Did you just use this argument in defense of the slave-holding South? There is always a right to secede under any form of government – it's called revolution. Anyway, were there not “immoral: acts going on in the North at the time, such as indentured servitude, “sweat shops”, suspension of habeas corpus, closure of newspapers, jailing of dissidents, etc.? Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. I'm sorry, but I don't see how you're defending the South, here. [38][39] Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who famously declared in his inaugural address in 1963, "Segregation now! If Lincoln had done the right thing and did not try to force the southern states to stay in the union , he could have saved 600,000 lives. We are indeed “forgetting a few things here!” 1. The Constitution itself is silent on the subject, but since secession was an established right, it didn’t have to be reaffirmed. Exposition and Protest was the work of South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun, formerly an advocate of protective tariffs and internal improvements at federal expense. Thousand of Southern women and girls were raped and left homeless, an estimated 2-300,000 children under the age of ten died of starvation in 1864-65 due to the policy carried out by Sherman’s Army of burning any food crops and killing any livestock that could not be consumed or carried off by his soldiers. 658–59. It eventually led to the destruction of the America of the Founders and everything free about this country. I guess I would not make it at any Straussian U, or any Confederate U for that matter, for my ambivalence. But disillusionment set in with almost simultaneous Federal victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg (July 1863). The South controlled the economy (they produced the raw materials: read cotton, that were used by Northern industries) and they dominated politics. The ratchet theory held that Congress could ratchet up civil rights beyond what the Court had recognized, but that Congress could not ratchet down judicially recognized rights. States' rights forever! The Northern apologists on here make a huge mistake. As a practical matter, the Civil War established the supremacy of the federal government over the formerly sovereign states. They needed a legal, rather than moral, rationale, perhaps for both consistency’s sake and their own personal safety.). "[40] Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights. As a conservative and as a republican (small-r), I believe that if laws are to have any binding authority, they must be enforced. Examples given are a states' right to engage in slavery or to suppress freedom of speech. In Gonzales v. Oregon, the Supreme Court ruled the practice of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is legal. Slavery spread like wildfire across the Northeast. During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was confronted by the proponents in the Southern states of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws who denounced federal interference in these state-level laws as an assault on states' rights. It wasn’t negated because Northern munitions factories were more efficient than Southern ones. First of all, the States are countries. John Wilkes Booth was 5 years too late to save America. Not even the brilliant tactics of Lee in the East or of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in the West could indefinitely hold off the stronger Northern armies. [29], In 2009–2010 thirty-eight states introduced resolutions to reaffirm the principles of sovereignty under the Constitution and the 10th Amendment; 14 states have passed the resolutions. The Southern Congress first voted to permit direct volunteering up to 400,000, but conscription was begun in April 1862. These non-binding resolutions, often called "state sovereignty resolutions" do not carry the force of law. This is one of the reasons why this perspective of the Civil War era is so intolerable. In March 1861, after he was inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States, four more followed. Almost three quarters of a million Americans were slaughtered in that war, that is 2.5% of the entire population! It again held that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to acts done by states, not to those done by private individuals, and as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 applied to private establishments, the Court said, it exceeded congressional enforcement power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Any state which lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse or both. Trade barriers, especially protective tariffs, were viewed as harmful to the Southern economy, which depended on exports. I don't necessarily disagree with your observation that the Civil War destroyed any way for the states to stand in the way of the national government: recent times have shown that to be true. #6. In The Federalist Papers, ratification proponent Alexander Hamilton explained the limitations this clause placed on the proposed federal government, describing that acts of the federal government were binding on the states and the people therein only if the act was in pursuance of constitutionally granted powers, and juxtaposing acts which exceeded those bounds as "void and of no force": But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. the south was wrong to hold slaves and the north was wrong to be jingoistic. I greatly respect your opinion, Mr. Willson. Copyright (c) Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfBooks.com. But then again, we as a society have lost any real understanding of limits and proper form of government; we have no concept of equilibrium. In the period between the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, the states had united under a much weaker federal government and a much stronger state and local government, pursuant to the Articles of Confederation.