Trump’s Civil War Comments Show ‘Lack’ Of Understanding History

[Scamp]

...Secession was legal.

Wrong yet again.

So like if secession was not legal, then the USA is not legal. Right?

 

[Scamp]

During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....

Wrong

You do know that it is spelled out in the Constitution how a new state is made right? ...

And West Virginia satisfied those requirements.


Study some real history once in a while.

Statehood for West Virginia: An Illegal Act?

 

[Unkotare]

...Secession was legal.

Wrong yet again.

So like if secession was not legal, then the USA is not legal. Right?

You're not making any sense.

 

[Unkotare]

During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....

Wrong

You do know that it is spelled out in the Constitution how a new state is made right? ...

And West Virginia satisfied those requirements.


Study some real history once in a while.

Statehood for West Virginia: An Illegal Act?

You didn't even read your own link.

 

[Scamp]

"Even President Lincoln had doubts about the legality of admitting West Virginia to the Union." And he was a lawyer.

 

[Unkotare]

Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 was satisfied.

 

[usmbguest5318]

pro-slavery intellectual

Oxymoron of the day?

Plato was a very smart cookie, and he saw nothing wrong with slavery. Moses was no dummy, and he wrote instructions on how to treat your slaves (you free the Hebrew ones after seven years). In fact, no one anywhere in the world ever had an issue at all with slavery until white Christian males in Great Britain and North America began, in the 19th Century, to frame the issue in moral terms. With white Christian males, abolition was born on this planet. (which, btw, is one of the reason's Hollywood's constant portrayal of white Christian males as the zenith of human injustice and depravity for their participation in slavery so particularly noxious).

Hindsight informs us of the limits of sapience great thinkers of the past had. To the extent they objected not to slavery -- particularly to its attendant notion that some men, owing to their race, were born chattel -- one cannot today validly assert those ideas augur for those luminaries being of great intellect....thus the oxymoronic nature of the term "pro-slavery intellectual." Indeed, were we to from men like Plato and Moses have only their thoughts and expositions about slavery, we'd have no choice but to think of them not as intellectuals in any sense, but rather as mere chroniclers of the past. As always, context is "everything."

Plato was a very smart cookie, and he saw nothing wrong with slavery. Moses was no dummy, and he wrote instructions on how to treat your slaves (you free the Hebrew ones after seven years).

I'm torn between incredulity and indignation over your having written that. It's not clear to me whether you didn't know any better than to pose sophistry like that in support or refutation of anything, or whether you penned it thinking I'd not immediately recognize it as specious and thereby "buy" it, or even give it credence.

That one is a "very smart cookie" does not make one infallible. One can be very smart in one, several or many dimensions and still not "get it right" in others. Given the possible inferences one may rationally draw from what it seems you allude in the quoted passage above, I have to wonder whether concomitant with those observations you assert that Plato and Moses and others were right to take no issue with slavery.

no one anywhere in the world ever had an issue at all with slavery until white Christian males in Great Britain and North America began, in the 19th Century, to frame the issue in moral terms....(which, btw, is [why the] portrayal of white Christian males as the zenith of human injustice and depravity for their participation in slavery so particularly noxious)

Slavery, in and of itself as you note, wasn't by the 18th and later centuries a new concept, but you are surely well read enough to know damn well that the foundation of enslavement was, in the ancient world, in service of a debt -- financial, personal or political such as fighting on the losing side in a war -- not merely by dint of being merely a "common" animal, rather than the type of animal that is called human. [1]

Ancient Middle East:

The earliest slaves, it would seem, were captives taken in warfare....The slave population was also recruited by the sale, abandonment, or kidnapping of small children. Free persons could sell themselves or, more frequently, their offspring into slavery. They could be enslaved for insolvency, as could be the persons offered by them as pledges. In some systems, notably that of Rome, free persons could also be enslaved for a variety of offenses against the law.
Source​

Ancient Greece:

There is a slave or slavery by law....The law of which I speak is a sort of convention---the law by which whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors. But this right many jurists impeach, as they would an orator who brought forward an unconstitutional measure: they detest the notion that, because one man has the power of doing violence and is superior in brute strength, another shall be his slave and subject.
Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle. Jowett, trans.

If, gentlemen of the jury, you will turn over in your minds the question what is the difference between being a slave and being a free man, you will find that the biggest difference is that the body of a slave is made responsible for all his misdeeds, whereas corporal punishment is the last penalty to inflict on a free man.
Demosthenes, "Against Timocrates." Wayte, trans.

