I am sure this title caught your eye. The point is that rebellion is actually GOOD once in a while. Personally, teenage rebellion is good as well, otherwise the teenager stays in one’s basement for decades and no honorable person, parent or child, wants that long term. Allowing and encouraging these young adults to “be all that they can be” is a most honorable path I would think.
Countries and cultures are similar in that there comes a time when going separate ways brings out the best for all parties.
Thomas Jefferson was one that spoke to the benefits of rebellion:
God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.- Thomas Jefferson (1787)
Rebellion is a warning shot that liberties have been violated. This is an honorable recourse when peaceful approaches have been ignored time and again. Liberty can grow in the way that the American Revolution’s conclusion was conducted, not so much how the French Revolution was conducted.
If the 1776 rebellion was honorable, why not the 1860/1861 rebellion? What might help to set the context is to compare the presidential inaugural addresses of both President Lincoln and President Davis.
Lincoln made the strongest case ever in the defense of Southern slavery even supporting its enshrinement in the text of the constitution to be a perpetual right but on the issue of tax collections he would definitely go to war to enforce the newly doubled federal tariff.
Davis defined the South as an international trading community that sought free trade with the world and promised to resort to the sword if the North were to invade to put an end to the Confederacy’s free trade policy.
Davis also set the context for the formation of an agent to work on the principle’s (13 sovereign states) behalf when he said:
The declared purpose of the compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity
He continued on why the seven states had voted to leave such a Union:
When in the judgement of the sovereign states now composing this Confederacy, it had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and it ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot box declared that so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely asserted a right that the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable .. they, as sovereigns, were the final judges, each for itself ..
What few people know is that this man was so honorable and such a Unionist up until his home state of Mississippi seceded, that his logic, actions and words were honorable to their core.
So what do we do with men like this after a War for Southern Independence is fought and lost? We honor honorable men of that day by naming military forts after them, even when they in the end were not victorious in securing an independent country against a country who secured a victory in less than honorable means.
Walter E. Williams addresses this in his article at Lew Rockwell today. He lays the groundwork as to why we have forts in the US today that bear the name of honorable Confederate generals who were fighting for their homes and families against a tyrant who violated the US Constitution left and right.
Walter addresses a statement made by an ignorant military man, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee arguing in favor of renaming Confederate named military bases:
The Confederacy, the American Civil War, was fought, and it was an act of rebellion. It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the U.S. Constitution.
Ignorance knows no bounds, as I pointed out yesterday that Lincoln himself was the one that acted treasonous and also acted violently against the US Constitution. The Southern state’s secession was NOT an act of treason, even if your feelings and emotions convince you and Gen. Mark Milley that way. He needs to find a safe space, and by renaming these forts I do hope he feels better soon.
But I digress ..
Walter E. Williams starts with context of the union in the first place:
Let’s start at the beginning, namely the American War of Independence (1775-1783), a war between Great Britain and its 13 colonies, which declared independence in July 1776. The peace agreement that ended the war is known as the Treaty of Paris signed by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay and Henry Laurens and by British Commissioner Richard Oswald, on Sept. 3, 1783. Article I of the Treaty held that “New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States.”
This fact is something that Lincoln himself ignored to retain his narrative that the “Union” preceded the states, which then dovetails into his own personal thought that the states should have asked permission of all the other states before leaving.
Walter continues:
Delegates from these states met in Philadelphia in 1787 to form a union. During the Philadelphia convention, a proposal was made to permit the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, rejected it. Minutes from the debate paraphrased his opinion: “A union of the states containing such an ingredient (would) provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
The fact that Lincoln never acknowledged the states as having seceded, left him with the complicated aspect that he actually violated the principle above, that his making war on states still in the union meant the compact was in fact dissolved. He wanted to ask for the “divorce”, he did NOT want the spouse(s) to have that status!
With this thought, that each of the sovereign states would voluntarily join this union one at a time, each state also understood that they each could voluntarily leave this union.
During the ratification debates, Virginia’s delegates said, “The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” The ratification documents of New York and Rhode Island expressed similar sentiments; namely, they held the right to dissolve their relationship with the United States.
Note that northern states also expressed interest in the ability to exit. Only 16 years later, there was talk of that from that section of the federation:
Many New Englanders were infuriated by President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which they saw as an unconstitutional act. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who was George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state, led the movement. He said, “The Eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government.” Other prominent Americans such as John Quincy Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Fisher Ames, Josiah Quincy III and Joseph Story shared his call for secession.
Sparking secession talk again was the War of 1812 that hurt the New England commerce the most, rekindling this viable option:
While the New England secessionist movement was strong, it failed to garner support at the 1814-15 Hartford Convention.
By early 1861, many Northern government officials and presses were well aware of the dangers of not allowing an honorable rebellion to take place and voiced such before Lincoln took action to send armed reinforcements to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor:
- Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, “Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical and destructive of republican liberty.”
- New-York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): “If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”
- The Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): “An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil — evil unmitigated in character and appalling in extent.”
- The New-York Times (March 21, 1861): “There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.”
Walter summarizes this so well in saying:
Confederate generals fought for independence from the Union just as George Washington fought for independence from Great Britain. Those who label Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals as traitors might also label George Washington a traitor. Great Britain’s King George III and the British parliament would have agreed.
Spot on Walter, you rock as an 80-something!
Should the ten forts named after Confederate officers be renamed? No. But it seems that stupid people with a lot of feelings now rule. While the name of a fort does not do anything physically, it is a part of the culture cleansing going of to remove whatever is left of this country’s honorable past.
In my mind, the past was already being erased a little at a time over the last 100+ years. I think it is the shear momentum of this now that has many feeling that it is over the top and openly wondering when if ever will it stop.
Honestly, can we start talking secession now, or is it too early yet? Asking for a friend.
Peace out.
-SF1