Timothy Noah Quotes
Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.
Noah, Timothy. "Chatterbox." Slate, 2004.
As this passage makes clear, the Southern States would not accede to a Union unless they had more representation than the larger Northern states. Thus the infamous three-fifths clause. This meant that white slave owners had proportionally more representatives in Congress and more votes in the Electoral College than whites in the Northern States. This artificial majority kept slavery from being abolished until the Civil War.
Statement regarding the situation the Mormons encountered where the majority of the citizens in the areas that they inhabited were not only opposed to Mormonism but felt it moral to attack, harass and even murder Mormons. Because the bigots were in the majority, the politicians and officials were loath to protect the Mormons. In Mormon religious prophesy, before the Second Coming of Christ the Mormons must settle in Zion and the Jews in Israel. So the persecution preventing them from settling in Zion was the work of Satan to prevent Christ’s coming.
In the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the delegates agreed that the there would be no official transcript and that the debates were to be kept secret:
George W. Bush. See {618119} for the rejoinder to the defense.
The version of the Constitution they were debating did not include the Bill of Rights.
The House Rules Committee had evolved into a very powerful committee which controlled the debate rules of every piece of legislation that came before the House. This Congress—the worst in American History—passed fewer bills than any other. Those that ever got out of the Rules Committee had Rules that prohibited the minority from even offering amendments.
This quotation illustrates the "winner take all" conceopt of many political cultures that call themselves and think of theselves as a democracy. But a true democracy does not allow a tyranny of the majority--especially a very narrow minority.
This editorial reflected majority Southern political positions of the time. There was never going to be any compromise by ending or curtailing slavery in any way. Amongst the abolitionists, there was an equally rigid view towards compromise. Many Northerners felt that the anti-slavery Americans had been compromising for half a century and slavery was a larger institution that it ever was. They wanted no further compromise. The South had never budged from its original position at the founding of the nation. Historically, it was just a matter of time before there would be a showdown politically and probably militarily. The explosion took 10 more years.
When the first Southern States seceded, each appointed a whose job it was to persuade the other Southern States to also secede. In this case Hale was marketing secession to Kentucky which with Maryland were the only two Southern States to reject what they regarded as treason and rebellion. The importance of the quotation however is in his argument which was all based on enmity to racial equality and abolition. Later Southern apologists would argue that the Civil War was fought, not about slavery and racism butt about different philosophies of government. See {623715} .
It was commonly asked of Blacks applying to register. There are few people who could give a cogent response to this. What made it terrible was that the white racist registrars had the unilateral authority to determine whether or not the oral response was adequate. Recording of responses were prohibited so that no Black who was disenfranchised could ever appeal when he/she was rejected. This is one of the thousands of techniques that were used throughout the South to prevent Negro voting. They were so egregious that Lyndon Johnson was abe to force through Southern filibusters The Voting Rights Act which has eliminated the worst of the racist restrictions on Black voting. As the worst of the racist white generation has died off, Southern discrimination in voting has lessened and the situation is better each year. By 2012 there were some who claimed that the law was no longer necessary do to changes in attitude and practice, but others worried that if there were no longer any forms of discrimination in voting, why some wanted to repeal the Voting Rights Act.
The Union troops had just been routed at Bull Run. Many in the North thought that the war would be a short one with little disruption of loss of life. Here Norton, like so many others, provided a a more realistic assessment. Also note the reference to “barbarism” in the South, When the Union was formed, the Southern states were not as well developed as the North from an industrial, educational or cultural perspective. There were vestiges of aristocracy, crude law enforcement, and much more poverty (Virginia excepted) than in the North. Most Northerners thought that the South would reform—modernize and become more like the North, but instead the gulf became greater as the North itself developed and changed rapidly while the South was mired in its traditions with their aristocracy gaining more political, economic and cultural control. This attitude of Northern superiority, objectively valid though it may have been, was sorely resented by the South and this resentment has persisted into relatively modern times.
Timothy Robert Noah (born 1958) is an American journalist and author. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic, where he wrote the "TRB From Washington" column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the "Chatterbox" column. In April 2012 Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.
