One of the acts of Congress in our history that most deserves our scorn today and the active disobedience of the law at the time, was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, which delayed the Civil War for ten years. The extra-legal powers given to slave trackers by that act still exist today in the rules by which the modern bounty hunter operates. Thousands of slaves made their way to new lives in Canada via the Underground Railroad, and hundreds of white citizens were killed and imprisoned for helping the slaves escape the South via the Underground Railroad. It was the tales that the fugitive slaves brought with them to the North that hardened the Abolitionists' stance, and inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which became a bestseller in the non-slave states and overseas. Men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee would not believe the stories of the escaped slaves, because these gentlemen did not treat their slaves in such an abhorrent fashion, and turned a blind eye to those who did.
The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Rise of Jim Crow
The Civil War is ultimate example of dissension and rebellion so far in this nation's history. The states of the Confederacy violated the United States Constitution by seceding without asking the permission of the other states and receiving that permission through Amendments or a Constitutional Convention, dissolving their bonds with the Union and the people in those other states. (Read my OpEdNews articles, "If At First You Don't Secede," "The Tenth," "Not Breaking A League," "The Children of Cain," and "Teacher's Pet,", for more on this subject.)
I am beginning to think that President Andrew Jackson was wrong in his handling of South Carolina's Nullification Act. He should not have written a letter; he should have ordered out the United States Army and Navy, nationalized the militias of the several states, and headed south; extirpating the rebellion root and branch in its cradle, South Carolina. When he got there, President Jackson should have carried out his threat, by hanging the "gentlemen" responsible for this act of sedition from every tree between Columbia and Charleston, beginning with his former Vice President, John C. Calhoun. If he had done so, no one would have talked about secession thirty years later. South Carolina's Nullification Act was every bit as much a piece of illegal sedition as secession was thirty years later.
The Confederates also violated laws by seizing Federal property in Confederate territory (arsenals, shipyards, fortifications, courthouses and other buildings, as well as mints). The rebelling states technically committed treason by taking up arms against the legally established government (established when the Confederate states agreed to the provisions of the Constitution through either the ratification of the Constitution--if they were one of the original 13 states; or by applying for and accepting statehood for the other rebelling states), which includes the Constitution's supremacy clause. Further, the Confederacy resorted to violence to get their way (Fort Sumter), like a playground bully. That's the problem with aristocracies: if they don't get their way they pout and then get violent: ask the Athenians and Romans.
The South went to war, and threw away a generation of its young men: between 500,000 and 600,000 dead by the best current estimates. They also threw away virtually all of their wealth, both in terms of specie and actual property. When John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, any short-term hope of real peace and financial aid to get the South back on its feet, died with the President.
President Lincoln would have gladly negotiated a freeing of the slaves in 1861, with financial compensation for their former owners (as Great Britain and France had done), rather than spend close to five-hundred million dollars a year on a war that would kill four percent of America's population, disrupt our national economy, and leave scars in the national psyche that still have not fully healed. He was never given the chance.
South Carolina seceded the moment that it was announced that Lincoln had won the Electoral College, followed soon after by (in no particular order) Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the other seven when Lincoln issued a proclamation asking for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion after his inauguration.
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