Reasons other than just "slavery alone" tied to igniting US Civil War of 1861-1865.

[Last updated 01/10/2011: 
The purpose of this post is NOT to defend slavery or to "vindicate" the South, but to examine the effect of straying from the US Constitution. 

For the South, it was more or less a polarizing of a view that the US Constitution was little more than a contract, a yearning for the days of the Confederacy of Government in 1778 to March of 1787, and in the words of the reasoning for seceding from the Union, that view was perfectly clear. But the South alone was not the only side to blame.  Those who seek to bog themselves down in micro-arguments miss the intent of the macro-argument that is being made below.  When States, the Federal Government, the US Supreme Court stray from adhering to the US Constitution given by the Founding Fathers, its consequences can be deadly for the Country.  So were there other reasons than just slavery alone to igniting the Civil War?  Not ALL the reasons will be listed here...but the pattern of straying from the US Constitution will.    -- end of update.]



The United States has long offered "revisionist" history regarding the cause of the US Civil War as gradually being more and more solely upon the issue of Slavery.  Ignored are the issues that the Southern States like South Carolina viewed themselves as if nation-states allied in a common Confederacy: one Confederacy was among themselves, as if an oral contract between family and friends, an exclusive whites only club with an exceptionalist aristocracy; the other, to the Union of States called the United States and its guiding Supreme law or Constitution, the highest contract by which they could obligate themselves to...and if that contract were severely and intentionally broken by other states contrary to the Southern Confederacy, then as free and independent nation states (as recognized at the Treaty between Great Britain and the Independent Statesin 1783) they could then as if nations, absolve themselves from the Union called the collective (i.e., the United States of America).


When South Carolina gave its historical reasons for the legality of seccession,
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
they stated:


"And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.






In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."



Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof."



Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.


In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended for the adoption of the States, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.


The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.


...By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that 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. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.




Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.


We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.


In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. "


South Carolina then cited the Northern States refusing to abide by the US Constitution, whether it involved slaves or fugitives of any kind, all were given Sanctuary by crossing State Lines into the North.




"The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.


... In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.


The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."


These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves...."




Did the Supreme Court assist in allowing the Southern States mis-direction on the US Constitution to draw any particular wrong conclusions so as to aid in causing the US Civil War? 


In Marbury v.Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803) @ 179-180,
http://supreme.justia.com/us/5/137/case.html
both elected officials and judges are to maintain and adhere to the US Constitution as the supreme law that guides and governs their actions, and states:


"...it is apparent that the framers of the Constitution contemplated that instrument as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the Legislature. Why otherwise does it direct the judges to take an oath to support it?"




In Murray v. The Charming Betsey, 6 U.S. 2 Cranch 64 (1804)
the US Supreme Court, in the Syllabus and @ 118
http://supreme.justia.com/us/6/64/case.html
states:
"An act of Congress ought never to be construed to violate the law of nations if any other possible construction remains..."




Now read the following case in the mindset of the Time Period, where free whites land owners are the voting citizens of the United States, and that slaves, alien races, and Indians -- although inhabitants -- are viewed as perpetual strangers and enslaved visitors to this nation as though aliens to the land. The States are guided individually as well as collectively by Vattel and "the Law of Nations" in Pre-Civil War America.


The Venus, 12 U.S. (8 Cranch) 253 @ 289-290 (1814)


http://supreme.justia.com/us/12/253/case.html


- Chief Justice John Marshall stated:
The whole system of decisions applicable to this subject rests on the law of nations as its base. It is therefore of some importance to inquire how far the writers on that law consider the subjects of one power residing within the territory of another, as retaining their original character or partaking of the character of the nation in which they reside.


Vattel, who, though not very full to this point, is more explicit and more satisfactory on it than any other whose work has fallen into my hands, says


"The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages.


The natives or indigenes
are those born in the country
of parents who are citizens.


Society not being able to subsist and to perpetuate itself but by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights."


