I reposted what I call my "bedtime story" The Civil War Must Be Refought In Every Generation .
I wrote it in 1996 on an old Brother Word Processor, and I edited it slightly, when I retyped it into Blogger on the day after Election Day 2004.
When I put it up today, I did not re-edit it at all.
One prominent school of scholarship says that the Civil War occurred because the elite class in both the North and the South became more radical than the people they were representing. The Southern leadership was more secessionist than the Southern people. The Northern leadership was more abolitionist than the Northern people. Instead of the leadership (basically the older men) cooling the passions of the rabble (basically the younger men), they inflamed them into fighting, where there may have, in fact, been more room to compromise.
My own view of the matter, which I have discussed at various points on this blog, is that although the South seceded over something called "states rights," they meant something very different (in the 1850s) from what the term came to mean (basically in the 1950s). The states righters of the 1850s, I contend, did not feel that the Federal government was too strong.
They felt that the Federal government needed to be very strong to protect the "states rights" -- i.e. -- the rights of the states to make and enforce state laws regarding whatever they liked, notwithstanding the objections of the other states. In those days, they liked slavery.
When the South lost control of the Federal government, for the first time really, in the Election of 1860, they did not want the strong Federal government they created to be turned against them. Therefore, the South seceded.
"States Rights" in the 1850s context, especially in the radical notion espoused by John Calhoun, refers to the notion that the States, not the people, are the sovereign players in the Federal government. In order for me to make that claim, or for Calhoun or Cobb, or any of the other Fireeaters to make that claim, you have to assume that in the Preamble to the Constitution, either the phrase "We The People" refers to the States, or more likely, that the people give their power to the States.
In either context, under this theory, individuals are not direct players in the Federal government.
The Civil War changed that context on the ground, and the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment changed that result in the Constitution. The South lost the Civil War, and have spent the last 140 years trying to reverse that fact I am free to assume, and of course, I do assume, that whenever someone talks about longing for a Constitution that goes back to the "original intent of the framers" that they are looking for a Constitution that ignores the fact that the Civil War was fought, and ignores the Amendments that arose because of the War. Of course, the Supreme Court does that themselves all the time. But, its more than that.
If I am right in saying that the Civil War was fought because the South did not want the strong Federal government that they themselves had created to be used against them, then the South has managed to re-write history (fiction) that states rights meant a weak Federal government. And with the election of George W. Bush, they moved a long way, if not all the way, to success.
That, of course, is a library and a lifetimes worth of research and assumptions ploughed into one paragraph, but we'll deal with the specifics some other day.
But for now, it leads to the following conclusions: The Federal response to Hurricane Katrina -- "it's not my job man" -- is the direct result of the refusal to face the fact that the States Rights was not a cause of the Civil War. Slavery was.
Although States Rights could have other meanings, States Rights, as an actual doctrine in the world, has only been used as an excuse for racism early (as an excuse for free labor) and later on in the contexts of "right to work" -- (an excuse for cheap labor)
No comments:
Post a Comment