The Civil War Wasn't About Slavery- Walter Williams

[Paul Revered]

The North Declared War with a Congressional Authorization.

When the Southern states walked out of Congress on March 27, 1861, the quorum to conduct business under the Constitution was lost. The only votes that Congress could lawfully take, under Parliamentary Law, were those to set the time to reconvene, take a vote to get a quorum, and vote to adjourn and set a date, time, and place to reconvene at a later time, but instead, Congress abandoned the House and Senate without setting a date to reconvene. Under the parliamentary law of Congress, when this happened, Congress became sine die (pronounced see-na dee-a; literally "without day") and thus when Congress adjourned sine die, it ceased to exist as a lawful deliberative body, and the only lawful, constitutional power that could declare war was no longer lawful, or in session.

The Southern states, by virtue of their secession from the Union, also ceased to exist sine die, and some state legislatures in the Northern bloc also adjourned sine die, and thus, all the states which were parties to creating the Constitution ceased to exist. President Lincoln executed the first executive order written by any President on April 15, 1861, Executive Order 1, and the nation has been ruled by the President under executive order ever since. When Congress eventually did reconvene, it was reconvened under the military authority of the Commander-in-Chief and not by Rules of Order for Parliamentary bodies or by Constitutional Law; placing the American people under martial rule ever since that national emergency declared by President Lincoln. The Constitution for the United States of America temporarily ceased to be the law of the land, and the President, Congress, and the Courts unlawfully presumed that they were free to remake the nation in their own image, whereas, lawfully, no constitutional provisions were in place which afforded power to any of the actions which were taken which presumed to place the nation under the new form of control.

President Lincoln knew that he had no authority to issue any executive order, and thus he commissioned General Orders No. 100 (April 24, 1863) as a special field code to govern his actions under martial law and which justified the seizure of power, which extended the laws of the District of Columbia, and which fictionally implemented the provisions of Article I, Section 8, Clauses 17-18 of the Constitution beyond the boundaries of Washington, D.C. and into the several states. General Orders No. 100, also called the Lieber Instructions and the Lieber Code, extended The Laws of War and International Law onto American soil, and the United States government became the presumed conqueror of the people and the land.

http://www.barefootsworld.net/war_ep.html

 

[YumYum]

Very few people know that Lincoln was an alcoholic, who refrained from drinking, but occasionally would go on a bender. Do you know what Lincoln said after a three-day drunk?

"I freed who??!!??"

 

[erowe1]

Yes....and it [the confederate constitution] also made slave ownership an individual right and forbid any state in the confederacy from passing any law that would infringe on the right to own slaves. I think that difference in noteworthy.

You find what difference noteworthy? The Union's constitution also forbade any state from passing a law that would infringe on the right to own slaves. And Lincoln did nothing to rectify that.

Oh bull. Never had there been recognized a right to unilateral secession.

Yes, there had been. It's recognized in the Declaration of Independence. But it doesn't need to be recognized. That it is wrong to rule others by conquest is true whether anyone recognizes it as true or not.

 

[Working Poor]

In All reality, slavey was and is one of our biggest disgraces. I do have to agree that slavery probably would have been phased out similar to how it did in Brazil. My brother owned a restaurant in Cabo Frio Brazil and he has seen that their peaceful end to slavery actually produced better long term race relations.

I know some people from Cabo Frio it is a beautiful little sleepy coastal town I wish I was there right now.

 

[bwlibertyman]

Oh my gosh. This whole argument comes down to who created who. Did the USA create the states or did the states create the USA? If you think the USA created the states you are wrong and that's impossible. If you think the states created the USA then you agree that the state voluntarily entered the union. If that is so, why would they not be able to voluntarily be able to leave?

If your argument is "well the south shot at northern troops at fort sumter", I think you have to ask yourself "was fort s. in the south or north at the time s.c. seceded? Boom! State sovereignty. The north can put troops into s.c. after they seceded. I know the timing issue puts into a funk but it's not that hard to see. The north was violating south carolina's state sovereignty by putting troops at fort sumter. Therefore it is reasonable for south carolina to protect itself.