"The inhabitants, as distinguished from citizens, are strangers who are permitted to settle and stay in the country. Bound by their residence to the society, they are subject to the laws of the state while they reside there, and they are obliged to defend it because it grants them protection, though they do not participate in all the rights of citizens. They enjoy only the advantages which the laws or custom gives them. The perpetual inhabitants are those who have received the right of perpetual residence. These are a kind of citizens of an inferior order, and are united and subject to the society, without participating in all its advantages."




Southern States believed that a gradual emancipation of slaves to free by amending their State Constitutions was the means by which those perpetual inhabitants could be granted privileges near equal to citizens without depriving the existing citizenry.  They were, even as the Supreme Court said, were "a kind of citizens of an inferior order...united and subject to the society, without participating in all its advantages."  These words helped reinforce the Southern States to a state of Southern aristocracy as masters among slaves, as superior to even their Northern Free White Citizen counterparts.  Every son of the south was to have the experience of leadership on some level, and nations (i.e. States) of leaders were superior to those other nations of the Union  (i.e. northern States) who bulk populace were little more than followers.  The military distinction would be that the South was viewed by some in the South as if a Confederacy of Officers, and the North as if of Bureaucrats and enlisted men. 






GIBBONS V. OGDEN, 22 U. S. 1 (1824) @ 188
http://supreme.justia.com/us/22/1/case.html
states: " ...the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said."
 
Holmes v. Jennison, 39 U.S. (14 Peters) 540 @ 570-71 (1840)
http://supreme.justia.com/us/39/540/case.html


“In expounding the Constitution of the United States, every word must have its due force and appropriate meaning, for it is evident from the whole instrument that no word was unnecessarily used or needlessly added. The many discussions which have taken place upon the construction of the Constitution have proved the correctness of this proposition and shown the high talent, the caution, and the foresight of the illustrious men who framed it. Every word appears to have been weighed with the utmost deliberation, and its force and effect to have been fully understood. No word in the instrument, therefore, can be rejected as superfluous or unmeaning, and this principle of construction applies …”


In 1833, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Peters 243,
http://supreme.justia.com/us/32/243/case.html
in which the US Supreme Court threw out the acceptance of the US Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land as it regarded the 5th Amendment's "takings clause", and de facto and de jure supported not only the notion of a duality of State Citizenship and US National Citizenship, but allowed that States could of their own accord be deemed greater in their Constitutions than the national US Constitution of 1787-1789.  Chief Justice Marshall stated to the effect that the Bill of Rights only restricted the Federal Government and not the State Governments, leaving the States a free hand to legislate individually as if singular more sovereign than the Federal Government, and reinforced the South's primary legal argument that they were to be Individually recognized as Free and Independent States with the local ability to raise taxes, go to war, etc, the same as sovereign nations.


 This intentional refusal to enforce the 5th Amendment in the natural sense it was written, and to provide a wharf owner Barron, who was refused a just recompensation for the city of Baltimore's encroachment and destroying of his commercial business by dumping sand and gravel wastes from the city paving projects that effectually devaluied his property to near worthlessness and disabled his business...that case, by refusing to abide by the US Constitution,  enabled the US State's over US National sovereignty argument, which in 28 years enabled the US Civil War to happen. The Supreme Court under Marshall was of a mind that only if the national (i.e., Federal) Government had done the damage to Barron without just compensation, only then would the 5th Amendment have been violated. 

