Article by Walter Williams, forwarded by Prattville Dragoons Sam Reid and Tyrone Crowley on Aug. 12, 2015.
Historical
Ignorance
Walter E Williams - 15 July 2015
The victors of
war write its history in order to cast themselves in the most favorable light.
That explains the considerable historical ignorance about our war of 1861 and
panic over the Confederate flag. To create better understanding, we have to
start a bit before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
The 1783 Treaty
of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Its first
article declared the 13 colonies "to be free, sovereign and independent
states." These 13 sovereign nations came together in 1787 as principals
and created the federal government as their agent. Principals have always held
the right to fire agents. In other words, states held a right to withdraw from
the pact -- secede.
During the 1787
Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would allow the federal
government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison rejected it, saying,
"A union of the states containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for
its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a
declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be
considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by
which it might be bound."
In fact, the
ratification documents of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island explicitly said
they held the right to resume powers delegated should the federal government
become abusive of those powers. The Constitution never would have been ratified
if states thought they could not regain their sovereignty -- in a word, secede.
On March 2, 1861,
after seven states seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration,
Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that
read, "No state or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter
admitted into the union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction
of the United States."
Several months
earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of
Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional
amendment to prohibit secession. Here's a question for the reader: Would there
have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already
unconstitutional?
On the eve of the
War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Rep.
Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, "Any attempt to preserve the union
between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and
destructive of republican liberty."
Both Northern
Democratic and Republican Parties favored allowing the South to secede in
peace. Just about every major Northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the
South's right to secede. New York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): "If tyranny and
despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not
justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in
1861." Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): "An attempt to subjugate
the seceded states, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil -- evil
unmitigated in character and appalling in content." The New York Times
(March 21, 1861): "There is growing sentiment throughout the North in
favor of letting the Gulf States go."
The War of 1861
settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American
lives. We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L.
Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: "It is poetry, not logic; beauty,
not sense." Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives "to the
cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people,
for the people should not perish from the earth." Mencken says: "It
is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle
actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought
for the right of people to govern themselves."
The War of 1861
brutally established that states could not secede. We are still living with its
effects. Because states cannot secede, the federal government can run roughshod
over the U.S. Constitution's limitations of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
States have little or no response.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at
George Mason University.
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