Not just in “bleeding Kansas” – but the dream of expanding slavery into the West generally, and also in South and Central America (Mr Walker was not some lone nut – his opinions were mainstream amough the Slave Power activists).

And, if they were sincere defenders of the independence of States, why did they INVADE KENTUCKY?

Remember the Confederate army was not asked into Kentucky – and when they arrived they were asked to leave (by the government of the Commonwealth of Kentucky) and they WOULD NOT GO.

I support the right of any State now to leave the Union – in the right way (a vote by the PEOPLE of that State, including the BLACK people).

However, that is not the same thing as supporting Jefferson Davis and co.

They were not really about “opposing big government” (the American Federal government was very small – even as late as 1912, let alone in 1860) or “freedom”.

Not at all.

One must not allow a defence of modern secession to get smeared by an association with Jefferson Davis and co.

Clue – modern secession (if it is to be successful) must have NONWHITES in key positions.

“That is inverted racism Paul”.

Of course it is – but it is also POLITICS. In fact “Politics 101″

Like not going up against Barack Obama with a ticket made up of two white people (indeed last time with two white men…. for …… sake).

Thus allowing the media to (with hints and nudges) imply that to vote against Barack is to be a “racist”.

Secession must not make the same mistake.

No defence of Jefferson Davis and co.

And nonwhites (and women) in key positions of real power.

It is the only way.

The idea that the individual states retain the right to secede goes back as far as the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 (drafted by Thomas Jefferson himself). And secession was certainly discussed at the Hartford Convention, although you’re correct that it was not among the resolutions ultimately adopted. We don’t know the extent of those discussions, because the meetings were secret and no record of the proceedings was kept. From the Wikipedia article (link omitted because I have exceeded my limit of 3 hypertext links!): “Secession was again mentioned in 1814–1815; all but one leading Federalist newspaper in New England supported a plan to expel the western states from the Union.” Certainly the idea was common among the southern states long before their attempted secession in 1861. The South Carolina Declaration of Causes and Necessity includes a number of statements along those lines, including “each Colony [after the Revolution] became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE” and “the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State.” (emphasis added.) Other seceding states adopted similar language.

The salient points of all this are: (1) for all purposes the states were individual sovereign entities prior to the creation of the United States, and even afterward they retained many of the indicia of sovereignty; and (2) the idea that individual states reserved the right to withdraw from the Union was current and widespread at and after the time of ratification of the Constitution (some states expressly addressed that point in their ratification debates and authorizing resolutions). I believe they still retain that right, under the “compact” theory of the Constitution.

None of the thirteen colonies ever exercised several key elements of sovereignty: to treat with foreign governments, to make war, or to impose customs duties. They never treated each other as foreign governments.

There are references in the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris to the colonies as “independent states”, but that’s a very thin hook to hold up the claim of full, perpetual national sovereignty for all “states”.

Of the other 37 states, only Texas and Hawaii ever had any sovereign nation status. The remainder were all created by the Congress of the United States.

Your gall bladder analogy is specious; the extent of a sovereign state is arbitrarily decided, it has no organic basis. Parts have been removed from or added to sovereign states all the time. The Republic of China continues to exist, despite the loss of over 99% of its territory.

As to the Hartford Convention: Secession was not discussed at the Convention. There were veiled suggestion made about “collective action” by the New England states, and there were rumors that secession was discussed privately by some of the delegates. These rumors were seized on and played up by the Republicans as a stick to beat the Federalists with (the Convention was entirely a Federalist project).

Such was the national antipathy to secession that these rumors ruined the Federalist Party. The Federalists went from 64 House seats in 1815-1817 to only 26 seats in 1819-1820.

First: The sort of slavery we’re discussing here is not just; it is an ongoing dreadful crime against the enslaved. With this sort of slavery, there is no right of self-determination for the enslaved; even his very body belongs to his owner, who may do with or to that body whatever he will. (Which is not to say that all Southern slaveowners were monsters. Some I imagine were actually kind and tried to treat their slaves like human beings, in most respects. But the system itself had no such requirement.) Therefore it is never morally wrong to attempt to end it, by force if necessary, provided the person or persons making the attempt do so responsibly (that is, they are knowledgeable and do not act recklessly).

The problem that arises when another country (Country B) attempts to free slaves is that of making sure that the true (natural-law) rights of the people of country B are being honored. So anyone in B who does not want his tax money spent that way, should not have to pay to support the freeing effort. And only those who freely wish to fight should do so.

If, with the full and complete agreement and support of each U.S. citizen, the U.S. were to go to North Korea for the specific purpose of overthrowing the regime–there would be nothing morally wrong with doing so.

Of course, whether such a thing would even be possible in the Real World is another matter. People have been working on the problem of Universal Consent for a long time, without a lot of success–in the real world, that is. It’s easier in the abstract.

