@McGentrix,
McGentrix's quote wrote:While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries." (emphasis added)
McPherson may have won a Pulitzer, but he is apparently ignorant of the text of the United Sates constitution. The tenth section of Article I of the constitution reads, in its entirety:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay. (emphases added)
As i have pointed out many, many times, no proposed amendment ending slavery could have passed both houses of Congress by a two thirds majority until Oklahoma entered the union in 1907.
To this day, the fifteen states in which slavery was legal would be sufficient to prevent the ratification of such an amendment. In fact, any thirteen of that number could prevent ratification,
to this day. Among the stupidities and enormities committed by an elite faction in the southern states, secession was the first, and arguably the most serious of them. With the southern delegations departed from Congress, there was nothing they could legally do to prevent the amendment of the constitution.
In the first week of January, 1861, two months before Lincoln took office, so-called state troops all over the South seized United States military installations, chiefly arsenals, and removed, without authority, the arms and ammunition stored in them. On January 8th, an armed mob from Pensacola--excuse me, "state troops" of Alabama and Florida--attempted to seize forts Barrancas and McRee. The U.S. Army Artillery officer in command ordered his men to fire over the heads of the mob--excuse me, the "state troops"--who scurried back to Pensacola as fast as their fat little legs would carry them.
On January 9, 1861, almost two months before Lincoln took office, cadets from the Citadel, a private military academy supported by the state of South Carolina, fired on
Star of the West, an unarmed civilian transport, as she attempted to deliver reinforcements and supplies to Fort Sumter. "Southern heritage" loonies here have, over the years, attempted to claim that a bunch of teen aged hot heads were justified in firing on the ship just because they were attempting to reinforce and resupply Major Anderson's command. Since when has any President of the United States needed the permission of any state government to reinforce and resupply United States military installations?
I am bemused at Mr. McPherson's claim. As i've also pointed out time and again, the southern states started a war which they could not win, they got their asses kicked, and they've been whining about it ever since. Regardless of what Mr. McPherson has to say, Buchanan and Lincoln had ample constitutional justification for responding to the war-like acts of southern states as they did. Mr. McPherson may have won a Pulitzer prize, but it appears to me that he is as deluded as the most deluded of the lost cause myth devotees. It appears that Mr. McPherson's knowledge of the constitution is less than comprehensive, and his math sucks, too. It also appears that he only partially knows the history of the civil war, or is willing to play fast and loose with historical truth in order to make himself out to be some kind of oracle.
