The Confederate Constitution | Introduction with Brady Douglas V Gibbs

➡ Ron Partain from the Untold History Channel had to cancel his usual slot due to an important matter. Instead, a recording from last Friday was played, featuring Douglas Gibbs and Brady discussing the Confederate Constitution. They explored the reasons behind the South’s secession, challenging the common belief that it was solely about slavery. They also compared the Confederate Constitution with the U.S. Constitution, highlighting similarities, differences, and potential improvements.
➡ The founders of America were worried about the centralization of power, as they had just fought a war to escape it. They were concerned about the British Parliament making rules for places they didn’t live in, and about companies like the British East India Company profiting at the expense of American producers. This led to debates and conflicts, including the Civil War. The discussion also touched on the concept of crony capitalism, where the government favors certain industries, and how this has evolved over time.
➡ The speaker discusses the autocratic power of the executive branch, particularly under Trump, and expresses hope that this power could help overcome current challenges. They also introduce their upcoming analysis of the Confederate Constitution, comparing it to the U.S. Constitution and the Articles of Confederation. The speaker ends by apologizing for a co-host’s absence and wishing everyone a good night.
➡ This text discusses the political history of the United States, focusing on the power shifts between the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans in the late 1800s. It highlights the impact of the Tariff of Abominations, which led to the Nullification Crisis and increased tensions between the North and South. The text also discusses the issue of slavery, including the numerous petitions against it and the debate over its expansion into new territories. Lastly, it mentions the demographic shift in the mid-19th century, which saw the North gaining more representation in the House due to increased immigration.
➡ During the slavery period, Brazil imported the most slaves due to harsh conditions leading to high death rates. In the United States, only 4% of slaves from Africa were brought in, with many being smuggled from Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. The issue of slavery led to violence in Kansas, as the state’s decision on slavery would be determined by its population’s stance on the matter. This period also saw the formation of the Republican party, primarily in response to corruption in the Democratic party.
➡ In the 19th century, political parties like the Whigs and Democrats had differing views on slavery and the role of the federal government. The Whigs, who initially opposed a strong central government, evolved into a party that supported it, leading to a split. Anti-slavery Whigs joined the newly formed Republican Party in 1854, while others joined the Democrats. This period saw a shift from voting for individual candidates to voting for a party’s platform. The 1860 election, won by Republican Abraham Lincoln, was marked by dirty politics and four major factions: the Republicans, Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats, and the Constitutional Union Party.
➡ After the 13th amendment, 16 slaves were freed in New Jersey. The article also discusses the differing views on slavery in various territories and states during the time, including Arizona and New Mexico. The article then delves into the political platforms of the time, particularly the National Democratic Party’s stance on slavery, the Supreme Court, and the construction of a railroad. The article ends with a discussion on the election of 1860 and the potential for secession and civil war if the Republican Party won.
➡ The text discusses the complex history of the United States, including controversial actions like the forced relocation of Native Americans and the issue of slavery. It emphasizes that not all actions represent the entire country or government, but rather segments of them. The text also stresses the importance of learning from history, not erasing it, and the need to look at original documents for a true understanding of events. Lastly, it discusses the concept of property rights, particularly in the context of slavery, and the belief that what one owns is their business, not the government’s.
➡ The text discusses the perception of slavery in the South, arguing that it’s often misrepresented by Hollywood and history books. It suggests that there was a mutual respect between white and black people in the South, as they worked the land together. The text also mentions that many black slaves and free blacks fought for the Confederacy and stayed on the same properties after emancipation, with the only change being that they received a paycheck. Lastly, it discusses the economic factors of the time, including the importance of the cotton industry and the struggle for fertile land, and the political debates around slavery and secession.
➡ The text discusses the historical context of the 14th amendment and the legality of secession, highlighting the 1815 Hartford Convention and attempts to make secession illegal. It also discusses the impact of Lincoln’s assassination on the South, the controversy surrounding the Lecompton Constitution, and the reopening of the African slave trade. The text further delves into the issues of federal government control over territories, internal improvements, naturalization laws, and the corruption within the postal system. The main point is the struggle for self-governance and the controversy between the North and South.
➡ In the 1860s, many Southern states, starting with South Carolina, decided to leave the United States due to disagreements with the federal government, similar to how the American colonies had previously separated from Britain. They formed their own country, the Confederate States of America, and created a constitution that emphasized states’ rights. However, this lack of central control made it difficult for them to effectively fight in the Civil War against the North, which had a stronger central government. The article also discusses how President Lincoln’s actions, such as calling for troops without a declaration of war from Congress, further escalated the conflict.

Welcome everybody to the Untold History Channel. My name is Ron Partain and it is Tuesday. The what is today? Today is the 18th of February. Crazy 18th of February. And this is normally the time slot that I have devoted to for Mike King. Unfortunately, Mike sent me an email this morning and said that he had to cancel. He had something that was of importance that he had to go do. So he, he wasn’t going to be available tonight and our schedules are. Are conflicting for the next several days. So tonight was just kind of a. A cancel and we will resume next Tuesday, so apologize for that.

This, what I’m going to play tonight is, is going to be a recording that, that we did last. I want to say it was last Friday. This is Douglas Gibbs, Mr. Constitution and Brady, aka Warhamster. And we, we did this. It’s. It’s. We’re going to go through the entire Confederate Constitution. But what we did was we started by kind of laying the foundation of what was going on at that time. Why the. The, you know, kind of like the real reasons the south seceded. You know, everybody thinks the south seceded because of slavery. That’s what, you know, the north was altruistic and they wanted to stop slavery and, and the south was barbaric because they wanted to keep people enslaved.

You know, these, these very simple concepts that weren’t really. It was much more nuanced and much, much that. That just. That’s. That’s. That’s a cop out way of trying to justify, you know, you know, what the war, Northern aggression was, why it occurred and, and all that. So anyway, I am going to be playing this video in its entirety and it goes, I want to say it goes about. So I’m just going to go ahead and let this play and I’m. I will be in and out of the comment section and then when it’s over, I’ll come back and if anybody has any questions or whatnot, I will be.

I’ll be here to answer them. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this and I will not, I will not personally be doing this live. This is a recording again, as I said, from last week. So that said, here we go, guys. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the refederalist Report where we look at current historical events from an original intent standpoint in the hopes of returning to our true federalist roots. I am Brady, also known as the Warhamster in some crazy corners of the Internet. And joining me today is my good friend Ron Partain and my other good friend Douglas V.

Gibbs himself, the Navy guys. Yeah, the squids are in the room. Yeah. I was going to ask you guys offline about how does a small little boat run into an aircraft carrier, but we get that another day. They don’t have eyes out there anymore like they used to. Well, clearly the aircraft carrier can’t be at fault. I don’t know, I thought that like a thousand. You can’t see the aircraft carrier coming and you’re driving a tugboat, that you’re in serious problem. You got some serious troubles. Yeah, well, fortunately that’s not our topic for today. Right, Exactly.

We do have a really fun topic today. Yes, we do. Today we are going to start the first and probably a three or four episode series on the Confederate Constitution. Constitution. And the reason we’re doing this is. Yeah, it’s pretty important we look at the founding documents. Doug and I recently looked at the comparison of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of the United States that we live under today. The Articles of Confederation are interesting because, well, they had 80 years of looking back at the Constitution to say, what did they get right? What did they get wrong? What do we like about it? What didn’t we.

And so we’re going to find as we go, we’re going to go into the history that led up to, you know, the reason they wrote the Confederate Constitution. But we’re also, you know, and you’re going to see some things that are actually improvements on the US Constitution. And there’s a couple other things that, you know, may not be. But to the untrained eye, a lot of the language is almost exactly as the Constitution. But then you start seeing these little differences and these little hybridization of a confederation, Articles Confederation into it. Yeah. And it really gives you some insight into what those people, the framers of the Confederate Constitution, what they really cared about.

And right from that you can translate and say, okay, why exactly did they secede in the first place? And you know, Doug and I have been doing these shows for a while. Ron absolutely had to be invited on this show because about three, four years ago he and I, he started, he brought up the Confederate Constitution to me. So he knows this topic really well and there’s no way I was going to do the show without him. So welcome. Thank you, sir. Glad to be here. Well, to get started, you know, let’s look at the, you know, at the founding of the United States of America.

There are a few different schools of thought of what the government should be. You know, we hear people all the time talking about Our democracy. Ah. And of course you come back and say, you know, we’re not democracy, we’re a republic. But even that isn’t technically correct. Nope. The Articles Confederation was a confederation. It was a federation of sovereign states. That’s right. When they formed the Constitution, they, you know, basically created a general government, they called it. They didn’t create a national government. When people say republic today, they talk about a national government. It’s. That’s just not what they intended.

That’s not what they said in the Federalist Papers. It’s not what they said in the anti Federalist Papers. They were still a union of sovereign states. They took the confederation part out of it. You know, and Ben Franklin said, a republic, ma’am, if you can keep it, technically, I can make an argument that wasn’t correct. Well, do we know that he even said that or is that just, you know, legend? Yeah, the, the conversation was mentioned once in somebody’s writings, in conversation that Elizabeth Powell was having with somebody. And when they asked her about this meeting that had kind of gone around, you know, the circles, and she then, in that conversation gave her, her, her side of it, and then that person wrote it down.

