The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by John:

Kevin A.: How exactly was the south mistreated by the north in 1860? Because the Republican party won a presidential election on a platform pledged not to allow slavery in territories that weren't suitable for slavery anyway? Forgive me if I am not particularly sympathetic.

As far as tariffs, again, they are a red herring. The "Tariff of Abominations" led South Carolina to action, but the rest of the south supported President Jackson in opposing the nullifiers. And economic issues had absolutely nothing to do with the origins of the war. What brought on the war was a bunch of southerners who felt that the north, by electing the Republicans president, had proved that it did not care about the south's interests re: slavery, and that there was no point in further association with it. Tariffs had pretty much nothing to do with it. The root causes can be brought deeper - my old professor, Michael Holt, argued that it was the collapse of a bi-sectional two party system (Democrats vs. Whigs) in the early 1850s, due to improved economic times which destroyed the Whig program, which brought the Republicans into existence and generally made everybody focus on sectional issues (since economic issues didn't really matter) which was the proximate cause of the war. Nevertheless, I don't think any historian would deny that it was the issue of slavery, and particularly the silly non-issue of the extension of slavery into the territories, which got the south upset. Basically, my opinion is that the whole thing was a bizarre mania. Logically, the Republican victory would not really affect slavery in any particularly notable way. But decades of paranoia (and the complete destruction of the kind of bisectional understanding that mitigated such paranoia) made the south abnormally sensitive about slavery, and brought on the war.

On a completely different note, I'm just wondering, but what are the opinions of people here on the Compromise of 1850? Here we see that a compromise was made to preserve the union which included many features that we would find rather horrifying (well, one feature, the despicable Fugitive Slave Act, at least). I've always been of two minds. On the one hand, the Northern Whigs who opposed it were dead right: the Fugitive Slave Act was monstrous. On the other hand, the other option was southern secession and civil war. Was that really a desirable result? Isn't a negative judgment of the Compromise really a result of us applying our own standards to a time where they can't really be applied. Wouldn't most of us, had we been living in 1850, have applauded Daniel Webster when he spoke in favor of the Compromise, saying that preservation of the Union was more important than either side scoring points? I don't know, to be honest, but I think anyone who says it was an easy call is being dishonest. It's easy enough now to say that slavery was really, really horrible, and that anything which perpetuates it ought to be opposed, but I think that one can see, at the time, serious considerations that would impel one to the view that this evil would have to be tolerated for the foreseeable future (for one thing, there seemed to be no practicable way of ending it in the near future - certainly, provoking secession by unwillingness to compromise would not seem a particularly plausible way to bring about an end to slavery).

So, anyways, while I have little to no sympathy for silly romanticization of the Confederacy, I have little more for the kind of present-minded arguments that try to judge historical figures by the standards of the present. Yes, we ought to condemn the Confederacy as a government which was based entirely on a slaveholding economic system, and we ought to condemn those individuals who led it for their devotion to it. On the other hand, is there any particular need to show off our moral uprightness by saying nasty things about Jefferson Davis?

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. (my emphasis)

One would argue that the Supremacy Clause specifically prohibits to the states the right to nullify federal law (a broad class of actions which would include secession). But obviously, as you point out, the whole thing was disputed at the time. Which is one of the reasons why these kinds of arguments can be a bit silly. My point wasn't to make an airtight case against secession, but to point out that a pretty good constitutional argument can be made, using the text of the constitution, to show that secession, at least as carried out by the southern states in 1860-1, was unconstitutional.

Wow, quite an argument. A few points:

The argument that tariffs caused the civil war is an old one, and a bogus one. The southern states seceded because they didn't like the Republican policy that would ban slavery in the territories, and feared that this would be the beginning of the end of the slaveholding system. Period. The Whigs in 1840 won with a pledge to raise tariffs, and they won with, well, a great deal of southern support. Louisiana sugar planters, in fact, were explicitly dependent on high tariffs in order to make a profit - otherwise, cheap Cuban and Brazilian sugar would have driven them out of business.

As far as Graydon's proposal, not only is it rather horrifying, it's also, well, how to explain this? Graydon is upset that the Union didn't "finish the job". What, exactly, is the job he's referring to? For nearly everybody at the time, the principal job was not to ensure black equality. It was to ensure the restoration of the Union. For that purpose, what happened after the war worked fairly well. As far as helping black people achieve equality, well, I think a whole lot more could have been done without having to resort to the kind of measures Graydon has advocated, and I think his measures would, in many ways, have made the restoration of the union - by far the most important goal to the people of the time (and, even today, I think, one which most people would have to agree is an important one) - nearly impossible.

The Cromwell analogy Graydon made a long time ago was particularly inapt - if he was referring to Cromwell in Ireland, surely Cromwell's behavior did very little to quell Irish unrest in the long term, and even in the short term only left it to simmer beneath the surface. If he was referring to Cromwell in England, well, Cromwell really left almost no legacy in England - within two years of his death, the King was back on the throne, and things were back basically to how they were before the Civil War. 1688 (or even 1714, perhaps) was by far the more important year for English constitutional history (and was, surprisingly enough, a bloodless revolution)

Anyway, one thing this whole argument shows is the way that the Civil War is still a massively important contemporary issue in America today, due largely, I'd imagine, to the harrowing course of the history of race relations in this country. We don't find Americans arguing heatedly, for instance, over the merits of the Spanish-American War, which was surely one of the less justified wars that history provides us with example of. Nevertheless, a discussion of said war will rarely devolve into heated debates of possible counterfactuals.

And as far as the question of why secession would be unconstitutional, I believe the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution says that no state can, on its own authority, revoke the laws of the United States. Which suggests to me that an ordinance of secession passed under state law (which would, by the by, involve the revocation of numerous federal laws, such as tariff law) would be unconstitutional on those grounds. Secession would not be unconstitutional in and of itself, but congress would have to pass a law to legalize secession, which it did not do.

I don't know about "Trotskyists", Trotsky himself was pretty fine with Lenin's brutality, and only started developing a conscious after Stalin shunted him aside in the leadership. Even in exile, he didn't criticize even such things as Lenin's persecution of the SRs and Mensheviks.

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