Reading The Politics of Aristotle, one observes the author saw slavery as having two bases for legitimacy. I've explicitly shared only the legal basis for the other basis Aristotle (and his contemporaries) notes is the very one that led Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (ironic that term given the nature of this discussion) Christians to develop their notions about the inherent inferiority of non-whites.

Ancient Greeks like Aristotle, Plato and Demosthenes saw enslavement as the natural state of existence for some individuals; however, their conception in that regard existed bereft of the notion that race (skin color being merely an expedient habiliment for identifying it) be the basis for establishing the verity, with regard to individuals or communities of them, of that being one's due status. It was not one's being that made one fit for enslavement; it was one's lacuna in demonstrated ability and/or poor choices that marked one fit to be but a slave. [2]​

Chattel slavery emerged as a disturbing manifestation of a push for labor-intensive goods created in the new world. (See also: "Slavery -- Ancient") American chattel slavery's intellectual justification grew out of that economic need; however, unlike ancient slavery, America's "peculiar institution" in part derived from and thrived on the premise that non-whites were subhuman (see also: Racist ideas | Black and white in Britain | The wider world | After Slavery | Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery | PortCities Bristol), thus making it acceptable to enslave non-whites much as one might find, capture and domesticate a wild horse or other beast. Therefrom comes the distinction -- that one is chattel even before anything of substance about one's being is even known or given the chance to develop -- that makes 18th and 19th century slave owners and their apologists be thought as among the "zenith of human injustice and depravity." It is true that upon being enslaved in ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome, one could be treated as chattel; however, slaves were seen as neither less or more than human

References in addition to the linked content above:

• The Pro-Slavery Argument in the Development of the American Methodist Church
  
• The Southern Argument for Slavery
  
• The Religious Defense of American Slavery Before 1830
  
• The Biblical Argument for Slavery: Can the Bible Mislead? A Case Study in Hermeneutics
  
• Fitzhugh's argument for slavery -- CANNIBALS ALL! OR, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS -- is first and foremost a passionately argued piece of editorial writing. Published in Richmond, Virginia, in 1857, and aimed at both Northern and Southern readers, it sought to claim for the South the moral high ground in the increasingly fierce national debate over slavery.

Recognizing the subtlety of difference between Renaissance to Civil War era slavery and crediting you with the same or greater degree of awareness, I think you're equivocating -- though I don't know why you would do so -- rather than simply being ignorant of the various types of slavery and thus not recognizing the contextual basis of my "oxymoron" post derives from the irrationality of the lines of "thought" conjured to give philosophical legitimacy to American chattel slavery.


Notes:

1. Solon is credited with abolishing one's ability to offer oneself, thus one's status as a free man, as the security for a loan. That repeal of Draco's laws had the impact of, among other things, denying individuals having few or no fungible assets the opportunity to obtain loans they might put to use to boost their wealth. I don't know whether Solon's "reform" was the first of policies that ensure that only the "rich get richer," but economically it had the impact of codifying as much.
2. I mention the existence of the so-called natural basis mainly as a matter of discursive integrity. I've not cited any of the "naturally endowed to enslavement" passages because I'll not give fodder to folks who've not studied formally (or read extensively about) Ancient Greece, Aristotle and The Politics and who would yet, premised upon parallelism between antiquity and modernity's cultures, entirely out of context cite them to bolster their ill informed notions about slavery and slavery in ancient times.

 

[usmbguest5318]

pro-slavery intellectual

Oxymoron of the day?

Not at all. His assumptions are crap of course but he is logical. Just as the Marxist assumptions are crap but there are many so called "Marxist intellectuals". All an intellectual does is build on a set of assumptions. It is up to those examining those assumptions to tear down the arguments. Easy to do with both pro-slavers and marxists.

Greg

His assumptions are crap of course but he is logical.

What does his being logical (or not) have to do with it? An oxymoron is a rhetorical device. As such, they can appear in logical and illogical prose.

 

[cnelsen]

What an ignoramus -

When I first saw your thread, I feared that Trump had again uttered that bit of foolishness; however, checking the video's date (May 1, 2017) I found that not to be so. Accordingly, I'll reprize what I have written about Trump's having made that remark.

