LF: 1775 . . . Again?

Title: 1775 . . . Again?
Source: Eric Peters Autos
URL Source: https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2019/12/23/1775-again/
Published: Dec 23, 2019
Author: Eric
Post Date: 2019-12-24 07:56:34 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 10242
Comments: 55

When people desperately trying to avoid a fight are left no choice but to fight, they are often the fiercest fighters imaginable.

The reason being an explosion of righteous anger – of berserker fury – directed at the bullies who will not leave them be.

Governor “Coonman” Northam of Virginia is such a bully.

He intends to rescind the current, ancient and long-acknowledged legal right of Virginians who aren’t criminals to possess more than single shot rifles and pistols – by criminalizing anyone who does possess them.

These newly minted “criminals” will then be required to turn in their formerly legal firearms to the government or be subject to Hut! Hut! Hutting! by armed government workers sent by the Coonman to enforce his criminal acts.

These acts include the criminalization of any “training” – even without firearms – which the Coonman and his supporters consider potentially “anti-government.”

This is a recipe for 1775.

Another bully – Thomas Gage, the British military governor of Massachusetts – attempted a “Coonman” in that year, which lit the fuse of what became the Revolutionary War. He sent armed government workers – Redcoats – to confiscate the weapons of the colonists – who had finally had their fill of being bullied. These long-ago AGWs eventually gunned down several colonists on the village green at Lexington.

Word of the massacre spread and the people rose in response, fighting back with whatever means available, harrying the column of armed government workers as it made its way back toward Boston, some 18 miles away.

The fury incited by that long-ago “Coonman” was subsequently described by himself:

“These people show a spirit and conduct against us they never showed against the French . . . They are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of and you must proceed in earnest or give the business up. A small body acting in one spot will not avail, you must have large armies making diversions on different sides, to divide their force. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies cannot afford such losses, especially when the advantage gained tends to do little more than the gaining of a post.”

Eight years later, those furious colonists finally succeeded in getting the bullies off their backs – permanently.

They probably never imagined that homegrown bullies even worse than “Coonman” Gage would eventually arise to torment them.

The current “Coonman” may not realize just how very tired the people are of being bullied – and how willing they are to fight, if a fight is forced upon them.

The “Coonman” feels confident. He has the full weight and force of the government and all its means at his disposal. He has legions of armed government workers available to enforce his writ.

But he hasn’t got the fury – and that is something he ought to reckon with, before it it is too late.

I speak from a rural SW Va county, in which most of the people living here know one another. Know they are not criminals, no matter what laws the Coonman may hurl characterizing them as such.

It is a very different to “red flag” and sic police department Hut! Hut! Hutters! on someone in a suburban home whose neighbors have no idea who he is than it is to order local sheriffs – who know their neighbor – to Hut! Hut! Hut! him on orders from Richmond. There is no “gun violence” problem in my county and everyone knows it. They therefore understand that what Coonman is proposing is not some kind of needed curative but the criminalization of almost an entire populace by distant tyrants who are loathed by almost the entire populace.

People such as Coonman are viewed as illegitimate foreigners; creatures who speak a foreign language, even though it is English. People here have had enough. The differences are irreconcilable. And the resentment is boiling.

Look at a map of the last election. The state remains overwhelmingly red – but the blues control the entire state government. It is because the blues – like a cancerous mole – control the densely populated counties adjacent to the federal capital. The reds no longer have a say in state government – and people who have no say tend to get angry. Right now, they are extremely angry.

It could get out of control very quickly.

It will be hard for the Coonman and his followers to portray 90 percent of the people living in the counties outside of Northern Virginia and Richmond as “criminals” by passing laws transforming them into criminals.

If this thing starts, it will not end until one or the other side is no longer capable of fighting. It will be no-quarter-given. It will be awful.

But it will be righteous.

And it may be the only way.

No, it's not 1775 again. There's no French Navy or Army out there that might come in and save rebel bacon.

I hope it's not 1861 again either. There was no French, or British, Navy or Army coming that time, making the result inevitable.

Armed rebellion against the authority of the US or a state will simply result in something akin to Waco, on a grander scale perhaps. It is not the way.

Please forgive my intrusion or digression, but I haven't had occasion to drag out the documents about putting the militia to work in many years. For those unfamiliar with how to get a really big civil disturbance going, here are the historical documents regarding use of the military force against combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals. For example, the combinations may be interfering with the ability to collect the revenue, and that can lead to a great civil disturbance about the collection of the revenue.

Section 1 explicitly addresses invasion and insurrection. Section 2 addresses civil disturbances which interfere with the courts and allows the militia to be used to assist the marshals of the courts to enable the courts to function and the laws to be duly executed. Attorney General Black stated that "to execute the laws of the Union" meant "to aid the federal officers in the performance of their regular duties." As there were no Federal officers in the seceded states, there were none to assist.

From Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield. With a review of the events which led to the political revolution of 1860, by James G. Blaine. Vol. I, pp. 603-605.

