A reader named Kevin Carson writes, in response to my series of posts on secession and the Civil War,
Your bald assertions about secession and sovereignty are based on second- or third-hand historically illiterate arguments borrowed from Daniel Webster and Joseph Story.
Great way to start out an email you want taken seriously. It is of course up to readers to decide whether or not my views are “historically illiterate.” I can attest that, although a great admirer of Daniel Webster, I’ve read very little, if any Joseph Story. But my views on these matters come from reading the original sources.
That the Constitution was ratified by the people of the U.S. as a whole, and that states had no individual relationship to it, is refuted by no less an authority than the Constitution itself, in the ratification provisions of Article VII. As James Madison pointed out in the Federalist, no state became a member of the union until its own ratifying convention had voted to do so, regardless of how many other states joined. The Constitution specified that it would go into effect when nine members of the supposedly eternal former union had ratified it—but only between those states that had, individually, ratified it.
This is a recitation of what is probably the strongest argument that can be made to support the assertion that the Constitution is a league among essentially independent sovereignties. But still it fails. Certainly it’s true that the Constitution only bound the people of those states who ratified it, but that does not make the Constitution any less a Constitution, or make it a league among sovereignties. The Constitution was not approved by even a single state acting as a state government; it was approved by the people of the United States, as declared in its preamble, who acted in special ratifying conventions—not in state legislatures. The terms of any agreement might specify that certain procedural conditions must be satisfied before the whole agreement goes into effect—for example, people often make agreements that go into effect only when a certain number of other people sign on—but this does not change the character of the agreement, which is between the people, and not between the states in their corporate capacities. That is the crucial point; it marks the difference between a treaty or league on one hand, and a constitution or nation on the other.
The decision to ratify and join the union, Madison made absolutely clear, was a decision made only by the people of an individual state, and binding no one but themselves. North Carolina and Rhode Island both remained de jure independent sovereign states until well in Washington’s first term, before they decided—on their own authority—to join the union. That individual states came into the union only by their own internal votes, and not by a majority vote of the union as a whole—and that some individual states remained outside the union for some time after it was formed—is a rather inconvenient fact for you, Story, Webster, Lincoln et al to deal with, I’m afraid.
It’s not inconvenient in the slightest. It in no way undermines the conclusion that the Constitution derives its authority, and the federal government its sovereignty, from the whole people of the United States, rather than in a delegated way from the state sovereignties. John Marshall—who knew a thing or two about the Constitution—answered this argument this way:
This mode of proceeding was adopted; and by the convention, by congress, and by the state legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively and wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in convention. It is true, they assembled in their several states—and where else should they have assembled? No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the states, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the state governments.
The fact that the people of Rhode Island didn’t choose to join in the union known as the “people of the United States,” and that the federal union respected that fact, hardly proves that the Constitution is a treaty or anything.
Mr. Carson continues,
Interesting, also, that you denounce as “conspiracy theories” all suggestions, like those by Howard Zinn, that any government action might have “real” ulterior motives besides the stated idealistic justification of the actors.
I did not denounce all such suggestions. What I said was that there are two ways of looking at history: as basically about ideas, or as basically about interests. Those who seek to interpret it in the latter way typically portray ideas as really just camouflage for interests, or as devices used to accomplish or rationalize interests. This is often a successful and helpful way of looking at history. But it also has the same weakness as a conspiracy theory—it evades disprovability and allows a reader to attribute whatever motive he wants to the actors, while ignoring completely what the actors actually said or did on their own accord. (Howard Zinn was particularly a master of this; never letting any facts or reality get in the way of his absurd political ravings.) Certainly there are times when people have real ulterior motives that they disguise in idealistic rhetoric. But the opposite is also often the truth, and one must always take care when looking at historical events not to discard the idealistic rhetoric reflexively, and pat oneself on the back for ultra-sophistication on the grounds that one is much too clever to believe in ideals. Sometimes people’s motives are just what they say they are.