If you think it was about slavery just listen to lincoln "bla bla bal the white man is better, bla bla bla i have no intentions of messing with slavery, bla bla bla i'm losing the war so lets pull at the heartstrings of the abolitionists."

The north did nothing at the time south carolina seceded directly about slavery that would be the last straw for them to leave. The tariff was. Increased federal power was. Slavery really wasn't.

Will someone please refute my points?

I mean seriously if the war was about slavery why did Lincoln wait til the war was almost over to free the slaves? Why didn't he do it in 1861? Boom.

Again it really goes back to the states/usa argument. I don't think anyone can say, "I have to kill him, he's trying to leave, I want him to say". That is just really dumb.

 

[anaconda]

I was just watching Ken Burn's Civil War on streaming Netflix last night and apparently Jefferson Davis felt his hands were tied to a great extent in the war because he did not have the centralized autocratic powers that Lincoln had in the north, and his southern states remained too independent to collaborate efficiently and sufficiently in the war effort. A possible example of a failure of a coalition of highly independent states. Interesting food for thought.

 

[burt]

Initially, the south actually wanted slaves counted as nothing because they were considered a property and required to pay taxes on them just like real estate property.

This period of time you are referring to was during government under the Articles of Confederation.

After a while, it was understood that the it was actually better to accept them as a whole population count because it gave them more seats in the Congress.

This was during the constitutional convention.

The north didn't like this idea, this reversal, and the political landscape at the time began changing dramatically leading into the 1860's. The south was taking control of the Presidency and Congress.

The South had practically controlled the federal government since its beginning. Before 1860, only two presidents (the Adams), both single term, were elected who weren't carried into office by the South. The deep South seceded in 1860 because they had lost control of the executive branch (Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in 10 southern states) and because they were dangerously close to losing control of Congress too.

The south wanted to secede so they could count salves as whole.

Huh? What good does counting slaves as a whole do for you when you are out of the Union?

 

[Travlyr]

When the Southern states walked out of Congress on March 27, 1861, the quorum to conduct business under the Constitution was lost. The only votes that Congress could lawfully take, under Parliamentary Law, were those to set the time to reconvene, take a vote to get a quorum, and vote to adjourn and set a date, time, and place to reconvene at a later time, but instead, Congress abandoned the House and Senate without setting a date to reconvene. Under the parliamentary law of Congress, when this happened, Congress became sine die (pronounced see-na dee-a; literally "without day") and thus when Congress adjourned sine die, it ceased to exist as a lawful deliberative body, and the only lawful, constitutional power that could declare war was no longer lawful, or in session.

The Southern states, by virtue of their secession from the Union, also ceased to exist sine die, and some state legislatures in the Northern bloc also adjourned sine die, and thus, all the states which were parties to creating the Constitution ceased to exist. President Lincoln executed the first executive order written by any President on April 15, 1861, Executive Order 1, and the nation has been ruled by the President under executive order ever since. When Congress eventually did reconvene, it was reconvened under the military authority of the Commander-in-Chief and not by Rules of Order for Parliamentary bodies or by Constitutional Law; placing the American people under martial rule ever since that national emergency declared by President Lincoln. The Constitution for the United States of America temporarily ceased to be the law of the land, and the President, Congress, and the Courts unlawfully presumed that they were free to remake the nation in their own image, whereas, lawfully, no constitutional provisions were in place which afforded power to any of the actions which were taken which presumed to place the nation under the new form of control.

President Lincoln knew that he had no authority to issue any executive order, and thus he commissioned General Orders No. 100 (April 24, 1863) as a special field code to govern his actions under martial law and which justified the seizure of power, which extended the laws of the District of Columbia, and which fictionally implemented the provisions of Article I, Section 8, Clauses 17-18 of the Constitution beyond the boundaries of Washington, D.C. and into the several states. General Orders No. 100, also called the Lieber Instructions and the Lieber Code, extended The Laws of War and International Law onto American soil, and the United States government became the presumed conqueror of the people and the land.

http://www.barefootsworld.net/war_ep.html

The National Banking Act of 1863 - Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase is significant as well.

