Second, it's pie in the sky to think, as is said in the movie "Gettysburg," that "we should have freed the slaves first, THEN declared independence." This is utterly ridiculous, excuse me. The entire POINT of independence was to hold slave property. That was the only point. It was never, ever, ever about "states' rights." The only "states' right" that they were interested in was the right to hold slave property. They mentioned it no less than THREE TIMES in the Confederate Constitution, even to the point of having an article that said that if by some strange occurence any state emancipated its slaves, slave holders from all other states would still be safe in bringing their slaves into that state.
But go back to Calhoun's comment which was that it was more than just having slaves---their goal was, as in homosexual marriage today, not just to have the act inviolate, but to force ATTITUDES to change, namely, the South was already working on ways to prevent anyone from criticizing slavery in public. Talk about speech codes! The "gay lobby" doesn't come close to what the Southerners practiced. Slavery in every respect was an assault on the freedoms of all, and not just blacks in the south.
As for Johnson's comment, yes, we were a democracy (i.e., majority rules) and yes, the free whites in the South did FULLY support denying civil rights to blacks, so he is 100% correct: in the south, after Reconstruction, the voters got what they wanted, regardless of what the black minority said.
Well, I won’t contest your points. As I said, it may have been ultimately unavoidable. We had a brief window of opportunity between 1776-1789 and it was lost. Another problem with the Confederacy is that a pure states rights republic simply wasn’t going to be workable. Even in conducting war policy, that was apparent, you’re going to have to have some level of centralization or you’re going to have to have each state as an independent republic (and I could imagine there being another Civil War within the CSA before long).
You cited the “gay lobby”, an example of that is the current push for marriage. You can’t have it so that your marriage is valid in one state (albeit by however contorted means they arrived at it being remotely legal or permissable under a given state Constitution) and yet not in another, so all they merely need do is get it “approved” in a few states, go to another demanding their marriage of another state be recognized and have it set up to go to SCOTUS to have it imposed on the rest of the country (a la Roe v. Wade).