Joe Biden, Confederate colonel wannabe?

Edward Sebesta has been making the point, not a very welcome one to Democrats, that neo-Confederate pandering by mainstream politicians is not limited to Republicans.  An example illustrating his point comes via Atrios and Sebesta from Lambert at the Corrente blog: Joe Biden's Trent Lott moment 12/03/06.  It links to an article on an appearance by Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden before a South Carolina Rotary Club in The State 12/03/06, Biden charms local GOP by Lee Bandy.

What is Biden thinking?  He's going before a mostly Republican audience in South Carolina, trashing his own Democratic Party, talking up a bipartisanship on the Iraq War that doesn't exist and won't come into being any time soon, and makes good-ole-boy references to the grand days of the Lost Cause?  Weird, very weird.

Lambert also takes the time to quote from the South Carolina Articles of Secession of 1860, which figure in the Biden-in-South-Carolina story:

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government [the reference is to Abraham Lincoln's election as President]. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.  (my emphasis)

As much as present-day admirers of the Confederacy repeat their stock formulas about how secession was over some abstract Constitutional issues, at the time they were actually seceeding, the Confederate states were very conscious they were seceeding over slavery and said so as clearly as they could say it.

Those articles also complained:

We assert that fourteen of the States [the free states] have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:

"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.  In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress.  In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.  Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.   (my emphasis)

Although the Articles of Secession refer to Calhounian ideas about the legalisms of secession, this complaint just quoted was one of the slave states' most intense grievances in the decades leading up to the Civil War.  That is, the free states were not complying with their national obligations (as interpreted by the slaveowners) to hunt down and return human being held as property to their owners.  Instead, they were asserting the rights of their states and localities to resist such barbarous demands.

The Slave Power always, always put the preservation of slavery over any idea of "states rights".  The postwar emphasis former Confederates put on "states rights" as an abstract reason for secession was a bogus rewriting of history.  Sadly, one of the most successful bogus rewritings of history in the American experience.