So it was. So we know about it only because she was asked about it later. And then even the story that we’re told is different than what she relayed. The story we’re told is they met on the Hill just outside the Constitutional Convention. And actually it was in a building later, I believe, at the Powell house, where somebody asked her about her conversation with Franklin. So really our only evidence is what is what someone said she said during a discussion later. Well, it’s certainly taken on legs of its own and. Oh, absolutely. Even some pretty well read people will insist that we are a republic.

And they say it in a way that we are a national republic. Just like France is a national republic. It’s one country. We were never intended to be anything of the sort of a national republic. In fact, the founding fathers feared centralization of power in a central government. And even the proponents of the Constitution, who, some of them who are actually nationalists, you know, they. Everything they said in the Federalist Papers was, no, this is not what we’re doing. So the Constitution as ratified as, was not a national republic. Now, if it was a national government, the states would have never ratified it.

No, not a million years. But you had three kids, three schools of thought. You know, the founding generation, you have the people who were called the anti Federalists, who basically were the Federalists. They wanted to keep state Sovereignty. You know, you had the Constitutionalists, you know, people that wanted a little bit more central government and they, they acted in good faith. That would have been a Madison because they recognized the Confederate, you know, the Articles of Confederation were too weak. And then you had the people that call themselves Federalists that were actually nationalists led by Alexander Hamilton.

Well, Federalist Party and, and you know, the left has been doing. And when I say left, I mean left of the Constitution has been doing this since the beginning of America where they’ll take a term and then hijack it. The only thing federalist about the Federalist Party was the fact that they use the word federalist in the name. And the reason why they did was because they knew that federalism was a popular thing. Yeah. And they want to convince everybody that’s what they were when they weren’t. Republican party had nothing to do with the Republic, had to do with the nationalist.

And the Democrat party has very little to do with democracy, but. Well, in the beginning they did, but that changed toward a tyrannical direction. But democracy always does. So there’s some big issues and we’re going to do this at the 30,000 foot level because we’ve gone granular, the three of us, a number of times. But the big issues in the minds of the founders, you know, first of all they were worried about the centralization of power. They just fought a revolutionary war to get away from centralized power. They were concerned that the British Parliament was basically legislating rules in places they didn’t live.

There was no representation. One of the big ones was the mercantilism that they were doing experiencing because companies like the British East India Company were getting beneficial legislation so to profit their company at the expense of American producers or shippers. And this is crony capitalism, also known as mercantilism. It’s a real big point that had a lot to do with secession in the Civil War. One of the things the Hamiltonians and later the Lincolnians would campaign on was things they wanted like federally in funded internal improvements and protective tariffs. And those are very damaging to the agrarian south.

So it was actually set up for this. And the antebellum period is filled with debates in Washington regarding the battle over that. And you know, it’s interesting because even a couple of founding fathers presidents who would be against that typically, or signing bills that allowed for internal improvements by the federal. By federal funding. One of my. One of the most famous vetoes of all time in 1817 is James Madison’s where he actually rejected it. So go Ahead, Ron. No, I was just gonna say, you know, I. I read a really interesting article yesterday. I did a show basically, called the Whitewashed Tyranny of Abraham Lincoln.

And basically I just. I kind of read an article that had been written by somebody about. From about 10 years ago, and it was really interesting. A lot of the stuff that, you know, things that she put in that article, it was a good refresher for today. It was, you know, the. The north basically was using the south as their. As their piggy bank with. With the. With the tariffs and whatnot, you know, that. With what ultimately became the tariff of abomination, as they refer to it as. And the south was like, man, we’ve had enough of this.

It’s like all we’re sending. You know, you. You guys are basically taxing the hell out of us. And for all intents and purposes, it was just an. It was a. It was a second time where you had taxation without representation, because in the, in the north, especially in the. In the Lincoln administration after 1860, there was no representation from the South. You’re jumping at. You’re jumping ahead. You’re absolutely correct. My apologies. No, no, no, no. That’s the hardest part about doing a show with these two is reeling them both in. My bad. I’ve behaved. I’ve behaved.

I’ve been sitting here. You’re getting better. It makes it sound like I’m, you know, recovering from, you know, some horrible disease. I’m sorry. It’s just fresh on my mind, so. Well, well. And. And the thing is. And. And now I’m really going to make a Warhamster mad. And the thing is, the north wasn’t producing anything, Right? They manufactured what the south was producing, and then they didn’t allow the south to manufacture. And, you know, they were, in a sense, the ultimate parasite, the South. The north was. Well, yeah, let’s. Like I said, you guys jumped ahead of it.

Absolutely correct. But there’s a little bit of history we have to go over first. And it really starts with. You mean, like, how did it become that way? Well, can I. Can I. No, just. I, I just want to. Just. This, this kind of brings it home to where we are now. I don’t know if you guys saw the. The kind of the, The. The. The. The fervor this or the, The. The rage that’s going on right now, because I guess Elon Musk tweeted about the parasitic class. There’s a parasitic class of people in the United States, and it’s, you know, it’s it.

Basically it’s the same thing that what the north was to the south, the north was parasitic of the South. Yeah, it hasn’t changed a whole lot since the 1860s. What we call ism, you know, we called it then, then we decided to call it the American system. Hitter America. And it’s a system. And now we call it crony capitalism. Sometimes they call it fascism. It’s all the same thing. It’s the government picking favored industries at the, you know, at basically at the cost of everyone else. Mercantilism. Yes, by another name. So we get back to the War of 1812 and what happened was Jefferson had put some tariffs on both England and France.

They wanted to stay out of the wars, but those tariffs were hurting at the time. The south had the population advantage. They had the control of, you know, at the founding, Virginia was the most populous state. This is not too much longer after that. The south had a little bit more political power than the north, especially with a small advantage in the Senate. But they put tariffs and the vast majority of the trade of New England, you know, their, their whole industry was, you know, shipping. So with tariffs going up, they were losing money hand over fist.

And they were so upset, even during the middle of the War of 1812, they convened, it was called the Hartford Convention of 1815. And they were openly talking about secession and joining Canada. Right. Anything to add on that? Well, I just find it odd that, you know, it. Secession only suited the Yankees. If I can use the Brian McClanahan term properly. It only suited the Yankees when it benefited them. Yep. Well, you just described any left of the Constitution ideology. So this idea of protective tariffs is. Is problematic. But the other big part of mercantilism or was what they call internal improvements and that’s using federal money to do things like at the founding days was build canals or roads.

And the companies or entities that would get those contracts would make a ton of money. They were the favored people of the. Of the politicians. And of course they had a financial incentive to put their politicians in power to make sure they got those contracts. Same things that happens today. So there’s nothing new under the sun. And then, and then the states become dependent upon that money coming in ultimately. And then as we see in today’s political society, then government uses that over their head to get them to do what they want. As we get into the 1800s, it goes from canals in shipbuilding to railroads and steel.

And as you will see post Civil War, that single party ruled by the Republican party under that system of spoils and patronage. The biggest fortunes in the history of mankind, known as the robber barons rose up. And basically that’s when you have a single party rule and you are the, you know, you’re the class that runs that party and you’re getting all the favors, the political favors, getting government subsidized railroads. You are making a lot of money. And these robber baron families established generational wealth and they pretty much still sit at the, you know, the table and run the world today.

Now the reality is the United States prospered and became better out of it. But you know, with every good comes about there’s, with every pro there’s a con. And so while who you’re calling the robber barons, I don’t necessarily like to use that term, but as, as you propel them as the, as a bad entity, at the same time, a lot of good came out of it. So there can be arguments of both sides about that time period. Yeah, when they had every. Well, we’ll get to that. When we get to the election of 1860, we’ll talk a little bit more.

We move forward in time and we get A couple of big events happen. One is the tariff of abominations and the other, of course is the election of Andrew Jackson right around the same time. Jump all over. Which one do you want to do? It’s just, you know, Hamilton, John Marshall and Andrew Jackson. That’s like the terrible threesome from the antebellum period. Well, and you know, Hamilton launched it and then Marshall and Andrew Jackson just carved out, you know, what really became Hamilton’s America. And by that you mean a much bigger general government or federal government power, all of that.

Absolutely. And you know, it’s funny because Andrew Jackson, the Whigs can, you know, joke called him King Andrew. He essentially established a mark, a monarchy in the name of democracy. Where have you heard that before? He, he claimed it was be. It was. He’s the reason why the electoral college got messed up. Everything was all about becoming more democratic. But see by being more democratic, it what it is that fed him more power. And that’s why the Whigs emerged. And the Whigs claim that the strongest branch of the government is not supposed to be the president as Andrew Jackson was pushing, but that it should be the legislature.

And so you had this battle that was forming and he was to, to, for lack of better way of saying it, a very energetic president like what we’ve seen, except for he used, just didn’t use his powers for good. And he basically just Ramroded everything he wanted through, through the system and, but. And we never really recovered from that. And it really set the stage for the Lincolnian era. And I want to share a screen real quick, a little bit of his little historical show the balance of power. This shows the party divisions of Congress. And we’re going to go back to about the late 1800s where you can see the Federalists.

