Secession Obsession

Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860.  What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states.  He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.

The South, in fact, didn't have to make a deal with Lincoln at all.  Indeed, the South had plenty of reasons not to secede.  Among them:

First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote.  The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.

Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.  Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.

Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.   

Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.

Which pretty much settles it.  The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery.  It was Southern stupidity.  Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks.  But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years.   The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.

And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom.  Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.

Ikki Nikki

States' rights are wonderful.

States' rights are the reason one state does things differently from another.  They're what enable Pennsylvania to run a chain of "state stores" at which to buy alcoholic beverages, enable Maine and Nebraska to proportionally award some of their presidential electors, enable Hawaii and Utah to ban gambling, and enable New Jersey to require expiration dates on water, which doesn't really expire, which means that expiration dates get printed on water bottles in all fifty states because it's too expensive to print dates on only bottles sold in New Jersey . . . oh, and it's illegal only in New Jersey to pump your own gas.  (Okay, maybe New Jersey is a bad example here.)

States' rights are guaranteed in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, written by Founding Father Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only state with a stand-alone gift tax (and it's Connecticut's right to have one!), which reads as follows, and I quote:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So, the rights of the states matter a lot.  But the states do not have the right to withdraw from the Union in defiance of federal policy regarding the restriction in federal territories of a practice legal in certain states and banned in others, because secession under any circumstances is unconstitutional.  No state has the right to secede on the basis of issues regarding federal powers and individual liberties, and that was especially the case regarding . . . slavery.

But Nikki Haley, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in New Hampshire, seems to think that the cause of the Civil War  was a issue over states' rights, personal liberty, and federal government overreach.  

Which is particularly strange when you remember that her home state of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union after Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, said it was doing so because "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution."

Haley has since tried to backtrack on her statements, but the very idea that she could talk about the cause of the Civil War and not acknowledge slavery would be laughable if not for the fact that she will happily dodge any inconvenient realities of American history to avoid offending Trump supporters whose votes she doesn't have a prayer of getting anyway.  How bad it is for her?   She has Ron DeSantis - who approved educational guidelines in Florida to suggest that slavery provided skills to those in bondage - criticizing her, and she has Chris Christie laughing at her!  

We seem to be in an Alice in Wonderland situation when a South Asian woman married to a white man in the state where Bob Jones University is located can't talk openly and honestly about race.

Then again she is a Republican . . . 

Slavery Benefited . . . Slaves?

The state of Florida, under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis - who somehow won re-election in a landslide last year - has just issued guidelines to teach in public schools that slavery had positive benefits for those who were enslaved, as they developed skills such as blacksmithing, carpentry, painting, and, for all I know, bellows-mending.

Unless you're talking about Nat Turner using the organizing skills he developed as a slave to lead a rebellion of slaves against their white masters, I don't see how that idea makes a ton of sense.

Even if the slaves did indeed learn skills, how many of them were able to put them to use for their own benefit once they were freed?  How many were actually freed?  I'm willing to bet that a majority of slaves who learned skills - and many if not most of them probably didn't, because their masters simply had them pick cotton or shine shoes - never lived long enough to gain freedom and employ their skills.

Let's get real.  The only people who benefited from slavery were white people.  Not just the Southern plantation owners but the Northern textile mill owners who bought all that cotton and employed low-paid white workers - "wage slaves," as John C. Calhoun called them - to turn the cotton into cloth.  But at least in the early nineteenth century, the white working class of the Northeast could pack up and venture west for land and opportunity.  Slaves didn't have that liberty, even if they were more skilled than the white textile workers in New York or Massachusetts.  

As for Ron DeSantis, he clearly lacks the necessary skills to be a successful politician . . . at least outside Florida.

We Don't Need Southern Men Around Anyhow

Robert McDonnell, the governor of Virginia, is aware of his state's history, and he seems to be bent on honoring the past by living in it.

McDonnell issued a resolution reinstating the celebration of April in Virginia as Confederate History Month in honor of the people of Virginia "who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth." He called for Virginians "to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present."

Oh yeah, and he forgot to mention that Virginians fought to preserve the sanctity of slavery.

What planet is McDonnell on? He wants to cast the Civil War as a conflict between the states over "states' rights," but he seems to forget that the Southern states started the war as a reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The South opposed Lincoln's policy not allowing the extension of slavery to the frontier. (He had no intention to abolish slavery where it already existed, because he didn't have the authority; ironically, the Civil war gave him the ability to do so.) Although McDonnell apologized for failing to acknowledge the horror of slavery and said he never meant to condone it, it's worth stressing that the Southern states seceded from the Union. The idea of the Civil War from the Southern perspective was to form a new country, the Confederate States of America, not preserve state sovereignty within the framework of the Constitution.

McDonnell has only gotten many prominent black Virginians to speak out against him, including one of his own supporters from last year's gubernatorial campaign, Black Entertainment Television co-founder Sheila Johnson. The Republican party to which McDonnell belongs looks even more out of touch with people outside the Tea Party movement, and he may have sunk his own presidential ambitions.

Speaking of the Presidency, did you know that Virginian John Tyler, the nation's tenth president, served in the Confederate Congress just before his death?

I do agree that Virginians who fought in the Civil War for their country should be honored, though. So let's honor George Thomas, a hero of the . . . Union. (Thomas is famous for having destroyed a Confederate army under the command of John Bell Hood at the Battle of Nashville in 1864.)