Comments by "Patrick Cleburne" (@patrickcleburneuczjsxpmp9558) on "PragerU"
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@TheStapleGunKid "Likewise, it is equally clear that there is no constitutional right for states to form a new government, as this is prohibited by article I, which says "No state may enter into any alliance, treaty, or Confederation." It prohibits exactly what the Confederate states did in very specific terms."
Are your games really that childish and stupid that you're going to argue that the Confederate states didn't have a right to secede because they subsequently formed a confederation? Granted, that may be the best argument you've got, but can't you obfuscate any better than that?
"If you want to argue that the states did not comply with the articles of the Confederation when they ratified the constitution, that is an entirely separate issue that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I wasn't responding to anything the articles said, I was responding to your claim that 'it's also found in the constitution in article VII, in which the constitution asserts the right to establish a new government by and among a number of states'"
Let me ask you a question first: Would you say the Bill of Rights fundamentally changed the constitution or would you say the Bill of Rights was more of a clarification of what the legal principles of the constitution had been all along?
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@TheStapleGunKid "You said "the constitution asserts the right to establish a new government by and among a number of states," which is not only false, but in fact expressly prohibited."
The constitution established a new government by and among a number of states, and article 7 makes clear that the standard that the constitution invented for itself (9 of 13 states) with no basis in the pre-existing law (i.e. no basis in the Articles of Confederation) would have been sufficient. If the constitution wasn't asserting the right to establish a new government by and among a number of states, what's the alternative? That the founding fathers believed what they were doing was wrong and illegitimate? That's ridiculous, and there's obviously no historical evidence for your suggestion that the founding fathers believed what they were were doing was ultimately illegitimate, that they didn't have a right to do what they were doing, what we today would call a 9th amendment right.
"...but in fact expressly prohibited."
What the Confederate states did wasn't prohibited even to the extent that the Articles of Confederation prohibited what the founding fathers believed they had a right to do (which we know because they actually did it), a right that superseded any prohibitions. That the Confederate states were within their rights is even more clear than the case of the founding fathers, because unlike in the case of the founding fathers where the states didn't first secede (a right which isn't prohibited in the constitution to the states and was therefore, according to the 10th amendment, reserved by the states), the Confederate states first seceded before confederating (and whatever they did after seceding obviously isn't subject to regulation under the terms of government from which they seceded.) But even without seceding first, even while still parties to the Articles of Confederation which said, " No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them..." the founding fathers still claimed a right to establish a new government by and among a number of states.
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@TheStapleGunKid Call it revolution. Call it whatever you want. It's government deriving its authority by the consent of the governed.
But speaking of revolution, here's another abolitionist, Joshua Blanchard, speaking to the principle of revolution:
“But the rule of a majority of voters, of necessity led by a few influential persons, is but a disguised oligarchy... The only way, then, in which the principle of Revolution – the consent of the governed – can be truly accomplished, is, not by increasing the comparative number in majorities, but by exempting private individuals, as far as possible, from the power of the government... The appellations of 'rebellion,' and 'treason,' so profusely bestowed by Northern prints on this secession, are false, unjust, illiberal.”
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@TheStapleGunKid If you reject Jefferson's understanding of the constitution (which is an excellent summary of my own legal view), particularly as regards constitutional disputes -- and, of course, he was far from alone in the founding generation in expressing views contradictory of yours; in fact, there's no clear expression of views like yours from anyone in the founding generation (not that you've even presented any sort of coherent alternative) -- then present a coherent alternative (and answer my questions about the alternative you're suggesting.) If you can't even say what the alternative should be, then you have no ground from which to criticize Jefferson's view.
But, yes, it's also true that the seceding states had a natural (revolutionary) right to choose their own government, apart from all constitutional questions, so the North's justifications failed multiple times over.
As for the Hunter quote, like you he implies but doesn't say what's really the heart of the matter, probably because he understood it would be a lie to say it, namely the lie that the slavery was in any way at stake in the war. Lincoln and the Union officially denied any purpose of interfering with slavery in the slave states, so however hypocritical the slave states were -- for whatever it's worth, the Union was consistent in its opposition to freedom, denying freedom both to the South and to slaves in its own slave states -- slavery was no more at stake between the Union and Confederacy than it was between the 13 colonies and England. So, yes, the Confederacy was hyopcritical just like the 13 colonies had been hypocritical, but as the abolitionist George Bassett said, “Such is the deranged and distracted condition of the political elements of our country at the present time, that, while the South are bravely fighting the great battle of national liberty in the name of slavery, the North are maintaining the principles of oriental despotism in the name of Liberty!”
So not only did the North's justifications fail on natural rights and constitutional grounds, but they failed on moral grounds, too, i.e. they failed to take any moral high ground with regards to slavery.
