Was the South the Bastion of Limited Government Against Lincoln, Yankees , and the Federal Government?

I am still planning to write my Civil War and Secession posts. I have had a little bit of a low grade fever the last few days so sitting down and thinking hard outside work on a serious extensive laid out post has not been appealing.

However I am paying attention to what very good bloggers and often fellow Louisiana Bloggers , for instance the very learned Cajun Hugenot, are writing on this.

One thing Cajun wrote on this caught my eye in this post
On political issues I stand much closer to Jefferson. I am for true constitutional federalism (which was lost in 1865), and also limited government (which was lost in 1865, mostly regained after that for a time and now almost completely disappeared again and forgotten).

Now let me say I hope to address soon in my post what is true Const Federalism. I am a big Federalism person and I suspect I would agree with many of Cajun's concerns today. Though we must of course look at Federalism through the the Civil war amendments and not pretend they do not exist. It is of a sad note that early on those amendments were ignored and the result was a ever expanding use of the Commerce clause!!!

It is also well to note that one reason why limited Govt was lost again perhaps was that a good many Americans treated the fellow citizenship of a good many of their Americans like they were garbage. As Thomas L. Krannawitter wrote in his piece Washing Mud from Marble

Lincoln may have been dead for four-score-and-seven years when Brown v. Board of Education (1954) inaugurated the "second Reconstruction," but many conservatives who were dubious about the second Reconstruction's use of federal power—especially federal judicial power—as the principal lever for bringing down Jim Crow could hardly help suspecting that the template for federal intervention in the 1950s had been copied from Lincoln's in the "first Reconstruction." I think this view of the relationship between the "first" and "second" Reconstructions pays insufficient attention to the distinctive ways in which the latter was shaped by Progressivism, while the former was a campaign to introduce free-market and free-labor capitalism into a society built around racial caste.

And it is true that there were many things wrong with the civil rights movement—its dismissal of the rule of law as a white man's invention, the domino effect of racial egalitarianism toward egalitarian absurdity, the invention of victimhood and identity politics. But it was right about one very big thing, and that was the vicious and deliberate way in which white Southerners trampled the sacredness of American citizenship into the mud, while whites everywhere else turned a conveniently blind eye. Civis romanus est brought down Gaius Verres; civis americanus est ought to have protected Emmett Till, James Meredith, and Medgar Evers, but it didn't. Any conservative who wonders why blacks' perceived self-interest veers so often in the direction of power rather than law has only to consult the many ways in which, for a century after the Civil War, the "rule of law" was used as an excuse for the routine subornation of natural rights and civil justice.

This part of history cannot be ignored. Sadly my State of Louisiana , which in Pre Civil War days had a foundation and blueprint for progressive racial relations that could have been built upon became another Jim Crow nightmare. This occurred during that time that a lack of massive Federal Intervention and a more true Federalism "mostly regained after that for a time ".

However I think this needs to be clear exactly how Limited limited Govt was in the South. If one divides the South into the deep South, the border States, and the upper south one finds the Deep South was most wild for secession. Why is this?

Well there are many factors but one factor one sees that made the Deep South different was in large part a complete lack of two party rule. Limited Govt indeed. In fact the more blacker an area got the more limited Govt (or anti democratic to perhaps be more precise) it got.

We see a glaring example of this as to Georgia and the time of secession. The very good and fair Elektratig blog(For instance while he we both are more Pro-Union as to our outlook we both think the whole WEST VIRGINIA thing was kind of shady and problematic) has a fascinating post here called The Secession of Georgia . It is a very interesting look at how that occurred. This part struck me:

It was possible to “change[] the political status quo” because the convention’s second task, after voting on secession, was to draft a new state constitution. Conservative secessionists were able to use their influence to draw up a document that limited some of the perceived excesses of Jacksonian democracy. Professor Johnson summarizes some of the provisions by which conservative delegates were able to endow the state with the stabilizing virtues of “a patriarchal republic” “without changing the form of government or restricting the suffrage:”

They had reduced the size of the senate and increased the size of the senatorial districts, hoping thereby to filter into the senate men whose interests, outlook, and social standing inclined them to protect and maintain the status quo. They had denied the legislature the power to tamper with slavery or with other forms of property. They had entrusted the judiciary with the final word on the constitutionality of legislation and insulated the judges from shifting popular sentiments [by providing that judges, who were previously elected, would be appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the senate]. And they had provided that any future constitutional changes would be made not by ordinary legislators but by convention delegates like themselves – men who stood above the hurly-burly, demagogic world of politics.

Indeed!!!

He hits again on the importance of one party rule

At the same time, Professor Johnson does not allow all of these currents and eddies to obscure the source of the secessionist impulse. In his view, the fire eating proponents of immediate secession were driven by the desire to protect the institution of slavery – and the fear that, if Georgia did not leave the Union before Lincoln’s election, nonslaveholders would join the Republicans. It was this fear of “the latent disloyalty of some southerners toward slavery” that made the issue so urgent:

Secession had to be immediate because as soon as Lincoln was in office he could use his patronage to build a Republican party in Georgia. This was the most compelling argument the secessionists had. All their other charges about . . . northern outrages . . . amounted to little more than alerting Georgians to Republican threats and harassment. Even if such external actions spelled the ultimate death of slavery, which was extremely questionable, they did not necessitate immediate secession, for little was likely to change in a few months or even in Lincoln’s four-year term in office. . . . [T]here was time to wait. Immediate secession was not necessary. But to escape the extraconstitutional consequences of a constitutional process – the creation of a southern Republican party by the use of the newly elected president’s patronage – immediate secession was necessary.

Ironically, Professor Johnson argues, it was this same fear about the trustworthiness of the people that made pro-secessionist Democrats amenable to a more conservative constitutional structure. Thus, conservative Whigs who had converted to immediate secession and fire eating Democrats were able to come together to agree on the democracy-limiting features of the new state constitution described above.

History does repeat itself. Southerners by nature are for limited Govt. I count myself among them. However we do have a disturbing history of putting in Govt for the very few and ruled by the few and abusive to the many.

One must ask in one party rule Mississippi how did a domestic spying service such as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission develop. A organization whose duties involved keeping a eye on people's political activity and in who was also involved in watching who was sleeping with who. All in the land of limited Govt.

Sometimes Govt is a tad too limited