Judge Black's opinion is interesting, reasoned, and ultimately unworkable - if the United States were to be kept together.

Truth is, Black's opinion would have blocked Lincoln from doing exactly what he did: mobilize the various state militias of the Union to create a "Grand Army of the Republic", which then went on to conquer and subjugate the seceding South.

What Black wrote at the end "The States are colleagues of one another, and if some of them shall conquer the rest, and hold them as subjugated provinces, it would totally destroy the whole theory upon which they are now connected", was essentially true in 1860. The Civil War established a new national relationship, and demonstrated that states cannot secede from the Union unless they can win their independence in battle (good luck with that).

That seems reasonable to me. When people think they can just get out of something if they don't like it, they are prone to act that way. When they realize that there is no escape no matter what, they are more inclined, I believe, to work together for mutual benefit even if they can't stand each other, because the only other option is to suffer in the muck together.

Mightily inconvenient to all that is the indisputable historical fact that, under the Articles of Confederation, a declared perpetual union was formed, there were thirteen (13) states in the Union, and when George Washington was inaugurated, there were eleven (11) states in the Union. The impossible happened.

The Congressional Register I, and the history therein, leave absolutely no doubt that Rhode Island and North Carolina were not members of the constitutional union for some time after it was created. In Rhode Island's case, it was more than a year. History seems to dispute indissolubility, but SCOTUS said it, and it has been the law ever since. For that kind of writing, they even put the Chief Justice on a $10,000 bill and named a bank after him.

The 14th Amendment flipped the relationship of the states and the federal government upside down. One of the basic markers of sovereignty is self-determination, and the 14th told the States who were citizens of the States. It is hard to be a truly sovereign State when a higher power decides who is a citizen of the State.

Officially the War of the Rebellion, (a/k/a The Civil War, The War of Northern Aggression, The War for Southern Independence, The War Between the States), is a judicial delight and a never ending foodfight on various websites.

Of course, I was a career Navy man before I was a lawyer, and it's plain as day that the South was conquered, occupied, and not allowed to vote on its own governance again until it acceded, under force, to constitutional amendments that the bulk of its people opposed. Might, not law, made right.

Interesting that, from a legal perspective, the declaration of the blockade was a mistake. From a military perspective, it was necessary. As you note, it created some legal inconveniences, particularly with respect to England and France. But once again, might made right, and the American capacity to directly threaten English interests (Canada was indefensible were the British to enter an actual shooting war with the USA) was sufficient to keep the British from intervening to benefit the "sovereign belligerent" Southern states (made so by the blockade).

To my military eyes, Lincoln did what was expedient and necessary - the legal justifications were put together to hang a paper mache fig leaf over it, but WHATEVER was necessary, Lincoln was going to do, and some legal justification would be ginned up to cover it. The law is endlessly malleable,anybody can make an argument, and, to quote John Marshall, "Conquest grants a title which the courts of the conqueror are bound to respect." In Lincoln's case, we might add "....or else."

Because the outcome is the one I prefer, I am happy to allow the legal justifications as put together to stand, but I don't really believe it. To my eyes, the Civil War was the failure of the original US Constitution, that some of the forms and norms were respected during the war, but the USA really was akin to a military dictatorship during and after the war, at least in half the country, and that that degree of unconstitutional force was absolutely necessary to reconquer the South.

The blockade, for example, could not be foregone awaiting Union recapture and closing of the Southern ports, for a resupplied South may well have been able to successfully win a war of attrition with the Union. Preserving the unity of the country was more important than respecting the Constitution, in my view, and I don't believe we DID respect the Constitution to win that war. Of course, I recognise that many legalists need to believe we did, to maintain the continuity of their belief systems, so they will fight to the end to find ways to show the constitutionality of everything the Union did.

That's why there will be endless churn in those legal chat boards about the Civil War. It's also why I won't go there. To me, it's obvious that the Union did what it took to defeat the South, and what it took exceeded the limits of the original Constitution. Of course, that does not bother me, being a pragmatist. I understand why legalists cannot accept that and fight on. It makes no difference to me, but to them, it's crucial to their belief system. Sort of like Catholics and infallibility. - for some, that the Church never changed any doctrine is fundamental to their belief, and they never will admit the changes, recharacterising them as necessary to maintain the purity they insist exists (when it obviously doesn't, to others).

That is why the 14th amendment isn't a real amendment according to the constitution.

You like lies and deception. It is the way you read the Bible. You like adding to scripture and tearing out pages of gods word and burning them in the fire and pretending they never existed.

You pretend about the constitution and pretend that what some guy in a black robe says is automatically true. You like authority figures. You are a follower not a leader. Kind of a lemming.

Yes I know that what chan says is they way it is working right now. But there is no reason to pretend that they are following the constitution or being truthful about the powers that were delegated to them. Deceiving and being deceived.

Stone, I rib you, but I'm with you. There are times when people have to stand their ground for what is right, even against the duly elected government. Cliven Bundy is a recent example, and during my parent's lifetime the Battle of Athens, TN.