@ 247: The question thus presented is, we think, of great importance, but not of much difficulty. The Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves, for their own government, and not for the government of the individual States. Each State established a constitution for itself, and in that constitution provided such limitations and restrictions on the powers of its particular government as its judgment dictated. The people of the United States framed such a government for the United States as they supposed best adapted to their situation and best calculated to promote their interests. The powers they conferred on this government were to be exercised by itself, and the limitations on power, if expressed in general terms, are naturally, and we think necessarily, applicable to the government created by the instrument. They are limitations of power granted in the instrument itself, not of distinct governments framed by different persons and for different purposes.
 But such was not Founders' Intent, and this case enabled the polarization of the nation with a most deadly after effect by degrading the superiority of the US Constitution which every judge and legislator in every State pronounced by oath as superior, but to many, they were just words, and their loyalties were to their States first and foremost  over that of the Nation.
If these propositions be correct, the fifth amendment must be understood as restraining the power of the General Government, not as applicable to the States. In their several Constitutions, they have imposed such restrictions on their respective
Page 32 U. S. 248
governments, as their own wisdom suggested, such as they deemed most proper for themselves. It is a subject on which they judge exclusively, and with which others interfere no further than they are supposed to have a common interest."

By the time the US Supreme Court thought to restore the 5th Amendment on the Federal Level with the release of the well explained and return to originalism in Dred Scott, it was already too late.  Just before Dred Scott's release, President Buchanan at his inaugural torpedoed its effectiveness by leaking the highly confidential results of the decision in advance, and diffused any effectual cohesion and calming effect the release of that case might otherwise had in showing that the US Supreme Court had returned to a Court willing to return to US Constitutional enforcement in their decisions.


 So was the Civil War fought exclusively over the issue of "slavery"?
       The answer is no.  We could cite that to free the slaves for the sake of being free is the current political reason given, but to say it was the sole cause would be the illiterate answer.



http://www.jstor.org/pss/2116615
“The Cause of the Civil War rests in a form of Limbo. …there is at present no recognized procedure by which a consensus on the actual cause(s) can be reached.”







In the Journal of Economic History, Volume 31, Number 1, March 1971, pp. 276-278

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2117040

and in James M. Mcpherson's Civil War History, Vol. 50, 2004, 

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KC0GzMDZTz0YhyTxLGXtzYwPvTf1Q3QpvkTkxrtVq8gGYmb9xwTG!1562892977!-563477853?docId=5008438018

we find that it was a combination of the Ante-Bellum Tariff and a southern exceptionalism apart from a pride in the United States as a whole that led to the reason why the South decided to secede from the Union. This exceptionalism, and the keeping of what has been described as a neo-feudalism voiding or suppressing the existence of and/or prosperity to attain to a a "middle class", dated back to the founding days of this nation, when the United States had Declared its Independence,  and for some 11 years (from 1778 to 1789) called its own Governance a "League of Confederacy". 


In 1860, the fact that the Southern States were exporters of 80% of the world’s Cotton, and Northern Industrialists and Bankers were upset that the South failed to provide greater infrastructure, especially failing to immediately provide fast rail transportation at their own expenses (as yet undeveloped and and nearing a boon in development and financing) factored as a cause to the US Civil War.  


There was indeed a bullish economy from 1807-1837,  (see p. 4 of

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99013089.pdf  );
but there is still debate to this day on pre-Civil War economies.  


The South was more poorly developed and less linked by rail. They were sluggishly “behind the times” as far as Northern Industrialists were concerned, being chiefly limited by river transport to deliver goods to ocean shipping. The conclusion appears to be that, in the North, tension was rising among the Industrialists (especially those in Textile) for the South to build and connect by rail, and to pay for it themselves. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1892932



So what pressured the North to pressure the South to hurry up, and get with the times or suffer the consequences?
It seems that "population distribution" with heavy immigration, with their various cultural impacts, as well as the financial bear markets of the Industrial North after decades of overall bullishness, which some say jangled up in the 1850s, not only added to the immediate tensions leading to Civil War, but were primary motivators in the guise of "survival and greed".
See also: 
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2113473
http://www.nber.org/papers/h0028.pdf

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2116137
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1925706
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1836195

This primary factor of organized Banker and Industrialist Aristocracy GREED, and the rise of Industrialization and forms of Corporate (think in comparison to "Colonial") usurpation (that would happen after the Civil War from 1865 to the Present, including the conglomerate rise of Wall Street Financiers) that contributed to the Civil War occurring in the first place. That is, a desire of northern Industrial owners to virtually own the South, to control the cotton fields and textiles of the South (hence, even the Plantation owners themselves) and “profiteer”.  But the empowerment to spark and conduct the Civil War needed moral philosophical and religious justification.  The war at its root cause was more than about slavery, even though that was a resonating moral philosophical and religious justification most appeared to use to justify the provoking of a war with the Southern States.


