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Let It Fly

[Note that I have modified my position. See this comment.]

Was the Confederacy exclusively about slavery? Did the South have nothing to be proud of before they were defeated by the North?

Of course not. I know plenty of Southerners, some of whom love the Confederate flag, and not one of them approves of slavery. They are proud of the South without being proud of slavery. Duh.

Yet that's how the latest clamor to take down the Confederate flag makes things sound. The clamor is loudest from the same people who insist that nobody is allowed to tell anyone else who they are, what they represent, what gender they are, or anything else that defines them. They now insist on telling Southerners that their symbol represents one thing, and one thing only, as if they have the right.

By those standards, those same people should insist that we stop flying the American flag. No country can be proud of its heritage.

And that's ridiculous, so to Hell with them.

Let it fly.

Comments (104)

One might ask to know what black Southerners feel about it. And would they (and others) equate the South to the Confederacy?
Similar things might be said about Germany, Nazi Germany and Nazi symbols.

It is not merely the Left that opposes it. There is NRO as well today--Let it Go.

"And today, the presence of the flag on public grounds is a reminder to blacks that, in some ways, whites still rule, insofar as virtually no black citizen of the state would consent to such a display."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/420089/let-it-go-shake-it-peter-augustine-lawler
http://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/420089/let-it-go-shake-it-peter-augustine-lawler

There is NRO as well today--Let it Go.

NRO is busy standing beside the tracks yelling, "Please go slower." I don't take much they say anymore seriously.

Now on to the main question,

Was the Confederacy exclusively about slavery? Did the South have nothing to be proud of before they were defeated by the North?

The Civil War, at its core, was about slavery. States Rights was a veneer thrown on by Lost Cause writers after the war. Leading up to and during the war, slavery was the main point of contention.

It is hard to argue that the Confederacy was against a strong central government based on the actions of that government during the war. The Confederacy was the first to enact conscription. This was something that had never happened in American history. The North did not follow until almost a year later. Also, it arbitrarily converted all volunteers enlistments for the duration of the war instead of what thy were original enlistment said. It instituted the first direct taxes on income and wealth. There was no hesitation in arresting people who spoke out against the Confederate government. Interestingly, this is always an argument against Lincoln who did the same thing. Also, the Confederacy violated the neutrality of Kentucky. In the end, the only thing that was not violated was the right to own slaves.

Slavery was the linchpin of the Southern economy. The vast majority of Southern wealth was tied up in slaves. From a dispassionate viewpoint, I can understand why the South did what it did. It grabbed the tail of the tiger and could not let go. There might have been a possibility of gradual emancipation, but the main power brokers in the South did not want that. Instead their drive to expand slavery to new territories is what precipitated an unending series of crises that led to war.

I will stop there. In general, yes the Confederacy was defined by slavery. That being said, I don't have a problem with the Stars and Bars. This country is about a non-racist as possible. Flying or not flying that flag won't change a thing.

And if there is one, or a few, or a small minority consisting of hundreds of thousands of blacks who do NOT view the flag that way, who do NOT consider it a reminder "all about" that "whites still rule", would that simply undermine the thesis and the conclusion in NRO that we must "let it go"?

I know people in the South who love "the South", who are proud of the South, who hunger for part of the noble tradition inherent in the concept of "the South", who weren't born or raised in the South. They do not, nay they cannot have this nostalgia due their own memories of something they themselves had and have watched shrivel away. No, they have absorbed at second hand - almost completely from reading the thoughts of true southern gentlemen - truths that were valid then and are still valid now, truths that are not rooted in racist social or economic bases. To suggest that a symbol of a whole region, the South, a flag, is "all about" white supremacy, is to these people simply ridiculous on its face. It is no more rational than suggesting that the American flag is all about American world supremacy (thanks for the comparison, Jake). Balderdash!

And, by the way, NRO is going further and further in showing that "conservative" is no longer any part of its core reason for existing. That they would have a corner called "postmodern conservative" is rather obvious, since a true conservative could no more be postmodern than he could be modern. The very term is an oxymoron.

And Peter Lawler at least has one true statement:

As Hayek explained so well, a libertarian is really a liberal—or no Burkean respecter of custom and tradition as such. It just so happens that in America, the libertarians can ally with the conservatives in respecting the very classically liberal 1787 Constitution.

Jake, you make a good tu quoque about defining one's identity. It's a completely accurate tu quoque. By the leftists' own lights, there is certainly no grounds for not allowing southerners to define their own identity.

More substantively, though, those of us who _don't_ believe in the postmodern ability to make things mean whatever we want to make them mean _do_ have a more interesting question about what a flag means.

My own opinion, which I don't have time to go on and on about and which is pretty insipid, is that the Confederate flag has sufficiently varied and complex historical meanings that it isn't intrinsically a problem.

I certainly would not say, as I saw someone say on Facebook the other day, that I "would never want to get to know" anybody who flew it. If you get to know people who fly it, you'll get to know a mixed bag of people--some wonderful, some crazy, some in between.

In any event, for the left or the mainstream right (e.g., NRO) to make _that_ what this evil murder is about is ghoulish and absurd. As if more opprobrium heaped upon the Confederate flag would have somehow prevented these murders instead of simply fueling the flames of the murderer's obsessions.

Telling other people what they mean by what they say, when there are multiple reasonable interpretations available, is simply bullying. It's an assertion of raw power, and unreasonable on the face of it. It's not unlike saying that when I use the generic "he" for reasons of proper subject-verb agreement, that I am excluding women, no matter how much I protest and no matter what the grammar books may say. What is at stake is Humpty Dumpty's question: Who is to be master?

In the murder and oppression sweepstakes, there's a far stronger case to be made against the Islamic Crescent, or the phrase Allahu Akhbar, than there is the Stars and Bars, but of course, liberals could not imagine letting me tell Muslims exactly what their symbols mean, no matter how much historical data I could marshal to my side. I'd be accused of having a phobia.

In general I think Lydia's point gets to the heart of the issue: there's a complicated history behind the flag, and the people who want it at the memorial where it flies today ought to be granted a basic assumption of sincerity. That is what the "other" side, if I can call it that, refuses to do. By and large, for them, it is just a convenient means of signaling their orthodoxy on race.

" It is no more rational than suggesting that the American flag is all about American world supremacy (thanks for the comparison, Jake). Balderdash!"

The American flag existed long before the US was a world power and can have various meanings. The Confederate flag exists solely as a symbol of treason in defense of slavery. Go read the Cornerstone speech and the secession resolutions of the states who formed the pretended nation known as the Confederacy.

I will once again remind you all that had we dealt properly with that treason in 1865 we wouldn't be having this discussion now.

(In the spirit of Paul's admonition to you all below re: one of my comments, I would suggest that if one hasn't read those documents, one is is living is a fantasy world of chitlins, cornbread, and "honor" and shouldn't reply.)

Some of my Southern ancestors were slave "owners" *and* Unionists. Clearly, Old Glory cannot be flown.


Oh, wait. The "liberals" *do* already forbid displaying the Republic's flag.

The Civil War, at its core, was about slavery. States Rights was a veneer thrown on by Lost Cause writers after the war. Leading up to and during the war, slavery was the main point of contention.

I will agree with Chris to this extent: to the extent that "states' rights" was a real cause of the war, it was so only because slavery was already the driving cause. Nobody would have made of states' rights the big issue, and a cause of war, completely on its own. Nobody cares that much about the procedural aspects of power except when power is being abused or when you fear it is going to be abused. So, the motive force behind states' rights always was retention of slavery (and extension into the territories, but that too was at least partly about retention, so the slave states would retain parity of votes in the senate.)

I don't think this results in a conclusion that states' rights was a fiction, or a charade, and certainly not merely an ex-post-facto explanation.

I agree that the flag means very different things to different people. I am not comfortable in aquiescing to a media and race-baiter driven interpretation that the flag represents only slavery and racism. That's a revisionist narrative that only serves certain agendas. I think we play right into the leftist agenda by glibbly accepting that notion.
To many, the Confederate flag represents a view of the state that focuses on the local, the agrarian, an all but lost notion of chivalry and gentlemanly behaviour. This was a worldview deeply imbued with Christian values.
I cannot deny that slavery existed at the same time, which, however, was supported by many interests in the north as well.
Befoer we discard an important symbol, we need to look beyond the PC, Twitter group-think here, and know exactly what it is we are throwing out. That how a classic liberal (ie: modern conservative) should approach this, IMO.

I don't think this results in a conclusion that states' rights was a fiction, or a charade, and certainly not merely an ex-post-facto explanation.

But I think it is a rephrasing along the lines of "Right to Choose." It's a high sounding principle meant to hide the baser motive underneath. As I pointed out above, the Confederacy threw out a lot of States Rights in creating their new union.

The American flag existed long before the US was a world power and can have various meanings.

The flag in question is not the flag of the CSA. It is a battle flag. Battle flags represent more than their cause. They can represent various meanings as well.

The Confederate flag exists solely as a symbol of treason in defense of slavery. Go read the Cornerstone speech and the secession resolutions of the states who formed the pretended nation known as the Confederacy.

So, instead of making the argument yourself, you would have us read a number of documents and make the case for ourselves? And you think that the self-evident conclusion, which cannot be disputed, is that the flag exists SOLELY as a symbol of treason?

Well, I have read the Cornerstone speech. And some of the secession documents. And the Confederate Constitution (which you didn't mention.) And the conclusion is NOT manifest. It is certainly no better than one biased and cantankerous notion of what the slave states undertook.

I am not one of those people who say the southern states should have seceded, and I have vociferously argued against slavery in general and the American institution of it in particular. But I don't agree at all that the southern states' attempt at secession amounts to NOTHING BUT treason. Even if (which I dispute) that secession was in fact certainly and definitively treasonous, I don't in the least agree that a flag for the South has no other meaning but treason in support of slavery. Even if using the flag, in its original usage 150 years ago, was actually treasonous as an act, that does not imply that using it today likewise holds the very same symbolic meaning that it held then.

And if there is one, or a few, or a small minority consisting of hundreds of thousands of blacks who do NOT view the flag that way, who do NOT consider it a reminder "all about" that "whites still rule", would that simply undermine the thesis and the conclusion in NRO that we must "let it go"?

The Onion beat you to it Tony. Oh wait, they are a parody news site.
http://www.theonion.com/article/black-man-support-confederate-flag-triples-his-med-50727

And that's ridiculous, so to Hell with them.

"We will fight the secessionists until hell freezes over, and then we will fight them on the ice." - unnamed Tennessee minister

I asked two questions in the original post: Was the Confederacy exclusively about slavery? Did the South have nothing to be proud of before they were defeated by the North?

The answer to the second question is clearly that they did have much to be proud of.

I have understood for years that the answer to the first question is "no". I have just read the reasons for secession compiled by the states of South Carolina and Texas -- primary sources, not secondary lists by later compilers -- and they deal exclusively with issues related to slavery. I am compelled to change my understanding: The answer to the first question is "yes".

As such, I amend my statement. I can sympathize with those who think the flag represents Southern pride rather than slavery, but when the Southerners own reasons for adopting it are documented as being exclusively related to slavery, I can only say that those people are objectively misguided.

It is, of course, still South Carolina's problem (and each state's individually), but they should resolve the problem by eliminating that symbol and choosing a different one.

Also note that the talk of treason is misguided, even foolish. The American experiment had begun in living memory, and the Southern states (if we accept their belief in a right to own slaves) had perfectly adequate reason to separate from the Union, given the logic in the founding documents.

Jake Frievald,
I totally agree. I would only add that the talk of Pride, be it Southern, African, Indian etc etc is generally mischievous.

I would also say that it is self-contradictory for a State to honor flags of failed insurrections against itself.

PS "Post-modern conservative" is where one finds more thoughtful articles at NRO.

Perhaps the worst thing a Republican can do is demand the flag be taken down after having previously said it should stay. By doing so, he is essentially admitting that the symbol is responsible for the murders committed by an evil and deranged soul. Furthermore, he is letting CNN dictate the narrative--why aren't we talking about Obama's disastrous trade bill or illegal amnesty of millions of criminal illegal aliens?

Of course one cannot divorce the flag from slavery or anything else integral to the history of the South, but why should white Southerners care? Every city in which they've been demographically overtaken has become more dangerous, more rundown, less economically prosperous, and less moral--just as segregationists predicted. Baltimore was recently allowed to turn into a war zone by a black mayor and black police chief because the black residents of the town were angry a career criminal no one care's about otherwise may have been a victim of police brutality, and whites are supposed to feel guilty about a flag?

For heaven's sake the spokesman of the "racist" CoCC (the website which published the hatefacts about black on white crime the murderer cited in his manifesto) condemned the murders unequivocally and made no rationalization of the murder but "mainstream" groups like the NAACP openly campaign for the release of death row inmates and defend the behavior of black criminals as being at least partially motivated by white racism all the time.

I say put Dylann Roof to death shortly after we do the same to the Carr brothers (who had their death sentence reduced due to a procedural reason). Or after we execute the murderers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

Or after we execute the murderers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

It still amazes me that a "civilized society" can fail to give such people anything less than life in prison. Of course, Tennessee is the state where Mary Winkler was given basically no punishment for shooting her sleeping husband in the back, so YMMV.

and they deal exclusively with issues related to slavery. I am compelled to change my understanding: The answer to the first question is "yes"

Well not so fast. The more interesting question is that if slavery had been removed as an objection, would the South still have seceded due to their other significant grievances? Stated reasons are often just a pretext. Like the Declaration of Independence. The actual grieveces cited are rather flimsy for justifying a full revolt and it would have been more honest if it simply said, "We deliberately provoked a ruinously expensive war with the French and now we don't want to help pay for it."

