x said: Neither the abolitionists nor the governments of those states nor a majority of the people there would make such a claim.
x, you know that if the Southern states had truly wanted to keep their slaves all they had to do was stay in the Union. You remember, the Corwin Amendment.
So they seceded to lose their slaves?
First, there's a lot of hindsight involved here. Southern slaveowners tried to secede and lost their slaves. We can speculate now that if they wanted to keep their slaves they would have been better off in the union, but they didn't see things that way at the time. From the slaveowners' perspective at the time -- wrong as it may have been in hindsight -- independence was the way to secure slavery.
Second, they didn't trust the Corwin Amendment -- and with reason. Amending the Constitution with an unchangeable, unamendable, amendment was a very questionable procedure.