I saw the Democratic Republicans who do Jeffersonians in the green. This is the Senate and over here is the House. And in the pink is the Federalists. And after the election of 1800 you can see a huge shift towards the Democratic Republicans. And they would maintain that for the better part of 25 years. And the Federalist Party never, never recovered, not only from the election of Thomas Jefferson, but the first thing Thomas Jefferson did is he fired the Federalist Party half of the bureaucracy and they just never recovered from it. Yeah. And every president we went from Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, you know, eight years of each, all from the Democratic Republics.

That’s 24 straight years. And then Jackson comes along and they didn’t call the Democratic Party at the time. It’s the Jacksonian party versus the anti. Jackson is what this is calling it. Yeah, well that’s when the Republican Party under Jefferson became the Democratic Republican Party and then ultimately then the Democratic Party. What’s interesting as you get through the 1830s over here on this section you can see this thing called others in the House started to pop up. A third party started to have an influence. So at this time we have the tariff of Abominations, even though this is under a Jacksonian.

And what that is is basically 47. 47 tariff on they could goods like cotton in the South. And what that does is it means that the south couldn’t export to England, nor could they import from Europe because Europe is paying these heavy tariffs. They’re going to latch back with tariffs of their own for their goods. And it was basically a punitive tax by the north on the South. Now South Carolina is not having it and no. Yeah, so we had a great showdown with Mr. Calhoun, I believe. Yes, indeed. And basically said we’re not going to do it.

And this is what we call nullification. Does a state have the right to, you know, basically say fine, you can pass all your federal laws. You want that? We’re still a sovereign state and we’re just not going to have any of our, any of our state officers enforce your policy. It created historically what is known as a nullification crisis. And the real question comes down to was the nullification a constitutional notification? Not just is notification constitutional, but was what they did constitutional? In other words, were they trying to nullify a perfectly authorized federal law or was it just because they didn’t like it? And, and that’s where James Madison got involved.

And a lot of people believe that because of James Madison’s writings that Madison was against nullification. No, he was against that nullification because he believed that the tariff was a perfectly authorized federal federal move. I’m not sure it was, but the south shores heck didn’t. Well they, they sure heck didn’t like it. And it definitely set the stage for what we saw in the near future when it comes to the division and ultimately secession. Well, but nullification was very successful because the north didn’t, wasn’t able to collect those tariffs and they were able to get them down lower and lower and lower.

There was. Well, what happened was the other states in the south began to, you know, know, get behind South Carolina and their support on this. And that’s when allocation does work, is when the states work together on it. Well, I didn’t. After, after Lincoln was elected, that was, that was when Calhoun essentially negotiated a deal. And the, the people in the north or Lincoln specifically was like, they just could, they, they couldn’t have it. They’re like, well what are we going to do for our money? And if we negotiate this deal, then all of our, all of our money is gone.

Now the parasite’s mouth would be separated from this. Exactly. Well, this issue heats up over the next few decades as they’re going through the different interparties. Strife and slavery is an issue. There are very few northern states that still have slaves. Most of this, all the southern states. And if you don’t mind real quick, slavery was such an issue at the end of the First Amendment. It says petition the government for redress. Agreements. Communities, cities, counties would petition Congress back then. They would actually have these petitions and have a whole bunch of people sign it and then send them to Congress.

And before Congress did any business, they would go through all the petitions. They were receiving so many anti slavery pro abolition petitions that they actually just stopped going through the petition. It was too many. And they said, well, we got to do other business. Unfortunately, the, the, the concept of petitioning the government went away. We just quit doing it. But it shows you how big of an issue it was that there were so many petitions coming in that Congress basically said we can’t do this anymore. The other big issue, even more important than current slavery, because most People admitted that the Constitution did not allow Congress to ban slavery outright.

That would have taken a constitutional amendment. Was the big thing on the table was slavery in the new territories. And that is a big fight. And you’re going to see that really come up when we get into the 1860 election. Well, if I remember correctly, there was a. They, they were at the time debating a, what we refer to as, as the 13th Amendment, which in reality was actually the 14th Amendment. They were debating this, this amendment to essentially what, what was the Corwin Amendment or the. That they wanted to make that a, a. They actually wanted to amend the Constitution to make it so that no state could outlaw slavery.

It was. If I, is, is that. Am I correct in saying that? Am I correct? Yeah, it was, it was the 13th amendment, before the 13th amendment and after amendment. The one in between. Exactly. They were trying to outlaw abolishing slavery and because they knew that was on the horizon and law wouldn’t do it. You know, it’s. And there’s an important thing to understand. There’s a big demographic shift happening once we get to the middle part of the, of the 19th century. The south actually did, you know, had very strong in the Senate because of the, you know, states were pretty much equally represented, but the House, which was more population driven, the north was getting more and more seats because basically a lot of the immigration came into the big cities of Boston, Philadelphia, New York.

Right. And the Missouri compromise was an attempt to at least keep the Senate even. Let me just show, I got the graph of the population and it really kind of shows it a little bit. Here’s from the 1860 US Census. You can see the biggest states are now New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois. The first four are all bigger than Virginia, which was the biggest at the founding. Then you had Indiana, Massachusetts. It’s the population disparity is pretty significant. Of course. You see all the Deep south states are you know, basically like 12 and on. Yeah. And the, well, you know, obviously if you have the three fifths clause, the, the slave population in 1860 was nearly 4 million.

In 1800 it was, it was under, it was under. It was just, just under 900 million. So they, that was growing too. But I don’t know what the population was in the slave. It wasn’t at the same rate because thanks to 1808, the, the Atlantic slave trade had been outlawed and so the only new slaves were those born and. Well, yes and no. I mean, well, there were, there were about 13000 that were smuggled into the United States. Right. And there’s an actual. There’s an actual. They were actually smuggled in from the north, that’s true. Through Boston.

But there’s actually an effort legislatively in the 1840s and 50s to try to reopen the slave trade. And that’s going to show up in these party statements we get into in a second here. I just wanna, I just, just want to make a. Make a notation though, that. I mean, I think it’s rather incredible to think that if you have a slave population of just under a million and it. And it. And it grows by, you know, basically four times without the importation of very many, I think that, I think that shows or that, that that’s a reflection that the slaves were not treated nearly as poorly as what Hollywood tells us because.

Absolutely. If they were, if they were beaten to death and worked to death, they wouldn’t reproduce. Right. So that’s what was happening in Brazil. They were beating into an inch of their life. That was a poor nutrition, malnutrition, poor nutrition, poor living standards, and they were literally killing their slaves. And then they would have to import more. And that’s the reason why, if you look at the records, Brazil has by far the most imported slaves during the slavery period. And it was because they had to replace what they were killing. Their slaves were not reproducing. You’re not in the mood to reproduce when you’re being beaten to the inch of.

And now that said, there were some slave owners in the south that were absolutely cruel. And what was. And what. And the funny thing about it is one of the worst offenders was a guy named Andrew Jackson. Yeah. And just. Just to kind of tie that up with a bow, you know, if you analyze all of the records of all of the slaves that were taken from the African continent and brought to the Western hemisphere, be it north, south or central, slash Caribbean. The popular. The amount of slaves that actually were brought into the United states was only 4% of people from the African continent.

Only 4% of them ultimately made it to the United. That’s if you add the colonial period and the nationhood or, or country hood that’s not yet together after 1776, it’s about 2%. Right. That was, that was all gone by 1808 too. So. Right, well, once again. Yeah, exactly. And once Again, though, about 13,000 were still smuggled in from Africa. Directly from Africa. That’s the number smuggle in from Africa. Then there were some others that were smuggling from the Caribbean and Mexico. There was a lot of slaves that were actually being smuggled into Mexico as well. But anyway, so the big issue among the states they’re battling out is whether there’s going to be slavery allowed in the new territories.

And Kansas is where this manifests itself. There’s a big episode called bloody Kansas. And you basically had southerners trying to bring their slaves in and you know, northerners who wanted free, trying to stop that. And there was violence. Doug, you want to give us a little more granular? Bloody Kansas or bleeding Kansas, Both terms are used by historians. And basically what happened was with Kansas, they decided that the, to pass the Kansas Nebraska act, which nullified the Missouri compromise. It basically said that now a state is not going to be determined on if they can have slavery or not have slavery based on their location.

It’s none of the federal government’s business to determine that. Therefore, we’re gonna let the states determine that. Well, by letting the states determine that when they go to enter the union, that means that the state that has the larger population of pro slave or anti slave, that’s what it’s going to be. And people aren’t stupid. They began to flock to that state, even if they had no intent to move west. A lot of people coming in from Missouri in different places. And then as the numbers remained close and it got close to that time where they’re going to be voting on becoming a state, then you started to see the real violence come in.

And there are, there are a number of stories about like a couple of brothers and families who were notorious for slaughtering people who were either pro abortion or pro abortion, pro slavery or anti slavery at the time. And, and it was, for lack of a better way, really the first battle of the war between the states. It really set the stage well. And I, and, and I think it’s important to understand that when the north talked about being anti slavery, it wasn’t because of there, it wasn’t because of altruism that they, they were, they were trying to defend the black people.

