George
Herbert’s 1884 history text exemplified what Northerners were led to
believe about the war, and what Southern parents wanted excluded from
their children’s schools. With a severely distorted understanding of the
framers’ Constitution of 1787, including its provisions regarding the
writ and presidential powers, Lincoln and his followers destroyed the
experiment in self-government. Apparently unknown to Andrew Johnson in
1861, the 1781 Treaty of Paris granting independence to thirteen former
colonies, each individually as sovereign entities, preceded the
Constitution of 1787.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Andrew Johnson’s Ingenious Sophism
“In
the Senate Andrew Johnson appeared as the Senator from Tennessee . .
.[and] we may take occasion, presently, to quote from his powerful
speech in defense of the Union, delivered in the Senate on the 27th of July [1861]:
“It
is believed that nothing has been done [by the President since Fort
Sumter] beyond the Constitutional competency of Congress. Soon after
the first call for militia, it was considered a duty to authorize the
commanding general, in proper cases, to suspend the Writ of Habeas
Corpus; or, in other words, to arrest and detain, without resort to the
ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem
dangerous to the public safety. The authority has been exercised but
sparingly.
It
was decided that we have a case of rebellion, and that the public
safety does require the qualified suspension of the writ, which was
authorized to be made. Now it is insisted that the Congress, and not the
Executive, is vested with this power. But the Constitution is silent
as to which or who is to exercise the power; and as the provision is
plainly made for a dangerous emergency . . . No more extended argument
is now offered, as an opinion at some length will probably be presented
by the Attorney General.
It
might seem at first thought to be of little difference whether the
present movement in the South be called Secession or Rebellion. The
movers well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they
could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name
which implies violation of law . . . [but they accordingly] . . .
commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind; they invented
an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly
logical steps through all the incidents of the complete destruction of
the Union. The sophism itself that any State of the Union may, and
therefore lawfully and peaceably, withdraw from the Union without the
consent of the Union or of any other State.
With
little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for
just cause, themselves to be the sole judges of its justice, is too thin
to merit any notice within the rebellion. Thus sugar-coated they have
been dragging the public mind of these sections for more than thirty
years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a
willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some
assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their
State out of the Union, who could have been brought to no such thing the
day before.
Our
States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in
the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State
out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union before they
cast off their British Colonial dependence . . . Having never been
States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence
this magical omnipotence of State rights, asserting a claim of power to
lawfully destroy the Union itself?”
(The Popular History of the Civil War, Illustrated, George B. Herbert, F.M. Lupton, 1884, pp. 116-119)
Vladimir Putin puts troops in western Russia on alert and orders drill to
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