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Generals of the Civil War
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Aug 27, 2017 20:19:58   #
Loki Loc: Georgia
 
Homestead wrote:
There is no Constitutional amendment dictating how a secession is to be executed.

In that vacuum, you don't get to make up your own rules.

To secede, all parties would have to get together and make that decision, make up a bill and get it passed through congress and singed by the president.

You don't get to mount an insurrection and then call it a secession.
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Article I, Section 8, Clauses 11, 12, 13, 14: War; Military

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
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Supremacy Clause follows the lead of Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation, which provided that "[e]very state shall abide by the determinations of the united states in congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them."
http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/6/essays/133/supremacy-clause
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Then, by no means was secession unanimous amongst the people of the Southern States.

By bypassing congress and keeping it within the states, those that opposed secession were denied their rights to to gain support and join with others from other states who felt the same way.

The sudden departure of seven states from the Union and the establishment of a southern nation gives an impression of a unanimous popular movement following Lincoln's election. In fact, however, opposition to immediate secession was notable in most of the seceding states, and became quite potent as one proceeded northward towards the border and upper South region. The elections of delegates to secession conventions were close in a number of deep South states, belying the greater majorities for secession at the conventions themselves. In Georgia, for example, the votes for secessionist delegates constituted at best a bare majority and may well have actually been outweighed by voters opposing immediate secession. In Alabama and Louisiana, the vote was also very close. Opposition to immediate secession was not the same as devotion to the Union, but it suggested that some kind of compromise could return most, if not all, of the seceding states back to the Union.
In the upper South, where slavery was less prominent and association with the North more pervasive, opposition to immediate secession was even stronger. States like Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas took a wait-and-see attitude, sometimes calling for a convention, sometimes rejecting demands. Even where conventions were called, pro-Union delegates predominated. Thus, Virginians held an election for a convention on February 4, but the secessionists were outpolled about two to one. A few days later, Tennessee voters went even further and rejected a move to call a convention. Thus, after the secession of Texas in the beginning of February 1861, secessionist momentum ran into a wall of resistance. Eight slaveholding states remained in the Union. How to keep them there, especially by avoiding the outbreak of actual fighting, was a matter of considerable urgency to unionists in the days following Lincoln's election. Not surprisingly, the upper South was the main source of compromise initiatives intended to provide for an honorable and peaceable restoration of the Union.
http://www.tulane.edu/~sumter/Background/BackgroundUpperSouth.html
There is no Constitutional amendment dictating how... (show quote)


The Articles of Confederation are not the same as the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment, which is worded much like Virginia's declaration of the right of secession when they voted to ratify the Constitution, says

" The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I don't know what part of this is so difficult to understand. If the Constitution does not delegate authority to prevent secession (NOT "insurrection") then there is no need for anything but a vote of the citizens concerned. Once more, Virginia did not secede as a member of the Confederacy, but as an independent republic.

If the upper South was the "source of compromise," as you stated, why was no compromise reached? There were areas of the South, such as East Tennessee, which were very much opposed to secession. However, the question is not whether secession is right or wrong, or moral or immoral, or anything else. The question was WAS IT LEGAL IN 1861? Yes. Absent any legal or Constitutional prohibition on secession, it was legal.
Try and keep up; if there is no law against something, there is no need to make one to decide whether or not it is legal. The absence of prohibitive legislation renders it legal. Using your logic, income tax evasion would have always been illegal, even before there was an income tax to evade.

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Aug 28, 2017 18:43:51   #
Homestead
 
Loki wrote:
Louisiana seceded in January of 1861. If there were any exchanges of fire before then I have not heard of them, although there might have been. I suppose you have a date for this supposed pre-secession violence.


I may have to eat some crow on the, "precession violence."

I thought I copied the link where I read it, but, I can't find it now.

The links I do have, talk about events happening the same day as secession, but, nothing before.

So, unless I find something different, I'm going to have to assume that I read it wrong.

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