA or SC or TN, it's "The War of Northern Aggression."
If you call it the Civil War, they're not really sure what you're talking about.
I think if Cuba fired artillery on Guantanamo Bay, the US would be fully justified in considering that an act of war and invading.
Hence, War of Southern Aggression if anything.
I'm fond of Second American Revolution, myself.
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I'm fond of Second American Revolution, myself.
I'm fond of Second Breakfast, myself.
There's no actual contradiction between the meaning of 'civil' as a synonym for politeness, and the sense in which it is used to name civil wars. Both meanings link to the same etymological background.
civil war = a war between fellow cives (latin, citizens)
civil man = a man who knows how to act in the society of other citizens.
Same root meaning.
The war for the freedom to own slaves!
Valhala here i come!
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I think if Cuba fired artillery on Guantanamo Bay, the US would be fully justified in considering that an act of war and invading.
Hence, War of Southern Aggression if anything.
If Cuba tried to starve it out, we'd probably treat that as an act of war too. That's what SC and then the CSA were trying to do. Then they fired on an unarmed ship chartered by the US Navy, well before Lincoln took office. In the technical sense, if the war didn't begin with SC's ordinance of secession (or a few, erm, irregularities before) then it began then. But the Buchanan administration didn't opt to treat it that way because the Old Public Functionary (his real nickname) believed that both secession and resistance of secession were unconstitutional.
Yes, really.
This is some really nasty stuff. http://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm The Casual Killing Act really stuck out.
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This is some really nasty stuff. http://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm The Casual Killing Act really stuck out.
And Virginia's slave code was of a somewhat more moderate cast than those which prevailed in the Lower South. (The Upper South and Border States generally had Virginia-inspired codes. The Lower looked to South Caroina's example.) Here's Georgia's, as quoted by William & Ellen Craft in their narrative:
"Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offense had been committed on a free white person, and on the like proof, except in case of insurrection of such slave, and unless SUCH DEATH SHOULD HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT IN GIVING SUCH SLAVE MODERATE CORRECTION."
I have known slaves to be beaten to death, but as they died under “moderate correction,” it was quite lawful; and of course the murderers were not interfered with.
"If any slave, who shall be out of the house or plantation where such slave shall live, or shall be usually employed, or without some white person in company with such slave, shall REFUSE TO SUBMIT to undergo the examination of ANY WHITE person, (let him ever be so drunk or crazy), it shall be lawful for such white person to pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct such slave; and if such slave shall assault and strike such a white person, such slave may be LAWFULLY KILLED."
Such laws presented a minor procedural difficulty, of course. Slaves could not really give testimony to a court. The court must then either take the white man's word or find some kind of white witness to events. Most of the time they didn't bother. If you killed someone else's slave you might face some kind of civil suit for damages.
As a practical matter, if some white person pleaded slave resistance or revolt they were usually taken at their word. Especially during one of the periodic panics. In one of those, you'd usually see slaves tortured for evidence of conspiracies that would then turn up conspirators, rinse and repeat. It creates a problem in the historiography since we can't entirely trust the information we have about this or that conspiracy, but it's usually the only information we have about it. How many were real conspiracies, how many exaggerated, and how many were pure panic. I'm not familiar with all the details, but I understand that the Denmark Vesey conspiracy is one of the larger bones of contention. David Brion Davis, one of the big name slavery historians of the past fifty years, confesses he's changed his mind on it at least twice.
I thought Louisiana was the exception, due to the Napoleonic Code and creole system of slavery (slaves were paid a wage, though a small one and could eventually purchase their own freedom - at least in theory). Delphine LaLaurie infamously was sued over how horrifically she treated her slaves. Seriously, don't Google her.
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I thought Louisiana was the exception, due to the Napoleonic Code and creole system of slavery (slaves were paid a wage, though a small one and could eventually purchase their own freedom - at least in theory). Delphine LaLaurie infamously was sued over how horrifically she treated her slaves. Seriously, don't Google her.
I'm not familiar with the particulars of Delphine LaLaurie or the LA slave code, but a lot of Louisiana's rep comes from French holdovers in the culture. There was a social space for prosperous free blacks (often biracial and somewhat set up by their rich white fathers) somewhere above slaves but below whites.
In Haiti such people formed a bloc that wanted their rights as free and equal Frenchmen as much as they wanted to keep their slaves. One of those things that reminds you white people invented and imposed blackness. Unless I've badly remembered what I read about the Haitian Revolution a few years back, which is possible.
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From what I know of Haiti (operating under similar codes as Louisiana due to French colonization) the biracial Haitians, gens de coleur were indeed considered a third class as they were in Louisiana, at least by locals. Interestingly, a large part of the birth of jazz music in New Orleans is due to a fusion of styles between classically trained biracial musicians suddenly considered "black" under Jim Crow laws - Plessy/Ferguson happened in New Orleans after all - who found themselves performing alongside the descendants of black slaves playing a much different style.
After the revolution, the Dessalines administration only lasted two years before Haiti split into the north and south regimes, with Henri Christophe and Alexandre Petion in power respectively, and gens de coleur had it much harder in the north due to lingering prejudice against the French. Depending who you ask, Christophe was either another petty tyrant emulating the colonists and no better than them, or a man who got in way over his head and tried to keep order the only way he knew how (Haitians themselves disagree on this point today). Danny Glover's been trying to make a film about the revolution for twenty-odd years now, with major studios being too gun-shy to approach the project for fear that a mostly black cast would alienate white audiences.
The idea of "black" and "white" seem pretty peculiar to the Western hemisphere on that count, certainly African tribes had prejudices against one another as anyone who's read Things Fall Apart can attest, and for that matter Europeans still do maintain certain biases against one another. Just look at English nationalists attacking Polish immigrants, the idea of calling that "white on white" crime would be ludicrous. I remember hearing the notion of "whiteness" coming around to convince poor, uneducated whites that they had more in common with white aristocracies than they did with poor, uneducated blacks in largely the same economic situation. Samnell, I'd wager you've forgotten more about the Klan's strategy in post-war Mississippi than I've ever known, so I'll defer to you on that point but suffice to say that Karl Marx's ideas had been reaching American audiences shortly prior to the outbreak of the war. (Tangential, but I'd always heard the Klan was founded after the war by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who then left after it became too radical even for him; now I'm hearing it was around during the war or possibly before.)
The notion of "race" is complete b!~**!*# in any event. Determinants of individual personality can, to a degree, be traced to two factors, culture and genetics, neither of which we understand completely, much less how one affects the other, and trying to lump them together under the umbrella of something we call race is arbitrary nonsense.
America seems to suffer under the idea of the 'one drop' rule of race when it comes to african heritage - that any African blood makes one black. My Jamaican and South african friends have explained to me that in their society, people of mixed heritage are considered a separate racial class. That being said, biologically, race as we see it is not an accurate description of genetic heritage.