Thus, the Civil War may have been kindled in part by a States v. States socio-religious and economic conflict, in which the unjust financial federal seizures of Southern Cotton sales at ports of call, action pressures used via the Federal Government to oppress the South into financial ruin and capitulation to Industrialists and Bankers in the north, which they instigated  as a means of seizing an entire industry of manufacturing, blew up in their faces with unintended consequences -- that being, the Civil War itself.  


That, and religious conflict that existed between the Roman Catholics of the North and the Protestants of the South.  Roman Catholicism recognizes the sovereignty of the Pope, and that of the Vatican in Rome. We cannot rule out the possibility of Vatican influences to proselytize the United States through its heavily Catholic Immigration, and that it exercised its influences to remove or neutralize its most ardent opponents in Congress, those aristocrats of the South. 


In US History leading up to the Civil War, British America, and then the United States, was hostile in its views toward Roman Catholics.  And with good reason.  The Roman Catholic Church tortured and persecuted born-again Christians and those who did not yield to the local priest as lord and master by the tens of millions over the course of 605 years, from 1203 to 1808 A.D.   (cf page 46 @ pdf p.10 of
http://www.bereanbeacon.org/history/history/Papcy_An_Overview_of_Its_History_and_Nature.pdf  ).


So Southerners, especially merchant traders, seamen, and even wealthy southern aristocrats in the 1600s to well past 1808 A.D.  were especially cognizant of the Inquisitions and dungeons of the Roman Catholic torture and murder squads...perhaps some because of some who in their family or employ died or were tortured as martyrs by the Roman Catholic Church.   The Protestant South by majority would have borne virtually the same undying hatred and abhorrence of the Roman Catholic Inquistion as Jews to this day hold for Nazis and the Holocaust. 


Therefore, we must also factor in the Ethno-cultural conflicts in the North that helped lead to the Civil War with the South, including the rise of an anti-Roman Catholic Republican Party.
 http://www.jstor.org/pss/1904303
http://www.jstor.org/pss/25013091

But in returning, it seems that Statehood before the Civil War was almost akin to, if not akin to "sovereignty" in the view of the Southern States, and their philosophical convictions of Southern Exceptionalism. 


Further, at the time, the various States before the US Civil War considered themselves as having the free and independent power to wage war, levy taxes, make treaties apart from the other States in the collective of the United States (and so forth), the pre-Civil War South was in the mindset of the United States Confederacy of 1778-1789, unable to make the full transition to fully embrace the US Constitution as the Supreme and binding Law of the Land that was to be preciously guarded and equally enforced.   


It is true that one of the gripes of the Southern States in their seccession was that they had expected a co-equal administration and influence of lands to their west as far as the Pacific Ocean, lands south of the Missouri line that could also be "slave states" by which Southern Aristocrats could expand their enterprises westward legally.  But these were primarily gripes about monetary losses out of Southern State treasuries that operated primarily at cost, and could have been reinbursed over a period of years in a payment by the Federal Goverment to the States for their losses as a form of good will to preserve the Union, but Northern Corruption would have none of it. 


 The Southern States for nearly 60 years were insulted that the nation that was once a Confederacy acted like it was something else...a nation in which northern interests increasingly held the Federal Government in its pocket, as it were. 

