Antietam Protest

I lived seven years in Hagerstown, the closest "big city". We even found bullets in the battlefield a couple decades ago.

I didn't want to post here, until I saw the western PA'ers tailgating at Big Ben's hospital. Then I didn't feel quite so bad.

This country is nuts.

 

Fenian, a more relevant reference might be the first 10 words of Article I, Section 10: No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation.

 

Also a good one.

 

I think Texas is an exception. It was its own republic before it became a state, therefore the only state to join the Union via treaty rather than annexation. (The fact that it joined the Confederacy by the slimmest of margins doomed it to military action.) Texas can probably legally secede whenever it wants to. But it'll never happen.

 

FB and NW, thanks for clearing that up. I'm no constitutional scholar, but that question has always intrigued me. I guess once you're in the club, you can't get out. Sort of like a gang.

That really added to the discussion. Thanks.

 

I'm no constitutional scholar either. But when I came across this thread, I went and found a copy and read it, mainly because I had this remembrance of the phrase from the Declaration of Independence: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Had my documents confused. Apparently the confederate states felt it was their right and their duty to throw off the existing government. It looks to me that they were ignoring the question of "absolute despotism," (I'm sure that's where slaves felt they were), but the DOI doesn't establish our societal framework. The Constitution does.

 

If you were you would have to wear a bow tie.

 

Technically speaking, Lincoln had no authority, except a morale one, to free the slaves. The Confederate States were technically another country.
As for the war, the South loss.End of story.
However, slavery is still an issue for many in the United States. It's just on a different level.

 

I'm a Constitutional scholar!

 

Although it does bring up a fascinating counter-argument. If the states could technically never seceed, why did they have to be readmitted to the Union?

 

Texas is indeed unique in that it has a provision in its constitution to allow for it to be split into multiple, regional states as opposed to one big one.

 

n_w --
Technically, they weren't "readmitted." Once they fulfilled certain conditions, they resumed their status as if the war never happened, with the same boundaries etc. (If they'd had to apply for readmission, the border skirmishes and land fraud alone might still be going on.) That's how Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the VP of the CSA, went right back to being the US senator from Georgia, like nothing ever happened.