The situation becomes even muddier when there is a legitimate argument that the national defense of Country B is involved. That is the grounds upon which, in the real world, any given Country B should make its decision. (Muddier, because another opportunity for legitimate disagreement now exists: DOES the national defense require the action?)

If the U.S. is Country B, then I say that Viet Nam (and Korea) were absolutely just, and that it was in the interest of the Western Nations, the South Vietnamese (in the case of V-N) and most of the North Vietnamese people as well to have conducted that war, won it, and followed through on the win–which as we know was not done. In short, it was a “righteous war.”

I believe that destroying the Iraqi regime was also more than justified as a matter of national defense, nor was it unjust to take down the regime. But again, the follow-through was awfully flawed; although at least we didn’t turn tail and run, simply giving up the win after victory, as happened in V-N.

(But to have left with the Husseins dead and nothing put in their place would have been to leave a power vacuum that would inevitably have been filled by thugs of one kind or another, which would have reconstituted aIraq as a danger to us and to the West generally (including Israel). The reason that Germany didn’t fall apart after the War was the Occupation; we should have been prepared to occupy Iraq for as long as it took, be it 500 years–just as it is said that the problem with Zimbabwe is that the British left Rhodesia far too early.) –This is a side comment, which grew out of the main issue, which is, is it ever just to end slavery by force–even slavery in another country? And I think the answer is clearly Yes, provided one can reasonably expect to do so without making the situation worse.

The second question I’d ask is whether American chattel slavery was on the way out anyway. A few decades ago, the fashionable answer was Yes, and a lot of people today picked up that idea.

But I have read more recent historians who say that it was on the way out, being not actually economical, until Mr. Whitney’s cotton gin came along and made slave labor a lot more productive. (I see that Wikipedia takes this view, in their article on the Cotton_gin.

Looking at the modern world, I find unethical/crony capitalists ever ready to improve their profits by hiring cheap labour and paying them minimally (or avoid paying at all), which tells me they might be willing to own slaves if the option should ever be presented to them.

Machines can replace some tasks, true. Other things, and there are lots of them, can be done better and faster by versatile breathing people. And some can ONLY be done by breathing people.

Slavery still exists in many parts of the world. This alone tells me the economic/technological reasons for the gradual abolishment of this vile institution is bunk.

So where does it leave us? As with all things at the end, violence. Violence on the part of organizations (often governments) to ensure that slavery remains in the background, not the fore.

So should the war have occurred? My personal opinion is no. Let the slaves eat cake. They want freedom, they should prove that they deserve it by fighting for it themselves.

Yup, I’m an evil man.

But the same does not hold true for counties within a state, because the counties are also creations of the state, possessing only the authority granted by the state. (The same is true for cities and municipalities.) A county is not a sovereign entity.

It’s similar to you and me and 11 of our friends forming a partnership. Each of us is a sovereign, independent entity, with the power to withdraw at will (consistent with the terms of the partnership agreement). If my brain makes the decision to withdraw the rest of the body has to go with it; I am a unitary entity, and I make all decisions as such. But my spleen can’t secede from me, because it is not an independent entity (although obviously it can cause me much trouble if I don’t treat it right!). Much less can any individual cell secede.

The fundamental change wrought by the Civil War was to vest the notion of primary sovereignty in the United State, rather than in its individual component states. While it was by no means agreed by everyone, prior to that time many believed that states had the right to withdraw from the union at their pleasure (indeed, that was made explicit in some of the state ratifying conventions). There are plenty of writings by some of the Founders to that effect, and the first serious discussion of secession was by some of the New England states at the Hartford Convention in 1814-15 (in reaction to the War of 1812). That came to nothing (because the war ended), but serious people believed that the states possessed that right. The Civil War ended the discussion by force, but not by logic or legal reasoning. I believe that the states still possess that right.

Why should a 51% majority in a U.S. state have the right to coerce the other 49%?

If the majority in a single U.S. state has the absolute right to repudiate the authority of the United States throughout that state, does a majority in one county of that state have the absolute right to repudiate the authority of that state in that county? Why not?

Does a majority of the population of any subset of a sovereign government’s territory have the absolute right to repudiate the authority of that government in that territorial subset?

If not, why not? And if so, does any individual have the same right? If not, why not? If so, that is anarchism, which is philosophically defensible, but has no bearing on “secession”, which is an act of political coercion.

If one is not an anarchist, then one concedes that sovereign government, with the power to coerce the people in its jurisdiction, is necessary; and that neither individuals nor groups may by natural right unilaterally repudiate the jurisdiction of the sovereign. Secession and revolution are natural rights, but violation of written law, to be exercised only for good cause.

