[i]“I’m not aware that the Confederates ever used the Declaration as a basis for their action. They used secession, a presumed Constitutional concept, as their basis.”[/i]
Once again: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Other than drawing it in crayon, I don’t I know of anything that could be more clear to the right of secession unless you think our founders were only joking from one founding document to the next.
[i]“The concepts of a right of revolution would have been inconvenient not only with reference to their slave population but also with large strategic regions of their domain where the citizens overwhelmingly wished to stay in the Union.”[/i]
No more inconvenient in 1961 than in 1776. Once again, you block out the parts of history you don’t like.
[i]The voters in East Tennessee rejected secession by over 4-1. In the Greeneville Convention, the people of Union-loyal East Tennessee requested separation from Tennessee and the confederacy. A strategically vital railroad ran through the valley of East Tennessee. Do you think that their request should have been granted?[/i]
Beats me. I would need more info than you’re providing to even guess.
Had the Confederacy allowed E. Tennessee to depart, the Confederacy would have lost a vital railroad connecting Georgia and the gulf states to the Virginia theater. Maybe even more vital in the long run they would have had a region hostile to the Confederacy situated in strategic Chattanooga, the gateway to the Deep South which would have served as a political magnet for nearby ant-reb regions in northern Georgia, Western NC and Northern Alabama.
But the rebs did not do that and proved they had no respect for the principles of the Declaration. And in relation to your argument, how can you describe the Union as fighting for tyranny against the wishes for self determination of the South and not equally describe the Confederacy as fighting for tyranny against the wishes for self determination of the people of East Tennessee?