Salmon Chase Explains Civil War Finances to Horace Greeley and the Public
A comprehensive summary of the financial measures that helped produce Union victory in the Civil War, written by then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court about his former role as Secretary of the Treasury to an influential newspaper editor.

encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406400620.html

NATIONAL BANK ACT OF 1863

The National Bank Act of 1863 was designed to create a national banking system, float federal war loans, and establish a national currency. Congress passed the act to help resolve the financial crisis that emerged during the early days of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The fight with the South was expensive and no effective tax program had been drawn up to finance it. In December 1861 banks suspended specie payments (payments in gold or silver coins for paper currency called notes or bills). People could no longer convert bank notes into coins. Government responded by passing the Legal Tender Act (1862), issuing $150 million in national notes called greenbacks. However, bank notes (paper bills issued by state banks) accounted for most of the currency in circulation.

As Ron Paul often mentions, "Wars are difficult to pay for without debasing currency."

 

[jmdrake]

You find what difference noteworthy? The Union's constitution also forbade any state from passing a law that would infringe on the right to own slaves. And Lincoln did nothing to rectify that.

That's not even close to true. The U.S. constitution required escaped slaves to be returned[1]. But it did not requires states to allow slavery like the confederate constitution did[2]. That was the argument behind the Dred Scott decision[3]. Dred Scott had been taken by his master to a free state. After being returned to a slave state, Dred Scott sued claiming that the voluntary act of his master carrying him to a free state made him in fact a free man. The U.S. constitution didn't even touch that question. It talked about slaves who escaped, not slaves voluntarily taken. The difference? Under the U.S. constitution as written (not as illegally interpreted by the treasonous Dred Scott court) states did have the right to forbid slave owners from importing their slaves into free territory.

[1] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

Southern apologists do their cause a disservice when they butcher history like this.

And I see you didn't even comment on the worst part of Walter Williams sloppy history, the fact that the Morril tariff was passed after secession, not before.

Yes, there had been. It's recognized in the Declaration of Independence. But it doesn't need to be recognized. That it is wrong to rule others by conquest is true whether anyone recognizes it as true or not.

These southern states cared so much about individual liberty that the enslaved poor whites to fight for them. That's right. The south was the first in the conflict to institute a draft.

http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/SoldiersLife/620416.html

And some of the same people here who want to claim a unilateral right of secession for the south want to bitch and complain about Lincoln accepting the secession of West Virginia. Really, if anything kills the Ron Paul movement it will be this fetish with the confederacy and the civil war. The argument about states rights and resisted federal tyranny can much better be made through talking about the nullification crisis which, unlike the civil war, actually didn't have anything to do with slavery.



Even the "Southern Avenger" is aware of the fact that part of the reason the south seceded is because they were angry at northern states for nullifying the Dred Scott decision and the fugitive slave laws.



While I don't agree with SA 100%, I appreciate his sensible position that slavery was most certainly a factor in the civil war, though not the only issue.

 

[jmdrake]

I'm rather surprised that one of the big reasons for the Civil War hasn't been touched on yet. The 3/5ths Compromise played a major role in the collection of taxes and the number of congressional seats for each state.

Initially, the south actually wanted slaves counted as nothing because they were considered a property and required to pay taxes on them just like real estate property. After a while, it was understood that the it was actually better to accept them as a whole population count because it gave them more seats in the Congress. The north didn't like this idea, this reversal, and the political landscape at the time began changing dramatically leading into the 1860's. The south was taking control of the Presidency and Congress. The south wanted to secede so they could count salves as whole.

Combine that and a few dozen other factors and you have the reasons for the Civil War.