Let us focus on the motives here, because they are what really matters. The left does not care what the flag actually stands for or its historical context. They are interested in one thing and one thing only. White guilt. Any symbol that white people might rally around against their enemies must be destroyed and discredited.

Also, I can only laugh when people mention the NRO. The NRO has essentially caved on sodomite marriage. It proves the uselessness of Conservatism and the necessity of Reaction. It has absolutely no credibility to anyone except Republican Party toadies.

Also, "a symbol of treason". What praytell does this make the regular flag? Was it not also forged out of the fires of a great treason? This is asinine.

Mark, I chuckled a little at your mention of "the" NRO, which I associate with these guys. Of course, they've also long since caved, but that's an issue for another thread.

Similarities and differences between this issue and the controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque"? Both are largely moot now, of course, but maybe worth exploring in a meta kind of way (as long as Paul and Lydia never find out...).

Well there was some revulsion at the North's factory system, and how did that song go, I Owe my Soul to the Company Store. It's not as if there was a 40 hour work week, and women and children, many of them not in their teens, worked in utterly miserable early factory conditions. There's enough to fault and much gets changed with time.

Congratulations to those who have reflected and reconsidered, looking candidly at strongly held priors isn't easy. Haley is a terrible governor but she gets credit here though I assume (as in Indiana) business interests weighed in.

"Well, I have read the Cornerstone speech. And some of the secession documents..."

Tony, maybe you need to read some more and closer. The Confederate Constitution is mostly about the nuts and bolts of governing as that is what constitutions are for.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp

"Also, 'a symbol of treason'. What pray tell does this make the regular flag? Was it not also forged out of the fires of a great treason? This is asinine."

But,

" Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort..."

Article 3, Section 3 U. S. Constitution.

Chris, I was well aware that it was a battle flag. It has become the symbol of the Confederacy through broad usage by organizations like the Klan and the Dixiecrats. Mark, I assume you mean the U. S. flag and yes, it is a symbol of treason relative to the Crown, so what? Can either of you (or Tony) make the case that raising armies and firing cannon balls at a Federal fort isn't levying war? Let us hop on the way back machine:

In 1867 good Senator Thaddeus Stevens made a speech about H. R. 20:

"Mr. SPEAKER: I am about to discuss the question of the punishment of belligerent traitors by enforcing the confiscation of their property to a certain extent, both as a punishment for their crimes and to pay the loyal men who have been robbed by the rebels, and to increase the pensions of our wounded soldiers. The punishment of traitors has been wholly ignored by a treacherous Executive and by a sluggish Congress. I wish to make an issue before the American people, and see whether they will sanction the perfect impunity of a murderous belligerent, and consent that the loyal men of this nation, who have been despoiled of their property, shall remain without remuneration, either by the rebel property or the property of the nation."

Considering the Confederacy to be treason has a long pedigree. I use the term for a reason - there are specified penalties for treason and had we availed ourselves of them (and laws like H. R. 20) back in the day we would be in a happier situation today.

"I know people in the South who love "the South", who are proud of the South, who hunger for part of the noble tradition inherent in the concept of "the South", who weren't born or raised in the South. They do not, nay they cannot have this nostalgia due their own memories of something they themselves had and have watched shrivel away."

And there are still folks in Magnitogorsk who do vodka shots and likewise folks who gather deep in the Bavarian forests and sing the Horst Wessel Lied while pining for long dead rulers and times that never were.
Serial killers doing life without parole somehow attract folks on the outside who desire romantic attachments with them. Delusion and denial abound. Again, so what?

"Well there was some revulsion at the North's factory system, and how did that song go, I Owe my Soul to the Company Store. It's not as if there was a 40 hour work week, and women and children, many of them not in their teens, worked in utterly miserable early factory conditions. There's enough to fault and much gets changed with time."

Actually Tennessee Ernie was singing about coal mining in Appalachia. Company towns and script are gone but miners are still dying due to the depraved hearts of mine owners. Time changes nothing without laws and unions. Folks died for a forty hour week and better working conditions. I assume you aren't making the point that slavery's rape and torture is preferable to the baser tendencies of unfettered Capital.

I respect the loyalty of the Southerners to their states, but I've always been hesitant in claiming secession and war was justified.

It's the common thing to call it the war of Northern Aggression, and to say that Lincoln manipulated the shots at Sumter.

Of course, this isn't really true. Lincoln might have known what the South would do, but South Carolina did not have to do anything.

Also note that the talk of treason is misguided, even foolish. The American experiment had begun in living memory, and the Southern states (if we accept their belief in a right to own slaves) had perfectly adequate reason to separate from the Union, given the logic in the founding documents.

This assumes that the documents were unambiguous, and the founders agreed on how they should be interpreted. The founders weren't a person, they were a group of incredibly contentious people.

The one prior precedent we had of how the government dealt with trainers was when Washington went into New England and crushed the rebels.

(Trainers should of course be traitors.)

It still amazes me that a "civilized society" can fail to give such people anything less than life in prison.

Except for the fact that the juries did give the three found to have intended the sadistic murders life in prison or the death penalty. The ringleader of the group is sentenced to death. Both the others were originally sentenced to life without parole, but because the trial judge was taking illegal drugs during these trials one of those murderers, and only one, had his sentence reduced during retrial to consecutive life sentences with the possibility of parole after 51 years. The only female of the group was acquitted of first degree murder and she was given limited federal immunity for her testimony on the carjacking charges, her second trial reduced her sentence from 53 to 35 years. If you are going to be amazed about injustice at least know what the justice was.

the point Al, is that you can hardly attack the Confederate flag for being a symbol of treason when the US flag itself is a symbol of treason. Nobody would deny the South did launch a war for independence (although the North's hands are hardly bloodless). The question is why a country built on treason would have such a problem with treason. It seems kind of unprincipled. Is it just because they were wascally slave owners?

Again I stress, the reason this flag is being attacked is because it is politically incorrect and a symbol of something exclusively white. Like the original South African flag, it is therefore a symbol of 'hate'. This is why one should oppose its removal, because its a point score for the left.

I asked two questions in the original post: Was the Confederacy exclusively about slavery?
I have just read the reasons for secession compiled by the states of South Carolina and Texas -- primary sources, not secondary lists by later compilers -- and they deal exclusively with issues related to slavery. I am compelled to change my understanding: The answer to the first question is "yes".

I reject the conclusion.

The primary sources are clear that slavery was at the top of the list. They do not establish that slavery was the only matter. There was, had been for many years, and continued to worsen, the tariff issue. Al asked us to read the Corner Stone speech, and in it we find

We allow the imposition of no duty with a view of giving advantage to one class of persons, in any trade or business, over those of another. All, under our system, stand upon the same broad principles of perfect equality. Honest labor and enterprise are left free and unrestricted in whatever pursuit they may be engaged. This old thorn of the tariff, which was the cause of so much irritation in the old body politic, is removed forever from the new.

This is of course an implicit reference to the South Carolina Nullification crisis, attempting to nullify the effect of tariffs, and the ongoing ills of northern manipulations of government to benefit one region or class at the expense of another. There can be no doubt that this was, also, a cause of the war. Whether minor or major, it was another irritant leading to anger and rejection of the North.

Tony, maybe you need to read some more and closer. The Confederate Constitution is mostly about the nuts and bolts of governing as that is what constitutions are for.

You're a fine one to say so. You said to read the Corner Stone speech. So I did. And it makes a claim about the Confederate Constitution, that it is directly founded

upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

What's funny is that although the document certainly rests on an assumption that the negro is not equal and shall not be granted equality under law, it nowhere even claims to purport any basis for the position - there is no why even hinted. Stephens is bloviating about the document. The only references to race or slaves are like these in 9(1) and (4), purely pragmatic do's and don'ts:

Sec. 9. (I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same...

(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

The most far-reaching is simply this:

In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress

You simply cannot find in the document any claim, even implicitly, that black slaves are by nature subordinate to whites. I have no doubt that this is what the South _thought_. But it's not in the document. And the question wasn't whether the Confederacy is founded on slavery, (of course it was), the question was this:

Was the Confederacy exclusively about slavery?

And of course it wasn't. The simplest proof is this: what they changed in their Constitution shows what they were about, and they didn't change ONLY the rules around slavery.

"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort..."

Al, only a completely prejudiced and biased observer could attempt to use this as "proof" that either the flag or the acts of secession were, of themselves, treason.

Your own ballyhooed document, the Corner Stone speech, makes it clear that the southerners were setting themselves up not as OPPONENTS or ENEMIES of the federal United States of America, but simply as SEPARATE from that entity. (Since right now, there are over 100 countries on the face of the planet that are neither part of the US nor enemies of it, but simply separate therefrom, it must needs be possible to be separate without being enemies.) That was their own stance on it. The North claimed this constituted treason, but of course could only make it out to be so on a stance about the Constitution that was (and remains) absolutely not the "norm" of constitutional understanding. There is no way to get to the "treason" result except by accepting one side's claim and rejecting the other side's claim about the matter - which is JUST WHAT THE BASIC ARGUMENT IS ABOUT. To pretend that the definition in the Constitution settles the matter is just so much begging the question.

Like MarcAnthony, I don't argue that the South should have seceded, nor that they ought to have gone to war for it. But that's not the same thing as recognizing that there STILL remains a real disagreement as to the nature of the underlying compact that has not been resolved by any reasoned argument that is clearly for the Union's stance and clearly logical. The "resolution" was rather by force of arms, and Lincoln's commentary (at Gettysburg) can be viewed as nothing more than a return to medieval "proving" of the truth by the stronger arm. Whatever else that is, it isn't reasoned argument.

Tony, the list of reasons for the secession in South Carolina and Texas (I didn't read others) are modeled somewhat after the Declaration of Independence. They have a list of principles, a set of specific grievances, and a set of repercussions (primarily secession). The principles are good ones, and the repercussions follow directly if the principles aren't followed.

But the specific grievances deal exclusively with slavery. No slavery, no grievances that warrant secession. Therefore -- despite the other aspects of governance that were historically relevant -- the actual act of secession was predicated, in their own words, exclusively on slavery.

I would argue much as you did -- have so argued, in fact -- but the documents proved me wrong. I respectfully submit that they prove you wrong, too.

Jake, you are looking at part of the evidence and not all.

The actual acts of secession hardly speak to the causes. The most complete is this one:

An act declaring the political ties heretofore existing between the State of Missouri and the United States of America dissolved.

Whereas the Government of the United States, in the possession and under the control of a sectional party, has wantonly violated the compact originally made between said Government and the State of Missouri, by invading with hostile armies the soil of the State, attacking and making prisoners the militia while legally assembled under the State laws, forcibly occupying the State capitol, and attempting through the instrumentality of domestic traitors to usurp the State government, seizing and destroying private property, and murdering with fiendish malignity peaceable citizens, men, women, and children, together with other acts of atrocity, indicating a deep-settled hostility toward the people of Missouri and their institutions;

Texas has a little but is ambiguous:

WHEREAS, The Federal Government has failed to accomplish the purposes of the compact of union between these States, in giving protection either to the persons of our people upon an exposed frontier, or to the property of our citizens, and

It is certain that "property of our citizens" is a reference at least in part to slaves, what is less than certain is whether it is also a reference to other disagreements about property, such as unreasonable tariffs. The "protection...of our people upon an exposed frontier" is something else, I am not sure what precisely, but is not obviously on the matter of slavery.

Alabama's is somewhat less precise:

Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section

It cannot be said (from this) whether all of the "dangerous infractions" had to do simply with regard to slavery or with regard to other matters as well. It is simply indeterminate.

All the others were simply ordinances abolishing the compact between the state and the federal union, without explicit explanation as to the causes.

The declarations of causes in support of the actions taken are more complete, of course. Georgia's is well developed, and has this:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade.

Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency.

The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States...

All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success.

The last quoted sentence shows that in the minds of southerners, the tariff, protections, and special supports for northern industry ended up COLLAPSED INTO the anti-slavery alliance. Thus, here is clear evidence that even when the South spoke explicitly about slavery, they also intended to include all those OTHER issues and causes that had become subsumed into the anti-slavery coalition.

Mississippi, though focused almost wholly on slavery, adds to the causes:

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

Texas concurs:

They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.

and adds:

They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens

More importantly, for both South Carolina's and Texas's documents, while primary underlying matter of the 'causus departi' is certainly slaves, the form of it is distinct: the North has violated the compact of the states:

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor 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 labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

That is to say, SC could no longer remain in compact with 14 states who refused even to comply with the mandates of their own agreement. While the subject about which they refused to comply was treating slaves as property, the form was repudiation of their own agreements.

