Apologies- Dachs- I made a mistake and thought you hadn't posted a reply.
If the people who actually wrote the Tenth Amendment heard about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Roe v. Wade, Korematsu v. US, Prohibition, or any other of a host of political decisions that have been enshrined in American government since their time, they would collectively have shat themselves in sheer outrage. The US Constitution is designed to be a living document, here. I doubt that the Founding Fathers had any inkling of what would occur further down the line in American history, and by gum they didn't think they would either. That's why they wrote it the way they did.
There is not a single mention of the idea of a "living constitution" in the drafting commitie, nor in any time up to the death of Washington. The Founding Fathers you appeal to would have been outraged as well.
That seems to be a statement that would be rather difficult to back up at best, but it doesn't matter what they want. What matters is that the United States would have economically, geopolitically, and militarily have been forced to recognize the existence of such an entity had that been the case. And since the United States government is empowered to do so, said action would have taken precedence over any legal irregularity. Was it written down in the code of law of the Ottoman Empire that regions under their control had the right to secede? Certainly not. Did the Ottoman Empire recognize the independence of the Kingdom of Greece after it broke away anyway? Yes, therefore such an action takes precedence over the legal authority to do such a thing. If the Confederate States had managed to secure diplomatic backing, the Federals would have been forced to acknowledge the existence of a separate state. Until that time, they were criminals and no more in the right than John Dillinger or Alferd G. Packer.
Force does not justify a decision legally- if the United States had recognised the South, it arguably would have (assuming the South was illegitimate) given it legal legitimacy, but until then would make no difference.
If the South has a legal right to secede, then it is automatically the entity in charge. Even Abraham Lincoln did not originally intend to supress the South by force (until it's attacks on Federal property), giving it time to establish itself as soverign in it's domains.
Legislation and law aren't the same thing either.
In a state like the United States, the bulk of law is legislation. Legislation's role as a part of law is undeniable.
That doesn't sound like an argument for the legality of the seizure of federal government property to me.
It was a refutation of one of yours- knowing that they could not simply take the relevant property, despite it being theirs by right, they attempted, as the next best thing, to purchase it.
Nah, because the United Nations administered Kosovo starting in 1999 as per the Kumanovo agreement. What Serbian government property? Serbia has evacuated by their own connivance (if not volition) for the last nine years. The Federal government of the United States signed no Kumanovo agreement.
De jure Serbian government property would still exist within Kosovo, which was de facto prior to evacuation. This would have been turned over to the United Nations, then Kosovo.
How are you going to logically prove the existence of an inherent right to freedom?
You can't- that's my point, outrageous as some observers will probably think it.
Jefferson Davis: Private Letters (1823-1889), collected by one Hudson Strode, examples on pages 81, 122, 214, 268, 483, and several others. Window dressing: the leading sentences to the Georgian State Declaration of Secession. As for Lincoln: well, does the Gettysburg Address count?
I don't think Davis was 'betraying his own cause' by using a certain form of parlance in his correspondence. The only cause he destroyed thereby was yours.
O.K- I concede there is a good case for calling the war such (assuming, as is probable, that Davis was not a secret Union supporter). But, as said, calling it that leads to the idea of "no true secession"- traditionally, like the word state, a civil war was one internally in a government (and ordinary people today would still consider it that).
To make a point I think you will concede, the cause "destroyed" was not just mine, but that of the modern neo-Confederate movement (they refuse to call it a civil war).
That has been variously defined as an alliance and a series of puppetry arrangements. I would tend to say that the states under Athenian control, save Attika itself, were, since they generally had their own self-government save for the tax assessments and military contributions levied by the central Athenian authorities, not part of a country, in the same fashion that the puppetry arrangement the Roman Republic and its Italian allies maintained cannot be referred to as a single state.
O.K then- this helps with definitions.
The American Revolution wasn't carried out within the Kingdom of Great Britain; colonial administration was a subordinate, but somewhat separate, entity. It has been noted before that 'Revolution' is a misnomer, however, so I'm not prepared to defend that title, unlike that of the American Civil War.
In the years leading up to the war, the Crown directly appointed governors for the colonies, like the Roman governors before them. How is that not part of the same country.
