Dear Editor:
This is a response to Charles Landis and Ron Matthews in recent issues of the Easter Shore Post regarding the “Brief Enquiry” into our Constitution and federal government by Abel Parker Upshur.
It is historically unfortunate that Upshur died by accident in 1844 before the start of the Civil War in 1861. We will never know for sure whether he would have stood for the Union or would have supported the breaking of that Union by the Southern states in order to protect their monetary interests in the system of human chattel slavery.
Make no mistake, everything about that rebellion was about protecting and perpetuating the wealth pouring forth from the sweat of black Africans captured and put to labor for their entire lives, their very children born as property for use or sale. The Southern slave owners protected their monetary interests at every step in the creation of our Constitution and the exercise of the new federal government. The delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 from South Carolina and Georgia made it crystal clear that if union was to be achieved then slavery must be protected.
The original 13 Colonies rebelled against and broke away from the English crown government because of “… a long train of abuses and usurpations…” detailed in the Declaration of Independence. However, by the middle part of the 19th century, that “train of abuses” was being committed by the slave states not only against millions of enslaved Africans but also by the de facto invasion of the Northern States by agents enforcing the odious Fugitive Slave Act based on the constitutional provisions extorted by South Carolina and Georgia during the Philadelphia Convention.
If Upshur’s work was hijacked, misused, and misrepresented by secessionists after his death then he is cleared of any responsibility for the disaster of the American Civil War. If, as I suspect, his actual intent was to lay the legal/constitutional groundwork for that very revolt, then he deserves no memorial. Indeed, he would fall into the same category with the likes of professor Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and the many other German intellectuals who laid the philosophical and legal foundation for Adolf Hitler’s monstrous Nazi Third Reich.
Brian Bloedel, Accomac