It was because they didn’t want black people living among them. Yeah, they, they didn’t want this because they figured if the slaves were freed, they would go north looking for work. Right. And they didn’t want that. And so there was a lot of northerners that basically didn’t want the abolition of slavery. They just wanted it contained. And if you look at the Lincoln Douglas debates, that’s what Abraham Lincoln actually ran on is containment of slavery, not the abolition of slavery. Well, actually, I just pulled that, I just pulled that quote up Let me read it real quick.

And this is. This is a quote from. This is a quote from Abraham Lincoln during that, during that debate. I will say then that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the Negro or jurors or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I suppose will never or will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they can, as they cannot so live, that they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.

Yeah, great catch. That’s a very telling. And this. There’s about a dozen more speeches that Lincoln gave. It was the prior 20 years. Remember, this guy’s a railroad lawyer. And that’s about as crooked of a job as you can have when you’re. When you’re trying to, you know, have a federally funded railroad go from point A to point B, which is totally unconstitutional. Absolutely. But you’ve got to have people give up their land and these people want to do it, and you’re going to have to do it at the best price. It’s that you can negotiate.

And sometimes that’s done with a lot of coercion. That’s what the railroad lawyers did. There’s also the amount of patronage going on where you’re handing out. You know, you’ll notice the early Continental Railroad zigzags all over the Midwest because certain towns would be willing to pay more bribes than others to railroad go through there. So instead of going straight across the state, it would take about five right turns or left turns. And that was all about patronage. And, and some of it was that every once in a while there were those who, when it came to domain, they just could not get them to budge and they’d have to go.

And they. So they go around those towns too. And that did happen. So the zigzags are. Because of both. Yeah, and that’s. And I want to add this real quick as we talk about the railroads and the robber barons, all sort of stuff. And the problem isn’t successful businessmen. The problem isn’t these big corporations. The problem isn’t all of this innovation. The problem was when they were colluding with government, government were colluding with them, and special rules were being made as a result of that collusion. That’s the problem. Yeah. And you’ve got, if you’re these rich guys that require government handouts, you’ve got every incentive in the world to put your hand picked people in office.

And that’s where we get the, you know, the corrupt Washington D.C. and you may not even require government handouts but you’re sure not going to complain about them. Amen to that. Interesting enough about those Lincoln Douglas debates. I was for Illinois governor if I believe and Douglas won the election, not Lincoln. Right. This is a senatorial. Senatorial, yeah. So that brings us up to it. Ron brought us right where we need. Okay. Before we jump to 1856, the other major issue that they’re debating over was that fundamental what is going to be the nature of our government.

The south is finding that the north really wants a stronger central government, a national government. The south still wants to be a federalist society. Remember a sovereignty is a big deal. States rights and the name. There’s a reason they would call it the Articles of Confederate. I mean we had the Articles of Confederation and then they came out and they called it the Federation, not the Confederate States. It’s all about being federal and that’s different than being Confederate. Actually there’s a. We don’t need to. We couldn’t nitpick the difference but tomato, tomato little. Yeah. So here we get to 1856 and something happens.

The Republican party is founded. They kind of came from the Whigs. They weren’t necessarily founded on being against slavery, although that was a part of the platform, a smaller part. The biggest thing they cared about was they were the Buchanan presidency, Democrat presidency from 1857 to 1860 was one of the most corrupt in American history. These Democrats were handing out favors to their people all over the world or all over the country. It was, it was a very. There’s no doubt that their complaint about the Democrats being corrupt were correct. And that was really the main impetus for the Republican party to form.

And you can see here in their first election of 1856 they were able to get 20 seats in the Senate and 94 in the House. And again this is a party from the north which is the more populous, but there are northern Democrats still. We get to the election of 1859 or 1858 election took office in 1859 and the Republicans are getting closer and actually take a majority in the House. This brings us to the great election of 1860. And real quick, before you get going too far here, I wanted to go back to the Whigs for a second.

The Whig Party was the alternative to Andrew Jackson. They considered Andrew Jackson to be a monarch minded kind of dictator. They called him King Andrew and they fought saying that they were more constitutional, they were more in line with Jefferson. However, when John Tyler becomes president he is so strictly, so strictly adheres to the United States Constitution. And the Whig parties and, and this is something we were talking about earlier, are pushing for internal improvements paid by, for the federal government and he’s vetoing them all. And they got so angry that they literally threw him out of the party.

So he actually began his presidency as a wig and finished it as an independent. And so when you see the, and you see the Whigs as time passes after that become more and more of a national government type party, they basically become what they hated originally or what they said they hated. So though now what happened with the Whigs is now you’ve got a battle over pro slavery, anti slavery. So where did the anti slavery Whigs that now believe in a national government go? They went to the new Republican Party in 1854. So you’ve got a Whig big government attitude that was willing to throw somebody out of the party over it.

Now taking the helm in this new party that’s going up against Jackson and, and of course then the other Whigs went to the Democratic party. So you have two parties now that have a foundation that the federal government reigns supreme. They can perform internal improvements, it doesn’t matter. The states don’t have a right to argue. And, and even, even though technically in one case Andrew Jackson was right. But a, but a energetic president that can, that’s going to do as he pleases. Trail of Tears being a great example of that. He was sued. The court said you can’t do that.

And he said well John Marshall’s made my decision, let’s see him enforce it. And then Andrew Jackson did it anyway and he set, he set a precedent for both parties as we went into the second half of the 19th century of strong controlling president and a centralized federal government with centralized, centralized powers. And so it’s not a surprise when we went into the Lincolnian era that we saw this national government type of attitude also following him in. So elections back then were a little different than they are today. You didn’t necessarily vote for candidates, you voted for a party.

And, and the electoral college was still mixed up. Some, some of the states it was based on what, how the people voted. Some of them, they still did it the old way where the people and the states appointed their electors. Yeah. So what would happen is let’s say you’re the Republican Party. You’ve got all your Republican candidates on the ballot. You’ll basically print a bunch of blue ballots and you’ll pass them out among all the different states and the Democrat Party would do the same and all the factions would print their own, their own ballots. I bring this up because there’s a lot of people, historians will tell you that the south worked really hard to keep Lincoln off the ballot.

Well no, that didn’t happen. There was no state ballot to keep them off. That just means the Republican Party chose not to bother to go print in states where Lincoln had no chance of winning. Republicans were not going to win in South Carolina. Why bother wasting the paper and the ink? The other key part about this is that the party would put together their platform and that’s what you’d really be voting on. And they were pretty short and succinct. You know, we didn’t have mass communication back then. Everything was done by pamphlets for the most part.

I want to show the geo. Well first of all we had four major parties in the 1860 election and I’m going to tell you who they are and then show you the geography because I think it matters. We already know the results. Lincoln won. But in line with what you’re saying real quick too, if something else shifted because you, you voted the man and you voted for president, you voted for a vice president but because it was shifting to voting for party, you also began to vote more so for a team president, vice president rather than the individual ballots.

And that, and that kind of was, had been shifting over the last 30 to 40 years as well to the point where by the time the Republican party was established you didn’t vote for an individual president and vice president more it was a team for the party. And that was also kind of fed into this party versus party rather than the man. And make no mistake, the elections and politics in the 1800s were even much dirtier even than we have today. Oh yeah, yeah, you can say that. I mean we could talk about the know nothings and the stuff they did know nothings were pro young, pro Republican people in the Midwest and they were reigning terror on elections.

But there’s a. Well they would actually one of, one of the schemes that was caught found out about is what they would do is they would take some an immigrant who didn’t know much and they would get him drunk and then take them to polling places in different towns. They would change his hat each time so people might not recognize them to have them vote in all these different towns, just lead them, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, and people talk about our sacred elections. It’s ridiculous. You know, we had Tammany Hall, I mean, you name it.

Everything was going on with the. That’s not today’s topic. Excuse me. Dirty politics has been there all along. That’s what it comes down to. So 1860, we’ve got four major factions. You’ve got the Republican Party, whose candidate is Lincoln from Illinois. You’ve got the Southern Democrats. Their candidate is John C. Breckenridge from Kentucky. You’ve got the Northern Democrats, just. Which went by the Democrat Party. And their candidate was Stephen Douglas from Illinois. That name sounds familiar. Yeah, just be Lincoln. And the fourth is what was called the Constitutional Union Party, this guy named John Bell from Tennessee.

Now, before I go into the platforms, I think it’s important for us to see the geography. So I do. I do have that pulled up. Hang on. Now, we all know the results. This is not. I’m not giving away a spoiler here. If I can pull it up. There it is. All right, so this is the election results of 1860. And you see Lincoln in the red all across the top here and all out west. Okay. You had. In the green, we had the Southern Democrats all the way across the South. Basically, most of the states that seceded Constitutional Union came out of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.

There’s the ones that are stuck right in the middle. And the Constitutional Union of Bell won Missouri. Constitutional unions platform was interesting, and we’ll get to that in one second. But the results were interesting. Lincoln won, obviously, with 39.7% of the popular vote and 180 electoral votes. He won 18 states. The next closest, with 21.5% of the votes, was Stephen Douglas. But if you combine the other three, they basically had about 48% of the vote. Lincoln had 39. And you could. Do you combine the Democrat parties as they were previously? They’ve been right on Lincoln’s nipping at his heels.

