Tolerance, Part Two

As a postscript to my previous post on tolerance, my interlocutor replied in an interesting way.  He revealed that he cannot possibly see any other point of view - not even theoretically - than that the hundreds of thousands of men who fought in the Confederate armed forces - and the millions of civilians who supported them - were "traitors," saying, "How else could they be described?"

He says, "They fought against the Governing Authorities, the United States Government, and they lost."

His reference to the "governing authorities" comes from the English Standard Version translation of Romans 13:1-6, in which St. Paul writes:

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed."

The implication is clear, our Confederate ancestors were sinning against God, because God had apparently determined that the Hamiltonian legal theory is correct and the Jeffersonian legal theory is not.  And also notice that he adds "and they lost."  According to this logic, the sinfulness or righteousness of a particular act depends upon the outcome.  So if your state secedes and you defend your state, there is no way to know whether this is sinful or not at the time.  If the mother country recognizes your independence, then it is not sinful.  If the mother country does not recognize your independence, and unleashes a military invasion - then it is still up in the air.  If there is a war of independence, and you win the war, your act of secession is, ex post facto, not sinful.  But if you lose your war of independence, your act of secession is, ex post facto, sinful.

This exposes a remarkable flaw in the ethics of my interlocutor's view.

It is akin to saying that if a guy shoplifts, it is only sinful if he gets caught.  It is also a variation of "might makes right," that an act is moral if one has the sheer force to get away with it.

The question of whether or not secession is legal or illegal, moral or immoral, cannot be grounded in the ultimate success of the action without adopting a kind of moral relativism.

Moreover, in appealing to a particular historiography of the United States Constitution combined with the "might makes right" premise, what does this say about slavery?  To use my interlocutor's reasoning, under the "governing authorities" of the day - both that of the private slaveholder and the United States government as authorized by the Constitution, slaves are obliged not to rebel, and anyone giving a runaway slave aid and comfort (such as the Underground Railroad) are condemned under the same moral principal laid down by my interlocutor.  Slavery was legal according to the United States Constitution.  And according to the Fugitive Slave Acts, anyone discovering runaways were obliged to turn them in and return them to their masters.  Hence Lincoln's misnamed Emancipation Proclamation not only protected slavery in the Northern states where it existed, but specifically exempted Confederate territory occupied by Union forces, such as my own Jefferson Parish, Louisiana (mentioned by name in the Proclamation).  In other words, the Union Army, under the auspices of the Constitution, made it their policy to return runaway slaves to their masters and bolstered the institution of slavery.  My interlocutor's belief that federal law trumps all is a pro-slavery assertion.

He also accuses Confederate officers who were "graduates of our service academies" of "betraying their Oaths as Officers of the United States Army or Navy" and compares them to "Tomoya Kawakita" and "Max Haupt."  He also works in the Rosenbergs.  He misunderstands the nature of oaths.  They are no longer in force when a person is no longer a citizen of that country or a member of its armed forces.  For example, if a person were to emigrate from Canada and become a United States citizen - his obligations to the Crown cease and his nationality becomes American.  If he were to join the US military, the president of the United States would be his commander in chief, and the American forces would be his chain of command.  And even if he had served in the Canadian military forces, he is no longer bound by that chain of command.  When I lived in Ohio, I became a notary, and was under oath to the Constitution of the State of Ohio.  When I was no longer a resident of Ohio, my oath was (and is) nullified.

The officers of the United States military forces resigned their commissions with the United States before accepting commissions in their state militias or the military forces of the Confederate States.

This is similar to the argument that I have heard by some Roman Catholics that Luther broke his monastic vows by leaving the authority of the pope and getting married.

Modern American history is taught in a terribly anachronistic way that conveniently serves a narrative.  There is the assumption that the American Nationalism we take for granted today was the same as it was in antebellum America.  It simply was not the case.  There are ulterior motives in vilifying half of the American population of 1861, just as there are reasons why half of the population that voted for Donald Trump are similarly denounced as traitors, Nazis, and racists.  In 1861, people owed their primary allegiance to their states.  That is a fact that is seldom taught in our schools.  One of the results of the Union victory was to establish the supremacy of DC over nearly every aspect of American life.  The federal government today even regulates how big one's toilet bowl may be.  This kind of micromanaging in the lives of our people and states would have been unthinkable in 1861.  Today, DC micromanages school curricula (which explains the self-serving way the War Between the States is taught).  The vast expansion of the powers of Washington that resulted from the Union victory is the subject of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (no friend of the South and no fan of the CSA).

1861 was very close in time and thought to 1776.  In fact, the last veteran of the Revolutionary War was still living and receiving a pension at the close of the War for Southern Independence.  Men who were brought up to lionize the Virginia General George Washington (whom my interlocutor would have called a traitor and accused of violating Romans 13 had a couple battles gone the other way) likewise lionized Washington's grandson in law, Robert E. Lee.  Many a Southerner went off to war carrying his grandfather's Revolutionary War musket.  Historian James McPherson (a strong partisan of the Union who makes no bones about his biases) conducted a study of letters from the soldiers North and South to determine their motivation for fighting.  His 1994 publication What They Fought For reveals that the Southern soldier saw himself as defending the ideals of 1776, similarly defending his home from invasion just as his secessionist grandfathers did.  The seal of the Confederate States of America features an image of George Washington on his horse.  In the same way that Lutherans see themselves in continuity with the ancient church and not in rebellion against it, Confederates saw themselves in continuity with America - and not in rebellion against it.  They saw their enemies as perverters of the Constitution.  I would bet that not one in a thousand Americans has a clue of any of this.

Moreover, the USMA at West Point taught constitutional law using an 1825 text written by Philadelphia lawyer William Rawle, (1759-1836) a friend of George Washington and an active abolitionist.  Rawle's View teaches the Jeffersonian compact theory of the Constitution.  It argues for the legality of secession and essentially gives a step-by-step guide to how it would be done.  The Jeffersonian view was mainstream in those days.  This is the view of the Constitution that was taught to the military and government leaders in antebellum America.  The Jeffersonian view was so established in antebellum America, that a secession convention was called in Hartford, Connecticut by New England states considering secession in the waning days of the War of 1812 (the war's end brought the secession movement to a close).  There were threats of secession made in Northern states over the annexation of Texas.  Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison proposed secession of non-slave states from the Union.  There was no suggestion at that time that secession was treason, as the Jeffersonian view was the mainstream legal theory of the time.  Those court-historians who write the current American school curricula who deny this are either ignorant or engaged in gaslighting, if not outright propaganda.  I would bet that not one in ten thousand Americans knows this.

To have an actual understanding of the conflict instead of an oversimplified Schoolhouse Rock-style self-serving cartoonish court-historian view, it is necessary to examine the motivations of both sides - even if ultimately one disagrees with the Southern argument.  Simply dismissing us as traitors and racists is no different than the modern sepsis of Trump Derangement Syndrome.