re: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War

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I think you answered your own question. The Confederates were traitorous, Democrat weasels. And every statue of those slave-owning, KKK-loving cowards deserves to be torn town.

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Well that was a well thought out, unbiased opinion!

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Where does this “right” to secede come from in your mind? The Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that unilateral secession by a state from the union was illegal.

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Yet, the Constitution would not have been ratified had the power to force states to remain in the union been put into it. The Supreme Court was inventing shite even then.

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What are your thoughts on southern states keeping other humans in bondage relative to their inalienable rights?

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Interesting point. What are your thoughts on the NORTHERN states keeping other humans in bondage relative to their inalienable rights?

Slavery was completely legal in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware until the 13th Amendment. That technically means it was legal there AFTER it was made illegal by the dubiously legal Emancipation Proclamation. There were also legal slaves in New Jersey and New York that had ended the practice going forward but any current slaves were not freed.

Of course when you acknowledge that you have to acknowledge that the war itself was not about slavery, it was about keeping the union together at all costs. Secession was primarily about slavery (though there were definitely other issues, mainly the fear by the Southern states that they would be domimniated by the North and were lose their right of self determination, which actually did happen in the end) but unless you look at the ridiculous SC decision AFTER the war and with a stacked Court that had no Southerners on it that pretended like the 9th and 10th Amendments didn't exist that is a moot point.

The South was certainly not without fault. There were some truly evil men in the South and the positions justifying slavery were repulsive and certainly by today's standards horrific. The problem is that those views weren't uncommon in the world at that time. Many in the North felt the same way about blacks (thus why slavery was still legal there). Slavery had as much to do with geography as anything. The North had few areas where plantations were viable and thus the North had smaller farms or was industrialized.

The real silver bullet argument though is how the South seceded. The South seceded because of a 2/3rds vote in the states that voted to secede. That means that those people wished to leave and did so in a democratic manner certainly in the spirit of the Constitution and 9th and 10th Amendment. Those Amendments say that there are no Negative rights given to the government that take away rights from the People and that anything not specifically stated in the Constitution then is given to the People or the States and not the Federal government. Now the 14th Amendment did some things to curtail that but the 14th was AFTER the Civil War. There is just no way to look at the SC decision of 1869 and see it as anything other than what it was, a necessary justification for a horrific war that had no basis in law. If you don't think the South had the right to secede you don't believe in Democracy or the right of Self Determination. You can make that argument but you certainly can't do it in context of the the Constitution or Declaration of Independence.

The thing I have always found interesting in the books and reading on the Civil War is they act as though Manifest Destiny had nothing to do with it in spite of that being a major issue immediately prior and immediatly following the War. The United States wanted its own Empire just like the European Powers and they could not allow a significant portion of that Empire to leave. Thus they kept them in the Union by force. They even lionized Sherman who literally did everything he could to avoid any conflicts with the Confederate Army so that he could burn, pillage, and turn a blind eye to other atrocities committed by his troops on civilians in the South.

The other hard truth is that in the end slavery didn't really end for most blacks in the South. It just changed its name to "Sharecropper" and blacks were given very limited rights (and no one to enforce those rights) for almost 100 years after the Civil War. The real irony is the War and Reconstruction did so much damage to the South that it actually perpetuated that status until WWII finally allowed the South to start to recover economically. Had slavery been able to end naturally by virtue of the Industrial Revolution and government compensating slave owners there is no doubt things would be better today, we also wouldn't have lost a significant portion of our population to a terrible war. It just would have ended with 2 countries that likely would have become strong allies over time.

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So, if California decided to break away, would you support sending the military in to torch entire cities and burn out the residents?

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If they started to seize federal property and fire on U.S. military personnel, I might be in favor of doing just that.

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There was not a lot of support for the war in the north, I think we can all agree on that.

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No, we can't.

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The people in north were not interested in getting into a war with the south.

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Once again...you're repeating something that just isn't true.

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So Lincoln decides to push the idea that the south was only worried about keeping their slaves and how horrible slavery was.

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Which was very unpopular in the Union army as the vast majority of them couldn't have cared less if slavery remained intact. They were fighting to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.

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a necessary justification for a horrific war that had no basis in law.

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But it did have basis. The south opening fire on Sumter was the basis. Lincoln telegraphed the punch in his Inaugural Address.

On Apr 12, 1861 he broke the news of the attack on Sumter to a Virginia delegation. He made clear to them that the attack on Sumter was the requisite opening of hostilities justifying war and northern invasion in response. He told them in no uncertain terms there would be war.

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When two parties have a disagreement and negotiation and litigation are exhausted, the next step has in the past been physical conflict. This is not racist, it's a fact of human nature.

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I don’t disagree, but let’s not forget that Lincoln has been cast by historians as a skilled statesman and not a skilled leader that failed.

Linclon's failure as a leader was failing to recognize the tremendous loss of life and overwhelming economic cost. 600,000 lives as a percentage of the population then would be the modern equivalent of 5 million dead today. Morality aside, that is a lot of lost productivity and lost ingenuity.

Unlike the rest of the civilized world, Lincoln felt the potential losses were worth it for some reason. I would argue that Lincoln disagreed with our founding fathers on some very important issues. He wanted to consolidate power (though perhaps not for personal benefit). What he really wanted was to federalize the nation.

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I’m asking if he currently believes there is a “right” to secede from the union. It’s not spelled out in the constitution so it wasn’t a clear thing even during the civil war. His question assumes there is a right to secede though.

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Of course it is.

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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.

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There is no delegated power that gives the Federal government power to coerce states into the Union by force. The language the founders used ...'delegated' illustrates the view that the state government's were the superior entities who assigned certain things to the Federal government as an inferior.

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Which was very unpopular in the Union army as the vast majority of them couldn't have cared less if slavery remained intact. They were fighting to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.

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Lincoln said numerous time the war wasn't about slavery, but when support for war declined, he used it as a rally cry.

Read this!

LINK

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Would the Confederate states had inevitably been overtaken by France or England if they were left to their own?

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The confederate states would have made allegiances with Mexico and South American countries and would have been a more advanced Brazil