The Federal Transit Administration: Fill & Download for Free

Here’s why:A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.The Declaration of Causes of Seceding StatesAnd here:Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal UnionWe affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] 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.Also here:A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union.In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.Or maybe here:The new constitution [of the Confederate States of America] has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”Our new government [of the Confederate States] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, March 21, 1861“Corner Stone” SpeechI could go on, as there are many more examples, but I think the point is made.People don’t believe Southerners when they say the Confederacy seceded over states’ rights because nobody said that until years after the Civil War was over. The idea that it was about States’ Rights was an example of Post-Civil War revisionist history on the part of Southern leaders; it’s commonly known among historians as “the Myth of the Lost Cause”, and was a (highly successful) attempt to recast the cause of the war as a noble struggle that had little or nothing to do with slavery.It is also absolutely and utterly without historical evidence from before and during the war to support it. The South was not shy about why it was seceding, as the excerpts from the documents I’ve posted above indicate.In fact, rather than violating the rights of the states, many of the Southern states accused the federal government of not doing enough to rein in the behavior of the Northern states, specifically in regard to the recovery of fugitive slaves. Here’s another excerpt from South Carolina’s declaration of secession, which I have already quoted from above: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 [the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850]. 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 [the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850] 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.The target of South Carolina’s anger is not the federal government, except insofar as it was too weak to stop the non-slaveholding states from resisting the return of fugitive slaves to the South. In fact, you can’t find anything in South Carolina’s declaration of secession that points to specific actions by the federal government infringing on the rights of the Southern states at all. It was the non-slaveholding states they were angry at.EDIT: The section of South Carolina’s declaration I quoted above is referring to something called the Personal Liberty Laws, which were laws passed by Northern states to provide legal protection for blacks living in the North who were accused of being fugitive slaves. Under the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, all that was required to prove someone was a fugitive slave was a written or verbal statement from their alleged owner, or a representative appointed by the owner (such as a slave hunter) that the person in question was an escaped slave. Personal Liberty Laws required anyone seeking to reclaim an escaped slave in a free state to first obtain a warrant from a state judge, which could be denied with insufficient evidence that the person in question was in fact the fugitive being sought. They also provided some opportunity for the accused fugitive to face their accusers in court, which the federal acts expressly denied. This was a source of great controversy between the Northern and Southern states, and from the Southern perspective was evidence that the federal government was too weak to defend their interests, rather than so strong that it was infringing on their rights. Other states mentioned this in their declarations of secession as well.Here’s Texas:The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.The Supreme Court actually ruled Personal Liberty Laws unconstitutional, as a violation by the Northern States of the federal government’s authority to determine how the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Article IV Section 3) would be enforced. This ruling was handed down in 1844 in the case of Prigg v Pennsylvania, but Northern states continued to pass and enforce Personal Liberty Laws after that ruling.Personal Liberty LawsPrigg v. PennsylvaniaThe Southern States were angry because the Northern States were sheltering escaped slaves, in defiance of federal law, as part of what they saw (correctly) as a larger effort to undermine the institution of slavery in the South. The problem they had with the federal government was not that it was taking their rights away, but that it was not doing enough to stop this behavior by the Northern states. In other words, rather than being tyrannical, they saw the federal government as largely ineffective. Added to this was their concern with Lincoln’s election that the federal government would now join the Northern states in their effort to undermine slavery, specifically by limiting it to those states in which it already existed, while barring slavery from the vast territories acquired from France in 1803 and Mexico in 1848. This would ensure the slaveholding states would become a small minority of the overall nation, placing (it was thought) slavery on a path to eventual extinction. The South wanted to prevent this from happening.So in response to the question, people do not believe it, because it is not true.

The MTA is currently projecting a December 2016 completion for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 (Lexington/63rd Street to 96th Street/2nd Avenue).However, the Federal Transit Administration, which is providing substantial funding, is hedging on a substantially later date—sometime between early 2017 and February 2018.Sources:Second Avenue SubwayFeds double down - and hedge - on 2018 opening date for 2nd Ave. Subway

“Should the state of California have to pay back the federal government for the high-speed train project’s lack of progress?”If California hasn’t complied with the conditions imposed on it by the federal funds it received for the high-speed rail project, yes, it should have to pay the federal government back. The state isn’t entitled to spend billions in federal money without adhering to the feds’ rules!“Can that $3.5B go toward the wall?”Probably not. These are federal transit funds. One of the arguments in favor of CA HSR (and rail improvements in other states during the Obama Administration) was that if states didn’t take advantage of them, other states would get more. So it’s more likely that the funds would be returned to the Department of Transportation.“Does phase 1 not require an actual working train and not just track?”While I’m not completely clear on the conditions attached to the CA HSR project, one news story says that the state’s rail authority “need[s] to move forward with construction to meet the deadline for $3.5 billion in federal grants, of which it had already spent $2.6 billion.” (See Newsom scales back high-speed-rail plans). Which makes it sound like the funds are conditioned on construction, not “an actual working train.”But I don’t doubt for an instant that the Department of Transportation has plenty of attorneys and auditors monitoring the situation and that it will sue if California isn’t complying with the funds’ conditions.