Donald Trump remarked that Andrew Jackson "was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War." That remark is merely among the most recent Trump has made and that show his penchant not only for revisionist history (alternative facts?) -- modern and long ago -- and/or his abject ignorance of yet another subject, American history.

No small number of people have noted salient facts about Andrew Jackson:

• He died some 15 years before the Civil War.
• He was POTUS some 30 years before the Civil War.
• He owned ~150 slaves, enough that (1) we can safely say he didn't take great exception with the "peculiar institution," and (2) he, in person, may not actually have known or met each of them.

Was Jackson cognizant of the divisive potential slavery held? Of course, he was. Everyone and every political leader dating to the Founders was. Jackson, like plenty of his contemporaries, surely remarked upon how slavery may well be "the undoing of the nation." So contentious was the issue that there'd have been and is nothing particularly prescient in his having done so.

Quite simply, one either was supportive of/acquiescent about slavery or one was not, and the extent which one held either stance drove one's position on its political impact. Similarly, one had a 50/50 shot of being right, no matter one's thoughts about whether slavery would sunder the nation. So it is with all things binary.

Trump's dearth of knowledge about Jackson and his age's U.S. history, though bizarre for a man who has succeeded Jackson, is minor. Far more troubling is "The Donald's" ardently pathological refusal to keep mum about things he doesn't know well. Even worse, however, is the toddler-like obdurate truculence he manifests in avouching the verity of his thus uttered hogwash.​

At the risk of truculent obduracy, let me just point out that Andrew Jackson as president (as I posted elsewhere) managed South Carolina's 1830 secession masterfully. He avoided war. Had Lincoln been less truculently obdurate himself, and a more savvy horse-trader, he may have resolved the secessions of 1860 in a similar manner and we could have ended slavery without 750,000 white men having to die. You yourself point out that it took no gift of clairvoyance to see the civil war looming between 1830 and 1860. It is entirely reasonable that the ex-President Jackson, as he surveyed the folly propelling us toward the carnage that began in 1860, bemoaned the fact he was no longer in a position to help us avert the disaster. And Trump, looking back on the period from this far distance, is even more justified in his remarks. It is pretenders like Political Junky who display their ignorance, and not only ignorance, a contemptible ignorance, as it is imbibed from others, and wielded in an attempt to smear the president while, toddler-like, pretending sophistication.

 

[cnelsen]

That one is a "very smart cookie" does not make one infallible. One can be very smart in one, several or many dimensions and still not "get it right" in others. Given the possible inferences one may rationally draw from what it seems you allude in the quoted passage above, I have to wonder whether concomitant with those observations you assert that Plato and Moses and others were right to take no issue with slavery.

You didn't say "the pro-slavery oracle" was an oxymoron, you said "the pro-slavery intellectual" was an oxymoron.

 

[Scamp]

Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 was satisfied.

“No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State”

 

[Scamp]

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right, which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.....Abraham Lincoln in his speech in Congress in 1846

 

[cnelsen]

pro-slavery intellectual

Oxymoron of the day?

Plato was a very smart cookie, and he saw nothing wrong with slavery. Moses was no dummy, and he wrote instructions on how to treat your slaves (you free the Hebrew ones after seven years). In fact, no one anywhere in the world ever had an issue at all with slavery until white Christian males in Great Britain and North America began, in the 19th Century, to frame the issue in moral terms. With white Christian males, abolition was born on this planet. (which, btw, is one of the reason's Hollywood's constant portrayal of white Christian males as the zenith of human injustice and depravity for their participation in slavery so particularly noxious).

Hindsight informs us of the limits of sapience great thinkers of the past had. To the extent they objected not to slavery -- particularly to its attendant notion that some men, owing to their race, were born chattel -- one cannot today validly assert those ideas augur for those luminaries being of great intellect....thus the oxymoronic nature of the term "pro-slavery intellectual." Indeed, were we to from men like Plato and Moses have only their thoughts and expositions about slavery, we'd have no choice but to think of them not as intellectuals in any sense, but rather as mere chroniclers of the past. As always, context is "everything."

Plato was a very smart cookie, and he saw nothing wrong with slavery. Moses was no dummy, and he wrote instructions on how to treat your slaves (you free the Hebrew ones after seven years).

I'm torn between incredulity and indignation over your having written that. It's not clear to me whether you didn't know any better than to pose sophistry like that in support or refutation of anything, or whether you penned it thinking I'd not immediately recognize it as specious and thereby "buy" it, or even give it credence.