Let us admit that for the South, slavery was on its own a sufficient cause of departure. Let us also allow, for the purposes of the argument, that the issues of tariffs and sectional advancements of partial interests was NOT, on its own, a sufficient cause of departure - though the Nullity crisis suggests it could have come close. Fair enough. Nothing in these two premises can lead to the conclusion that the latter issue was not one of the causes of secession, that it was not one of the reasons held and adduced as to why secession was the pathway chosen. For it manifestly was - it's in their own documents.

there STILL remains a real disagreement as to the nature of the underlying compact that has not been resolved by any reasoned argument that is clearly for the Union's stance and clearly logical.

On this matter, maybe it is useful to pose the question this way:

Had there been a proposed Amendment to the Constitution, an 11th item in the Bill of Rights, which "clarified" the 9th and 10th Amendments so as to make clear that secession was categorically and forever to be defined as treason, and that the President would retain the authority to raise the militias of some States to make war on seceding States, and to conscript men into the national Army for the same purpose, with a footnote (to satisfy the Al's of the world) that the officer corps of the seceding army could be summarily massacred in the event of its defeat at arms, is there even the smallest probability that the Constitution would have been ratified, that the United States would even have come to exist in the form that it did?

I think the question practically answers itself.

Well put, Sage.

I agree that the acts of secession don't speak to the causes much, if at all. Therefore we must look to their actual list of grievances. That's what I've done. I admitted to only looking at two -- South Carolina and Texas -- but those were sufficiently damning that even if others had more reasons, I can say with confidence that large swaths of the Confederacy only seceded because of their desire to maintain the peculiar institution.

Your first quote, from the State of Missouri, dates from October 31, 1861. To give you a sense of how late this was, here are some of the events that happened before that date:
The firing on Fort Sumpter (4/12/1861), President Lincoln's call for a militia of 75,000 men (4/15), the occupation of Arlington Heights (5/24), the first clash of Union and Confederate forces (6/3), the secession of West Virginia from Virginia (6/20), the Battle of Bull Run (7/21), the Battle of Wilson's Creek in Missouri (8/10), and the battle for Lexington, Missouri, which was taken by the Confederates (9/20). So, yes, by that time there was already hostility between Missouri and the Union. What your quote describes is the grievances of a state already at war, nothing more.

I can't find a list of reasons for Missouri to secede -- the whole set of circumstances seems to be in question to this day -- but it's instructive to look at Georgia's use of Missouri in its declaration of causes:

In 1820 the North demanded that the State of Missouri should not be admitted into the Union unless she first prohibited slavery within her limits by her constitution. After a bitter and protracted struggle the North was defeated in her special object, but her policy and position led to the adoption of a section in the law for the admission of Missouri, prohibiting slavery in all that portion of the territory acquired from France lying North of 36 [degrees] 30 [minutes] north latitude and outside of Missouri. The venerable Madison at the time of its adoption declared it unconstitutional. Mr. Jefferson condemned the restriction and foresaw its consequences and predicted that it would result in the dissolution of the Union. His prediction is now history. The North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future time. It was the announcement of her purpose to appropriate to herself all the public domain then owned and thereafter to be acquired by the United States. The claim itself was less arrogant and insulting than the reason with which she supported it. That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity. This particular question, in connection with a series of questions affecting the same subject, was finally disposed of by the defeat of prohibitory legislation.

All slavery, all the time.

I read up on "the protection... of our people upon an exposed frontier", and it's Texas complaining that the Federal government wouldn't pay to protect Texans from Mexicans. I doubt, however, that any self-respecting Southerner would make it a point of Southern pride that they were asking the Feds for help against the Mexicans. Either way, it's pretty clear that this wasn't a new situation, and was insufficient to bring about secession.

It does help demonstrate my point, though: You would expect people who are taking such a significant step to throw the kitchen sink into their list of grievances. Yet the declarations of causes that I've read are all slavery, all the time.

I'll give you Georgia. It appears that slavery was the only stated issue to large swaths of the South, but Georgia has additional issues.

Your quote from Mississippi does not "add to" the causes of secession when it says, "It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system." Those grievances are precisely on the subject of slavery. That's how they talked about what slaveholding meant to them.

The quotes from Texas can be considered ambiguous if you like, but my understanding of the history is that these complaints were directed toward efforts to repatriate slaves or to rescue slaves from slavery. Note, for instance, that the full context of your "murdered unoffending citizens" is unambiguously about abolitionists:

They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.

I fully agree that the secession occurred because of a violation of the compact of the states, and that based on this violation of compact the secession was a logical repercussion. This the set of principles and repercussions I mentioned previously. But it's also quite clear that the specific grievance that the Southerners cited as a violation of the compact, was that anti-slave states weren't upholding parts of the compact related to slavery.

I disagree with this:

Nothing in these two premises can lead to the conclusion that the latter issue was not one of the causes of secession, that it was not one of the reasons held and adduced as to why secession was the pathway chosen. For it manifestly was - it's in their own documents.

...because a flag is an official symbol, and the official reasons for secession in their own documents were all slavery-related, with the exception of Georgia.

I have great sympathy for those who want to stand by that symbol. I argued in its favor in the original post. But I see now that I was, objectively, wrong about what that symbol means. The people who think otherwise are like those in India who think there's nothing wrong with Hitler ice cream.

"There is no way to get to the 'treason' result except by accepting one side's claim and rejecting the other side's claim about the matter - which is JUST WHAT THE BASIC ARGUMENT IS ABOUT."

Exactly. If, as James McPherson says, the war would resolve "whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government," then any accusations of treason could only have been applied in an ex post facto, and thus invalid, manner. You can't very well criminally condemn someone for a act committed in 1861 if it couldn't have even been a crime until 1865.

NM, if the Union was indivisible it was so from the beginning. Succeeding in a criminal enterprise through force of arms doesn't change its inherent criminality. It's understandable that upon failure one would assert that there was initially a lack of clarity in the matter as a defense but that defense should fail.

The consequences of our failure to properly punish the perpetrators of that criminal enterprise are still with us. The latest major example was the failure to deal with the sedition and insurrection in the Bundy ranch standoff.
That could have been decisively settled, with no risk to law enforcement, with an A-10 but the Obama Administration lost its nerve.

With his last comment, Al demonstrates his complete lack of ability to understand the Founders' mindset, much less the history of America's first century.

Understatement of the year, Jake. I almost wish Obama had tried to order an air strike on an American farming family over a minor land dispute. We wouldn't have to deal with his kind in the White House again for a generation.

If, as James McPherson says, the war would resolve "whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government," then any accusations of treason could only have been applied in an ex post facto, and thus invalid, manner.

First and most importantly, welcome back Nice Marmot, you have been absent too long. Second, maybe choosing the name "United States of America" was supposed to be a hint about their intentions. Third, by the time that they had decided the Articles of Confederation, originally titled Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union - which is also referenced in the Preamble of the Constitution as "to form a more perfect union", were not working for anyone it was clear that a sovereign national government was necessary.

Is it just because they were wascally slave owners?

Sure, slavery was a cartoon fun-time institution. Having all of your labor stolen, being subjected to countless public and private humiliations and beatings, and then possibly seeing your wife and children sold to somebody hundreds of miles away reeks of hilarity.

were not working for anyone it was clear that a sovereign national government was necessary.

Step2, thank you for introducing the critical issue. You happen to get it wrong, I believe, but let's see if I can make the case.

South Carolina sets out a very well-stated preliminary to what happened leading to the institution of a new federal government with a new constitution in 1789. In my estimation they get it exactly right, at least with respect to this much: in 1776 when the Declaration was signed, and in 1783 when George the III signed a peace treaty, and in 1789 before 9 states elected to ratify the Constitution and join the stated union, each entity was a free and sovereign country. Each one had complete freedom to enter into treaties or not, and to end those treaties. This is particularly apparent as when in 1790 and 1791, before the last 4 former colonies voted to join the union, they operated as free and independent sovereign countries and the other entities treated them that way.

When the Constitution was proposed, and the ratified by a sufficiency of states to put it in force, those countries did indeed hand over sovereignty to the federal union - with respect to some matters. Not whole and entire. Not utterly and absolutely. This is the absolute crux of the matter: the United States was a new experiment, that of creating a larger political entity from a set of smaller, where the new union received sovereignty by free grant of the smaller, but soreignty only within prescribed limits. The experiment was that of shared sovereignty. The smaller not only retained their pre-existing political identity intact, but retained sovereignty with regard to all those things that were not part of the prescribed and enumerated powers and rights handed over. Since a sovereign political entity which has full sovereignty has what is called "plenary" authority, that is, general, unconstrained (by law, that is), undefined (as yet) powers, to the extent that plenary authority subsists in only the states or only in the federal union, it must subsist in the states - which is what the 10th amendment makes clear. And this is what South Carolina is arguing. The federal union's powers are prescribed by compact, the states' powers are general, they include "all those other powers" of a state, including any powers discovered in the future if there should be any.

Now, man is a social animal, and "the state" is in some measure a natural being: man cannot live without society, nor without rules, so there must needs be some authority to prescribe rules and to put down refusal to obey those rules. Some political theorists suppose that given that there will be a public authority, there must needs be something at the top, something which lays claim to "sovereignty" and "plenary" authority - whether it be a duchy, a principate, kingdom, a "state" under an oligarchy or aristocracy or a democratic republic government. What is NOT necessary is that there be a system of shared sovereignty. This can only be understood to be a creature of man's ingenuity, made out of natural goods, need, and social effort to achieve the common good along one elected pathway.

So even if "the state" as a generic concept is in some measure a "natural" being, natural to mankind under his social nature, the system of shared sovereignty that is the state-federal compact of the US is NOT a natural thing but a man-made thing. Since it is also a thing made by agreement among many, by words and intentions (rather than made in a factory or a farmer's field out of physical stuff), it is the subject of the words by which it is expressed, the words that the many diverse parties agreed to. Unlike marriage, which is a natural being to which we can consent or not, but which we cannot simply choose to make into something else (such as, for example, a 3-hour agreement between a man and and football stadium corporation that he shall have free access during the 3 hours), the kind of compact that creates our dual-layer federal- state system is, precisely, the creature of men's minds in putting forth the words that express the compact. There is no underlying "nature" of the being that we either successfully express or fail to express. (The only caveat I would put there is that, to the extent that some parts are apparently contrary to some other part, the words must be interpreted as well as possible to resolve the apparent contradiction because we assume that the compact was not meant to fall of its own words.)

And, as Sage points, out, the lack of freedom to exit the union once joined was neither part of the words expressed, nor implicit in them, nor what the makers of the Constitution meant underneath it all, nor would it have been agreed if some of them had tried to put those words in. The power to leave was, on the part of many of the parties, explicitly endorsed. In the case of Texas, the power to leave was explicitly included in their enactment of choosing to join the US, and so at least for that state it is impossible to argue that when the Union received them it received them as an unconditionally perpetual member.

Each one had complete freedom to enter into treaties or not, and to end those treaties. This is particularly apparent as when in 1790 and 1791, before the last 4 former colonies voted to join the union, they operated as free and independent sovereign countries and the other entities treated them that way.

Sure. You know how many foreign countries recognized the Confederate States as a free and independent country? Zero, despite all the assertions made that other countries were beholden to King Cotton.

And, as Sage points, out, the lack of freedom to exit the union once joined was neither part of the words expressed, nor implicit in them, nor what the makers of the Constitution meant underneath it all, nor would it have been agreed if some of them had tried to put those words in. The power to leave was, on the part of many of the parties, explicitly endorsed

We used to have a historian with the screen name Perseus who commented here. IIRC, he claimed one of the writers of The Federalist Papers, whomever it was that took the pro-state's rights side, was quoted saying that dissolution by a state or block of states was illegitimate, once the Constitution was ratified it was perpetually binding, although presumably a majority or supermajority of the states could enact such a dissolution and then each state would return to its sovereign status.

In the case of Texas, the power to leave was explicitly included in their enactment of choosing to join the US, and so at least for that state it is impossible to argue that when the Union received them it received them as an unconditionally perpetual member.

So what you are saying is that they have always been this ornery, color me surprised.

It seems to me that the language of the Declaration of Independence makes the language of the various Declarations of Causes completely appropriate. Look elsewhere for treason.

Jake:

You have always been uncommonly willing to examine your own premises. I appreciate your writing for this reason among others. Therefore, may I challenge you with a hard question?

Is it your premise that slavery is wrong in principle? If not, then is there an alternate premise you can illuminate? If so, then does the premise underlie your arguments today?

Please note that I did not ask whether you wished that the United States still had the institution of slavery, whether you would like to own a slave, or whether you would like to be a slave. I assume that your answers to those questions would be the same as mine: no, no and no. But there are other points to consider, as St. Paul once observed.

Edward Gibbon is perhaps no friend of this blog, but is still a great mind this blog is likely treat with respect. Gibbon wrote much incidentally of slavery. He also had somewhat to say about blacks, though nothing to say, as far as I recall, about black slavery. Gibbon would surely find this week's American civic discussion surrounding the battle flag bizarre. If so, would Gibbon be wrong? If he would not be wrong, then who is wrong? Could it be the U.S. consensus in 2015 on blacks, segregation and slavery that is wrong? If not, why not?

I am familiar with the content of Confederate V.P. Alexander Stephens' 1861 Cornerstone Speech. Perhaps you are, too. It is a political speech presumably appropriate to its time and place, neither a particularly good nor an especially bad speech, but a consequential speech, a speech in which one can discern maybe what Stephens' 1861 Southern audience wanted to hear. I am loth to judge matters Stephens and his audience knew far more intimately than you or I, as presented in a speech the consequences of which so many of Stephens' free fellow citizens would soon so freely spend their lives to uphold.