Have you actually read the confederate constitution?

(3) Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within this Confederacy, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all slaves. ,The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the Confederate States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every fifty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of South Carolina shall be entitled to choose six; the State of Georgia ten; the State of Alabama nine; the State of Florida two; the State of Mississippi seven; the State of Louisiana six; and the State of Texas six.

Why would the south secede so that could count slaves as whole only to write a constitution that, like the U.S. constitution, counted slaves as 3/5th?

 

[erowe1]

These southern states cared so much about individual liberty that the enslaved poor whites to fight for them. That's right. The south was the first in the conflict to institute a draft.

Who ever said otherwise? Why is that relevant? And, given that you could mention enslaving kidnapped innocent Africans and their descendants, why bother mentioning the draft of whites, unless it's that you think I would be more offended by enslaving whites than I would blacks?

I don't see how the fact that some regime is tyrannical gives me the authority to force others against their wills to help me go overthrow that regime (through taxation, conscription, and other societal controls) and install another one. North Korea is worse than the Confederacy. But it would still be wrong for the regime in DC to compel me to help it take over North Korea.

 

[erowe1]

That's not even close to true.

I know the Confederate one was worse. But my statement was that the Union's constitution forbade its states from passing a law that would infringe on the right to own slaves, which is a true statement.

Prohibiting states from giving refuge to runaway slaves does just that. And again, Lincoln did nothing to rectify that, even when the states and Congress sans the confederacy probably could have.

 

[jmdrake]

Who ever said otherwise? Why is that relevant? And, given that you could mention enslaving kidnapped innocent Africans and their descendants, why bother mentioning the draft of whites, unless it's that you think I would be more offended by enslaving whites than I would blacks?

I don't see how the fact that some regime is tyrannical gives me the authority to force others against their wills to help me go overthrow that regime (through taxation, conscription, and other societal controls) and install another one. North Korea is worse than the Confederacy. But it would still be wrong for the regime in DC to compel me to help it take over North Korea.

It's relevant because you were portraying the South as some hapless victim standing up for its "self determination". Using the North Korea example, while I wouldn't support another war with North Korea, that doesn't mean that North Korea is right to invade South Korea again or that anyone who stood up against North Korea was somehow wrong. And again, the South started conscription. The civil war wasn't some glorious war for southern independence any more than it was a glorious war to end slavery. It was a bunch of greedy southerners versus some greedy northerners. The greedy northerners wanted to further industrialize the country. The greedy southerners preferred a slave economy. They south supported low tariffs because that best fit their slave based economic model. The poor white dirt farmers who were sent out as cannon fodder probably couldn't even spell the word "tariff". And when the civil war ended and industrialization came to the south, those same poor white dirt farmers were actually better off.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Tom DiLorenzo made a good blog post on this general subject today:

Like the leftists and neocons who are Lincoln cultists, the beltway "libertarians" have taken to smearing and defaming Lincoln critics as "neo-Confederates." In doing so they support the centralized governmental leviathan and the foreign policy of military imperialism that is Lincoln's legacy. That of course is why statists of the Left and the Right idolize Dishonest Abe. I'd like to see if the beltwaytarians have the chutzpah to apply this label to the late, great Murray Rothbard, of Brooklyn, New York, who authored this scathing critique of Lincoln and his war that contained such passages as the following:
"The two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence."
"If the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim its powers were permanent and revocable? . . . [T]hat monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States."
"One of the central grievances of the South . . . was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners . . . The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports."
"The Republicans [in 1861] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government; protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."
"[Lincoln's] major emphasis was on Whig economic statism . . . Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes . . ."
"In his first inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region."
"Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar."
"Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot."
"There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincolnband his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union."
"Sherman's infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half."
"y targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century."

 

[erowe1]

It's relevant because you were portraying the South as some hapless victim standing up for its "self determination".