Up to September 23, 1861: "...the North had been ostensibly for the preservation of the Union alone although every one knew that in some way or other it turned on slavery; but from now on it became a war for the destruction of slavery as well as a struggle for nationality and the conviction grew that there could be no true and permanent reconstruction of the Union unless the cause of the trouble had perished.”Rhodes, James Ford History of the United States, Vol. V (1864-1866)
NY: The MacMillan Company, © 1904, p.2


But was slavery the only trouble, or was it really because the South and the various States disregarded the US Constitution when it suited their own State interests the most?  Was it because the South could not let go of the original concept of the Confederacy of the United States, and the demand to claim independent sovereignty as nation-states, a view that was reinforced by Chief Justice Marshall in Barron v. Baltimore as well as by the US Treaty with Great Britain between Great Britain and the individual states listed individually instead as a collective "United States"? 


The Union entered the war on the rallying cry to preserve the Union...but in less than 6 months, it had changed to a rallying cry that it was because of the immorality of slavery that caused the war, and that alone was the cause.  But was slavery alone the cause of the US Civil War?  While it was a very major part, the fight for the Southern Confederacy, and the desire for the South to claim that the contract of the US Constitution had been broken with them proves that it was not about slavery only...but about setting right a cohesion that should have occurred with the signing of the US Constitution, and never really did until after a US Civil War killing hundreds of thousands of American Citizens of the Northern and Southern States slammed the issue shut.  After which, we are to look back as if the South was always a part of the United States, even if in rebellion for 4 years.


For the South, the issue of Slavery was "a" hot button issue, but not "the" hot button issue that launched the Civil War. I believe that a case can be made that it was effectively committed by a series of Constitutional violations by the Federal Government against the South, including a refusal to heed a redress of various grievances in Congress, and especially the forced seizure of "duties" (State revenues) from the ports in South Carolina and Virginia was the issue.




In Harper's Weekly in January 5 and 12, 1861, the Federal forces are stated to have abandoned Fort Moultrie for consolidation in Fort Sumter just after Christmas of 1860 in a manner suggesting defensive provocation as if already at war.




http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war-harpers-jan-5/harpers-weekly-1861_Page1.htm




HARPER'S WEEKLY.


SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 1861.


THE ABANDONMENT OF FORT MOULTRIE.


THE country is thrown into a state of great excitement by the intelligence that, on Christmas night, the gallant Major ANDERSON, commanding the United States force at FORT MOULTRIE, abandoned that fort, and removed all his command to FORT SUMTER. The guns at FORT MOULTRIE have been spiked, and the gun-carriages burned. FORT SUMTER IS a work of great strength, and, with the force now in it, commanded as it is, can be held securely against any army that South Carolina can bring against it. FORT MOULTRIE, on the other hand, was a very weak position, and could not have been defended against a vigorous attack. The movement reflects the greatest credit on the judgment of Major ANDERSON, who, it seems, acted exclusively on his own responsibility in the matter, and without consultation with the Government or with General SCOTT.


We can formulate very accurate literary understandings of the past from their testimonies and their points of view at the times they occurred.
For example, see also:
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/major-anderson-ft-sumter_Dir/civil-war-seizure-southern-forts.htm

If then, those Federals coming against the States as if the States themselves were already enemies and were actively seizing properties and monies as confiscations until left no sufficiency for the states (as appears separately intimated but not explicitly made in Harper's during the period in question), and violated State Rights for tax revenues in the seizures; then, clearly, even if those same forces suddenly took a defensive posture after South Carolina had declared secession, the Civil War wasn't just about slavery from the point of view from the South in the 1861 mindset.   To South Carolina, for example, it was more about the rights of autonomy, the rights of self-governance -- and even if those claims were exceeding the limits of the US Constitution, the US Supreme Court in Barron v. Baltimore led them to believe otherwise. And for that reason, moreso than the issue of slavery (it seems to me), Fort Sumter was fired upon.
We know this is historically likely to be the most factual conclusion, because the South was willing to forego all importation of slaves:


 In the Amendments Proposed by the Peace Conference, February 8-27, 1861; ARTICLE XIII.


SEC. 5. The foreign slave-trade is hereby forever prohibited; and it shall be the duty of Congress to pass laws to prevent the importation of slaves, coolies, or persons held to service or labor, into the United States and the Territories from places beyond the limits thereof.


