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Was Abraham Lincoln Justified in Waging War Against the South?
Tens of thousands of volunteers responded to Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of 15 April 1861 calling for 75,000 militia to put down what was referred to therein as "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law." Lincoln's words were carefully chosen, for it was his intention to thereby bring the proclamation under the Act of Congress of 1795, which authorized the President to call out the posse comitatus when Congress was not in session for the purpose of putting down insurrection within a State. The formerly pro-secession Republicans, who had literally only days before the fall of Fort Sumter defended a State's right to leave the Union in peace, willingly followed Lincoln's lead in declaring the actions of South Carolina and the infant Confederacy as "rebellion," "insurrection," and "levying war on the United States." However, "insurrection" has no meaning constitutionally if not in reference to the laws and authority of a sovereign State. It is true that the general Government may intervene to quell insurrection, or "domestic violence," within a State, but this force is to be exerted only "on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened)" — that is, the legislature or executive of the afflicted State itself, not by an independent determination of the President. Such was the case with George Washington himself in 1794, who had only called upon the militias of the adjoining States to aid in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion after being requested to do so by Thomas Mifflin, the Governor of Pennsylvania, whose State was thus afflicted. There was no such request made of Lincoln by the Governors of any of the seceded States. Furthermore, this provision is inseparably connected to the duty of the United States to guarantee to each of their sister States "a republican Form of Government." Secession did not extinguish republican government in any of the Southern States, nor did it affect such in any of the State that remained in the old Union.
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