"With no hope of making its views prevail through law, the South seceded...." DK
Looking again at his text, it seems to me that white southerners, hardly the only whites worried about negroes, either slave or free, would have been less worried about law, through which it seems to me that they had very well been able to make their views prevail by a majority in Congress, with for example the Kansas Nebraska Act, which overruled and supplanted the Missouri Compromise quite apart from Dred Scott also ruling it unconstitutional. It seems to me that that was plenty of law on their side.
They had certainly been able to make their views prevail, consistently with well founded judicial interpretation of the Constitution, in Dred Scott.
So what was it that caused them to secede, hardly out of legal or judicial hopelessness, but perhaps out of justifiable concern? It was the branch implacably, irrationally, against them, the one branch which they now could not control, Lincoln's.
Lincoln's new Republican Party was founded on a supposedly originalist basis, 'originalism on steroids', to use Professor Kaiser's term. See Douglas' quotation from the Second Resolution from the first Republican Mass State Convention in Illinois in 1854, Debates, p 48, ";to bring the administration of the government back to first principles;...".
What Lincoln's originalism on steroids actually is, in reality, however, is Butterfield's Whiggism on steroids.
The actual views of the founders regarding negroes as citizens or subjects were those summarized and expressed by Justice Taney, not by Lincoln and the Republican Party, as even someone like Bobbitt has readily acknowledged.
In a sense, then, Lincoln and Trump may turn out to be the two most momentous, and in some ways similar, presidencies, for analogous tragic, doctrinaire, and irrational reasons.
Maybe they each, in their way, are rather Alcibiades figures.
Make America One again. A house divided cannot stand....
Make America great again.
Lincoln's new Republican Party was founded on a supposedly originalist basis, 'originalism on steroids', to use Professor Kaiser's term. See Douglas' quotation from the Second Resolution from the first Republican Mass State Convention in Illinois in 1854, Debates, p 48, ";to bring the administration of the government back to first principles;...".
What Lincoln's originalism on steroids actually is, in reality, however, is Butterfield's Whiggism on steroids.
The actual views of the founders regarding negroes as citizens or subjects were those summarized and expressed by Justice Taney, not by Lincoln and the Republican Party, as even someone like Bobbitt has readily acknowledged.
In a sense, then, Lincoln and Trump may turn out to be the two most momentous, and in some ways similar, presidencies, for analogous tragic, doctrinaire, and irrational reasons.
Maybe they each, in their way, are rather Alcibiades figures.
Make America One again. A house divided cannot stand....
Make America great again.
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