At the time of the Declaration of Independence, our Founders believed that slavery had been imposed on America by Britain, and that was one item in Jefferson's original list of grievances against the king.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 colonies.
Even by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 only Vermont and Massachusetts had fully abolished slavery, while Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island began gradually phasing it out.
Slavery in Pennsylvania, for example, did not fully end until 1847.
At same time that some northern states began to slowly abolish slavery, southern Founders like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison all acknowledged slavery was wrong and should be eventually abolished.
Had those views prevailed in the South, there would certainly be no Civil War, and our whole national conversation today would have been much different.
But between the time of Thomas Jefferson and, say, Jefferson Davis, there was a major change in attitude in the South, caused by economic realities and a pro-slavery ideology developed to justify them.
So, where Thomas Jefferson saw slavery as an evil to be abolished, eventually, Jefferson Davis saw it as a positive good to be defended with lives of hundreds of thousands of fellow Southerners.
That's the difference.
This is why non slave owing officers an enlisted had no problem with Confederate Emancipation, their will to fight would not have been dampened one bit if this had happened. I think this was never understood by the Confederate leadership.
In 1860 New Jersey still had 18 slaves, though redefined as "apprentices for life." This was due to the peculiarities of the various emancipation laws passed over the course of the 19th century.
http://americaninstituteforhistory.org/presenters/Singer/Slavery.pdf
If any of them were still alive and not emancipated during the War, NJ joins DE and KY as the only states where slaves were actually freed by 13A in 1865.
Not just defended, expanded. Of course, the dominant southern ideology of the 1850s saw no distinction between the two.
One of the areas of agreement between Fire-Eaters and moderate non-abolitionist Republicans like Lincoln was that both sides believed the institution was like a shark. It had to keep moving ahead or die.
AFAIK, this unproven assumption was never really challenged. The Democratic Party split, ending any hope of stopping the Republicans, over northern Democrats refusal to bow to southern demands they insert a pledge to abandon popular sovereignty in the territories and impose it on the inhabitants whether they wanted it or not via a Federal Slave Code enforced by federal troops. (It is interesting that the last national institution, the Democratic Party, split over southern demands that the power of the Federal Government be expanded.)
Whether slavery had to expand or die was true or not, all southern leaders certainly believed it. Which led to some obvious difficulties for them. Expansion into the remaining territories was a symbolic issue, as none had the climate that would allow slavery to thrive, at least slavery of the type southerners were familiar with.
So we are supposed to assume that southerners, had they been allowed to depart peacefully in 1860/61, would have been content to remain in their existing boundaries, and peacefully watch their beloved institution gradually wither and die.
They wouldn't, of course. They would have promptly attempted to move South and conquer new territory in Latin America.
This would most certainly not have worked, since the only way to attack these areas, given the tech of the time, was via the sea. And the Royal Navy (not to mention the US Navy) would never have allowed conquests in the interests of slavery. That such expansion was possible was a peculiar delusion widely shared in the 1850s South.
That's true. In addition, in a parasitic relationship, the parasite tends to become more (and never less) dependent with each generation. Look at what has happened here since the New Deal and the Great Society.
Ultimately, the parasite becomes so crippled by dependency that the relationship can only be terminated by either a rejection by the host (a slave revolt) or by force applied from an external source (the Union). The parasite becomes too weak and dependent to ever initiate the change on its own.
Slaveholders depended upon the machinery of government to preserve their status as parasites. When it became clear to them that the government in Washington was slowly withdrawing support for their lifestyle, they became increasingly dependent upon state governments for protection.
Nowadays, the parasites are dependent upon the government in Washington to preserve their lifestyle and this time the parasites are more frightened by attempts by state governments to free them from their culture of dependency. Now as then, the parasites become weaker, more dependent and less capable with each new generation. Dependency is never a pretty picture.
The more things change, . . .