Did the Southern U.S. have the right to secede?

Though given the sheer amount of disinformation that got pumped into military recruiting at the time, it's hard to say all of 'em made an informed decision.

edited 14th Nov '12 9:08:45 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

Ace of Spades correctly elaborated on this point. I mean that "bombing South" is no laughing matter. You shouldn't make war on your citizens, or on a people going peacefully independent, when they have done no wrong to you.

I imagine that a lot of Southerners had something of a "my country right or wrong" attitude, as was particularly common back in those days. It wasn't exactly honorable to not defend your home back then, even if you didn't agree with everything the government said. Choosing to join the military isn't always about what the government itself endorses. Manly honor was at stake, and this and loyalty to your country were very serious things in the South. And the North.

Yeah, General Lee, for example, was personally against secession, but he felt his loyalty to the State of Virginia trumped his loyalty to the United States.

A lot of people felt that way. Jefferson Davis didn't want to be President, but finally agreed because he hoped to bring some sort of peace.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

Some facts worth noting about secession:

- it wasn't the South, but New England states that threatened to secede on multiple occasions during the early 1800s. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, an embargo in 1807, the war of 1812 and the admission of Texas into the United States in 1845, plus a couple of other instances, all brought threats of secession from New England states. They all went nowhere for one reason or another, but this trend does demonstrate that belief in the right of secession was not confined to the south in 1860.

- The earlier threats took place at a point when the Founders, who wrote the Constitution in the first place and would surely know a thing or two about whether secession was permissible, were still alive. John Hancock and Samuel Adams were peripherally involved, as was John Quincy Adams.

- Thomas Jefferson said “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in the union …. I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.'” Jefferson espoused the Compact Theory, which looked at the Union as a collection of sovereign states that had created the central government.

- New York, Rhode Island and Virginia all reserved the right to leave the Union when they ratified the Constitution.

The South was hardly on shaky Constitutional ground with all of this as precedent. Granted, there were other views, and Abraham Lincoln certainly disagreed with Jefferson's theory. Lincoln's views were more in line with Alexander Hamilton when it came to a strong central government.

My personal view is that the Southern States had a right to secede and govern themselves. I don't agree with slavery obviously, but there had to have been a better way to end it than a war that cost 620,000 lives, the ruin of much of the South, the death of Abraham Lincoln and the death of close to a million freed slaves after the war from starvation and disease. A gradual system of paid emancipation whereby the government bought and freed the slaves would have cost less than the Civil War, and would certainly have spared the country a lot of death.

edited 18th Nov '15 8:40:56 AM by andersonh1

The governments of the southern states started the war. With no legitimate cause (they were OVER REPRESENTED in the federal government) and against the wishes of the majority of the people living there. It was all solely because the rich landowners wanted to keep their slaves, as explicitly stated in their constitution and their cornerstone speech. The nearly 1 million deaths caused by the war are all on the south's hands.

So no, they had no right. The southerners were just evil.

edited 18th Nov '15 9:36:16 AM by Nihlus1

I think you have to make a distinction between whether or not something was a legal or constitutional right, and whether or not that right was exercised for moral reasons. I can disagree with slavery while still believing the south or the New England states had a right to secede.

Four of the states that seceded (Virginia, NC, Tennessee and Arkansas) did so only in response to Lincoln's call for troops to invade SC after Fort Sumter. Their issue was sovereignty, not slavery. In fact, Virginia and NC voted against secession in January of 1861. Arkansas called a convention, but had intended to put the issue to the voters in August. Lincoln's call for troops changed the majority's attitude in all of those states.

The South was not monolithic in belief and motivation.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:03:42 AM by andersonh1

Virginia specifically lists 'the oppression of the southern slave-holding states' as one of its grievances against the government in its Secession Act. So that's probably not the best example.

What's precedent ever done for us?

One wonders how many slaves would have died premature deaths had slavery been allowed to continue for another twenty years or so. The assumption behind the claim that slavery should have ended is that 620,000 white lives matter, but four million black ones don't, so its fine for them to sit in bondage for another couple of years.

Even if one ignores the fact that the South was not a society with slavery, it was a slave society. Slavery was the lynchpin of the South's social and economic order. They were never going to give that up while it still made money.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

The south never had a right. There was no legitimate cause for secession; if anything the power of the south should have been neutered for the benefit of everyone else. The southern landowners held way too much influence over the government relative to the population they represented. Keeping in mind that nearly 50% of the south's population was slaves.

I'm not even strawmanning anyone here. The south started the war because of slavery and almost nothing else. This was specifically stated in all their constitutions and in the Constitution of the would-be confederation that they joined.

620,000 is the absolute lowest estimate for purely military deaths. Other estimates for military deaths go as high as 900,000. Then you have civilians; relatively few of them died, but deaths by indirect causes should still add a chunk to the total (slaves especially). Such was the deadliest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere (unless you count the Mexican Revolution as one war and use some higher end estimates, and that was its own mess...). Nearly a million Americans died in four years, purely because of the whims of some spoiled racist southern aristocrats.