In the Alabama Constitution of Succession, though considered property, the negro was afforded courteous laws of protection from mistreatment or abuse equal to that of a white man or woman.


The process of compromise was there, but it boiled down to the interpretation of what autonomy the individual State did or did not possess, especially in regard to Article 1, section 8, clause 3"s Commerce clause just before the hostilities started by the Federal Government ignited the Civil War. 


The individuals that fought, like Robert E. Lee, cared not about the slave issue, but that war was coming to their homes, against their families and loved ones.
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/chapter2.htm


Arlington, Virginia, April 20, 1861.
"My Dear Sister: ... The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which Virginia, after a long struggle, has been drawn; and though I recognise no necessity for this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native State.


"With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword. I  know you will blame me; but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavoured to do what I thought right.

"To show you the feeling and struggle it has cost me, I send you a copy of my letter of resignation. I have no time for more. May God guard and protect you and yours, and shower upon you everlasting blessings, is the prayer of your devoted brother, R. E. Lee."


"Arlington, Virginia, April 20, 1860.
"My Dear Brother Smith: ... Save in defense of my native State, I have no desire ever again to draw my sword. I send you my warmest love.

"Your affectionate brother, "R. E. Lee."

So with the love of State, there was also a commitment that such love especially included a love of home and family.But then, let me go back and ask this.  If the North fought to end slavery, what about all that segregation for the next century?    31 years after the Civil War, and 28 years after the 14th Amendment we had Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) http://supreme.justia.com/us/163/537/case.html
effectually say that once again the States could individually rewrite the 14th Amendment enforcement under the guise of "separate but equal"  State laws.  If the States provided both blacks (negroes) and whites similar facilities and afforded them "equal protection of the laws", there was no de facto or de jure violation of the negro rights as citizens  under the 14th Amendment.  Segregation with 163 US 537 therefore polarized or enabled a polarization of inter-racial hatred this nation, and that citizen v. citizen inter-racial hatred was more than tolerated through the US Supreme Court until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas 347 US 483 (1954).  http://supreme.justia.com/us/347/483/case.html

  After which followed important cases like Cooper v. Aaron 358 US 1 (1958) http://supreme.justia.com/us/358/1/case.html  , Griffin v. Prince Edward County School Board 377 US 218 (1964)  http://supreme.justia.com/us/377/218/case.html
 and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenurg Board of Education 402 US 1 (1971)
http://supreme.justia.com/us/402/1/case.html  , the which cases with Brown legally dismantled segregation along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act upheld in legal challenges to it.


So in light of the lack of conviction to act in Congress until 1964 to fully embrace all ethnicities, and for the Courts to take another 7 years to complete the desegregation process...was the Civil War solely over the issue to maintain or end slavery?  I would argue: No, not solely that.

And clearly, there seems to be a distinction from Founders' Intent and the US Constitution with the de facto and de jure actual application and legality of US Constitutional Law as intended by the Founders in 1787-1789.  Those historical lessons of distinction only validate my call to a greater Constitutional and legal purism in our own day to help preserve and prosper this Republic (and to keep that Republic and the 1787-1789 Constitution as ever existent for as long as we are able) versus the corruption that actually occurs, such as with Obama and his violating US Constitutional Articles 1, 2 and the1st, 5th, 10th, 11th, 14th, and 20th Amendments.  Clearly, in light of what we can all learn from the past from the unintended consequences of being disnmissive of the specifity and enforcement of the US Constitution, and realize (be cognizant of)  those new consequences created by Obama and the Left's intentional sabatoge and disregard  to the US Constitution, we find that History warns that such egregious behavior  is no laughing matter -- the fields of the Civil War crosses at Arlington Cemetary, despite all that came after, are yet an ever present testament to that.  Let us learn from the past and legally and peacefully act upon that knowledge in good and constructive legal and peaceful ways, that we may pass on a better future to those that come after us.  May G-D help us, and deliver us. In Christ Jesus' name.  Amen.