Yeah, but basically, everything south of the Mason Dixon line went Democrat, the three different Democrats, and everything north of Mason Dixon line went Republican. But you’ll notice aside from. Aside from the southern half of New Jersey, basically. Well, I’m sorry, aside from Maryland and Delaware, the northern states that were slave states were more moderate in their voting, with Breckenridge being the more radical going further south. And also understand a lot of people don’t recognize this, that as you look at that map, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, while they were still slave states, they did not secede.

They remained with the Union. Well, Maryland, Maryland didn’t have an opportunity because Lincoln basically jailed all of their legislators so that they couldn’t vote on it. Yeah, there’s, there’s a, there can. There’s a discussion to be have about habeas corpus on that one. Mm. And note also typically when you look at these maps, folks, New Jersey is typically not listed as a slave state. Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, Tennessee, all those peripheral states will be. But for some reason they never list in New Jersey as a slave state. And New Jersey is actually the last state to let go of its.

Exactly. That said, that said, when New Jersey even refused to let go of those slaves after the 13th amendment was ratified, there’s refused. And then finally it was January 23rd, I believe, after the ratification of 13th amendment when they finally did it and there was a massive number of 16 slaves that were freed. So I mean, it wasn’t this unbelievably huge population of slaves, but nonetheless there were slaves in New Jersey during the whole time. Yeah, that 1860 census I pulled up earlier had 18 slaves in New Jersey. But the point is. Oh, it was too lower.

By the time you let them go. Okay. They must have lost a couple. Did Delaware had like 1800 District. District of Columbia had 3, 200. And what’s interesting. Let me just pull this up again real quick because this is, this shows you why it was such a heated topic is let’s look at the slavery in the territories at the time. Arizona would be a big one. If you go down here to the. Arizona was in a territory yet Kansas. But that air. Well, Arizona was in dispute. It was actually a part of the New Mexico territory and but they sided with the Confederacy.

So really? Yes. New Mexico. Well, that’s what split New Mexico and, and Arizona because Arizona went with the Confederacy and New Mexico went with the North. But they were part of the set. But they were part of the same territory. So it was actually a battle within the territory. Wow. And that’s one of the reasons why they wound up splitting as two different territories. But anyway, go ahead. I’m even. I’m, I’m even more fond of Arizona now. What’s funny is all these territories, the District Columbia’s got the most and Utah had 29, Nebraska had 15. You see something like Colorado and Washington would have zero.

So what about Florida? Florida was already a space. Where are they? Okay, when. Forgive me, I’m. When did Florida become a state? I don’t have that memorized it was in the 1850s. I don’t remember that. It wasn’t. Yeah, it wasn’t too much. I mean it was. It was very close to when the War of Northern Aggression occurred. But I don’t remember exactly when. Well, and when I get to Arizona it was. It wasn’t the col. The settlers in Arizona as much as it was the Indians that were siding with the Confederacy. As if when you look it up it’s.

It’s a fascinating story but we continue. Okay. What I want to do since we know the results, but let’s really want to look at the cause. What they were thinking about at the time is you have to look at their actual platforms. And at the back of the book, The Election of 1860 by Michael Holt, there’s some appendices with some wonderful information from the time. And I’m just going to go through and highlight some of the each of the four parties platforms and what they cared about and have you guys comment because I think it’s really telling.

Okay, here’s the national Democratic platform. Is that the first one? Yeah, that’s Douglasses. These are the Northern Democrats. First thing they say is we want to declare as a platform of principles by the Democratic convention of in Cincinnati in the year 1856. This is where the Democratic Party got together in Ohio and said these are the things our party believes in. Okay, I can give you a little more information on that if we need to but I want to go into this a little bit more resolved that the Democrat party will abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on the constitutional law.

Now why is this important? Because what you’re going to see in these arguments is one side is saying the state legislature is going to determine whether they have slavery or not in the new territories. And the others are saying everyone’s got to abide by the Supreme Court. You’re also going to hear them talking about citizens, whether not born or naturalized, whether they get the same rights and whether the government has to protect them, which goes back to bleeding or bloody Kansas. The next big point that the National Democratic Party wanted will ensure the construction of a railroad to Pacific coast at the earliest practicable period as they are pushing for a government funded railroad internal improvements.

Next I have highlighted is that the enactments of state legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law are hostile in character. This is a big deal. Doug, tell us why. Well, the. Wow. What was basically going on was that when the Fugitive Slave act what that basically Did. Is it. It. Is it told that. That it basically allowed for the. I’m. I’m captured on the word captured. Slaves had to be returned. Yeah, but there’s a, there’s a term for it. And that’s what I was looking for. But absolutely. And basically you got to remember that from the Southern states point of view, that person is property.

And so that you’re. And, and what’s happening is the Northern states are refusing, Refusing to abide by that. They saw it as hostile in character. They saw it as. As not just. And so they would not defend. They would refuse to send the slaves back. And so from the South’s point of view, they’re saying, okay, we’re seeing Northern states not follow the law. They’re not abiding by the law, which is unconstitutional. And then we have a federal government that’s not enforcing that law, and that’s a problem. And I wanted to, you know, and if, if you don’t mind, I want to.

And, and I’ve got it now do this. My. Do this real quick. I want to share something on screen real quick because I want to kind of show Ron something that he was kind of asking about. And now I just screwed it up because I lost my map here. Here we go. Well, he’s looking. Ron, you know, I asked you to. When you jumped forward earlier, you were kind of hitting on this period. You had a couple points to make. So jump in right now if you’d like to. About which one specifically. Well, let’s lead. We’re leading up to the election right now.

Just don’t go past 1860. Well, you had, I mean, essentially what you had is you had the, you know, you had the south that they didn’t want. They didn’t want Lincoln and, and this. The south didn’t have a, a Democrat or. The south wanted their own Democrat. The north wanted their own Democrat. And then you had. If I’m not, if I’m not mistaken, it was Tennessee that, that had. They, they put some guy up, some billionaire guy who. Yeah, John Bell. And you. You. Essentially what you did is you split the election four ways. And, and I mean, it’s very, very, very, if I may use the word, parliamentarian.

It was basically kind of almost. Almost a parliamentarian situation at that point. The, the north. Because the north had the Republican Party and they were unified under the Republican Party. The north had, they were. It was. You know, even, I think. What. It, what did he get? Like, was it like 39% of the popular vote? Yeah, 39.7. Like, I just. Yeah, yeah. What’s interesting, taking you back a step, is John Bell’s Tennessee party was called the Constitutional Union Party. All three parties, besides the Republican parties knew that if the Republican Party won, there would be secession and civil war.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind. And we’re about to exhibit that when we talk about the. We look at their platforms. Right. Doug, do you find what you wanted? Yeah. Yeah. So I taught US history, and so this is the map I created. Kind of show you where the allegiances lied. So when you get down to the New Mexico territory, and you’ll see the southern third or quarter is kind of a pink. The Confederate states actually claimed that territory, the southern side of those territories, and then the sea, the U and the sea in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona was where their allegiances and Arizona, the Indians in Arizona actually sent personnel to the war to fight with the Confederates.

And then all the territories to the north of that, you can see, got blue around them, and they all pretty much remained under Union control. But anyway, so I just wanted to show you that. That. That both Oklahoma and Arizona, the Indian population sided with the Confederacy and that the Confederate states actually claimed the lower third of the New Mexico Territory. Now, what. I’m just curious why. What was the rationale? You know, it’s funny, because there’s not a lot of records as to why other than that they cited, but I believe is because the Indian populations didn’t like the way a centralized federal government was intruding on.

On their rights as a sovereign nation. And the south was saying, hey, you guys are sovereign like we are. We’re gonna leave you alone. We’re gonna, you know, work with you rather than against you. That’s probably the main reason. They probably didn’t like Andrew Jackson either. No, of course not. You know, Trail of Tears. I mean, Andrew Jackson basically just. He and his crew cronies decided that basically anybody who was an Indian needed to be west of the Mississippi. And. And it didn’t matter who said not to. And I included John Marshall’s United States Supreme Court, which told them when it came to Georgia and northern Florida, and, you know, you can’t do that.

And he says, well, you’ve made your decisions, you enforce it. And he did it anyway, which I. Which in many respects, I almost, you know, I. I find, you know, reprehensible. I mean, he was actually technically constitutionally right, though. Well, enforcement power over the present. But what he did, I mean, he used. He utilized a lot of those Same people in his defense of New Orleans when he was in, during the War of 1812. So it’s like, I mean, those people, those people helped him, you know, you know, defeat the British at the, at the Battle of New Orleans.

And then he, he basically stabbed him in the back. Right. All right. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to. Well, I, it’s just, I mean, you know, it’s, it’s interesting and I, you know, I don’t necessarily like going back. Just, just kind of a caveat here. I don’t, I don’t like going back and talking negative about the country. But, you know, everything that happened in this country is not all, is not roses. And there are a lot of people out there who do try to bring up some of these topics, and they’re kind of lambasted for it, saying, oh, you can’t talk about, don’t talk negatively about the country.

Well, you know, it’s like the 11th amendment, you know, with the Republican Party. What are you trying to talk about? Well, if, if they aren’t a, you know, ally, I’m going to. And when it comes to the history, the country’s history, and this is when, when people say, well, the government did this, the United States was a bad guy on this. And I always want to correct them, no, America wasn’t. And the government wasn’t. It was segments. It was that both sides were represented. We, it’s just like during Obama’s presidency, we weren’t all Obama ites, you know, and, and while Trump is president, not everybody is a Trump.