That one is a "very smart cookie" does not make one infallible. One can be very smart in one, several or many dimensions and still not "get it right" in others. Given the possible inferences one may rationally draw from what it seems you allude in the quoted passage above, I have to wonder whether concomitant with those observations you assert that Plato and Moses and others were right to take no issue with slavery.

no one anywhere in the world ever had an issue at all with slavery until white Christian males in Great Britain and North America began, in the 19th Century, to frame the issue in moral terms....(which, btw, is [why the] portrayal of white Christian males as the zenith of human injustice and depravity for their participation in slavery so particularly noxious)

Slavery, in and of itself as you note, wasn't by the 18th and later centuries a new concept, but you are surely well read enough to know damn well that the foundation of enslavement was, in the ancient world, in service of a debt -- financial, personal or political such as fighting on the losing side in a war -- not merely by dint of being merely a "common" animal, rather than the type of animal that is called human. [1]

Ancient Middle East:

The earliest slaves, it would seem, were captives taken in warfare....The slave population was also recruited by the sale, abandonment, or kidnapping of small children. Free persons could sell themselves or, more frequently, their offspring into slavery. They could be enslaved for insolvency, as could be the persons offered by them as pledges. In some systems, notably that of Rome, free persons could also be enslaved for a variety of offenses against the law.
Source​

Ancient Greece:

There is a slave or slavery by law....The law of which I speak is a sort of convention---the law by which whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors. But this right many jurists impeach, as they would an orator who brought forward an unconstitutional measure: they detest the notion that, because one man has the power of doing violence and is superior in brute strength, another shall be his slave and subject.
Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle. Jowett, trans.

If, gentlemen of the jury, you will turn over in your minds the question what is the difference between being a slave and being a free man, you will find that the biggest difference is that the body of a slave is made responsible for all his misdeeds, whereas corporal punishment is the last penalty to inflict on a free man.
Demosthenes, "Against Timocrates." Wayte, trans.

Reading The Politics of Aristotle, one observes the author saw slavery as having two bases for legitimacy. I've explicitly shared only the legal basis for the other basis Aristotle (and his contemporaries) notes is the very one that led Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (ironic that term given the nature of this discussion) Christians to develop their notions about the inherent inferiority of non-whites.

Ancient Greeks like Aristotle, Plato and Demosthenes saw enslavement as the natural state of existence for some individuals; however, their conception in that regard existed bereft of the notion that race (skin color being merely an expedient habiliment for identifying it) be the basis for establishing the verity, with regard to individuals or communities of them, of that being one's due status. It was not one's being that made one fit for enslavement; it was one's lacuna in demonstrated ability and/or poor choices that marked one fit to be but a slave. [2]​

Chattel slavery emerged as a disturbing manifestation of a push for labor-intensive goods created in the new world. (See also: "Slavery -- Ancient") American chattel slavery's intellectual justification grew out of that economic need; however, unlike ancient slavery, America's "peculiar institution" in part derived from and thrived on the premise that non-whites were subhuman (see also: Racist ideas | Black and white in Britain | The wider world | After Slavery | Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery | PortCities Bristol), thus making it acceptable to enslave non-whites much as one might find, capture and domesticate a wild horse or other beast. Therefrom comes the distinction -- that one is chattel even before anything of substance about one's being is even known or given the chance to develop -- that makes 18th and 19th century slave owners and their apologists be thought as among the "zenith of human injustice and depravity." It is true that upon being enslaved in ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome, one could be treated as chattel; however, slaves were seen as neither less or more than human

References in addition to the linked content above:

• The Pro-Slavery Argument in the Development of the American Methodist Church
  
• The Southern Argument for Slavery
  
• The Religious Defense of American Slavery Before 1830
  
• The Biblical Argument for Slavery: Can the Bible Mislead? A Case Study in Hermeneutics
  
• Fitzhugh's argument for slavery -- CANNIBALS ALL! OR, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS -- is first and foremost a passionately argued piece of editorial writing. Published in Richmond, Virginia, in 1857, and aimed at both Northern and Southern readers, it sought to claim for the South the moral high ground in the increasingly fierce national debate over slavery.

Recognizing the subtlety of difference between Renaissance to Civil War era slavery and crediting you with the same or greater degree of awareness, I think you're equivocating -- though I don't know why you would do so -- rather than simply being ignorant of the various types of slavery and thus not recognizing the contextual basis of my "oxymoron" post derives from the irrationality of the lines of "thought" conjured to give philosophical legitimacy to American chattel slavery.