A too-lengthy digression is unfortunately necessary. Lydia, who is not of my acquaintance (or she would never have said with respect to me things she has said), has expressed a mistaken suspicion in the past that I had hinted at dark points without clearly stating them, so let me state this clearly: I do not in general like my black fellow citizens very much. I tend not to enjoy their company. I find their average (I said "average," not "typical": please do not misread) level of barbarity depressing and dangerous. I feel little obligation to put up with American blacks as a people when they are behaving badly. I resent the necessity to deal with, or route around, overpromoted, incompetent, occasionally hostile blacks in bureaucracies of all kinds. I believe that Stephens' Cornerstone Speech is not wholly devoid of good sense. I do not believe that "miscegenation" is a dirty word, but a good word that (when used in connection with whites and blacks) properly describes a risky, usually foolish act. I admire Jared Taylor, Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Markus Willinger, Charles Murray and Richard Spencer. If you are able to read this paragraph straight, without reading into it things it does not say or imply (such as that I wished that blacks would disappear; that I thought blacks unworthy of life, liberty or property; that I would disown a child of mine who married a black, etc.), then you are more rational in the matter than are most of our fellow white U.S. citizens in 2015. I pay you the compliment of suspecting that you are able to do this. This is not a compliment I would pay many Web writers of your good caliber. I do not think it quite fair that Lydia should challenge me in this particular way, but in any event, she may be satisfied that my cards are on the table, so to speak. I do not hint.

At any rate, is it your premise that slavery is wrong in principle? Do you believe that St. Paul would have concurred in your premise, either way? Have you aught to say of Stephens, one way or the other? And how does all this interrelate (if at all) with the point of your present article and the Confederate battle flag?

That could have been decisively settled, with no risk to law enforcement, with an A-10 but the Obama Administration lost its nerve.

And precisely what makes you think the military would have obeyed that order?

I think the Catechism says it pretty well:

The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason - selfish or ideological, commercial, or totalitarian - lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit. St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, . . . both in the flesh and in the Lord."

I have heard of a theory where, when two countries were at war, the victor could legitimately enslave the loser if the only alternative was to kill them all. The theory is that this form of enslavement doesn't treat them like merchandise, and is preferable to a massacre with respect to personal dignity. They are not reduced to productive value or to a source of profit. This form of servitude may not be "slavery" in the sense normally described, and may be compatible with the above Catholic teaching.

That's of little import, though, since this theory has nothing to do with the way blacks were enslaved by various American states prior to 1865. I do believe that that form of slavery was wrong, period, and yes, that underlies my arguments in this thread. Not only is it something one shouldn't be proud of, it's something that one should be ashamed of.

Segregation is different. People tend to self-segregate, and I see nothing wrong with that. State enablement of segregation is a somewhat delicate matter, as would be state enforcement of segregation, but if black people want to hang out mostly with blacks and whites with whites -- and Asians with Asians, and Irish with Irish, and so on -- I have no problem with that. I'd like to think that even the most insular of people are capable of enjoying the company of other races sometimes, since different groups all are children of God, and all have something to offer each other.

Whether you personally like having blacks (or Asians or Irish or anything else) around you is not my issue; to the extent that "black" represents a part of American culture rather than a race, I don't see anything objectionable about saying you prefer hanging out with whites vs. hanging out with blacks. Certainly, many blacks seem to prefer the company of other blacks to the company of whites. "Black" and "white" lacks nuance, though: From what I've seen, there are strong differences between various parts of black culture, and I like some more than others. I like ragtime and some R&B quite a bit, but not rap, for instance. But this appreciation for subcultures is also true of white culture, Asian culture, Jewish culture, and so on. Thus I don't really think that looking at preferences in terms of race, as some monolith, is generally helpful. People are people, mostly.

The Cornerstone speech is wrong-headed with respect to race. Even if we agree that different races have different talents and different challenges, saying that one is superior to the other strikes me as pretty foolish. For example, while some white people like to point out the problems that seem to afflict blacks more than whites, they rarely note the problems that afflict whites more than blacks. If you look at us, though -- I assume you're white -- you see that we're the race that tends to overthink things, that trusts in systems rather than in people, that trusts their own arguments more than tradition, and that is currently destroying a perfectly reasonable country that had amazing resources and a brilliant start. (Don't tell me that blacks are destroying it -- the stalwarts of the destructive powers are white, upper-middle-class professionals.) Different races have different strengths and weaknesses, but each member of each race is a child of God and is not innately inferior to any other person, and each race and type of person within each race has its value.

This may be more or less than you want to hear. Now, having heard my opinions, what are yours on the topics you've raised?

The experiment was that of shared sovereignty
That sovereignty could be shared is a conceit on par with declaring pi to be 3.

The smaller not only retained their pre-existing political identity intact, but retained sovereignty with regard to all those things that were not part of the prescribed and enumerated powers and rights handed over

This is what European Union is. The smaller entities continue to be sovereign and may exit by their own will. If they are indeed prevented from leaving, it will show that they were wrong about being sovereign.

But clearly, the American system was never like this. The We the People makes it clear that it was the people of America as a whole that were sovereign. This is also the interpretation that is offered at Claremont Review of Books.,

I did some digging and found the comment from Perseus:

Then conservatives have virtually no Founding Father from which to draw inspiration since it is, as Madison put it, a "colossal heresy" to believe that an individual state has the right to secede:

The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. And certainly there is nothing in the Virginia resolutions of — 98, adverse to this principle, which is that of common sense and common justice. The fallacy which draws a different conclusion from them lies in confounding a single party, with the parties to the Constitutional compact of the United States.

My gloss on Madison as being pro-state's rights was simply a mistaken memory, although he may have had some inclinations in that direction due to his close friendship with Jefferson he is best characterized as a strong nationalist.

In that same thread Perseus also included a relevant quote from Washington:

The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations...your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other. These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire.

Step2,

a "colossal heresy" to believe that an individual state has the right to secede

I think the founders would take a dim view of the idea that a state can just secede whenever and where it pleases. That would include the South's session which was primarily to protect slavery and only secondarily about the tariff. However, one need only read the list of reasons they seceded from the British Empire and compare that to what the federal government does today to see that they would very likely support a state seceding from the union in protest over how the federal government behaves today.

Some of the powers that the federal government claims are much worse than what the British government ever claimed, let alone did. For example, I can't remember the King ever claiming the authority to detain indefinitely without trial.

Jake,

With his last comment, Al demonstrates his complete lack of ability to understand the Founders' mindset, much less the history of America's first century.

Bear in mind that Al believes that the majority, if not entirety, of the Confederate Army should have been exterminated by firing squad upon defeat. He regards the refusal to at least massacre the entire officer corps as almost a sin of the Lincoln and Johnson administrations for which we are still paying today. He doesn't just fail to understand the founders, but the military culture of the United States and probably most of the West by such statements. It doesn't even seem to occur to him that if Grant had been given an order to shoot Lee in the back after the surrender, Grant very well might have marched his forces on DC and shot Lincoln for such a dishonorable order.

Gen. Grant was personally mortified by the fact that he had dust on his uniform from his ride to accept Gen. Lee's surrender. He was concerned that Lee would take it as a personal slight to the dignity owed to a defeated man at arms and one who, according to the Union's entire theory for war, was still an American. The idea that Grant would have overseen his execution and the slaughter of all his officers is so deranged it bespeaks not just bloodthirsty hatred, but a Visigoth's appreciation for the peculiarities of Western martial virtue. As MikeT says, he'd have been just as likely to turn his bayonet on Lincoln as obey such an order.

It's almost, but not quite, as crazy as insisting that President Obama suffered a "loss of nerve" by not strafing the Bundy ranch with 30-mm anti-personnel rounds. Or maybe he has in mind a stand-off engagement with AGM ATS munitions. Boy, would I would love to be in the room if he were to be given the opportunity to press this case to the President personally. "Call in the army and kill them all, sir. Put Brian Williams on the scene to narrate this glorious victory for a cheering American public. The right-wing crazies will overreach like they always do and you'll be a hero! It's fool proof!"

Step2, you quote someone as saying,

The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it.

It was precisely this compact that South Carolina cites in its Causes. Surely, if some states don't abide by the compact, it's not South Carolina that is making an error by breaking away, but the other states by breaking the compact.

The South Carolinian logic is essentially the same as "When, in the course of human events..." and would be easily recognized as legitimate by the Founders, I would think, whether they agreed with slavery or not.

The problem isn't with the logic of their secession, but with the fact that slavery-related offenses are the only specific reasons they give.

Thanks, MikeT. I didn't realize that. I tend to skip Al's comments, honestly, except when he's on one of my threads. If I want to read nonsense, I've got Dr. Seuss handy.

By the way, when I said his "last comment", I meant the entire thing, and not just the hyperbole (which apparently isn't hyperbole, in his mind) about the ranch.

It's sad commentary that we have ample evidence that Obama is a wiser and more ethical leader than Al would be in the same position. I would give Al about two years into his first term before he would either have this country in a state of civil war or go down as the first president executed by order of the Joint Chiefs.

The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it.

Step2, this is a curious pair of sentences. The first point that comes to mind is that in the first clause of the second sentence, the clear implication is that THEY COULD break off from the bargain by mutual agreement. That is, if neither party had a right to terminate the contractual agreement unilaterally, they could do it jointly. If, for example, Alaska were to come forward today and say "we are tired of being a 5th wheel politically and geographically, we are not contiguous with the rest of America, we are socially very distinct, we have needs that are not being met and we have no prospect of their being met while we are bound to the lower 48, we need to go it alone", and then submitted to Congress to be severed, it is certainly the case that jointly Alaska and Congress have the AUTHORITY to sever the ties by mutual edicts.

The second point is more obscure, but even more interesting: The second clause of that sentence is, like the first, negative in form: that there is no reason to think that one party has a "right to break away" STRONGER than the rest have a "right to force them to stay". This negative does not logically imply anything about the positive assertion that there is, actually, a GREATER right of the rest to force them to stay. In fact, the nature of the rights involved, suggest (to me, at least) that a presumption that the rest have a right to force a state to stay in the union would be equally odd. Analogy: a mutual compact between a man and a woman to form a marriage is a binding compact that neither can break unilaterally (and should be treated so in law, even if some states have deranged laws that upset this). But that does not of itself imply that if one party, say the husband, chooses (against justice) to depart the union and act as if no longer a member of the union, the woman has the natural RIGHT, herself, to use force to force him back and force him to remain in union with her in common life. She does have the right to ask the state for proper remedy to his wrongful unilateral action, which does imply that the state could use force on the husband, but that state is a higher authority over each of the parties to the compact.

In a situation where there is not, and CANNOT BE an independent higher authority over both of the parties to a political agreement, such as 2 sovereign countries' agreement to a treaty, it is is necessarily the case that nobody "above" them can as of natural right use force to force one of them to abide by the treaty. And so if there is a right to use force, it is a right in one of the two parties themselves. And since each are equal mutual parties to the compact, there cannot be (apart from the reality of which one actually is being more just in actual fact, which is exactly the issue at dispute) MORE legal right on one side than the other to use force, unless somehow there is fundamentally more authority on one side than the other. And (a) while there is certainly more authority in the federal union about SOME things that there is in the states, it cannot be so about ALL things - this is the consequence of the 10th amendment and the location of plenary authority. (It cannot be so, for example, about whether a new amendment approved by the states shall take effect and modify former parts of the Constitution: the federal authority has no capacity to OBJECT to a new amendment.) The matter of whether the federal union is living up to the conditions of the original compact by which a state ceded some of its sovereignty to the federal would naturally seem to be at least in some sense in the latter category, not the former.

(b) Again, while there is some sense in which the federal sovereignty is the pre-eminent - for example, with respect to foreign treaties - there are other respects in which the states' sovereignty is pre-eminent, for the states' sovereignty is the origin from which is derived the federal. Hence, about some matters, particularly those having to do with the source and nature of the compact a state made in order to join, it is at the very least odd and apparently viciously circular to say that the federal union naturally has a right of force over the other parties even to the extent of determining that the state shall remain in union against its will. (Whence has the federal that power? From the state's grant of authority...even when the state ceases to grant that authority? The vicious circle is obvious.)

The nature of such a compact is itself interesting: in the initial instance, the compact is between individual states as free sovereign countries. After the compact is in force, a NEW PARTY to the compact exists, the federal union. Once it exists, then, there is a party which has interests in the compact, a party to it which did not even exist (and so its interests did not exist) before the compact was made. It (the federal entity) cannot, then, have fundamental interests in the compact that are absolutely separable from those interests as found in the primary parties, the states. There is a sense, however, in which each state in the compact remains equal party with each other state in forming the compact, in making the compact a reality, which cannot be eradicated merely because the federal entity arises as a new entity. Thus we see the distinction between temporal priority and logical priority. The states remain ongoing sovereign political realities from which the federal entity draws its being - the federal entity is a derivative being of its very nature, and it REMAINS derivative throughout its existence. It's very being as a party to compact is as a creature of the consent of the primary parties. It would, then be nonsensical to say that the federal entity, as a "party" to the compact, would have rights that supercede the rights of all other parties and would have the right and duty to enforce the ongoing union even if ALL of the states wished, individually, that the union would cease to exist. The federal union as a party to the compact remains a party derivatively through the logically prior existence and consent of the PRIMARY parties to the compact.

