History Learner
Well-known member
I'm not misrepresenting or misinterpreting anything, unless of course definitions have changed such that "the constitution did not provide for secession by individual states" no longer means exactly. If we're going off legal definitions, as you suggested in your prior post, then looking at Texas v. White is rather critical, given it can guide us on how contemporary legal opinion on the word choice was. I get this is your strongly held opinion, but equally there is evidence and analysis by political scholars/historians that hold it was the opposite of what you propose and I've done you the curtesy of citing that.You are misrepresenting and misinterpreting what is written even when you directly post from a text. This is a pattern that you consistently do across topics on this forum. The text you cite does not say that the Confederate Constitution prohibited secession. It did not in fact, do that, and the source you are citing here makes no such claim. It just says that it didn't codify any such right.
The Confederate Constitution did not prohibit secession. It did not include language explicitly allowing secession but there was a belief on the part of the participants in the drafting of the Confederate Constitution that the United States Constitution implicitly allowed secession. Where they altered the Preamble you are citing they did so in a manner so as to emphasize the independence and sovereignty of individual states, against the ambiguity of 'We the People of the United States'.
I think you can probably figure out what events occurred between 1861 and 1869 that would make Texas v. White irrelevant to the matter at hand. The Constitution of the Confederate States in no way prohibited secession and there is no reasonable reading of the historical text which would lead one to conclude that it did.
There is definitely a debate to be had about how the Confederate Constitution would have performed in peacetime and how any surviving Confederacy would weigh the balance between states' right and the powers of a national government- but there is no room to claim that the Constitution of the Confederate States as written prohibited secession or that the founders of the Confederacy believed they had drafted a document which would have prohibited secession.
Likewise, you can interrogate this premise from actions, not just words. You conceded earlier there were at least two different attempts to explicitly codify secession; if the Confederate Constitution did allow for secession as you assert, why were these attempts even necessary if this right was commonly understood? Even better, why did both attempts fail? As numerous political scholars have asserted, and I've cited a few already in this thread, most of the State's Rights rhetoric was merely cosmetic and for propaganda purposes that gave way to an extremely centralized and powerful national government. There is a reason why The Atlantic calls the Confederacy an Antidemocratic, Centralized State.