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States Rights and Wrongs of the South

Historians keep saying that the "States Rights" issue of the Civil War was clearly the institution of Slavery. However, in 1830, the issue was not slavery but taxation. But the overall solution was the same...secession.

From the "Proceedings of the States Rights Celebration, at Charleston, S.C., July 1st, 1830."

Part of the speech by Major James Hamilton.

(as a young man he was sent to Congress)

"At this period, I do not believe there was an individual in this Union more thoroughly and enthusiastically national in his politics than myself. I went to the immediate centre of the action of the Federal Government with every prepossession in its favor. I had taken ap somewhat on trust, without much examination, but with no other than the purest motives, opinions in some respects (but with what I then supposed proper guards) calculated to sustain some of its implied powers. There was something in the picture of a magnificent government, invincible is war, beneficent in peace, balding in exact equipoise the scales of justice, presiding over all, sustaining all, protecting all, with neither the power nor inclination to do injury to any, well calculated to fascinate the imagination of a young man whose estimates of life were as sanguine as his knowledge was imperfect and limited. I was not, however, lone at the great federal laboratory without discovering some radical defects in the practical operation of its mechanism—some omens of sinister import, which satisfied me, that those who had been invoking unceasing watchfulness and jealousy on the part of the States over the general government, were the trustworthy sentinels of our liberty, that their challenges on the ramparts were the true and faithful watchwords; and if they did not cry in a dark and starless night, "All's well," it was because, indeed, all was not well! In confessing this error of my first political impressions, I am influenced quite as much by a desire of doing justice to the wisdom, and honor to the motives of those who, from the commencement of the operation of our federal system, have uniformly thought its highest peril, as well as its greatest tendency, was to consolidation, as to put my own opinions beyond cavil or dispute. In short, Gentlemen, during the last four years of my service in Congress, I witnessed enough to convince me, that, practically, the government of this confederacy was nothing more or less than an organ of indefinite power, admirably used (if not contrived) for the purpose of taxing one portion of the Union, with the view of distributing its exactions in another ; and that, under a league and copartner ship between the Tariff and Internal Improvement parties, monopoly was to be given to the one, and the fruits of the taxation necessary to secure that monopoly, to the other.

I thought I perceived, as I think I do now, in this corruption, the seeds of the dissolution of this Union, sowed broad-cast, and about to germinate with a rank luxuriance. That man must be far gone in Utopian visions, who supposes that a confederate government like ours, can violate, if you please, even the spirit of the compact, for the purpose of usurping powers of internal legislation among the States, when the object of such usurpation is to give to sheer plunder the forms of law, without term mating in a rapacious despotism over the minority, and in a thorough corruption of the public spirit of those who are the favored objects of this unlawful booty. We have been told that that government is the worst which, with the forms of a free, has the ends of an arbitrary government. Whether ours has reached this condition, let the signs of the present crisis determine.

In such a state of things, I leave you to decide, how hopeless must have been the efforts of those, who in scorning to unite in such a system of freebooting, by the very fact of their daring to lift up their voices against it, only excited our oppressors to fresh acts of injustice."

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The speeches go on and on about Southern Rights and Southern Wrongs. Disunion and Civil War are banted around freely- and all over the subject of taxation and bounties.

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"I have made the analysis and put the facts side by side, that you may run the parallel, and, having done so, say, whether the condition of this State, and of all the Southern States, is not one exhibiting all the essential evils of colonial dependence? Are you less colonial than Canada, for example? The great interests of that country, if is true, are controlled by the legislative will of Great Britain, which has the right, according to received notions of national law, to do so. But so are you governed by a people equally distinct form you, except as you and they are connected by institutions, legal and moral, social and charitable, which forbid the exercise of such power. But their peculiar interests are fostered- yours are oppressed. They receive bounties- you pay penalties. The burthens the people of that country bear are light- yours are enormous. The revenue collected form them is spent among them. That which you pay is spent abroad." Langdon Cheves.

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David Upton

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States Rights and Wrongs of the South
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agreed *NM*
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Right On, Alan *NM*
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