Jake, let me address the question of displaying the flag in a more general sense, given that you've changed your position on it.

I yield to none in my essentialism regarding symbols. I'm the sort of person who gets a little agitated when popular culture portrays dragons as cute and cuddly, because I don't think dragons can be made cute and cuddly. I argue that Islam is essentially violent for historical reasons.

So I definitely understand the essentialist position and the way that that might relate the Confederate flag and the founding documents of the Confederacy. And certainly slavery was essentially important to the decision to secede. Those who think otherwise are misguided.

However, since the flag is a human symbol, it is not clear to me why it could not symbolize *in some contexts* and *for some people* the good in the south which you also acknowledge. And for that reason, I do not think it would be wise to get involved in piling on in the demand for it not to be flown.

It seems to me that a relevant point here is that some who fought for the Confederacy (Lee comes to mind) would have had the choice of fighting _for_ their states or fighting _against_ them. I doubt that the union would have permitted neutrality. This was part of the tragedy of the War Between the States. Hence there is no doubt in my mind that a love of home and region and of the good in that home and region was part of what was symbolized by the decision to fight in many cases, and a very painful and serious decision it was.

One problem with stating that the Confederate flag must not be flown is the question of why this should not metastasize to tearing down all monuments that honor the Confederate leaders or dead. This would be completely contrary to Lincoln's own vision of "malice towards none." Lincoln recognized the difficulty in healing the wounds of the war. His vision could not have been farther from Al's, for example, and the entire idea of reincorporating these states into the Union afterwards carried with it the implication that they would not be required to vilify those who had led them.

I saw a comment on Facebook, from a young black man, that summed it up. Paraphrasing more or less: "why the heck are we even talking about a damn flag? It's not a flag that's running around shooting unarmed black people. Every minute we waste talking about a damn flag is another minute we aren't talking about issues like police brutality that actually kill unarmed blacks."

Or unarmed anybody, including white, yellows, reds, and blacks who happen to get in the way.

Very good point Mike. That hatred of blacks is a definite and terrible evil of its own, and when it issues forth in murder we need to address those acts as evil, heinous crimes. Criminalizing speech that is inherently ambiguous as if it were unambiguously hate speech is just a poor way to deal with it.

I don't, myself, revere the flag in question, and I would not (if I were an official in charge of selecting flags to fly on a pole) choose it if I had a choice. But flying the flag is not murdering people, and it isn't tantamount to calling for murder.

"The federal union as a party to the compact remains a party derivatively through the logically prior existence and consent of the PRIMARY parties to the compact."

I agree, but there is school of thought (seemingly alluded to above by Bedarz) that argues something along the lines that the union's sovereignty is prior to that of the several states in that it derives directly from "We the People," before the entering into the contract by the states.

Opponents of this view argue against it based on the fact that the "people" were not free-floating individuals, so to speak, but were already bona fide citizens of their respective states.

I confess to not having read a whole lot on this subject, but based on what I have read the latter idea makes more sense.

NM, I think that Madison directly argues against, and refutes, that "We the People" notion in Federalist 39.

On examining the first relation, it appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a national, but a federal act.

I think that my earlier point, that the states of Virginia, Delaware, etc, for some 2 years after 1789, continued to operate and act as independent sovereign countries, also speaks against it. They were far outweighed in numbers by the number of people who had by then already voted to institute the Union, but that general majority had no force in the 4 states that had not yet voted to join.

This is also a critical point for anti-secession claims. Many say that the very nature of the compact was both absolutely perpetual, and of such a nature that once a state joined it lost its capacity to reconsider (and even lost its sovereignty, as Bedarz suggests). What Madison says is exactly opposite: the federal entity does NOT swallow up the states.

If you make a cake by combining flour, eggs, sugar, butter, etc into one bowl, mix, and then bake, the unity you get of "cake" cannot be then assigned into "Parts" of flour, egg, sugar - neither by geographic sections of the cake, nor by flavor, nor by ideological assignments. The cake is cake through and through (until you separate it at the elemental level, in which case it no longer remains cake at all).

This is NOTHING LIKE the union made by the states, which while joined remain fundamentally real political units whose powers are not given to it by the union, but exist prior to and without the consent of that union. They are not combined into the union the way France's Departments are simply regional sections of the national government - or the way county governments are subdivisions of the state allocated regional powers. The nature of the states is PRIOR to that of the federal.

"Many say that the very nature of the compact was both absolutely perpetual, and of such a nature that once a state joined it lost its capacity to reconsider"

I believe that this partly comes from a misunderstaning of what "in perpetuity" meant in legal terms at the time of the founding. It did not imply "forever and ever, amen" but instead referred to an agreement that did not have a specified end date. It did not preclude the ending of the agreement at a later date if the parties agreed on it, or if the contract was breached, etc.

"This would be completely contrary to Lincoln's own vision of "malice towards none." Lincoln recognized the difficulty in healing the wounds of the war. His vision could not have been farther from Al's, for example..."

I am sure Lincoln's vision didn't include Johnson becoming president in 1865. We can't know what would have happened had Lincoln remained president until 1868 including what course his party would have taken with him at the helm anymore then we can know what the result of my just and modest proposals would have been. What we do know is that the Civil War didn't end in 1865, it just continued in different modes - Lost Cause/Birth of a Nation/Gone with the Wind on one front and a century of terror for millions of freedmen and their descendents as well as the brutal murder of thousands on another. Meanwhile his party abandoned Reconstruction (which we now realize should have lasted far longer, perhaps into the 20th century) and became the party of plutocracy.

"With his last comment, Al demonstrates his complete lack of ability to understand the Founders' mindset, much less the history of America's first century."

The Lost Cause strikes again. The "Founders" didn't have a mindset they had mindsets and the whole notion of intent is intellectually bankrupt anyway. As the war with its over 600,000 casualties didn't settle things, I don't understand the resistance to my suggestion that trying at most a thousand or so of the folks responsible for the war for treason. Trials do sometimes clarify and settle things.

"Understatement of the year, Jake. I almost wish Obama had tried to order an air strike on an American farming family over a minor land dispute. We wouldn't have to deal with his kind in the White House again for a generation."

Spoken like a Easterner. Bundy is a rancher not a sod buster. He is also a scofflaw, thief, and grifter who grazes his cattle on land not his own and expects to pocket the profit. The yahoos who flocked to his aid were well armed and had taken up advantageous positions around the area (as well as setting up roadblocks and harassing the area's residents, a couple of them later murdered a couple of cops and a civilian in Las Vegas). This was insurrection and sedition pure and simple and it needed to be answered. An A-10 occurred to me as there is nothing the insurgents had that could dent the beast and a demonstration run with a couple of taps on the GAU would have likely concentrated the minds of the insurgents and hence no causalities. On the other hand, using standard SWAT tactics (better suited for urban areas not the wide open spaces) would have resulted in harm on both sides.

I do find it interesting that folks horrified by spontaneous action by certain urbanites, usually provoked by excessive police force, are so outraged and horrified by a suggestion that the best way to deal with open, organized, and armed insurrection by a group of white guys is with overwhelming force designed to minimize causalities. And you wonder why we would have been well advised to counter the Lost Cause early and vigorously.

BTW: Treason is a charge and charges result in trials in which folks are found to be either innocent or guilty. I see that Paul's canard has legs (Mike seems to have expanded it) so just to clarify - in no way have I ever suggested that summary executions were to be carried out. If you all think about it for a moment the Katyn Forest reference says much about Paul's thoughts on the Confederacy and nothing about my just and very modest proposal.

BTW2: Only two individuals (Ferguson and Wirz) were tried and executed for war crimes. Meanwhile Negro soldiers and their white officers were sometimes summarily executed and civilian Negros in Union territory were seized and sent into slavery. I fail to see any difference between that and the actions of Japanese and German forces some of whose officers were executed for the same practices. Again, we know what the result of "malice towards none" was - a century and counting of insurrection, terror, and murder. A full exposition of events through trials and perhaps appropriate executions would have provided a useful counter to the Lost Cause BS and perhaps nipped it in the bud. I believe it would have been worth a shot, your mileage might vary.

BTW3: If I seem a bit harsh towards the insurgent types it's because we have to live with them out here. How crazy do you have to be to turn a simple building code issue into a capital crime? Every once in a while one of these nuts goes completely off the rails. Recently one of them murdered his family and took off into the wilderness. The resulting man hunt was very expensive. (a hiker found the remains as he seems to have done us taxpayers a favor and killed himself). Trying to deal with them like they are normal can be hazardous to your health.

However, one need only read the list of reasons they seceded from the British Empire and compare that to what the federal government does today to see that they would very likely support a state seceding from the union in protest over how the federal government behaves today.

Many of them would be disappointed that we became an empire in all but name, but not all of them.

Surely, if some states don't abide by the compact, it's not South Carolina that is making an error by breaking away, but the other states by breaking the compact.

That is what the federal Constitutional government was created for after the disaster of the Articles of Confederation, to reconcile disputes between the states and to do so it has to have the authority to choose sides. If one state doesn't like the decision they don't get to say, "It better be done my way or else I'm outta here", not if the sovereign is to actually have any meaningful authority. If the subsidiary groups do have an innate nullification power over the sovereign you might as well support anarchy, because whenever a state, city, or school district decides to be intransigent they can just nullify any laws or decisions they don't want, and going by the example of the Confederacy they can secede simply because they expect a sovereign to make laws or decisions they don't want, and nobody can do anything about it. It isn't a mystery why the militia movement has its roots in this kind of "each particular community is it's own sovereign" ideology.

The South Carolinian logic is essentially the same as "When, in the course of human events..." and would be easily recognized as legitimate by the Founders, I would think, whether they agreed with slavery or not.

As MarcAnthony noted above, the Founders were a group of incredibly contentious people and it is a mistake to assume they held a monolithic view. Of what is often considered the key Founding Fathers (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington) only Thomas Jefferson would likely have recognized the decision to resort to secession as legitimate. Of the less influential Founding Fathers, Aaron Burr and Timothy Pickering would likely have been supportive, Patrick Henry waffled upon this question but may have supportive.

The first point that comes to mind is that in the first clause of the second sentence, the clear implication is that THEY COULD break off from the bargain by mutual agreement. That is, if neither party had a right to terminate the contractual agreement unilaterally, they could do it jointly.

Of course they have the right to do it jointly.

In a situation where there is not, and CANNOT BE an independent higher authority over both of the parties to a political agreement, such as 2 sovereign countries' agreement to a treaty, it is is necessarily the case that nobody "above" them can as of natural right use force to force one of them to abide by the treaty.

News Flash: The Constitution is not a treaty. I repeat, not a treaty.

The states remain ongoing sovereign political realities from which the federal entity draws its being - the federal entity is a derivative being of its very nature, and it REMAINS derivative throughout its existence. It's very being as a party to compact is as a creature of the consent of the primary parties.

To borrow your rather strange analogy of a marriage, you could say the federal government is the 'derivative' adult child of a consenting union between a man and woman. I'll also suggest the man and woman are not married to one another, they only had...congress. So the adult child wants his parents to be kind to one another but they like to quarrel and he is always arbitrating their disputes.

I shouldn't have to write this but I will for the record. Al's retributive proposals are obscenely violent and in how they would be applied are thoroughly unjust.

Of course they have the right to do it jointly.

According to some, this is in doubt.

To borrow your rather strange analogy of a marriage, you could say the federal government is the 'derivative' adult child of a consenting union between a man and woman. I'll also suggest the man and woman are not married to one another, they only had...congress. So the adult child wants his parents to be kind to one another but they like to quarrel and he is always arbitrating their disputes.

Step2, your "borrowing" (read: complete deformation) of my analogy is inapt. If the states have the right to dissolve the union at mutual agreement, then the union DOES NOT have an existence independent of the states, unlike the child of parents. If a couple have a child (whether out of wedlock as you say or not), that child continues to exist as an entity even if they cease to want him to exist. This is unlike the federal union.

The federal entity has no completely separate existence apart from the mutual consent of states. It is not a "natural" being, like a human being or a tree that continues to exist after its parents die. It is a derivative being all along.

News Flash: The Constitution is not a treaty. I repeat, not a treaty.

Clarification: I don't consider it to be a treaty, and don't treat it as one. If it were a treaty, there would be NO DOUBT that the parties could leave, and I would not have bothered with the arguments I gave. The reason I gave more involved arguments is because I recognize that the mutual consent to the Constitution is not a treaty.

Nor is the Constitution a dissolution of the political sovereignty of the states whole and entire. They remain real things within the union, with real powers that are not the subject of the Constitution.

This is why I say that what we have is a cross-breed entity, a new situation: sovereignty that subsists across 2 parties.

This is also why I insist the US remains an important example to the world: it is the leading exemplar of the principle of subsidiarity above the level of city government. In order to have true subsidiarity in the political order, the higher level MUST HAVE powers to tell the lower what to do, but at the same time the higher must have limits beyond which it cannot command. In a viable political arrangement, this will obtain only if they each have rights and powers that the other cannot encroach upon - which means shared sovereignty.

