In a thread on Warner Todd Huston's Facebook I dared to challenge the conventional wisdom that Abraham Lincoln was a "great" president. I explained that I recognize Lincoln was in an unenviable position, with what he considered to be no good options. However, I also articulated that Lincoln was not an abolitionist, it was something that happened to him. He debated in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that the United States should "contain" slavery, and he even suggested at one point that if slaves were freed they should be deported. The context in his mind could have been a variety of explanations, from racism, to just trying to find a solution that would make everyone happy. Using the guise of war powers, he also trampled all over the constitution, leading over 600,000 lives to the slaughter with the American Civil War when the abolition of slavery was constitutionally on its way, State by State, behind a strong abolitionist movement in the South, and the reality that slavery was losing its economic viability.
Since I was not home when I made these assertions on Facebook, I was unable to properly source my findings, but off the top of my head, one of them I threw out was "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Mr. Huston explained to me that he believed DiLorenzo to be a hack writer, and worse - a liar.
As we began to escalate the conversation about Mr. DiLorenzo, Huston began to try to explain to me why DiLorenzo was such a bad source to be using, and in his soliloquy added that Thomas was also way off on his feelings that the union is voluntary. The States, according to Warner Todd Huston, cannot secede, and they are not able to leave the union. I challenged that statement, indicating that his assertion was not correct, and that the very fact that it was delegates from the States that created the Constitution, that makes the States the contract-makers, and it is hardly reasonable for those that make a contract to be unable to get out of that contract if they feel the other party has breached it.
Mr. Huston responded with the following:
As to his contention that everyone assumed that the Union was entirely voluntary it would have come as a surprise to James Madison who argued the exact opposite during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. In fact, Madison opposed Jefferson's wild notion that leaving the union was an obvious solution to any wrong perceived or real. (Jefferson is not to be trusted for steadfast proclamations or bedrock philosophy. His record is quite contradictory and his thoughts often meander from the well thought out to the fanciful. His contention that the laws of a nation should be thrown out every 17 years so that the contemporary society can make them anew with their own thoughts was just one example of how absurd his ideas were at times.)
On February 15th, 1830 Madison wrote to Nicholas Trist about the proceedings to create the Virginia Resolutions in 1798. They did not intend, he claimed, to "assert a right in the parties to the Constitution of the United States individually to annul within themselves acts of the Federal Government, or to withdraw from the Union". That was hardly a ringing endorsement of secession from the Father of the Constitution.
If the States are then "forced" to remain as a part of the union, how are they sovereign and autonomous? And does that not lend to the federal government a position of power that opens it up to tyranny?
Reading the Federalist Papers, and studying Madison's Notes on the federal convention of 1787, one realizes that not only was the union intended to be voluntary, but that the States were supposed to be the one's controlling the federal government, making sure it did not become tyrannical.
Or, as the Declaration of Independence says, it is a "right" to alter or abolish the government if necessary.
Finally, John Adams said it quite well in his letter to H. Niles in 1818: The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together — a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected.
Secession, or the ability to leave the union voluntarily, is as much the right of a State as is a person's right to leave a community if they desire to do so. The States are individual, autonomous, sovereign entities, which is a feature that makes America so exceptional. They are a part of the union voluntarily, and if they wish to voluntarily depart from the union, that is their choice - and a valuable tool for protecting themselves against a tyrannical federal government.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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