For those who claim that the Civil War established that states had no right to secede from the Union that is the fallacy of the Argumentum ad Bacculum that “right makes right.” Both territories of Alaska and Hawaii acceded to statehood but with secession provisions in the articles of accession allowing each state to have the option of seceding if the people of each state decided to do so. In fact Sarah Palin’s one-time husband Todd had belonged to a secessionist party in Alaska. Lincoln initiated military action against the secessionist southern states due to the attack on Ft. Sumter allowing him to claim authority to suppress rebellion against national authority under Article Four. Many actions by Lincoln including imposing an income tax to finance the war and the imprisonment and military court martial of civilian southern sympathizers in the northern states were prima facie unconstitutional uses of his power. The accession of West Virginia into the Union, a weird case of a region of a secessionist state seceding from its own state was later challenged on constitutional grounds though the case was ruled in favor of the creation of the new state.
It is very easy today for people to anachronistically impute evil to the South for the practice of slavery but during the Civil War both Maryland and Kentucky which fought in the side of the Union were slave states whose slaves we’re not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery was still being practiced elsewhere in the world after our Civil War most notably in the Brazilian and Ottoman Empires. And although it is now illegal in the United States there are still criminal enterprises that enslave both adult and child immigrants in our country with the adult slavery bring disguised as a form of indentured servitude.
Historians rewrote history claiming the Civil War was over slavery. Citizens of the north, the Union, were every bit as racist as those of the south. Union soldiers would have mutinied had they believed they were fighting and dying to free the lowly black man. One historian observed the American Civil War was among the first to have a written record of letters written home by soldiers. Slavery is suspiciously absent in those letters.
For those who claim that the Civil War established that states had no right to secede from the Union that is the fallacy of the Argumentum ad Bacculum that “right makes right.” Both territories of Alaska and Hawaii acceded to statehood but with secession provisions in the articles of accession allowing each state to have the option of seceding if the people of each state decided to do so. In fact Sarah Palin’s one-time husband Todd had belonged to a secessionist party in Alaska. Lincoln initiated military action against the secessionist southern states due to the attack on Ft. Sumter allowing him to claim authority to suppress rebellion against national authority under Article Four. Many actions by Lincoln including imposing an income tax to finance the war and the imprisonment and military court martial of civilian southern sympathizers in the northern states were prima facie unconstitutional uses of his power. The accession of West Virginia into the Union, a weird case of a region of a secessionist state seceding from its own state was later challenged on constitutional grounds though the case was ruled in favor of the creation of the new state.
It is very easy today for people to anachronistically impute evil to the South for the practice of slavery but during the Civil War both Maryland and Kentucky which fought in the side of the Union were slave states whose slaves we’re not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery was still being practiced elsewhere in the world after our Civil War most notably in the Brazilian and Ottoman Empires. And although it is now illegal in the United States there are still criminal enterprises that enslave both adult and child immigrants in our country with the adult slavery bring disguised as a form of indentured servitude.
Historians rewrote history claiming the Civil War was over slavery. Citizens of the north, the Union, were every bit as racist as those of the south. Union soldiers would have mutinied had they believed they were fighting and dying to free the lowly black man. One historian observed the American Civil War was among the first to have a written record of letters written home by soldiers. Slavery is suspiciously absent in those letters.
INDEED !!