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RonPaulHatesBlacks Plenty of Southerners, including the one Righteous Cause Myth propagandists like yourself most love to quote, argued that slavery would be more secure in the union than out of it. If there was some particular thing that the North had been threatening to do that would have adversely affected the fate of slavery that seceding offered any hope of preventing, you could name what that was. You can't name a single thing. The slavery-related constitutional rights that were prominent in the declarations of causes were over rights that clearly weren't at stake in the war, that seceding did nothing to remedy, but rather, as even Lincoln argued, would be totally lost if the southern states seceded.
And your username shows why you so hate the South, namely because the South stood for freedom. You are one of those "degraded slaves" that so fears his fellow slaves and so despises freedom that you'll tell any lie about your fellow slaves to try to suppress talk of freedom on the plantation. Tocqueville described you well when he said, "Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain [although in your case, you'd surely bow down before any kind of master.] By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience."
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@TheStapleGunKid One can be strongly pro-marriage and anti-divorce without believing that husbands should beat their wives into submission if they try to leave. Your interpretation of the Jefferson quotes you shared basically assumes there can be no such differencem, that strong feelings about the value of a union must mean unconditional submission. And, of course, you don't even try to reconcile the Jefferson quotes you shared with other things Jefferson said about secession (including the Declaration of Independence), because that would be as preposterous as your denial of the very definition of slavery. I could share the quotes I shared before again, but you had no argument last time, and I'm sure you'll just completely ignore them this time, too. (If anyone else reading this is curious about other things Jefferson said relating to slavery, please ask.) No one holds your position while seriously confronting the evidence against your position.
One question on your red herring, though. When Jefferson says, "When any one state in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they have bound themselves..." do you interpret that to mean that states are bound not by their own continuing choice (only so long as they continue to freely choose to bind themselves, to consent in the present) to be part of the union but by a previous choice which they and all future generations have no right to rescind?
But your distortion of Jefferson's views on secession are just another red herring, because the question I was addressing wasn't the right of secession but how constitutional disputes should be resolved, the question you've been doing everything you can do avoid in comment after comment. Why is that?
The Kentucky Resolutions, especially Jefferson's original draft, are a very good summary of my view of how constitutional disputes should ultimately be settled. As I said before, Jefferson was far from alone in the founding generation in expressing views contradictory of yours; in fact, there's no clear expression of views like yours from anyone in the founding generation (not that you've even presented any sort of coherent alternative.) If you reject Jefferson's view as presented in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions (and elsewhere, but particularly there) then you should present a coherent alternative (and answer my questions about the alternative you're suggesting.) If you can't even say what the alternative should be, then you have no ground from which to criticize Jefferson's view.
"Was slavery at stake in the war? Of course it was....They still understood Lincoln's administration anti-slavery policies, particularly his ban on the expansion of slavery..."
Of course, the territorial "expansion of slavery" (which you've interpreted to mean potentially expanding even into places that were already practicing slavery, which is a nonsense interpretation of "expansion", let alone an expansion in terms of who would be enslaved, which the misleading phrase suggests but is totally false) wasn't at stake in the war at all. The Confederacy didn't go to war over any claims to any territory at all besides that of the seceding states themselves. And there was nothing about respecting the right of self-government for the Confederate states -- and it only would have been 7 if Lincoln hadn't called for war to deny that right -- that would have required any compromise on the territorial "expansion of slavery." Preventing the territorial "expansion of slavery" was 100% compatible with respecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence, even more compatible than allowing those slave states to remain in the union, because it meant recognizing an international border across which the constitution prohibited the movement of slaves instead of movement within a union that the Supreme Court had just a few years before ruled the constitution didn't allow the federal government to restrict.
Your claims about later in the war would be nonsense even if they had come at the start of the war, but if you think the South didn't have a right to secede in 1861, if the North was justified in forcing the southern states under the government from which they had withdrawn their consent because of soemthing about slavery -- if you think anything about slavery matters in any way with regards to justifications in the war -- then you could find an argument that didn't depend on things that came later, things that Lincoln and the Republican platform hadn't even called for prior to the war, things which Lincoln himself described as a "practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion" and abolitionists described as "not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only 'as a war measure,' and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white."
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@seanmac1793 The reason I asked specifically about quotes from the first 20 years under the constitution was because quotes from closer to the founding era would not just represent arguments from authority but they would give more of an indication of original intent, of what the constitution was understood to mean by those that ratified it and provided the basis for its authority. I have yet to see a single quote from any founder from the first 20 years under the constitution denying the right of states to secede. The opposite certainly isn't true. And, of course, the US constitution itself reestablished the union among those states that chose to ratify it according to the new constitution's own standard (9 of 13 states) without meeting the standard for amendment in the Articles of Confederation.
“It adds to the stability and dignity, as well as to the authority, of the Constitution, that it rests on this legitimate and solid foundation. The states, then, being the parties to the constitutional compact, and in their sovereign capacity, it follows of necessity that there can be no tribunal, above their authority, to decide, in the last resort, whether the compact made by them be violated; and consequently, that, as the parties to it, they must themselves decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of sufficient magnitude to require their interposition.” Madison
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