Happy Birthday, Jefferson Davis

[Liability]

Piss on Jefferson Davis' grave, to show him all the honors which are his due. Oh, maybe shit on it, too.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Piss on Jefferson Davis' grave, to show him all the honors which are his due. Oh, maybe shit on it, too.

Always a class act.

 

[Liability]

Piss on Jefferson Davis' grave, to show him all the honors which are his due. Oh, maybe shit on it, too.

Always a class act.

Yeah. Class is what that traitorous scumbag deserves.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Piss on Jefferson Davis' grave, to show him all the honors which are his due. Oh, maybe shit on it, too.

Always a class act.

Yeah. Class is what that traitorous scumbag deserves.

Class has little to do with what other people deserve.

 

[demiurge]

So because Lincoln didn't believe secession was legal, they had to abide by federal law?

The President is the one who enforces the laws of the Constitution, remember? Yes, his POV on secession was incredibly pertinent.

He could have been overruled by SCOTUS. If so, the South gets what they want, the ultimate expression of States rights are upheld, and the political and legal outcomes of both nations are dramatically transformed.

If not, they get a war they were going to be fighting anyway. They just get months more to get ready.

The attack on Sumter was a political calculation by Davis. He and has cabinet reasoned that doing so was necessary because of radical elements in South Carolina might attack anyway, and by doing so at the behest of the Confederate government it gave stronger legitimacy to the action. It then would help provoke other slave states to their side, which might grant the Confederacy sufficient strength to abrogate war altogether. Both by bringing major slave states such as Virginia into the fold, and getting international recognition. The first part worked, the later didn't.

The only dissenter was Sec of State Toombs. Toombs famously said in his exhortations for peace that an attack on Sumter would be "suicide, murder," and would stir a "hornet's nest" of hostility to the South. "It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal!" He was right.

The Supremacy Clause merely begs the question, and since the states did not abolish or alter their republican governments in any way shape or form that clause doesn't apply.

In any way, shape or form? That's clearly not true. The 1840s Dorr Rebellion forced SCOTUS to rule on what constituted Republican rule - they said that it was up to the Congress alone to determine that. Luther vs Borden, 1849. This power was invoked during Reconstruction. The 14th and 15th Amendments made it moot.

Personally I tend to think given enough time, the peace sentiment in the North would have prevailed, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court any petition to address secession would likely have been successful. This would have put Lincoln clearly in the wrong if he didn't accede to the ruling.

Nor would it if they had, because the Constitution no longer applied to them once they had seceded regardless.

In theory. As we often see, theory and reality are very different.

They did deal with the issue legally,

There was no legal precedence for a means of secession. The rule of law required that to be in place, and the only group that could determine a difference of opinion on that between the Executive branch and individual states was the Supreme Court.

and even tried to deal with the issue diplomatically.

The US government couldn't accept an official envoy from a nation it did not recognize. That was known at the time. The envoys stayed for almost a month discussing the issue through back channels with Sec of State Seward, who asked them for more time to address the internal politics of succession, then left.

They could have remained as a back channel, but Davis recalled them.

They only resorted to guns when Lincoln gave them no other option.

I'm sorry, that's completely absurd. They had tons of options - they could have allowed resupply and allowed the status quo to continue while they worked for a peaceful resolution. They could have blockaded the fort, while not firing on it. They had done so before and it did NOT lead to war. If they had done so again, they would have captured Sumter out of simple logistics. They did neither - they started a bombardment of federal land. They forced Lincoln's hand, not the other way around.

Indeed, he promised not to reinforce the Fort, only to resupply it. Buchannon had done the same thing at Pickens, and it didn't lead to war.

As for majority rule, this country is not founded upon the idea of majority rule. The founders explicitly and continually rejected the idea of democracy because it rests upon the idea of majority rule.

Strike out 'Founders' and put in 'Federalists' and I'd agree with you. However, that's an important distinction, because the Federalists were only a faction within the Founders. Clearly we are a democratic republic - and just as clearly, stating that we uniquely have the right to abrogate any law or ruling we don't like means there's no way to form a coherent government. Thus, the act of secession itself needed to be determined via legalistic means.

While I tend to think the Confederacy would have been legally right if that had been ruled on (despite the ethics of the reason for their desire to secede), and likely could have triumphed, the fact they presumed they had that right when it was still in doubt ultimately led to them getting their asses kicked.

Because yes, they did have a choice - they could have continued the status quo, and Lincoln would have not been able to gather the political will necessary to address the de facto secession until it had been ruled on by the high court.

 

[MuadDib]

You'll have to excuse demiurge. He takes a very Progressive, if not outright Marxist, view of the Civil War.

Actually, he takes those views in most of his politics.

 

[Liability]

Always a class act.

Yeah. Class is what that traitorous scumbag deserves.

Class has little to do with what other people deserve.

Spoken in a very mindless manner; but at least your words have no inherent meaning.