Topic: Civil War, Matches 2 quotes.

Unrestrained Government

History books most often say the war was fought to free the slaves. But that idea is brought into serious question by Abraham Lincoln’s repeated disclaimer: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” The real causes had more to do with problems similar to those the nation faces today—a federal government that has escaped the limits of the Constitution.

John C. Calhoun expressed that concern in his famous Fort Hill Address of July 26, 1831, when he was Andrew Jackson’s vice president. Calhoun, who later became a senator from South Carolina, said, “Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.”

Calhoun, like Jefferson, feared Washington, D.C.‘s usurpation of powers constitutionally held by the people and the states (“consolidation”). For example, of the tariffs enacted to protect Northern manufacturers, Calhoun said that “an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North.”

Import duties extracted far more from the South than from the North, and Southerners complained of having to pay either high prices for northern-made goods or high tariffs on foreign-made goods. They also complained about federal laws not dissimilar to the Navigation Acts that helped bring on the War for Independence.

Source: Walter E. Williams
The Freeman, January 1999, pp. 63-64

Topics: Civil War; Government, Loss of Freedom; Slavery; Taxes

When you stop to think about it, you must conclude that this Church has been right throughout its whole history upon all of the important moral questions that have affected our welfare. In the nature of things there is not within the United States a people more patriotic than the Latter-day Saints. I know of no sect that assumes the position that the constitution of the United States was written as it were by the very finger of God. Surely that belief is an inspiration to the highest patriotism. You remember reading in the history of the Church that this people were accused in Missouri of being opposed to slavery. In that slave-holding state such an attitude became one of the reasons of our persecution and drivings. You remember that the first message that flashed across the completed telegraph line from here to the Atlantic ocean was a message of congratulation from Brigham Young to Abraham Lincoln that the Union was preserved or was in the way of preservation.

Source: President Heber J. Grant
General Conference, April 1920

Topics: Civil War; Heavenly Interest in Human Events; Morality

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