I do find it interesting that folks horrified by spontaneous action by certain urbanites, usually provoked by excessive police force, are so outraged and horrified by a suggestion that the best way to deal with open, organized, and armed insurrection by a group of white guys is with overwhelming force designed to minimize causalities. And you wonder why we would have been well advised to counter the Lost Cause early and vigorously.

If the rioters had specifically targeted the police and court system, while sparing their community elsewhere, the average conservative would have sympathized with them. I don't know many conservatives who are particularly fond of big city government, as they're notorious for their "Singapore minus the whole clean city, safe streets and robust economy" thing.

Jake writes:

This may be more or less than you want to hear.

Not at all. I wanted to hear what you had to say. That is why I asked.

Now, having heard my opinions, what are yours on the topics you've raised?

I do not know. Long miseducated, persistently misled in such matters, how am I now to discern the truth of them? How many among us are immune to the cumulative, degenerative effect of pervasive misinformation and lies? I certainly am not.

Regarding matters of race, slavery, segregation and such, I have reached this strange, ignorant state in which I am prepared to entertain almost any anti-postmodern suggestion or conjecture which seems, maybe, to ring true. The only thing I will not believe is whatever propaganda is printed in my children's public-school history books.

For two years when I was about five years old, my parents lived in and managed an apartment complex in which most of the tenants were black. The memory is not a happy one. I served with some pretty decent blacks (and some pretty decent whites) in the U.S. Army 25 years ago, which was all right. Yet I can see the Knockout Game and the Baltimore riots on TV, which do make one wonder whether Stephens, 1861, did not have a point.

Also, I have this quaint, pre-postmodern idea that when mine and theirs conflict, loyalty generally obtains. I'm for mine.

I think the Catechism says it pretty well:

I did not know that the Catechism said that. Since I have never yet found a single sentence with which to quibble in the Catechism, I certainly will not quibble with the passage you quote! I thank you for the lesson.

I have heard of a theory where, when two countries were at war, the victor could legitimately enslave the loser if the only alternative was to kill them all.

Yes. From reading Gibbon, this is more or less what I had in mind.

sovereignty that subsists across 2 parties.
which as a man-made thing, bears exactly the relation to sovereignty that same-sex marriage, a man-made thing, bears to true marriage.
This conceit of shared sovereignty only leads to nonsensical sentences like:
while there is some sense in which the federal sovereignty is the pre-eminent - for example, with respect to foreign treaties - there are other respects in which the states' sovereignty is pre-eminent,

Going by the meaning of sovereignty, the idea that federal (or state) sovereignty is not per-eminent in a certain area, this idea is meaningless.
A sovereign is one who is per-eminent in all temporal affairs, simply. So, one who is not per-eminent in any thing over some territory, that one is not sovereign, simply and plainly.

Sovereignty is a matter of fact. Over some territory, who is the per-eminent entity at a given time. It is not a matter of law, of legal definitions, of treaties but purely a matter of fact.
Even if the states were sovereign (or believed themselves to be sovereign) in 1861, they were not by 1865.

When any or all of a state's law can be abrogated by the Supreme Court of USA and a state has no control whatsoever over its borders, neither over external immigration nor over internal migration, then in what sense a state is sovereign?
And the said conditions obtained almost since very beginning of the USA, it makes it very hard to see what sovereignty the states had even in 1861.

Going by the meaning of sovereignty, the idea that federal (or state) sovereignty is not per-eminent in a certain area, this idea is meaningless. A sovereign is one who is per-eminent in all temporal affairs, simply. So, one who is not per-eminent in any thing over some territory, that one is not sovereign, simply and plainly.

Interesting way to put it: "in all temporal affairs". For some 3000 years, the ruler usually held "sovereignty over BOTH temporal and religious affairs. The king was also the chief priest - unless, of course, the king was himself raised to deity or practically so. Which applied in, let's see: Egypt, Rome, Persia, Inca, ... It was, mainly, with the coming of Christianity that we happened upon a division of the two "powers", and said that "the state" only has authority over temporal matters.

So, development can happen.

When any or all of a state's law can be abrogated by the Supreme Court of USA and a state has no control whatsoever over its borders, neither over external immigration nor over internal migration, then in what sense a state is sovereign?

When the states can band together and modify the federal union's powers by prescribing a limit, to that extent the states have authority OVER the federal. By stating limits to the federal power, and by specifying a mechanism in which the states can alter the federal government, the Constitution shares sovereignty between the parties.

Sovereignty is a matter of fact. Over some territory, who is the per-eminent entity at a given time. It is not a matter of law, of legal definitions, of treaties but purely a matter of fact. Even if the states were sovereign (or believed themselves to be sovereign) in 1861, they were not by 1865.

Bedarz, you are confusing the actual exercise of power with the proper authority to exercise power. It is often the case that some political power makes demands (and backs up those demands with threats of force) that are outside its due authority. Tyrants and conquerors do this all the time. If actual POWER EXERCISED is what you are holding up, then "legitimate authority" is in your mind a mere pair of words signifying nothing at all. For you, might makes "right", but of course in that sense "right" only means "we will obey you to the extent we fear being caught and punished." We reject that, because we insist that some men have a legitimate right to command, and this right both obligates the subject of it, and always rests within limits not of the human authority's own choosing.

To the extent the states have "lost" the powers properly delineated by the Constitution due to the war and its progenty, just to that extent Lincoln and the aftermath of the war were destructive of the original compact, and were so in the nature of a tyrant arrogating to himself powers he had no legitimate claim to. Since in nearly all cases this destruction resides first in men's opinions about the governments at issue, and only after that in men's actions upholding those opinions, the correction is to educate men properly about the true order.

Al, I see as many flight suits in a day as neckties, and I can confidently say that your proposal is delusional. The A-10 doesn't do elegant. It's for killing tanks and annihilating dug-in infantry positions by reducing their inhabitants to ravioli. It's the deadliest close air support craft in the American arsenal. You don't brandish a platform like that to "focus the mind," and certainly not if you want to calm the situation down or win the support of the American public (whom you scarcely seem to understand regardless of the era in question), but I think it's safe to say that personal animus and Tarantino-esque historical vengeance fantasies have as much to do with your suggestion as any real desire to defuse the confrontation. Again, there's always the question of whether an Army pilot would obey an order to open fire on American civilians on the ground, even armed ones, and I more than half suspect if he were to refuse such an order, you'd be calling for his execution for treason also. Anyway, your blithe assumption that it would not have brought down the Obama presidency to give such an order is actually sort of cute. In a way, you have a lower opinion of Obama's good sense than I do.

I do find it interesting that folks horrified by spontaneous action by certain urbanites, usually provoked by excessive police force, are so outraged and horrified by a suggestion that the best way to deal with open, organized, and armed insurrection by a group of white guys is with overwhelming force designed to minimize causalities. And you wonder why we would have been well advised to counter the Lost Cause early and vigorously.

As supposed gotchas go, this is pretty infuriating. Your delicate use of "spontaneous action" is just a circumlocution for "rioting, general mayhem, looting, and murder," which you immediately adorn with an exculpatory reference to excessive police force (which is one way of referring to accusations of such force, which are often highly questionable, and are often provably false, and wouldn't come close to justifying violent crimes against the innocent in any event). This contrasts with your very direct and insistent use of the word "insurrection," full stop, to describe the behavior of Bundy and Company. (Apparently, "certain urbanites" never go "off the rails" and commit violent crimes, so we Easterners just can't comprehend the psychological toll of living among such people.) Charges of hypocrisy on this subject--and veiled charges of racist motives, at that--are just too much coming from you.

You may find it interesting that people are horrified by vague references to using A-10's on American civilians, but you shouldn't. Retroactively hedging it all about with the claim that, "Aw shucks, I was really talking about 'focusing the mind' and 'minimizing casualties,'" then accusing people of responding with horror to those things, suggests to me you're not advancing it in good faith anyway.

On the general strategic principle, there's really no good reason to assume that bringing down the executioner's axe, extra-judicially or not, will always send people scurrying and "send a message" that once and for all will kill off an insurrectionary movement. There's just not a lot of historical writ for that. The British have long since admitted amongst themselves that executing the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising--some of them on the spot, and others after formal proceedings--was a catastrophic error that did nothing helpful over the longer run. A million Irish rebel songs contain references to it, including what is arguably the most famous, "Come Out, Ye Black and Tans":

Come let us hear you tell,
How you slandered great Parnell,
When you thought us well and truly persecuted.
Where are the sneers and jeers,
That you loudly let us hear,
When our leaders of Sixteen were executed?

You don't merely offer executions as right and just under the circumstances, you offer it as a panacea. That sort of claim seems like it would require quite a lot of evidence and argument to support it, especially given how tenacious the romanticism of overmatched rebel movements tends to be, in America no less than in Ireland or in Armenia.

Tony writes:

The nature of the states is PRIOR to that of the federal.

This is a fine Thomism, well and cogently put.

To illuminate the Federalist Papers in typically Catholic language is novel, though. Such language is usually heard in the mouths of the altar-and-throne conservatives of the Old World, not from American patriots!

Madison would probably not have chosen Tony's words, but maybe he should have done. If he had, it might have saved some later trouble.

Step2, your "borrowing" (read: complete deformation) of my analogy is inapt.

Like I said, it was a strange analogy to begin with. Why should I grant that states are the "real, independent" political actors and not instead a 'derivative' of its towns and cities or the actual citizens themselves? The right of a state to guide and direct the lives and fortunes of its citizens is no more grounded in something real than that of the nation-state.

If the states have the right to dissolve the union at mutual agreement, then the union DOES NOT have an existence independent of the states, unlike the child of parents. If a couple have a child (whether out of wedlock as you say or not), that child continues to exist as an entity even if they cease to want him to exist.

Are you trying to make a claim that all the instruments of federal governance and power will just disappear if the federal government were to be disbanded? Those instruments would no longer have any jurisdiction, similar to the way an adult could be disowned and excommunicated by both his parents, but to claim for example the US military or the federal prison system has no existence of its own is the worst kind of denial.

This is why I say that what we have is a cross-breed entity, a new situation: sovereignty that subsists across 2 parties.

A cross-breed entity is the same as saying the parties produced a child, so it can't be a completely deformed version of your analogy when you are using the same language.

Golly, all this upset over a couple of thought experiments. I was merely observing that what was done didn't work out so well and maybe something else would have worked out better. I noted that we used overwhelming force in a couple of 18th century insurrections and tried some of the participants for treason (a few were convicted and later pardoned - for the record, it wouldn't break my heart had the traitors who prosecuted the Civil War been pardoned as it is possible that a trial and conviction alone would have had an effect on the Lost Cause mythology). Perhaps a more vigorous prosecution of Reconstruction with passage of laws like H. R. 20 that Thaddeus Stevens advocated would have been sufficient. Anyway, what happened was the Lost Cause, a century of terror and oppression for millions, and thousands of murders. That doesn't trouble you at all? Was what happened the best we could do?

Yes Sage, I consider scores of heavily armed folks converging in order to prevent Federal and local law enforcement from carrying out a court order against an individual who had repeatedly violated laws and regulations that others seem to have no problem obeying insurrection and sedition pure and simple. There was no level of police misconduct involved. No cop got rattled and forgot his training.

Once again, we seem to always get this wrong. Ruby Ridge was entrapment followed by the murder of two innocent people and a dog. Waco was a total screw up once again involving innocents. There were no innocents here - armed folks flocked to the desert, set up defensive positions and harassed locals with road blocks. I don't believe that the government surrender sets a good precedent - letting the terrorists win and all that (note that since then we have had two more incidents of armed insurgents facing off against the BLM). Your apparent sympathy with the terrorists (as well as their existence) is likely driven by the just so stories about the South that prevailed after our failure to resolve matters after the CW.

What got me thinking about this was interviews with a sheriff's deputy and an insurgent leader who kicked off the site the two who later murdered three people in Las Vegas. The deputy said he and his fellows were really afraid that the matter was going to end in serious bloodshed. The leader seemed to be not unreasonable in his own way.

It seemed likely to me that if there were two real crazies that were discovered there might well be at least one other - all it takes is one pull of a trigger and everyone starts shooting which is what the deputy seemed to be fearing. This seemed to preclude a ground assault. Tanks and APCs have crews and really can tear things up. I also assumed that the insurgents would have had at least one .50 cal. weapon which would have made a helicopter a problem. An F - 15 or 16 is too fast and did seem like overkill. That left the lowly Warthog. It seemed to me that one pilot in one invulnerable vehicle would be less likely to lead to an over-reaction then a ground assault involving many people and/or armored vehicles roving around.

My sense is that the leader in the interview wished to live and would have done the right thing. If you all have a better solution then surrendering to the insurgents on one hand and doing the SWAT thing on the other, please share.

Sigh! Here I am trying to minimize the damage and getting no love. I really fail in see the obscenity in forthrightly confronting difficult matters.

Your apparent sympathy with the terrorists (as well as their existence) is likely driven by the just so stories about the South that prevailed after our failure to resolve matters after the CW.

I have no "sympathy" for the Bundys who, as far as I'm aware, had no real legal case to begin with. My comments have exactly jack-all to do with just-so stories about the Civil War.

