Sovereignty wars

Shall we start with punative income taxes.
Then we can start talking about states taking land for private benefit.
Then we cas start talking about govt taking land because a rare butterfly passes by from time to time.

Shall I go on?

MarkTheGreat on August 13, 2008 at 3:47 PM

I feel compelled to chime in here.

I agree with you.

The true legacy of the Civil War, in my view, was the empowerment of the Federal Government to, whenever it pleases, trample on the rights of the states to govern themselves.

First, let’s examine the Fourteenth Amendment:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Just as a teaser to the dubious manner by which the Fourteenth Amendment was “ratified”, I offer the following from The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History:

The first time the Fourteenth Amendment was presented for their consideration, ten of the eleven states of the former Confederacy (the exception being Tennessee) failed to ratify it, for the reasons mentioned above, among others. For the Radical Republicans, this was really the last straw. Flush with victory in the 1866 congressional elections, the Radicals decided that the South should be punished. As Wisconsin’s senator James Doolittle put it: “The people of the South have rejected the constitutional amendment and therefore we will march upon them and force them to adopt it at the point of the bayonet” and rule them with military governors and martial law “until they do adopt it.” It was through coercion, then, that the Republicans determined to bring about the amendment’s ratification.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 86 (Regnery 2004).

The section about the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification is too long to reproduce here, but suffice to say, even President Johnson raised objections to the wholesale disenfranchisement and coercion of the South. It is not out of the question to consider that the Fourteenth Amendment was never properly ratified.

So, now, fast-forward to a century later. The Fourteenth Amendment, when taken out of the context and time period in which it was put forth, can be applied to matters it was never intended to be. (This was a big reason that many objected to it in the first place.)

From the same book:

In 1994 California passed a ballot initiative, Proposition 187, which would have denied “free” (that is, taxpayer-funded) social services to illegal aliens. Californians, under the delusion that they had the right to govern themselves, defied fashionable opinion- liberal and “conservative” alike- in passing the initiative. But they found out who really governed them when the federal courts prevented the implementation of 187, in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment. What does forcing a state to bankrupt itself by giving away “free” services to people who are in the country illegally have to do with the Fourteenth Amendment? Who knows. But this is why many people opposed it in the first place: Language in the amendment that meant something specific and finite when taken in its proper context became a recipe for federal domination of the states when torn from that context.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 84 (Regnery 2004).

Example #2 of the Feds overriding a State’s rights:

Thanks to California’s relatively high welfare payments, the Golden State attracts a large number of people who want to collect welfare. This has resulted in serious and persistent economic difficulties for the state. To cope with the strain, California adopted a policy in which new settlers, for the first year of their residence in California, were limited to the welfare benefits they could receive to what they would have had in their state of origin. In Saenz v. Roe (1999), however, the Supreme Court found -surprise!- that California’s law violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This time it was the “privileges or immunities” clause that was cited. California, by limiting the amount of welfare money it paid out to settlers in the first year, apparently violated the “right to travel”. By forcing California to increase its welfare payments to new residents, the Court had in effect raised taxes on Californians without their consent. (Wasn’t there a revolution fought over that somewhere?)

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 89 (Regnery 2004).

Onward and downward.

As legal scholar Gene Healy points out, the case of U.S. v. Yonkers (1986) gives still more indication of where the Fourteenth Amendment can lead: Judge Leonard Sand declared the city of Yonkers, New York, guilty of “discrimination” in housing and education, and, usurping the power of the legislature, ordered hundreds of units of public housing to be built. He then imposed a fine for noncompliance that would have driven Yonkers to bankruptcy in just over three weeks.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 91 (Regnery 2004).

And, let’s not forget, Roe v. Wade overturned all the state’s existing laws with regards to abortion.
From Laura Ingraham’s Power to the People:

Most people get their information about court decisions from the media, not from reading actual court opinions- and the mainstream media has grossly and consistently (for more than thirty years) misrepresented Roe v. Wade did not “legalize abortion”, as most newspapers tell the story, and overturning it would not
“outlaw abortion.” Roe overruled the abortion laws of all fifty states, declaring a constitutional right to essentially unlimited abortion, and made abortion largely immune to the democratic process. Overturning Roe means nothing more than returning the issue of abortion to the voters where it belongs.