Eight and so same thing back then. So when something’s going on, this collusion going on or the, or the Trail of Tears or whatever it is, while there are segments of the government, segments of the population, there are certain figures like Andrew Jackson doing these things, that doesn’t necessarily represent everybody. So I tend not to try to use those general terms. The country, the government, the. This group, that group, you know, because there’s, there’s always that. It’s a segment, and we have to remember that. And this eternal struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, constitutional, unconstitutional, it’s nothing new.

Yeah, the bigger picture, I guess the point, the point I was trying to make there is that, you know, we, but we have been the bad guys often. Absolutely. Yeah. If. Well, but, but that said, that doesn’t mean that we just erase that history. What we have to do is we have to acknowledge it and then learn from it so that we don’t repeat it. And I think that’s the crucial thing That a lot of these, you know, people that they just, all they want to do is they want to highlight the negative history of the country as opposed to understanding that it’s.

No, it’s, not everybody is that way. Well, it’s not just that, but it also goes to this, this is what I tell people when I give presentations. You know, you as an individual, are you wiser today than you were when you were younger? Is it because of all the right decisions you made? Right. At the same time with Ron saying you have other people, that basically the official history, the US government wants, you know, people to be loyal to it, pay your taxes, go off to war and like that. So they have got every incentive to write the history in a manner.

But it brings the sheds the best light on the US government, its history. That’s why we grew up all thinking Abraham Lincoln was Honest Abe and the Mexican American War was a war of expansionism. Yeah. We were taught a sugar coated version of it. Our job is to really look at the real history, looking at source documents and say this is how it really happened. Our history is a lot messier than we’re told. Yeah. Original documents. Source documents. And that’s just it right there. Any good historian, that’s what they’re going to do. They’re not going to take the word.

And that’s the reason why I get upset on certain issues. You know there was, there’s a very popular pundit, for example, Mark Levin on TV and I love him, he’s right most time. And then he misrepresented the 1898 Wong Kimora. I know it’s not the place to get into that issue, but he misrepresented says, well, it was just a bad decision. No, it wasn’t. You didn’t read it. You know, you got to go back to the original document. Don’t take the word of other people. And then, and that’s unfortunately what happens. That’s why things like birthright citizenship and all that, you know, are as if they were able to completely survive is because people are just listening to the last guy.

Well, and that’s, and, and that’s where you get crap like the 1619 project from. Oh yeah. Or the fact that Ty Cobb was a horrible person. But anyway. All right, so this book was written by Michael Holt. In the forward he addresses that specifically. Okay. When he was given this, I have the book, but I haven’t read it yet. So now I’m, now you’ve just encouraged me to read my book. In the forward he said he was given the assignment. He’s retired. He was, but one of his old friends asked him, we need a new version of Lincoln.

And Lincoln’s one of the most written about people in history. So he decided to go back and approach it from a different direction. And he went back and found newspaper articles from every small town leading up to the 1860 election. And form his whole story from those small town and bigger town newspaper articles, source documents. And that’s where he got his conclusions, why he came up with. That’s why I think it’s such a valuable book. And that’s how we found out Ty Cobb was not as hated as he thought was. Newspaper clippings going back into these platforms.

All right, they talked about gotta throw baseball in at one point. Hey there, you’re talking my language. It’s spring training. All right, go ahead. Warhamster. Next thing highlighted, imposed by the federal Constitution on the power of territorial legislature over the subject of domestic relations. That’s the same thing. He wants to make sure that the their Cincinnati platform, it basically is during the existence of territorial governments. The measure of restriction imposed by the Constitution is basically talking of giving the legislation, the territorial legislatures their due power and not being overruled by this court. The national Democratic platform, those are the Southern Democrats, which is Breckenridge again.

They want to adopt a platform adopted at Cincinnati. He talked about that the territory organized by an act of Congress is provisional and temporary. And during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the territory without their rights, either of person or property. I’m gonna let Doug tell. Why did I emphasize property? Because you mentioned it earlier. Yeah. Once again, he’s talking about slaves. And from a South’s point of view, a slave is the property of whoever owns them. And the. The idea was, well, if somehow that property makes its way into the north, it’s then that piece of property is suddenly a free human being.

And you know, it’s funny because Dred Scott argued against that, said, no, just because you’re in the north doesn’t suddenly make you free. You’re still property. I mean, that’s like me, you know, having my suitcase and then I go into some other state and they say, well, now you can’t own your suitcase anymore. Well, no, it’s still mine. And so that’s why that was key. That was one of the arguments by the South. Now, obviously the arguments by the south, there was many of them. It was multifaceted. And slavery was one component of A much larger machine and larger complaint.

So we have to keep that in mind. That said, slavery was a component and the importance of the north not being able to stomp on somebody’s property rights was important, and they saw that as a natural right. Your property belongs to you. It’s none of the government’s business of what about your possessions? That’s the way they looked at it. Whether or not as a person, if you set the slavery part aside, that makes all the sense in the world. What I own, what I have in my house, what I, you know, decide to buy and, and, and purchase and keep inside my.

That’s my business. None of your business. Government. That’s my possession. My property. Ron, you got anything? No, that’s. Well, another thing that we, we need to realize is, is that, you know, our perception of how slavery was in the south really today is shaped more by Hollywood than it is by reality. You know, the, the. I was going through Abbeville Institute and there was an interesting article written by a guy, Massimo or something, whatever, I forget his name. But he, He. He talked about how the, you know, there definitely was a separation of the races. They understood that.

But the, you know, because, though. Because the white people and the black people in the south were almost. It. It was, it was. It was kind of almost a 50, 50 proposition. They, they. They all worked the land together. They had to figure everything out together. So in a sense, they, they needed each other and they, they had a level of respect for one another that did not exist in the North. And, you know, so the, the institution of slavery as we understand it by the history books today is, Is a gross misinterpretation of what actually happened in the Southern states.

And I truly believe that. I don’t mean to get ahead, but I truly believe that the, The. The war, you know, the, the invasion that Lincoln did in the south actually caused a greater harm to the slaves than it did, you know, then. Then benefit. But anyway, it needs to be said. It needs to be said that there were many black slaves and free blacks that fought on the side of the Confederacy and that after the emancipation, there was a significant number of former slaves that stayed on at the same property doing the exact same thing.

The only difference is they got a paycheck, they lived in the same quarters, they, you know, ate in the same location with the same food. I mean, nothing changed other than that they got a paycheck. Well, and another thing is, is that slavery was dying already. Well, okay, but I’ll. All right, I guess I’M probably, probably touching on something that you don’t want me to touch on, so I’ll show. No, it’s okay. But that statement that slavery was dying is only correct. It was dying in part of the south and very healthy in others. Virginia, it was already fading out in the Deep south.

It was, it was totally thriving at this point in time. Yeah. But they did recognize that even there, eventually it would. Because innovation and economics was had. The writing was on the wall. It was going to be eventual, but it was not going to happen quickly in the Deep South. Right. And, and so, so then the question becomes, as it’s dying and as things are changing, do we want the federal government to dictate to us how to handle that, or we want to be able to handle that the way we want to individually and decide when it’s time to make the change.

Very good. Jumping back in the next one I’ve highlighted is they’re talking about when these new unions get organized, they ought to be admitted to the federal union whether its constitution prohibits or recognizes the institution of slavery. Again, it’s to the South’s benefit. The new territories have slavery because they’d be their political allies. They’re trying to make it. This is our party that the state itself gets to determine their slave laws. And let’s understand something else. Slavery was changing not because it might be dying out, but also because the land had been worked in the south so much that it was becoming harder and harder to.

To have good crops. And so they were looking for fertile land. And the, if we were to. And if they were to remain to the south of the southern border of Missouri, as the Missouri Compromise had originally intended, those lands were basically desert lands, you know, Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. And in order to keep. Because remember, the south was all about agriculture. Slavery was a byproduct of that agriculture. But agriculture was the big deal. And so they needed more slave states in more fertile land so that the farmers could move to those fertile lands with, with their workforce, which were the slaves.

And the fertile lands were Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and places like that. And so it also, this is the reason why what you read a moment ago about, you know, the state deciding was important is because they wanted that fertile land for the, for the slave states, for agriculture, because agriculture was struggling because the land didn’t have the same nutrients, so on and so forth. They didn’t have the technologies we have today. And so it was as much a fight for fertile land as it was anything else. Well, and another thing that People need to realize is that at the time cotton was essentially what it was, the oil of the day.

Sure. You know, we didn’t have. You didn’t have the oil industry, you had the cotton industry. And the world relied upon the cotton industry. I mean, the Confederacy was producing what was like 80 or 80 to 90% of the cotton supply that the world used. So it was extraordinarily. Cotton was, was an enormous deal. We’re getting back on topic. I agree, but we’re rabbit trailing a little bit too much. My apologies. I think it’s important for context though. Oh, absolutely. No, it’s Doug’s fault. He wants to get full detail, but I want to litigate that another time.

