Immanuel
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- May 15, 2007
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You are welcome to your opinion, but please explain why you do not think it is a grey area....Did a state have the right to secede or not and if so under what conditions.
Two words: Tenth Amendment
That doesn't change a thing.
The Constitution granted rights to the states that the two sides disagreed on.
The South claimed the right to secede. The North claimed that the right to secede did not exist, but that did not mean that there were no states rights. Basically, the North believed that the States were subservient to the Federal Government and the South contended that it was the other way around.
That still leaves room for give and take by both sides thus leaving it a grey area. I submit the following in my assertion that there was no hard and fast rule as to the rights of the States.
From Wikipedia.
Interpretations of the amendment can be divided into two camps. The first interpretation, as held by the Tenth Amendment Center, the Libertarian and Constitution Parties, and a few Republicans including Ron Paul and Jeff Flake, is that the Constitution does not grant the United States any power that it does not expressly mention. This has been used as the basis for such court cases as Gonzales v. Raich, and for arguments in favor of repealing a large number of Federal laws, abolishing the Federal Reserve, and drastically slashing the Federal budget by 50% or more. It is also why amendments were necessary for the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of alcohol - without said amendments, Congress did not have the authority to do those things.
The contrary opinion is that the Constitution grants Congress the authority to do more or less anything that is not explicitly prohibited by the first eight amendments.
James Ostrowski - Lincoln's Secession Arguments
President Lincoln set forth his views on secession mainly in his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861), and his Special Message to Congress (July 4, 1861). In the first speech, Lincoln made primarily political arguments against secession, apparently hoping to persuade secessionists with his arguments. However, with secession already accomplished by July 4, 1861, Lincoln's Special Address to Congress focused on the alleged illegality of secession, to establish the legitimacy of his intended military resistance to it. This paper will therefore first consider the Special Message's legal arguments against secession, then the First Inaugural's political arguments against secession.
In his July 4, 1861 address to Congress, President Lincoln called the doctrine of the secessionists "an insidious debauching of the public mind." "They invented," he said, "an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is, that any state of the Union may, consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully, and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other state." Ironically, it was not "fire-eating" Southern rebels who had originated this "sophism," but the man Lincoln called "the most distinguished politician in our history"--Thomas Jefferson.11 Jefferson, who called Virginia his "country," planted the seeds of the secession doctrine with his Kentucky Resolution of 1798, written in protest to the Alien and Sedition laws:
"[T]he several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by compact, under the style and title of the Constitution of the United States, and of certain amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for general purposes, delegated to that government certain powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no effect."12
Hannis Taylor called Jefferson's compact doctrine the "Pandora's Box" out of which flew the "closely related doctrines of nullification and secession," which he notes, with less than perfect foresight, "were extinguished once and forever by the Civil War."13 Jefferson's biographer, Willard Sterne Randall agrees:
"[Jefferson] forthrightly held that where the national government exercised powers not specifically delegated to it, each state 'has an equal right to judge . . . the mode and measure of redress.' . . . He was, he assured Madison, 'confident in the good sense of the American people,' but if they did not rally round 'the true principles of our federal compact,' he was 'determined . . . to sever ourselves from that union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government . . . in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.'"14
In reply to this "insidious debauching of the public mind," Lincoln constructs a straw man secessionist argument: "This sophism derives much--perhaps the whole--of its currency, from the assumption, that there is some omnipotent, and sacred supremacy, pertaining to a State--to each State of our Federal Union." No secessionist including Jefferson made such an argument, though it sounds ominously like a description of Lincoln's own feelings about the Union. Since the States created the Union, Lincoln's denigration of the States and glorification of the Union is paradoxical.
American Civil War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Causes of secession
Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War and Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War
The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly anti-slavery North made conflict likely. Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but he had, in his 1858 House Divided Speech, expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction."[1] Much of the political battle in the 1850s focused on the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories.[2][3][4] All of the organized territories were likely to become free-soil states, which increased the Southern movement toward secession. Both North and South assumed that if slavery could not expand it would wither and die.[5][6][7]
Southern fears of losing control of the federal government to antislavery forces, and Northern fears that the slave power already controlled the government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor vs. slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.
Both North and South were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Southerners emphasized, in connection with slavery, the states' rights[8][9][10] ideas mentioned in Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions. Northerners ranging from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to the moderate Republican leader Abraham Lincoln[11] emphasized Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal. Lincoln mentioned this proposition in his Gettysburg Address.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said[12][13] that slavery was the chief cause of secession[14] in his Cornerstone Speech shortly before the war. After Confederate defeat, Stephens became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause.[15] There was a striking contrast[14][16] between Stephens' post-war states' rights assertion that slavery did not cause secession[15] and his pre-war Cornerstone Speech. Confederate President Jefferson Davis also switched from saying the war was caused by slavery to saying that states' rights was the cause. While Southerners often used states' rights arguments to defend slavery, sometimes roles were reversed, as when Southerners demanded national laws to defend their interests with the Gag Rule and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. On these issues, it was Northerners who wanted to defend the rights of their states.[17]
Sometimes the roles were reversed... grey area. No hard and fast rule.
Immie