[lit-ideas] Re: Marx's influence in America
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 09:02:42 -0800
On Feb 7, 2006, at 7:25 PM, Robert Paul wrote:
Neither the issue of States' Rights alone nor the issue of slavery
alone led to the Civil War. Slavery was both a moral and an economic
issue. And the South's concern with States Rights was not a purely
legal one: it was a way of supporting the slave states' claim to a
right to keep slaves. There's no evidence that a pure belief in
States' Rights
would have led them to secede.
It's a complex tale. My first impulse was to agree with Lawrence.
Students emerging from High School today have in their heads a slightly
skewed balance of causes, de-emphasizing the states rights issue and
assuming that all things lead "naturally" to Lincoln's abolition
proclamation. In this view Lincoln was merely biding his time, waiting
his moment to reveal himself as an abolitionist. A good way to
re-balance this understanding is to consider how near the Crittenden
Compromise came to succeeding.
We're in Feb of 1861. Lincoln bests two Democratic candidates--Douglas
and Breckinridge--and a fourth party candidate, John Bell of Tennessee,
gaining a plurality in a campaign that is pretty much only about
slavery, by--unlike the other candidates-- refusing to be immovable on
the issue. In response to Lincoln's win, South Carolina, Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Texas exercise what they see
as a right to secede. Now comes the last attempt to forge a
compromise, led by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. The deal
worked out re-establishes the geographical agreement of the Missouri
Compromise, bans slavery north of the line, protects it to the south of
the line, lets future states decide on a popular vote, acknowledges
that the fugitive slave law must be enforced but puts in place a system
of federal compensation payments, puts in place a legal block to any
amendment of the Constitution re. slavery. Here the rights of states
are acknowledged, the rights of slaveholders are acknowledged, so what
caused the compromise to fail; what was the tipping point that brought
war on? It was Lincoln, who said he could accept everything in the
compromise except the inclusion of slavery in the territories.
If you really want to be a Marxist and are wedded to a "one cause"
approach--and here I'm being just a little silly--the war was neither
about slavery nor about states' rights; the war was fundamentally
imperial, it was about which vision of the future to impose on people
who weren't yet part of the country!
BTW. During the election campaign Lincoln voters were stirred by a
series of torchlight parades by those who called themselves the "Wide
Awakes." At the following website you'll see an odd resemblance
between the torches then used and the Danish cartoon of Mohammed.
http://www.ohiokids.org/oe/bbb/02.html
Torchlight parades in America, long before the Nazis thought of them.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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