All right, no problem. Well, that’s a dangerous, that’s a dangerous part about this topic. It’s very easy to start getting into. Well, because it’s not, it’s not a single item, single component issue as certain people out there want to make it. It’s just about slavery. There were so many factors and that’s really, I think what this little rabbit trail is all about is to show how many factors that there was. It was more than just slavery. All right, continuing. They talk about the Fugitive Slave Law as hostile if they defeat the faithful execution. It’s hostile in character.

The language is great. They talk about the democracy of the US it is imperative duty of this government to protect the natural naturalized citizens and all his rights, whether at home and foreign lands to the same as its native born citizens. I think that’s about slave rights, slave property. Again down here at the bottom. They talk about they want the construction of a Pacific railroad from Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean at the earliest. Yeah. The northern railroad had already been built, the Southern Railroad. There was all kinds of issues and, and it was partly because of this what was going on.

Yeah. So here we have the constitutional Union Bell Everett platform. And these were the ones who wanted to preserve the Union at any cost. Well, they said, whereas experience has demonstrated the platforms adopted by the partisan conventions of the country have had the effect to mislead and deceive the people and at the same time to widen the political divisions of the country by the creation and encouragement of geographical and sectional parties. That’s another way of saying the two party system’s killing us. Yep, exactly. They say that this part of patriotism where we recognize no political prince principle other than the constitution of the country, the union of the states and the enforcement of the laws, they talk about separately and unitedly.

They talk about believing that thereby Peace may once more be restored to the country. And that’s really what this whole party was about, preservation of the Union. It’s an anti Lincolnian message because everybody knew that Lincoln was. If he got elected, the Republican parties took power, the south would be forced to secede. Yeah, that’s right. And here we get to the Republican Party, Lincoln’s party, and it says that the history of the nation during the last four years has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican Party and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature and now more than ever before demand its peaceful and constitutional.

Constitutional triumph. Boy, talking about it all being about party, huh? Then they go on to maintain the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embedded in the Constitution that all men are created equal. Etc. It’s essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions. Then he goes down a little further on. They say when we hold in abhorrence all schemes for disunion come from whatever source they may. And we congratulate the country that no Republican member of Congress has uttered or countenanced the threats of disunion so often made by Democratic members without rebuke and with applause from their political associates.

And we denounce those threats of disunion. You know, it’s interesting because it reminds me of today’s politics. No, we want to hold the Union together, even though the one or the ones forcing the others away. But we won’t say that. We’ll say we’re all about keeping it together even though we’re pushing them away. It’s, it’s, it’s the famous talking out of both sides of your mouth situation. And they’re basically saying it is. You are a scoundrel for even suggesting that secession is legal. Well, and, and they would go on to say it’s insurrection and treason. Yeah.

It’s such an important part. If we skip ahead to after the war, you know why the 14th amendment came in and they talked about insurrection. They needed to justify Lincoln’s actions from an ethical standpoint. That absolutely was the case. But everybody knew that secession was legal. We go Back to the 1815 Hartford Convention. It was so legal that The Congress in 1860 and 61 tried three times to pass a law making secession illegal. And you’re not going to do that if it wasn’t already legal. Right? Right. Well. And I just like to say something, and I don’t mean to be getting ahead of myself, but I do believe that Lincoln the assassination of Lincoln actually was the worst thing to happen for the South.

But that’s. Well, yeah, because. Because he wanted to at least deal with them in a fair manner and allow them to return to the Union without. Without disgrace and so on and so forth, which is something that Andrew Johnson tried to carry on. But the link, the Lincolnian Republicans, which were really nationalistic republic. The Congress, they wanted to punish the south the full extent of their ability. Well, and that’s. And he was. He was impeached for it. Yeah. And his feet and his vetoes were overridden over and over and over. But anyway, I didn’t mean to digress, but you all know that I’m no fan of Lincoln.

But at the same time I have to give credit where credit is due. And I do believe that his assassination was the worst thing that could have happened for the South. Well, you know, it’s funny because he was so unconstitutional and a lot of his actions. But like I said, he wanted at least, as the Southern states were trying to come back into the Union, be as fair and easy and quick about it as he could. Absolutely going on. Sorry, sorry there, Warhamster. Didn’t mean to go down a rabbit hole. That’s okay. From time to time we can do quick router trails.

So is that. Could we call those Ron droppings anyway? All right, go ahead. Touche. That the present Democratic administration has far exceeded our worst apprehensions. Apprehensions in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of a sectional interest, as especially evinced in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Le Compton Constitution upon the protesting people of Kansas. This is where they are calling out to the country. This Democrat administration that’s currently in office of Buchanan has been corrupt and they need to go and excited bleeding Kansas about it. Yeah. And you got to remember too that the Le Compton Constitution, what that was, that was the pro slavery document in 1857 in Kansas that basically was pushing, and it was unofficially official or officially unofficial, but it basically stated that that Kansas was pro slavery.

It guarantees slaveholders the right to own their slaves and their descendants. You know, it allowed the voters to choose between a constitution with slavery or Constitution without slavery. And it excluded any free blacks from the Bill of Rights. So the Lecompton Constitution was a big deal and it definitely increased tensions that led to what became the war between the States. Very good. Continuing that the people justly view with alarm the reckless. Listen this language. The reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the federal Government Sounds familiar. That a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the systemic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans calling out the corruption.

Boy. USAID was back. Exactly. Says that the new. Here comes number seven. They get to slavery. That the new dogma that the Constitution of its own force carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States is a dangerous political heresy. They. Their position is no more slavery in the territories. And that’s. That’s really the line in the sand. And. But, but here’s the thing. The reason why they mentioned the Constitution there is the argument was the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to. To dictate which way a territory goes. However it does, Congress has given the authority over all the rules over territory.

And so it’s up to the federal government and it’s not up to the government to determine if a state has slavery, but it is up to the federal government to determine if a territory has slavery. And that was. That was the battle. Just to wrap this. Wrap this up. We deny Congress the authority of Congress of a territorial legislature. He said that we brand the recent reopening of the African slave trade under the COVID of our national flag aided by perversions of judicial power as a crime against humanity. Okay. That’s what I said earlier. The African slave trade had reopened to some degree.

Well it. It was reopened by certain factions in the. From the south. But it was never officially recognized as being reopened. Yeah. And they’re calling it out. Says that in recent votes. Sorry, vetoed by the federal governors of the acts of legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska prohibiting slavery in those territories. We find a practical illustration of the boasted democratic principle of non intervention and popular sovereignty embodied in the Kansas Nebraska bill. And a demonstration of the deception and frank fraud involved within. We could probably dedicate an entire episode or two just to that whole Kansas issue.

That actually might not be a bad thing because there’s so few people know about bleeding Kansas. And I mean that’s just. That was a. That was a. A crazy time. Now forgive me if I’m getting it wrong. That was Dodge City and, and Wyatt Earp. That was well before his time. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s well before. Okay, so I highlighted this one in purple because it’s a real big one. That while providing revenue for the support of the general government by duties upon imports, sound policy requires such an adjustment of those imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interest of the whole country.

That’s what we’re talking about with internal improvements. They want to tax everybody to fund the industrialization. That includes steel. Again, we talked about canals earlier. Railroad, etc. This is the mercantilism clause. Nothing will happen without federal government. You didn’t build that. You didn’t build that. I. I love that dig there, Doug. That was great. Okay, then this is a fun one. That the Republican party is opposed to change in our naturalization laws or any legislation by the rights. Rights of citizenship hereto accorded to immigrants from. Blah, blah, blah. This is a natural born citizen. We dealt with this a lot.

Another big one in purple that appropriations by Congress for river and harbor improvements of a national character required by the accommodation and security of an existing commerce are authorized by the Constitution. Where are they authorized? The. The ports are mentioned when it comes to the necessary and proper clause, and that’s where they’re using it. And if. And if they can improve and hold and control over the port, then that means they can improve and hold the control over the water surrounding it. And then the water is beyond that, and it just progresses and progresses and progresses.

This next one’s interesting, that a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interest of the whole country. And then they get down here and they talk about a daily overland mail should be promptly established. I talked about the corruption of the railroad lawyers and that whole process. But the postmasters in the 1800s were very corrupt. You could give out favors of patronage like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, this is a stepping stone political position. You get to be postmaster, you can become a governor, congressman. But the postmasters controlled a lot of political favors.

Absolutely. You better not mess with any of the post roads or you will be accused of a federal crime. And that’s a. You’re gonna rot. How dare you? How dare you. Look under the skirt of their corruption in the postal system. 1. Once again, more things change, that they stay the same. I was just. You’re. You’re reading my mind there, Doug. Well, you know, we went through this exercise because, you know, I think it makes a ton of sense to understand what were the actual issues that led them to secede. Obviously, Lincoln wins. We don’t have.

We’re not gonna. I guess maybe we’ll read the preamble of the Confederate Constitution before we go today. But I wanted to read one other thing that really gives you an idea of what they cared about. And this comes from what’s called a report on the committee of foreign Affairs. And this was done on September 4, 2014. And this is a Confederate document when they’d already formed their constitution. But this, I know this is jumping ahead, but I think it’s worth reading. The real issue involved in the relations between the north and south of the American states is the great principle of self government.