Laura Ingraham, Power to the People 112 (Regnery 2007).

Now, you could argue that these cases have more to do with a judiciary that has unchecked power. We could have that in a North and/or South, regardless of how the Civil War played out. This is true.

But the fact remains that the amendment which came directly from the aftermath of the Civil War is now used, unjustly in my view, to deny the State’s rights to govern themselves. The Federal Government was never supposed to be involved in matters like the examples above. Thanks to the Civil War and its aftermath, it is now.

Take slavery out of the equation in the Civil War, and what do you have? The North invaded the South, resulting in the most American deaths of any war we have ever fought, in order to deny the South the right to leave the Union. Lincoln himself said that he would preserve the Union, with or without slavery. The preservation of the Union was the key. Without the issue of slavery, there really isn’t much morally to support what Lincoln did. And we know from his own words that the issue was irrelevant to him.

Now we have a Federal Government that is empowered to give and take away our rights at a whim. Look at the Second Amendment issue. The Supreme Court came oh so close to rendering the right to bear arms meaningless. A right that has existed since the founding of the United States, and was obvious to all of the Founding Fathers. If they had, would you want your state to secede from the Union? I’d be receptive to the idea. We have the Civil War and its aftermath to thank for giving the Federal Government this power.

I offer the following quote in closing:

“The Gettysburg address was at once the shortest and most famous oration in American history…the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg 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. 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 their people to govern themselves.”

-H.L. Mencken on the Gettysburg Address

Hawkins1701 on August 13, 2008 at 5:07 PM

1) you can not take slavery out of the equation and
2) south carolina fired on a USA fort which started the war.

3) even after the war the South continued to show their total disregard for the rights of blacks which lead to the 14th being enacted.

4) the powers of the federal government can be curtailed by many means besides succession and rebellion. And if the revolution war was not won than we would all be living under british rule.

unseen on August 13, 2008 at 5:16 PM

Let me say it again.

Lincoln did not care about ending slavery.

He did not care at all about the rights of the Negro.

He said it himself in his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858:

“I will say that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people: and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

-Abraham Lincoln

If the aim was to end slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been adopted at the beginning of the war.

It was instead adopted later, when the North was trying every means at its disposal to defeat the South. It was adopted not for the benefit of African-Americans, but to harm the Southern.

Again, the goal was not to end slavery. It was the preservation of the Union, by any means necessary.

The Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumpter because South Carolina had voted to secede. They could not allow the Federal Government to reprovision the fort if their secession meant anything.

There were no casualties at Fort Sumpter. It was an act of resistance.

Again, from the same book:

There were no casualties, but Lincoln now proclaimed a rebellion and called on 75,000 militiamen to quash the “rebel” states.
Lincoln’s decision to use military force provoked the secession of four more Southern states: Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas. The use of force against American states, they believed, was a mad project utterly at variance with traditional American principles. Thus began the “Civil War.”

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 61 (Regnery 2004).

You are so wedded to the idea that North=good, and South=bad.

The largely untold and misunderstood reality of history does not support that claim. It is an over-simplification of what actually happened.

Btw, since you bring up the Revolutionary War, the Confederates thought of themselves as the same as their forefathers who had fought against the British.

What a Southern Soldier Said

“Times may grow a great deal worse than they are now, and we can still stand it- And even then not go through what our Grandparents went through, when they were struggling for the same thing that we are now fighting for.”

Thomas E. Woods Jr.,The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History 73 (Regnery 2004).

Believe what you will. It’s a fruitless endeavor to get you to consider the Southerner’s point of view, or how the Civil War and its aftermath gave the Federal Government far too much power.

Hawkins1701 on August 13, 2008 at 5:46 PM