[Cheburashka]

Re-read Mr. Longstreet’s fictional sequence of steps.....free the slaves THEN declare independence.

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The key word being fictional, as in no chance of it happening. If they freed the slaves before independence there would be no point to independence, certainly not for the slaveholders, who would be bankrupt and no longer an economic factor. The slaveholders had no interest in freeing the slaves, they wanted to expand slavery into the territories, they dreamed of annexing Mexico and the Caribbean to add to slavery.

In any case the confederate constitution was specifically crafted to make the abolition of slavery impossible.

[Lowell1775]

You are obviously a very well read man. I don’t dispute anything you have written. Accept I am not a Southern apologist. I do not need lectured on the facts of slavery, the CSA constitution, or the economic value of slave chattel. There are no converts to make or hostile’s to humble in me.

Feel vindicated. Thanks for the practice.

Freeing the slaves first is a rhetorical construct to illustrate that all the good that could have come from the war was lost because of slavery.

Had an assembly of states brought Washington DC to heel over the punitive anti-sectional tariffs and affirmed the ultimate natural right of self determination, we would not now face an overwhelmingly large Federal government hostile to liberty.

And because of the CW, this same Federal government has the precedent to freely use force against its own people.

The tiny slave owning elite of the cotton south, even though they lost the war and are now long dead and judged, screwed this country royal.

As a consequence, to use one of your phrases Cheburashka, and not a fictional Mr. Longstreet’s, it is we as freemen who “.....are on the wrong side of history.”

Those flipping evil slavers and that darn CSA Constitution.