Shall a dominant party of the north rule the south or shall the people of the south rule themselves? This is the great matter in controversy. After the lapse of 84 years, this party of the north set up the same pretension the British Parliament. Parliament claimed over our ancestors in 1776. That’s the attitude of many in the South. Yeah, they. They saw the federal government and the north as being no different than King George. Right. And they weren’t too far off. No. And. And today there’s a lot of people would say the same thing about the federal government released under the hands of certain individuals prior to this presidency.

So. So Lincoln gets elected. Shortly thereafter, South Carolina says we’re out of here. That’s December 20, 1860. They’d be followed shortly there by Mississippi in January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama January 11, Georgia January 19, Louisiana January 26, and Texas on February 1. Then they meet and they get together and they sign the Confederate constitution. And then after hostilities begin, then you have a few more states that wind up also seceding, like Arkansas and. Well, yeah, so the Confederate Constitution is ratified on March 11, 1861. So pretty quickly. And when we get into that, you’ll see why it was so easy because they basically had a really good blueprint to start from and just made some tweaks around the edges.

But as Doug just said shortly thereafter, we’ve got the issue at Fort Sumter. We don’t need to re litigate who fired the first shot. In fact, that nobody died there gave Lincoln his excuse to declare war immediately. Virginia by April 17th. Virginia secedes, Arkansas joins in May, North Carolina on May 20th, and then Tennessee on June 8th. And that was yourself. Do you know, do you know why Fort Sumter was the main. Was. Was one of the main targets. Go ahead. Because that was where. That was one of the. That, that was. That was one of the main places where the, where the, where the, where the federal government collected their tariff money.

And another thing to point out here is you notice that Virginia was one of the states that didn’t secede till after everything got going. And a lot of people, especially 1619 Project will claim that rural Virginia was this, you know, and they’ll paint him as the leader of the Confederacy, blah, blah, blah. Because you know, the Confederate capital was in Richmond. Well, the Confederate capital was originally in Montgomery, Alabama. It wasn’t up there. It didn’t happen until later because that’s where the concentration of what was going on was. And that’s where they needed a lot of the troops and a lot of the personnel and so on and so forth.

Virginia wasn’t the harbinger of the Confederacy as things like the 1690 project make it. And let’s not forget that in the 1820s when Virginia had its Constitutional convention, they almost voted slavery out of the state. Yeah. Virginia was. They had a real strong belief in the doctrines of state rights. That goes back to. And that’s really the point we want. Well, that’s the state of Jefferson and Madison and George Mason and so forth. Yeah. What happened is Lincoln, after Fort Sumter, Lincoln calls for the troops and a bunch of Virginians say, nah, we’re not doing this.

Including Lee, who originally did not want secession. You know, it wasn’t until Lincoln called up the troops to attack myself. Right. And he did that. He did that without a. When he called up the 75, 000 troops, he did that without a declaration of war from Congress. And he actually told Congress to stay away. Now he not only did it without the declaration of Congress, he also did it without Congress calling them into the actual service United States. Because you got to realize back then the army was actually very small. Most. Most of what we had from the Union army was not.

They were not federalized. It was basically the militia still. And, and, and the militia or what today we might call the National Guard. But constitutionally Article 1, Section 8, that has to be called up by Congress. And he called them in action without Congress’s involvement also. So. And the reason why there was no declaration of war, it’s argued, is because it was a. It was. It was wayward states, not another country. Of course, I argue the opposite. They were a country. They declared their nationhood. They had declared themselves as the Confederate States of America. It was a different country.

And he did with that those troops invade a whole different country. Yeah. It was not a civil war because a civil war means fighting over the seat of power of a sovereign nation. That is not what happened. It was two entities fighting for control of one thing. But they had to make it a civil war in order for it to be insurrection. Entry. Yeah, yeah. It was one slave. It was one slave holding federal republic fighting another slave holding federal republic. And it becomes a war of conquest. They wanted to enforce the national government and the national will upon you at the Point of a bayonet right now.

Well, just real quick, just to kind of elaborate upon the point about Lincoln and, and some of the stuff that he did. He actually, I don’t remember what the four traps were, but he actually had four places set like traps to be sprung to push the south to firing the first shot. The one of them was at Fort Sumter and then there was, there was three others throughout the South. I don’t remember exactly where they were. Maxwell, Sam Maxwell talks about it in his book called. It wasn’t about slavery, but I, I just didn’t look that up.

And even after the election, secession was not inevitable. They still could have compromised. The Crittenden Compromise was on Lincoln’s desk and he ordered his Republican party not to compromise. Well, I think, I don’t think, I think you’re right in the sense that the south wasn’t necessarily dead set on secession, but I think the north was dead set set on forcing them to pay the tariffs because that’s, that was their, you know, that was their money. They needed it. They needed it to get the internal improvements. There was such an, I mean the railroad money is what they wanted.

It was, it was essentially corporate welfare. It was basically what it was is. It was just corporate welfare. Little did they know, and I know I’m jumping ahead here, but little do they know. On the horizon was silver in Nevada, but we’ll talk about that later. So we’ve kind of set the table for the Confederate Constitution and what we’re going to find is as we go through it, is the Confederate Constitution is much less of a national government and much it’s a return turned back towards federalism and states rights. Now I’ve made the argument that when the war sprung out, Lincoln immediately nationalized the government and turned it into a machine with all central power, took away all states rights, started, you know, printed money.

The Greenbacks were basically just a fiat currency. All these things you do to nationalize a government and get a stronger central government is really good for winning wars. It’s not really good for having a long term peaceful existence with, you know, states rights and protecting our natural rights and like that. The Confederacy did the opposite and it made it very difficult for them to wage war to the same degree as the north, which had more population. That is, that is true. That is absolutely true. In fact, I would, I would argue that the Confederate States needed a stronger Constitution like the United States Constitution was for centralized authority to win the war.

And then what they could have done is once they had that once they had won the war, then they could go back and mold it the way that they needed to. But in order to effectively fight the war, they really, they really should have had something. I remember, not that I’m a big fan of Ken Burns, but, you know, he, they very accurately got in there that it was, I mean, shoot, I think the. Georgia was debating seceding from the Confederacy because they thought that the governor actually thought that the Confederate government was, was overstepping its bounds.

And he’s. And because it was a Confederate government that’s actually doomed it from the very beginning when it came to the war, because what was happening is the same thing that was happening with the militias during the American Revolution. States will say, no, we’re not going to deploy our troops over there, and you know it. And so the lack of any central control or enough central control, should I say, is actually what doomed them from the beginning there when it comes to war, that needed to be more central control. And, and that’s the reason, the only reason why we pulled off the American Revolution was because George Washington was finally given that central control kind of role.

When you’ve got, as the old saying goes, too many chiefs and not enough Indians, you’re not going to win a war. And that. And that doomed the Confederacy from the very beginning. Correct? Yeah. The. An autocratic government is going to be better at some things. And we always talk about big government. It’s really good at two things and one is killing people and the other is collecting our taxes. So stealing and killing. So that’s. What if. I’ve always said killing and breaking things. But you know, to your point, to your point there, Warhamster, in terms of autocratic government, I, you know, with bringing it home to modern day, you look at the power that the executive holds, I would argue that the power is extraordinarily autocratic in many respects.

And that’s one of the reasons why I’m semi hopeful for our current situation that we will get through this much faster just because of the autocratic nature that Trump has the ability to do things. But all that power was. Was ceded to the executive by either the legislative or the judicial for the purposes of having somebody in there with the amount of power that Trump has. But it wasn’t supposed to be Trump. Yeah, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good closing thought. I guess next week we’ll jump into the Confederate Constitution itself. This is a pretty good, you know, table setting for it.

You guys have a great. You guys want to add anything else before we tune out. No, that’s. I’m. I’m good. Yeah. Oh yeah. You find me at Untold History tv. Takes you right to my rumble channel. Untold History tv. Yep. And, uh, I’ll have all these links in the, uh, description of the video on my channel. And I’m. One last thing. I’m on. I’m on Twitter as, uh, think It’s. It’s. It’s repj1969. That’s my. That’s my primary Twitter. Twitter handle or X handle. I’ll put that in the comments as well. Gentlemen, thank you very much everyone.

Thanks for watching. Have a happy Valentine’s Day and cheers. See you soon. Absolutely. Alrighty, guys. Well, there it is. That is the. That is the. The first episode or the. Or kind of like the introduction to the Confederate Constitution. Just kind of like laying the foundation as to what was going on and. And what have you. So we were supposed to record that on Wednesday. Warhamster had an issue. He was. He. He lost his voice or he was sick or something. So we had to record it on Friday and. But we are recording episode two tomorrow morning.

So there’s a very good chance that I’ll have the first episode. Well, that was the introduction. Episode one is going to be where we actually start to go into and read the Confederate Constitution and then start to dissect it and compare and contrast against what the American Constitution was. And you know, just loosely, the. The Confederate Constitution was all of the good elements of the federal constitution of the United States Constitution combined with. Or a hybrid of the good parts of the Articles of Confederation, hence Confederacy. So. So that was. That was what. That. That’s kind of going to be the.

The theme of what we’re doing here. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. Again, apologize that Mike wasn’t here tonight. That was beyond my control. So anyway, uh, I wish everybody to have a very good evening and I look forward to seeing you guys tomorrow. Have a great night, everybody.
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