As it happens, there wasn't a bunch of bloodshed, and the BLM isn't in the slightest danger of being overthrown or otherwise having any substantial amount of land taken away from it, so I'm just not all that worked up about it and I doubt very seriously that the "insurgent" problem in America would be helped by calling in air strikes.

Sage, as I pointed out there have already been two other face-offs and I fear it is only a matter of time before someone starts shooting. There are important resource management issues at stake here and continued intimidation could have very real impacts. The scope of this is what bothers me. Previously there were local confrontations that were usually resolved peacefully with give and take on both sides. What we have now is an organized group (Oathkeepers) that descends on an area to which they have no interests beyond a general anti-government agenda.

I do hope you are right.

The many Confederate officers who broke their oaths to defend the United States were certainly traitors. Even if South Carolina had the right to secede, it did not have the right to unilaterally abrogate the oath of a South Carolinian to the United States.

Al,

What you fail to note is that Bundy was as irrelevant to that confrontation as Brown was to why Ferguson exploded. Both the white militia and black rioters share one thing in common. They were fed up and something became a rallying point. It didn't need to be rational. In neither case was it rational. Bundy and Brown were both completely unsympathetic rallying points when examined objectively; there are plenty of white land owners and businessmen getting their rights stomped on by aggressive bureaucrats, just as there are many black men who really did basically nothing to deserve getting gunned down by the police with no accountability. Doesn't matter. The fact is the pattern of abuse of sufficiently expansive that at those times, people just decided to throw down with the government.

I don't know what your experience with veterans and people currently serving is. Mine is that most of them believe that the government has grown very antagonistic toward the public and doubly so toward veterans. Ordering servicemen to fire on such people would likely not have the reaction you are expecting. It would very likely go sideways. You could easily find that A-10 pilot actually turning his weapons on the law enforcement officers at that point. In fact, you could even find it leading to a general mutiny of the armed forces against civilian command since a localized showdown is not a general insurrection and does not merit the activation of federal war powers. In fact, it's not even obvious to me that it would be legal for Obama to give such an order under Posse Comitatus Act since the use of air power against American targets on American soil is a very extreme case likely well outside the War on Drugs/post-9/11 changes.

Jordan S., the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were also seen as traitors. If they were traitors at all -- a dubious proposition -- they were traitors in the best American tradition.

Like I said, it was a strange analogy to begin with. Why should I grant that states are the "real, independent" political actors and not instead a 'derivative' of its towns and cities or the actual citizens themselves? The right of a state to guide and direct the lives and fortunes of its citizens is no more grounded in something real than that of the nation-state.

It was "strange" only because you didn't understand it. The analogy was with reference ONLY to the capacity between parties to enforce their rights (under the compact) on the other. The same relation holds between 2 corporations that make an agreement to do something.

Why should you grant that states are "real" instead of a 'derivative" of its towns or citizens? Step2, the question makes no sense.

ALL legitimate political entities are derivative beings. They are REAL beings. That is to say, they are real beings whose reality derives from something else that is still more real. They are not physical substances, nor are they animals or plants whose reality is of substantial subsistence: animals and plants are things independent of outside actors' minds, for example. They do not rest on mental conformance for their reality.

Other real things do rest on mental acts for their being: a corporation is essentially an agreement among a group of people to operate a certain way in congruence with a set of rules (i.e. words) understood in mental acts. A corporation is not a physical substance, it is not a substantial subsistence, it does not exist apart from the minds of the men and women who hear and agree to the words that express its conceptual meaning. To suggest that a corporation is not "real" because it does not have substantial subsistence like an animal or a human is to deny the reality of words, concepts, and agreements.

All political entities are, like corporations, entities of the mind: they arise as the ongoing conformity of men and women to a set of behavior, rules, customs etc. which are understood by human beings. One of the proofs of this is that a man living in a single place can be the subject of one state today, and then 10 years later the subject of another state which never existed before, (or may have existed before but was not the ruler of his location before, as the people of Danzig found rotating their state from Prussia to Germany to Poland to Germany to Poland).

This doesn't mean that a state is "not real", of course it is real. The fact that its reality derives from something even more real is the point.

In the case of the United States, the states were ALREADY EXISTING derivative realities rooted in the human beings who had given rise to those states. Along came the 1787 convention, and in 2 years a NEW entity arose, out of an additional layer of derivation from the people operating under the communal (derivative) reality of statehood, so that the states themselves were parties to the compact out of which arose the union.

So, saying that the federal union is no more a derivative thing than the states is TRUE but not informative, since all political entities are derivative. The critical fact is that the federal union does not derive its reality solely from the people directly, but from the people acting as state communities.

Are you trying to make a claim that all the instruments of federal governance and power will just disappear if the federal government were to be disbanded? Those instruments would no longer have any jurisdiction, similar to the way an adult could be disowned and excommunicated by both his parents, but to claim for example the US military or the federal prison system has no existence of its own is the worst kind of denial.

Pay attention to your own words, Step2. Of course prisons have a substantial existence that is independent of any political order. They are not things of the mind, they are steel and concrete. But if you were to eradicate all the human beings from the universe, there is nothing that would make THIS prison to be part of a "system" with that prison over there, they would simply be utterly independent physical things. The only thing that unites them into a coordinated "thing" like a system is that they have been ordained so by human beings. Or, if you like: if you eliminated the federal union and went immediately to having 50 independent countries, the federal prison system would no longer be a system (no longer be a real thing), but each prison would quickly become part of the NY state prison system, the CA state prison system, etc. How can one and the same set of steel and concrete and razor wire be a "federal prison" one day and a "state prison" the next, unless its reality as being a part of a system is a reality based in the mental acts of the humans who use it? If the US ceased to be a political being, the army would cease to be the "US Army" but its physical materiel would become materiel of various other political entities.

Might I suggest that Step2 needs to read the Federalist Papers in order to gain a proper understanding of the original agreement the States signed onto - the relationship between the States as semi-sovereign political entities, and the national government (as a new creation of the States invested with limited powers) as its own semi-sovereign political entity - as envisioned by the framers when they wrote and agreed to it in the Constitutional Convention.

Besides, and as has already been pointed out, I think: "The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution *between the States so ratifying the same*. Done in Convention by the unanimous consent *of the States present*" is actually written in the Constitution (Article VII) itself, and that, among other reasons, is why you, Step2, ought to accept the relationship between the State and National authorities as it was originally agreed to. As Washington said in his famous "Farewell Speech?" "But the Constitution which exists at any time, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory on all." And by what means or instrument might the existing Constitution be changed by an *explicit and authentic act of the whole People*? Why that too was written into the Constitution in Article V; namely by the amendment process, which involves (or involved) The People *in their political capacities as the several States* - both methods. That is also covered in the Federalist.

Might I suggest that Step2 needs to read the Federalist Papers

In addition, one might read some of the actual debates in the Convention about matters state vs national to see how the result - the federal - was intended to thread a needle between state sovereignty and national sovereignty, intended to solve issues that seemed impossible to solve if one had full and complete sovereignty. And it is true that some of the actors, (like Bedarz here), thought that it is basically impossible that sovereignty can be shared. There might be some truth to that, but if so, then the truth is a truth that the Constitution was designed to test, to see if there CAN be a system of shared sovereignty. If there simply can't, then the experiment will of necessity fail - but you can't prove that the experiment must of necessity fail without actually trying the experiment. And the OBJECT of the experiment was, certainly, to see if we can create a system of shared sovereignty to serve as the structure of the polity. So, saying that the test must fail says nothing against the claim that the design was intended to make trial of the idea.

To suggest that a corporation is not "real" because it does not have substantial subsistence like an animal or a human is to deny the reality of words, concepts, and agreements.

That is interesting because I do deny the reality of propaganda, exploitation, and legalized corruption that is embodied by corporations.

If the US ceased to be a political being, the army would cease to be the "US Army" but its physical materiel would become materiel of various other political entities.

The US military would change its name and curtail many of its operations, but it would only be broken apart and control handed to the states if every member of the Joint Chiefs is insane. The federal prisons would have the opposite problem; no state will want to take over their responsibilities and will have no legal or economic reason to do so.

…is why you, Step2, ought to accept the relationship between the State and National authorities as it was originally agreed to.

Because a mostly agrarian community that had just won its independence and was highly distrustful of centralized government fully understood the challenges of a modern industrial world power during the nuclear age? I think not. On the other hand you, Terry, ought to accept that I will always disrespect your Confederate flag.

"...fully understood the challenges of a modern industrial world power during the nuclear age."

I thought the discussion was about the causes of secession prior to the Civil War. 1860-1865 was not the nuclear age. And it isn't *my* Confederate flag. I don't fly the Confederate flag; I've never flown the Confederate flag. I don't think I know anyone who owns a Confederate flag.

I don't think I know anyone who owns a Confederate flag.

I don't either, and I live in the South. I see people flying it, but I don't know any of them.

Me: To suggest that a corporation is not "real" because it does not have substantial subsistence like an animal or a human is to deny the reality of words, concepts, and agreements.

Step2: That is interesting because I do deny the reality of propaganda, exploitation, and legalized corruption that is embodied by corporations.

Oh, you mean you deny that there really is propaganda, exploitation, and corruption by corporations? OK.

Seriously, come on, you know that's just carping at instantiations of problems found in some such entities. Many non-profit corporations, including the little town Jaycees' tuition assistance program etc., don't engage in propaganda, exploitation, and corruption. And many small for-profit corporations don't either. And it doesn't take an officially corporate formulation to have this derived existence through agreement by word and in the understanding: partnerships, trusts, and even sole proprietorship companies have real existence in this way without incorporation. The reality of the entity itself isn't belied by the fact that some (even many) such institutions do evil things, and pointing out those evils does not amount to an argument that their reality is in doubt, only whether they should be real.

Even a friendship is a reality that exists not as of the physical world but derived from the real persons who have that friendship.

I don't get the point. Of course corporations are real. The issue is should they have the political rights of natural persons. For one thing this, in reality, allows the handful of natural persons who actually control very large corporations to have the equivalent power of millions of natural persons. They not only have their own very substantial purses but the treasuries of those corporations as well as the coercive power they hold over their employees.

"... I see people flying it, but I don't know any of them."

Perhaps you should make the effort; it would likely blow your mind and shake your oh so strong priors.

"In addition, one might read some of the actual debates in the Convention about matters state vs national to see how the result..."

We might also reflect on the actual situations. None of the colonies were independent nations in any real sense. They went from Crown colonies or proprietorships (I believe a couple, not southern, were self governing but they were still British) to asserted free and independent states, doing so as the "united colonies. Following the Continental Congresses we had the Articles (made problematic by the states pretending nationhood) followed by Constitution of 1787.They went from the Articles of Association asserting grievances as loyal British subjects through independence and the Articles to the Constitution seeking to act in concert. Texas was the only state was was actually an independent nation and that for only nine years. California was a republic for a few months. The other states were created went from territories to states with never having been independent.

That the results of fifty independent nations hasn't been seriously considered is demonstrated by the examples given and omitted. Forget the Joint Chiefs for a moment and tell me how it works out having several small, relatively poor nuclear powers added to the world's roster? And what does having all that hardare do to their budgets? Federal prisons? A trifle. What about Social Security, Medicare, and apportioning the national debt. Oh, and money. A dollar union without fiscal association? Welcome to the new Euro zone. One state could make it as a nation with a good shot at a northern European standard of living and governance and I live there; good luck to the rest of you.

Tony, the assumption that your theory of state sovereignty would be definitional is touching. Have you never heard of the county movement? Making a state truly independent would be throwing red meat to those folks.

The issue is should they have the political rights of natural persons.

Nope, that has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. It is mere red herring and obfuscation.

We might also reflect on the actual situations. None of the colonies were independent nations in any real sense. They went from Crown colonies...

I was speaking "de jure" and you are speaking "de facto". I will admit that in a de facto sense they were not completely independent - and this is a very large part of why they found the interim period unsettled: they were already far down the road to being one nation while being de jure separate countries, and that legal status did not sit well with the real situation of interrelations among the peoples and institutions. De jure, though, the evidence is quite clear. For example, George III in treaty recognized entities (plural), not one.

In saying that they went from Crown colonies to "to asserted free and independent states, doing so as the 'united colonies,' " I believe that you ignore important facets of BOTH concrete facts on the ground and the de jure situation. One of the important facts is that in origin the political entities that became MA, CT, NY, MD, etc were ENTIRELY independent beings. Not only were they entirely independent of each other (CT was started by men choosing to not be tied to MA, also they were in very significant ways independent of England as well. For the first 50 years Europeans were in the areas of what became the first 13 states, the dependence of these communities on the crown and on England de facto was virtually nil, and de jure was largely nil for many of the colonies. They made their own rules without reference to England - and without reference to their neighbor colonies. They made agreements with local Indian tribes without reference to England. They defended themselves without reference to England. When England (such as with CT) decided to take note of these new entities and impose a governor, it was a different governor for each colony, none answerable to one of their number other but answering directly to the crown. And it was that very imposition, in which the crown attempted to exercise control over the colonies without having the actual capacity to manage them (many governors "ruled" from England, and sometimes simply through the efforts of the president of a colony's council), (nor did Parliament have the capacity to appropriately rule over Englishmen in the colonies with a single set of laws applicable to both England and America, and a double set of laws decided from England without American representation would have been incoherent at best and anti-English tyranny anyway) that let eventually to the Revolution.