No I wasn't. They don't have to be hapless victims standing up for self determination or anything else in order for it to be wrong for me to conquer them and rule them without their consent and force you to help me do it. And even if doing that makes them better off, it's still wrong.

 

[jmdrake]

I know the Confederate one was worse. But my statement was that the Union's constitution forbade its states from passing a law that would infringe on the right to own slaves, which is a true statement.

It's a true statement only with tortured parsing. If Ron Paul was somewhat successful in his marijuana law legislation and the law said "States can legalize marijuana for anyone over 21", technically you could say that such a law would prevent states from passing "a law" allowing for marijuana usage.

So here's a clean up of the language. The constitution at the time did prevent the states from passing certain laws restricting slavery, but the confederate constitution prohibited states from passing any law restricting slavery. That's the point that the person you were responding to was making. He was talking about apples and you made a comparison to oranges.

Prohibiting states from giving refuge to runaway slaves does just that. And again, Lincoln did nothing to rectify that, even when the states and Congress sans the confederacy probably could have.

Lincoln attempted compensated emancipation with the slave states that didn't leave the Union and in D.C. he was successful. I'm not saying this to praise Lincoln, but sometimes your side gets ridiculous in its attacks on the man. Really, you're fighting a war, you have a few slave states who haven't left, and you're going to antagonize them too? To what purpose? And how many congressman and senators are going to sign on to a law that could very well derail the war effort? And before you say "Well he should have said to hell with the risks and gone with the more radical plan" then answer this. Why is compensated emancipation not good enough when Lincoln proposed it, but perfectly fine when Ron Paul proposes it after the fact? And don't give me any "Lincoln wanted to force all the slave to go back to Africa" because I've already done the research and I know that's not true.

 

[jmdrake]

No I wasn't. They don't have to be hapless victims standing up for self determination or anything else in order for it to be wrong for me to conquer them and rule them without their consent and force you to help me do it. And even if doing that makes them better off, it's still wrong.

You can't make a moral claim for self determination if part of your reasoning is to take away someone else's right to self determination. If you want to make a equitable claim you must come to the table with clean hands. Anyone who doesn't understand that just doesn't understand ethics.

 

[jmdrake]

Yeah, except it's not historically accurate. But hey, being historically accurate doesn't matter as long as you're defending the south right? I've long lost respect for DiLorenzo for his fast and loose use of American history. The Morrill Tariff not only was not passed before secession but it could not have been passed without secession. And why did these rich southern planters not go out and fight their own war themselves? Why did they insist on drafting poor white dirt farmers, sharecroppers, and overseers that they treated worse than even black slaves to fight for them? People here are quick to point out how Lincoln instituted a draft, but conveniently forget the south instituted a draft first.

Tom DiLorenzo made a good blog post on this general subject today:

Like the leftists and neocons who are Lincoln cultists, the beltway "libertarians" have taken to smearing and defaming Lincoln critics as "neo-Confederates." In doing so they support the centralized governmental leviathan and the foreign policy of military imperialism that is Lincoln's legacy. That of course is why statists of the Left and the Right idolize Dishonest Abe. I'd like to see if the beltwaytarians have the chutzpah to apply this label to the late, great Murray Rothbard, of Brooklyn, New York, who authored this scathing critique of Lincoln and his war that contained such passages as the following:
"The two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence."
"If the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim its powers were permanent and revocable? . . . [T]hat monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States."
"One of the central grievances of the South . . . was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners . . . The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports."
"The Republicans [in 1861] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government; protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."
"[Lincoln's] major emphasis was on Whig economic statism . . . Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes . . ."
"In his first inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region."
"Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar."
"Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot."
"There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincolnband his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union."
"Sherman's infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half."
"y targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century."

 

[heavenlyboy34]

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Yeah, except it's not historically accurate. But hey, being historically accurate doesn't matter as long as you're defending the south right?

Apparently not if you're defending the North either. ETA: Rothbard came to similar conclusions, and he could hardly be accused as playing fast and loose with the facts.