This is the first I've ever read about this and I thought I would share it with you. It gives lie to many of the 'reasons' for the CW and may give light to the real ones.
There was only ONE reason for the Civil War-- Lincoln's legal claims of the following:
...no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.
Absent this (trumped-up) legal claim, there would have BEEN no war, since he would have had no perceived legal authority. Rather,
his actions would have been ruled treasonous or revolutionary, and he would have been hanged soon after.
THIS is the
sole issue of the Civil War!
Contrarily, if the South had claimed that its acts of secession were unlawful, then it likewise would have likely had far less supporters-- including myself.
I really liked the quote from a letter by R. E. Lee:
" . . . [T]he consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of the ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
But this "consolidation" never happened--
legally; the Constitution today, is the same one ratified by the states in 1789; hence, it is bound by the same ratifying intents, unless officially changed--which it wasn't; conversion to such a system would require, at the very least, both an official amendment to that explicit effect-- as well as the non-coerced unanimous consent of all states, specifically surrendering their individual supreme sovereignty-- which they specifically retained in their repsective original ratifying intents).
Therefore, any government which claims to such a "consolidated" nature, absent such an amendment (or stronger documentation), is by nature criminal and autocratic-- a dictatorship, by definition.
In reality, the states are still, legally, sovereign nations; they are merely illegally occupied by hostile invaders-- and have been for 140 years.
However legally speaking, this illegal occupation is
still a criminal autocracy-- a crime of longer duration, does not by itself become less criminal... rather the reverse, if the victim was deliberately prevented by the perpetrator from availing himself or herself of remedy.