It should be noted that cotton plantations were at their most profitable in the 1850s. And that every southerner was indoctrinated to think of blacks as animals. Yeah, they weren't stopping without someone forcing them to, even though almost all of the north (i.e. the areas with 80%+ of the "white" population) had already abolished slavery 60 years ago. The Confederacy even had plans to conquer Mexico and turn it into a giant plantation, which thankfully never happened due to their defeat.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:27:16 AM by Nihlus1

They weren't going to give it up even if it didn't make then money. One of the issues leading up to the war was allowing slavery in the western territories, on which Jefferson Davis tried to appease anti-slavery Northerners by pointing out that even if it was allowed, the climate and geography made cotton plantations unfeasable. So slavery would never take root there.

When he went back South so many angry pro-slavers confronted him over his statements that he had to repudiate them.

A better representation of Virginia's motivation can be found in the minutes of their secession convention, and slavery is barely mentioned. The fact that they accurately describe the southern states as "slaveholding" doesn't change the fact that it was Lincoln's call for soldiers from sovereign states to invade another sovereign state that changed public sentiment in Virginia. An existential threat to slavery was not enough to cause them to secede, while helping to invade another state was. Their motivation is clear.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:30:57 AM by andersonh1

Let's be clear. Whether the South had the "right" to secede — a right that the Constitution theoretically permits — is irrelevant. It was decided not to permit it, and the issue was fought on the field of battle. The South lost.

With the state of politics these days, I'm almost sad that it lost, because the Southern slaveowner mentality has yet to go away and we might, arguably, have been better off had it gone off and formed its own country — that said, the slaves would certainly not have been better off.

And it doesn't matter what the issue that lighted the spark was. Virginia wanted to remain a slaveowning state, as did the rest of the Confederacy. You can dissect the moral values pertaining to both sides (Northern industrialists didn't really want freedmen per se, but a fresh source of easily exploited manual labor for their factories), but that one fact is key and must not be forgotten.

The war is over, guys. Civilization won. Get used to it.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:34:36 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The constitution is silly and so is Virginia.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele

I was about to contradict and said the legal angle was what the original post was about in the first place, but then I checked and saw that Raven Wilder had specifically said "Legal and/or moral right", so you're right.

Aesop of this story: Do check before posting.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I like that video, and Prager.

edited 18th Nov '15 2:33:58 PM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Constitution doesn't matter. Seccession is a universal right. Doesn't change the fact the confederacy's motivations were as base as they come. Also, with the large slave population being unable to vote it's not clear that the southern governments had the legitimacy to make such a decision.

Whoah whoah whoah hang in there.

Secession is not a "universal human right". Governments are already nebulous to define and stuff but to say that it is inherent of human beings to have a right to say "fuck it" to conventions and alliances seems to ignore the concept of agreements not just of the international level, but of national level.

Governments. Nations are historical and cultural behemoths that are difficult and amorphous in its concept but tangible and very real in their agreements. Seceding from all of the responsibilities towards agreed inhabitants is a breach of contract, which is sortof what a constitution is.

If it had been forcibly imposed on them, then yeah, it is within their "right" to fight that but no one pretty much forced them to treat black people like shit.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

@video

Oh hey, this is a great and comprehensive breakdown of why the Civil War was about slavery after all. This must be a great channel that I therefore shall check out... *sees videos like "Why the Right is Right" and "Left, but really Right", and so on* Sigh... *closes the youtube page*

Secession isn't a universal human right. Otherwise, it'd be perfectly acceptable to just 'secede' my house from the rest of the nation and get out of paying taxes.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Regarding "universal human rights" — that's a myth. Rights are things we take for ourselves; they do not exist "out there", in nature. A person may choose to "secede" from society, but then they have to go live in the wild without electricity, medicine, or what have you. Such folk are unfortunate, but not significant.

We institute governments for one of two purposes: securing the rights that a population chooses for itself, or securing the privileges of a small group within a population at the expense of everyone else.

Historically, most governments have been the latter. A sensibility began to develop in recent centuries that maybe the former is a bit more legitimate, and it would be better to get there through constitutional law than through violent revolution followed by a replacement tyranny.

In as much as we can play comparative morality with forms of government, the South had a lesser claim to legitimacy because it was based on a small number of privileged people holding sway over a large body of absolutely powerless people. This form of government proved irreconcilable with the North's, and the North had a bigger stick. The end.

Except that it wasn't the end, as the privilege of slaveowners ossified into the institutions of democracy despite the notional freed status of the slaves. It wasn't until the 1960s that we started cleaning up that mess, and the result was the large-scale defection from the institution of democracy by a group of privileged whites who never got over the Civil War. The ideology of the Confederacy is their banner, and no matter what anyone in that group may claim, its primary objective is to reestablish white privilege.

Again, in as much as we consider representative democracy a more legitimate form of government than others, the South was illegitimate and the actions taken to remedy the situation were both moral and necessary.

edited 18th Nov '15 2:41:45 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That has been tried, some people even get away with it on the basis that it's to much effort for the goverment to chase them.

Natural rights are a subjective-whether they exist depends on philosophy.

I, myself believe that a law exists outside of humanity. States gain legitimacy by their ability to enforce this law. Ergo, not only does natural rights exist, all other law is arbitrary.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"