So I guess the GOP never adopted the corporate mercantilist economic policy of internal improvements, a high industrial tariff, and a national bank, as suggested by Lincoln’s "beau ideal of a statesman Henry Clay." I suppose all that stuff about the Gilded Age GOP and the government being bought out by railroads is just left-wing conspiracist raving. I suppose the Tonkin Gulf Incident was real, and anyone who suggests otherwise is in the same category as David Ickes and Lyndon LaRouche. I suppose Woodrow Wilson was right to lock up all those deluded conspiracists who said WWI was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
When did I ever say any of these things? But it is not necessary to believe that the Republican Party was the party of laissez-faire (as I noted, they were not) or any of these other irrelevancies, to believe that the American Civil War was, at bottom, about slavery; that the southern states had no legal right to secede, nor any legitimate claim to the right of revolution; that the Confederacy really did want to erect a basically totalitarian fascist slave state, and that the union’s victory and the ending of slavery were, with qualifications, essentially and wonderfully good things.
...If you think opposing Lincoln and the GOP makes Stromberg a sympathizer for the South Carolina fire-eaters, I’d call that an unwarranted inference. Haven’t you ever heard of the phrase “a pox on both their houses”?
If that were all that Stromberg did, that would be one thing. But Stromberg’s article goes far beyond that. It is a long piece—written, like your own email, as a string of non-sequiturs, and drawn almost entirely from secondary sources—and consists of almost nothing but baseless assertions (or spin) against the union—while very carefully ignoring the south’s acts or character. It is a very old propaganda technique to point accusatory fingers only at one side, while remaining silent about the other, so that one can pretend objectivity while really conveying a wildly inaccurate message. That’s what’s going on here. Stromberg wants to argue that the north was wrong in the Civil War, that the south had the right to secede, that slavery was—well, we should just ignore slavery, mostly—that the north was the aggressor, that Lincoln did all sorts of nasty things, and that everything wrong with the modern state is Lincoln’s fault.... He attempts this by disregarding the law, the facts, the philosophy, and, most of all, by trying to distract readers into forgetting who and what the enemy really was. Stromberg does not say a pox on both houses; he tries to cast a pox on one house, only one house, and that was the house that, whatever its real faults, stood for liberty and equality. Fortunately, he fails in that attempt.
...while I consider secession from the union as such to be legitimate, as a mirror image of the process of accession to it, I would reserve my own active sympathies for a secessionist movement in New England to avoid complicity with abominations as the Fugitive Slave Act.
Two points. First, secession is not a mirror image of accession, because accession included certain promises in favor of protecting the rights and interests of the whole people of the United States. To name only one example, upon entering the union, the people of a state promise to respect the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states; in exchange, the whole people of the United States promise to guarantee to that state a republican form of government. These promises cannot be simply undone, any more than a marriage can be simply undone. One can accomplish a divorce—through a forward-looking process of law—and a state can leave the union through a forward-looking process of law (that is, through constitutional amendment). But one cannot lawfully just ignore the fact that one is married, or accomplish a divorce through some magical formula that has no relation to the law, and one state cannot merely unilaterally leave the union by some process unknown to the Constitution. Incidentally, although New Englanders had no legal right to secede for any reason, I will agree that the Fugitive Slave Act would have given them much better grounds for revolution than the south ever had.
And the fact that there were sincere abolitionists in the GOP—radical Republican Altkaempfers from the New England and Burnt Out District of the 1830s and 1840s—doesn’t alter the fact that the party mainstream had been taken over by plutocratic interests seeking to promote a mercantilist industrial model. No more does the existence of figures like Roehm and the NSDAP left alter the nature of the deal between von Papen and the German industrialists in 1933.
So the Republican Party was basically like the Nazi party. I see. Mr. Carson doesn’t want us calling him a Lyndon La Rouche type, but isn’t doing a very good job of it….
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