Notes:

1. Solon is credited with abolishing one's ability to offer oneself, thus one's status as a free man, as the security for a loan. That repeal of Draco's laws had the impact of, among other things, denying individuals having few or no fungible assets the opportunity to obtain loans they might put to use to boost their wealth. I don't know whether Solon's "reform" was the first of policies that ensure that only the "rich get richer," but economically it had the impact of codifying as much.
2. I mention the existence of the so-called natural basis mainly as a matter of discursive integrity. I've not cited any of the "naturally endowed to enslavement" passages because I'll not give fodder to folks who've not studied formally (or read extensively about) Ancient Greece, Aristotle and The Politics and who would yet, premised upon parallelism between antiquity and modernity's cultures, entirely out of context cite them to bolster their ill informed notions about slavery and slavery in ancient times.

I'm always skeptical whenever persons or cultures from other times are held to current pieties, and I'm not sure why you limit your critique so. Slavery was always universal. The Native Americans enslaved other Natives. The Egyptians enslaved the Nubians and the Jews, the Jews enslaved anyone they could get their hands on, slaves built the Great Wall of China, and there are live slave auctions on the streets of some African cities to this day. Slavery wasn't worse just because it was Christians doing the enslaving, for crying out loud, and the very idea smacks of anti-Christian animus. For how other than "less-than-ism" could we interpret the Mosaic law that required Jewish slave-owners to free their Hebrew slaves after seven years while everybody else remains property? There is nothing tantamount to the Aristotelian passage you site noting the abhorrence some felt for certain kinds of enslavement anywhere that I am aware of in the Old Testament.

 

[Scamp]

History of slavery in America...
The USA had slavery for about 89 years.
The Confederacy had slavery for 4 years.

 

[Unkotare]

Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 was satisfied.

“No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State”

You stopped the quote too soon. Keep going.

 

[Scamp]

Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 was satisfied.

“No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State”

You stopped the quote too soon. Keep going.

Furthermore, if any President trashes the Constitution by making a State without a legal Congressional vote, that President should be hanged.

 

[cnelsen]

There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?

But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.

The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.

The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:

The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.

Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”

Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:

“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
​

Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.

Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.

Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.

My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?

Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.

When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.

But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.

Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.

Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.

What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.

Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.

Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).

A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.

Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.

Greg

Slavery was $. it was the driving force of their agrarian economy. They had also spend 3/4 of a century having an advantage over the North that they kept well past the point of population divergence.

Slavery is not an economic advantage. Read de Tocqueville's description of Kentucky on the left and Ohio on the right as he floated down the Ohio River in the 1820s. The whole chapter is remarkable, but the stuff about slave Kentucky, free Ohio starts about a quarter way down. Control F this sentence: "But in the midst of all these causes the same result occurred at every step; in general, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more prosperous than those in which slavery flourished. The farther they went, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master."

Tocqueville: Book I Chapter 18

 

[Scamp]

Lincoln called for the states to come up with 75,000 soldiers to invade the South. This is another direct violation of the Constitution. Only Congress can call for troops.

 

[Unkotare]

Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 was satisfied.

“No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State”

You stopped the quote too soon. Keep going.

Furthermore, if any President trashes the Constitution by making a State without a legal Congressional vote, that President should be hanged.

Your dishonesty defines you.

 

[martybegan]

There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?

But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.

The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.

The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:

The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.

Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”

Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:

“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
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Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.

Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.

Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.

My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?

Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.

When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.

But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.

Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.

Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.

What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.

Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.

Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).

A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.

Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.

Greg

Slavery was $. it was the driving force of their agrarian economy. They had also spend 3/4 of a century having an advantage over the North that they kept well past the point of population divergence.

Slavery is not an economic advantage. Read de Tocqueville's description of Kentucky on the left and Ohio on the right as he floated down the Ohio River in the 1820s. The whole chapter is remarkable, but the stuff about slave Kentucky, free Ohio starts about a quarter way down. Control F this sentence: "But in the midst of all these causes the same result occurred at every step; in general, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more prosperous than those in which slavery flourished. The farther they went, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master."

Tocqueville: Book I Chapter 18

Slavery may have not helped the common Kentucky farmer, but it sure as hell helped the large plantation owners in the deep south, especially with Cash crops like Cotton and Tobacco.