The problem is that in places like Saudi Arabia (or the Islamified neighborhoods of Britain and France), women are not oppressed by the state, but by individuals acting out cultural imperatives. The oppression is not performed by a structured machine, but is distributed, disaggregated. (Saudi Arabia has formalized some of the process, but this reflects the overwhelming popular consensus – among men, anyway – and most of it is still inflicted by private agents.)

When a dominant fraction of one’s neighbors and relatives are all complicit in the oppression, the intervention of an intrusive state may be welcome.

So it is not a question of Progressives by another name – they were not Progressives.

Even as late as 1912 the Federal government was about 2% (two per cent) of GDP, and Federal regulations had little inpact on the life of most Americans.

I fully accept that people in Wisconsin hid slaves.

But the main anti slavery work done by people from Wisconsin was done by people in blue uniforms (trimmed in black in the case of the Wisconsin regiment I am thinking of) armed with a mixture of high quality rifles.

Turning back to Wilson (and Richard Ely followers in general – by the way Richard Ely and co would have baffled someone like Lincoln).

Even today the dream of the Progressives has not been fully achieved.

There were big roll backs of government in the 1920s and in the late 1940s (both achieved by the party of Lincoln – although acting more like the party of Salmon P. Chase or Warren Harding, or Senator B. from Ohio).

Although Comrade Barack may achieve it – not in the original Prussian form, but in the form of the “Red Prussian”.

By the way…..

I suspect that NEITHER SIDE would have faught had they guessed how destructive the Civil War would be.

People were misled by the Civil War in Switzerland in 1847.

Both sides expected a walk over.

Only General Sherman seems to have grasped that hundreds of thousands of human beings would die.

He tried to explain his reasoning.

But everyone thought him mad.

I think that was what happened in Brazil.

The Empire of Brazil allowed some local areas to get rid of slavey and the Princess (who had great influence on her father the Emperor) would not allow any fugitive slaves to be returned (hence slavery collapsed).

However, the American Slave Power was a Republic (no kindly Princess) and the Slave Power was very much interested in EXPANDING slavery to the West (and anywhere else) a point I have made several times.

By the way to talk of Progressives (let alone totalitarian Progressives) in the context of 1861 shows the influence of the Woodrow Wilson school of history.

Woodrow Wilson wished to pretend that the Civil War was faught to great a fundementally different government – because HE (WOODROW WILSON) wished to create such a government.

If the Civil War had created such a government – people like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt would not have had to create it many decades later.

Someone like Abe Lincoln (without the “benefit” of Wilson’s Germanic education – and dead in 1865 in any case) would not even have know what the word “Progressive” meant in a political context.

Lincoln (as, I think, I have pointed out) was nothing more or less than an old style Henry Clay Whig.

Not a good thing (to be sure not a good thing).

But not a 20th century Progressive (filled with Prussian philosophy) either.

A bit like comparing Mayor Daley (the first Mayor Daley) to Barack Obama.

Not the same sort of thing.

Had the first Mayor Daley ever met Barack Obama – he most likely would have set a couple of police dogs on him.

And had Abe Lincoln ever met Woodrow Wilson (the adult Wilson – not the young boy who actually existed in Lincoln’s lifetime)he most likely would have given the pointy head Prof a kick up the backside.

You’re right, I didn’t think through what my parenthetical comment implied.

Of course as soon as the United States Army was withdrawn from the South (after 1877) the rights of blacks started to be destroyed.

Paul, my understanding is that those rights were destroyed in the SCOTUS.

IMO, the entire civil war was engineered by unification Progressives (although not yet known as such). All the federal government needed to do was respect the Constitution and not enforce the fugitive slave act. The civil war was a big unified totalitarian government solution to too much federal government in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act. I live not far from a nationally known stop on the underground railroad. Wisconsin was never a slave state. Yet Wisconsin citizens in their own homes and communities had to conceal human beings from people in other states who used the federal government to claim ownership of them. Sheriffs not enforcing the act were deemed federal criminals for placing their own state’s respect for human liberty above the national authority’s support for slave owners.

I agree with whoever (JV?) up the thread said slavery would have soon disappeared. The market costs of turning entire states into prisons combined with the certain boycotts by other states and nations would have made it a futile effort. The slaves states needed to abrogate the federal government’s restraints and use its powers just to retain their slave state status.

I recently read an article on the physical impossibility of sealing the Mexican border against drug trafficking with anything less than a Berlin Wall style barricade with blockhouses the entire 1900 miles. The borders of southern states are even longer. Without the complicity of the federal government in the first place, slavery would have soon disappeared. As soon as the perimeter border states had lost too many slaves across their borders, they would have faced irresistible pressures to outlaw slavery to escape the boycotts by free states and nations.