Translation: There is no provision for secession in the Constitution. It doesn't trouble me a bit, it happened 150 years before I was born. But I do read history and the appalachian counties of Virginia did not follow the piedmont and tidewater counties into secession. They voted to form a new state. They should have called it South Ohio, since that part of "Virginia" was always more oriented to the Ohio river valley than to "old Virginia". Are you suggesting now that the war happened because the north wanted to "steal" West Virginia?
There is no provision against it and if the "mass of right" remains with the State, the decision is vested in the State. If the Constitution directly forbade such an action and the Northern states were defending the constitution they would have never let this happen. The whole issue still returns to the Hamiltonians and their loose interpretation of the Constitution to a means to an end, to remove a balance of power and transfer it to the North. They changed the interpretation from a Federation of States to a Federation of the people as they held a population advantage, engaged in a transfer of wealth, and held the Union hostage to maintain and ultimately acquire the control of the Union. The "undeleted powers" that they asserted served to to increase their leverage. From the Tariff of 1816, refusal to admit Missouri as a State without a balancing offer (Maine), Supreme Court rulings of rulings; Fletcher v. Peck, McCulloch v. Maryland, Cohens v. Virginia, and Gibbons v. Ogden all served to pervert both the Constitution and the Union envisioned by the leaders of the Southern States. This led to secession which led to War.
First you offer Jefferson and now Hamilton to support your argument. You realize that these two disagreed fundamentally? I'm confused as to what you are suggesting now. Yes, yes, all of that is true. . . secession led to war. Everybody here agrees on this. You are repeating yourself and preaching to the choir. In that whole soliloquy, you fail to address that the reason that there is a "north" and a "south" at all is slavery. Slavery is the root issue that begat all of the sectarian conflict, the states rights issues, the economic differences, and the power struggles you allude to. I fail to understand why you find it neccessary to deny that disagreement over slavery was always the fundamental issue, the defining issue, and the principal disuniting factor that resulted in secession and war.
I think we are getting somewhere now. The Hamiltonians were pushing a Northern agenda that directly contrasted the views of the purpose of the Union held by Jefferson and other Southerners. Their movement to a Federation of the people instead of a Federation of States, where the States no longer controlled activities within their own borders is the root cause of secession and revolt. The loose interpretation of the Constitution by the Hamiltonians allowed them to exercise powers not originally vested to them by the framers of the Constitution. Without this perversion of the Constitution the Northern states would have had no basis to exercise control over what were the undeleted powers that Jefferson talks about. Once again, this is the root issue. Slavery was just another issue that the North used to weaken the South and attempt to dominate the region. See above.
That's why I bowed out early. :hihi: Saw this one coming but have enjoyed the posts/arguments in the thread. :thumb:
Not arguing. We just see the issue very differently. I think the Northern states violated the Constitution by many of their activities, which caused the Southern States to exercise their legitimate right to dissolve their relationship with the Union and establish a confederation more to their liking. (Kinda like what the States joined together through the Articles of Confederation did.) The North, in an attempt to maintain territory and the economic servitude of the South declared War on the independent States and conquered those territories, reassembled them in a hollow facsimile of their status, and declared all is good. I would never pretend to speak for Red, he does it well enough by himself. I believe Red thinks slavery issue caused the Civil War. I don't deny that it was a divisive issue, but not the ROOT issue, which is what this discourse is about.
That's like saying there would have been no WWII if the United States recognized Japan's right to bomb Pearl Harbor. It is a truism.
As I have said before, the story of the Civil War has been written both by Southerners and Northerners, and on the significant details they agree. They agree that slavery was the principal cause of the war, and that had there never been slavery it is highly unlikely that there would have ever been a Civil War. So the axomatic cliche that "the victors write the history" is not a truism at all. First of all it applies primarily to ancient history before there was such a thing as historical research and to a time when the histories usually worked for the king. Modern history is not written by one side.
You are right. History is written for an audience. The history of the most recent Sino-Japanese war is case in point.