It should not surprise us that there was a transition period in which the actual reality on the ground consisted of a somewhat imperfectly clear condition, neither being utterly independent in every sense, nor being utterly united in every sense. From the French and Indian War to 1789, there was a heightened sense of the united purpose and need of their neighbor colonies, but there was at first no de jure organ to meet that need in America, and from 1774 onwards there was a de facto organ but its exact meaning and role was itself in transition, from 1774 to 1776 as delegates from separate colonies to a body with no official powers to rule at all, from 1776 to 1778 as delegates to a united Congress of separate independent entities, from 1778 to 1788 as members of a Congress of a Confederacy of at least partially independent entities.

In any case, the government actually operating - Congress - starting in March 1789 did not consider or treat the 2 remaining non-ratifying colonies as subject to their laws.

Tony,
There is no development of doctrine. Politics is solely concerned with temporal matters.

The political theory of the revolution whereby a community pretending to sovereignty derives its moral authority from itself--this theory is universal, is eternal and is true, as Belloc says.

It is misleading to speak of Federal Govt as possessing sovereignty. It is the USA that is sovereign (over its territory). So, in Texas, to take an example, it is either the people of Teaxs that hold Texas or the USA that holds it. Both can not simultaneously. It is a dangerous illusion to pretend otherwise and 1865 should have put paid to this kind of illusion.
But apparently, it has not.

Even in legal matters, it is best to have clear, undisputed titles. Joint properties only breed disputes.

1865 didn't settle anything, but rather changed the relationship between the union and its member states out of military necessity. The fact is that if the federal government had prosecuted the war like it did the War of 1812 or the Mexican-American war, it would likely have not had the men or the money to do it. The northern public simply did not care enough to volunteer a 2.8m army and all of that money on its own. The federal government had to grow and centralize out of necessity.

Mike T,
Now people talk of state rights, and not state sovereignty. For the sovereign does not need rights. but bestows them.

For once, I do hope some state attempt to assert sovereignty. I read that Texan governor has asserted that Texas is not bound by the SC decision. Now that would be a sovereign act and if he follows through, I would admit that the states or at least Texas is a sovereign entity.

the truth is a truth that the Constitution was designed to test,
Haven't the test results come out yet?
1865, 1954, 1973, and 2015.
USA reigns supreme over domestic matters, over definition of a person (1865, 1973), over definition of family and marriage (2015), over a hundred other humdrum things. Not just foreign treaties.

But I deny that it is an empirical truth. It is simply that both A and B can not be sovereign together over common territory as a matter of language and logic.

There is no development of doctrine. Politics is solely concerned with temporal matters.

Bedarz, you are very busy simply stating contradictions, without ever backing them up or trying to argue the issue with, you know, actual reasoning. If you can only spit out repeats of the same thesis without staking arguments to back it up, that's useless spittle.

Although there is no change in the truths that underlie political reality, there is indeed a change in how men in general understand the principles of political reality. For instance, long before the Greeks, when most social interaction was within the tribe or between tribes, there was very little if any concept of polity as such. It took the Greeks to discover the concept, but once it was discovered and disseminated with Greek learning, it gradually "caught on" more or less generally, and most of the world accepts the concept as valid.

Likewise, there was early on little explicit notion of any kind of legitimacy of power, there was simply power or the lack of power. Having the legitimacy to exercise power is a different concept than that of having power. "Might makes right" was widely held as an understanding of power, but...not so much any more, most people and most organized societies don't exactly agree that might makes right simply. Admittedly, it is still disputed - IN THEORY, at least, in academic circles. Rare indeed is the academic who claims might makes right who would not be upset at a mugger taking his wallet by might.

But I deny that it is an empirical truth. It is simply that both A and B can not be sovereign together over common territory as a matter of language and logic.

Let's be clear here: do you deny (A) That it is POSSIBLE for A and B to be sovereign together over common territory, or (B) that those who formed the US Constitution were attempting to design a system where A and B were sovereign over common territory.

I claim, at first instance, that the actual record of the debates in the Convention, and what those same people said of it after, establish (B) clearly.

If they were wrong that it is POSSIBLE, then their intention of trying to achieve it was of course doomed to fail. If so, then, we would have (B) be true while (A) is false.

But the fact of whether (A) is true cannot be established definitively by trying to achieve shared sovereignty and failing. If you have a scientific claim "It is possible to build a starship that will go faster than light", and test the claim by building a specific starship, the failure of that instance does not then prove "it is impossible". It only shows that THIS instance did not achieve it.

However, for 70 years before 1860, the constitutional order that was the United States was operating more or less successfully. That's a fairly long time for a brand new political order to survive, especially an experimental kind of order, if it is based on pure nonsense. To say "it foundered, and therefore it was doomed to fail from the beginning" is logically unsound. You can never prove that it would have foundered had not X persons tried Z instead of Y.

To be honest, I recognize the implicit weight of your position, Bedarz, that only one power can be sovereign over a territory: "Ultimate" capacity to say yea or nay must be, to be ultimate, in one power's hands. However, I believe that there are additional factors that make such a conclusion less than definitive: First, there is a fundamental logical distinction between power and authority. Second, if subsidiarity is a valid political principle, there must be a valid way for subsidiarity to be made effective in practice. Third (by way of historical rather than philosophical argument), men a long time ago thought that "ultimate" meant one SINGLE PERSON must be the ultimate arbiter, and therefore all true government must be a monarchy - but we no longer think this. If it is possible that the ultimate authority can be a governmental capacity to choose residing in the hands of many people _together_ rather than one single person, it is analogously possible the same kind of dispersion of power can be between 2 governments - especially two governments resting on the same people.

I admit that events of 1865, 1954, 1964, 1973, and 2015 have eroded the underlying structure of shared sovereignty greatly, perhaps even completely. But saying that it has happened isn't arguing that it could be no other way. Some people say that Lincoln "saved the union" at the expense of the Constitution. That is, he kept the matter of the body politic together (one people under one roof) , only by dint of changing the nature of the union itself from its former federality into a national union. He made fruit salad into a fruit smoothie. They are both made of fruit, but they are not the same thing.

And if it took many discrete events over the period from 1865 to 2015 to eradicate much of the shared arrangement, part by part, then in principle that course can be reversed by discrete events to re-establish the shared arrangement, part by part. However unlikely we estimate the chances.

Well, subsidiarity has never stopped a state from justly intervening in families if they turn dysfunctional. So, I see no reason why subsidiarity should require shared sovereignty.

Monarchy does not show otherwise. A monarch is always a monarch of some particular people. And it is the people that are sovereign. This is ably discussed by Belloc in The Political Theory of the Revolution.

Sovereignty is first a matter of psychology. If a people think of themselves as one, then they are one and they form a political community. This community may assert sovereignty as Americans did in 1776 or not as Jews did not for 2000 years. This assertion may be realized or may not be --as Tibetan assertion did not realize. The sovereignty is thus logically prior to laws --which exist fully within a sovereign realm only.

I refer to you the Claremont school:
"The founders understood the Constitution to be a compact of the American people acting within their states, not a compact of the states as independent peoples or political sovereigns. On behalf of limited self-government, it divided authority between the states and the national government, but it granted states no rights of nullification or secession and forbade them to make alliances without the consent of Congress. Asserting "state sovereignty" would denythe Constitution any authority at all".

However, my own position is once again
"Even if the states were sovereign in 1861, they were not so in 1865".

Hadley Arkes on enumerated rights:

The truth that dare not speaks its name then is this: there is no formula, no principle, nothing arising even out of the logic of the Constitution or the American regime that can furnish any hard limits that confine the federal government's reach or divide the local from the national jurisdiction. What is at work here are considerations of prudence, but considerations of prudence at a high level, which make the most profound difference for the kind of people we will be. What is at work is a kind of George Eliot perspective, mingled with Tocqueville: that it is good for people to take responsibility for things within their reach, rather than holding back and waiting for some more distant, central authority to take responsibility

Since there is no subject so prosaic that it cannot offer the occasion of harms or wrongs that involve a violation of the principles contained in the fundamental law of the Constitution.

But to say that we are governed finally by prudence is to say that we are guided by the principles that must ever govern our judgment about the ranking—of the things more or less important, more or less good—of those ends we are pursuing. The "limits" we keep referring to, in our talk about "limited" government, cannot ultimately be limits marked by subject matter, such as coinage or armed forces. They are, rather, moral limits. John Marshall, and Alexander Hamilton before him, fixed on that phrase "necessary and proper": were the means, or the powers, at hand necessary to ends that were legitimate, justified, rightful for the government to pursue?

two governments resting on the same people.

Same people, yes. But the people of a particular state are not the same people as people of the union as a whole.

Monarchy does not show otherwise. A monarch is always a monarch of some particular people. And it is the people that are sovereign. This is ably discussed by Belloc in The Political Theory of the Revolution.

Sovereignty is first a matter of psychology. If a people think of themselves as one, then they are one and they form a political community.

Oh, do stop equivocating. OF COURSE it is true that governments have sovereignty only insofar as they receive it from its original source. If, as modern political theory has it, the people are its original source, then pointing out that the people are sovereign before the monarch or aristocracy or republican government is sovereign is OK, but that doesn't set up opposition between the sovereignty of the people and that of the government.

Sovereignty is first a matter of psychology. If a people think of themselves as one, then they are one and they form a political community. This community may assert sovereignty as Americans did in 1776

The unity and integrity of a single people is a distinct thing from their sovereignty. The unity comes from their coalescing as having a life in common together, which usually requires (among other things) a common language and mostly common customs. This pre-condition of political order is indeed in part subjective: they cannot be "a people" effectively if they cannot perceive themselves as unified in some sense, but actually having unified customs is not subjective. If sovereignty arises from "the people" it does naturally require that "the people" have the unity of a one polity in order for it to be expressed into a government over them, so the unity is _logically_ prior to the sovereignty being formulated under one government. And, as with America in the 1700's, this unity can become true, rather than simply being true: it is capable of arising where before it did not exist.

"The founders understood the Constitution to be a compact of the American people acting within their states, not a compact of the states as independent peoples or political sovereigns.

This is simply a denial, a contradiction of what I pointed out from Federalist 39 above:

that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a national, but a federal act.

To CONTRADICT my point is not to argue the issue, it is only the START of an argument: "I deny that X is true, because..." So, either argue the case or stop quibbling.

In point of fact, the ratification wasn't merely IN each state, it was BY STATE: it required 9 of the STATES, not 9/13 of the population, for example. The requirement that the states hold special conventions for the explicit purpose instead of simply acting through their existing state legislatures was in order to get the affirmation of people more certainly than usual, because the act was more grave than usual, but people acting through a ratifying convention of the state is not LESS statish than people acting through the state legislature.

Tony, can you recommend any books or resources for further reading, please? Is there anything out there that can throw more light on the constitution (or political philosophy in general) in Thomistic terms as you've done here?

Thanks!

Rich, here are a few: St. Robert Bellarmine's _De Laicis_ (On Civil Government) is very important. I suspect that it is online in ebook form, but I have not looked for it recently.

St. Thomas's _On Kingship_ is also good. As is his treatise on law in the Summa Theologica, (Questions 90 through 108, in Prima Secundae, or "first part of the second part") although it can be tough reading if you are not used to his style.

_The Federalist Papers_ is worthwhile for us Americans, (especially ones like 10, 39, and 78) partly because it gets some things right, and more because it sets out the times and the thinking of the men responsible for forming and ratifying the Constitution. You have to read it critically and watch for Lockean and other errors, but it's still important.

John Henry Newman's _Letter to the Duke of Norfolk_ has some excellent and interesting points.

For more recent authors, I would recommend Richard Weaver's _Ideas Have Consequences_, though to be honest I have not read all of it.

And, to be a little not-so-modest, this discussion:

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2014/07/exceptional_america.html

Ah, thank you. Weaver's book is actually what got me started on the road from modernism. I have an elementary understanding of Thomistic metaphysics and natural law from Feser's blog and some other books since then. But I still just don't "think" that way yet, maybe because it's been too abstract for me. Hopefully reading some political treatments will help by giving me more analogies and practical application. Thanks again for your time.

That amendment or ratification process is by state has no bearing on the question whether the states possess sovereignty. Only if withholding of consent by a single state would terminate the process, would the states possess sovereignty, as it does in the European Union.

I am surprised that you still speaking of sovereignty of Govts. Aren't in America, the govts supposed to be our servants and hirelings. I believe you wrote something like this yourself.

I am surprised that you still speaking of sovereignty of Govts. Aren't in America, the govts supposed to be our servants and hirelings. I believe you wrote something like this yourself.

No. Wrong. "hirelings"? That's ridiculous.

You are surprised only because you are unable to properly read and follow what is being said. You attribute all sorts of nonsense to people here because you don't seem to be able to actually grasp what is being said. Stop putting words in our mouths.

"I assume you aren't making the point that slavery's rape and torture is preferable to the baser tendencies of unfettered Capital."

Al, surely you realize that the protestations against "wage slavery" weren't rooted in the defense of slavery. Granted, the pro-slavery faction capitalized on them, but "populist" attacks on unfettered capital, wage slavery, etc., had an origin and existence separate from that.

The upshot is that however disingenuous some of the pro-slavery attacks on Northern wage slavery may have been, they did have a point, and one that had been made by many non-slavers.

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