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So you’re holding on to the legacy of a culture where the 1% who held slaves told the 99% what to do including die for them by the thousand, lost the war you started by shelling Sumter, spent the better of a century after that running around in bedsheets lynching people, tainted American white nationalism by setting off a bomb in a church and killing children, and are directly responsible for importing the descendants of the most violent and useless class of people in the nation en masse.

“Congratulations” is all I can think to say at the moment.

My fellow Freepers should know something that is left out of most history books: during the negotiations that produced the Constitution, it was a record-hot summer in an age of heavy woolen clothing and no air conditioning. So when the Southern states refused to budge and negotiations dragged on the delegates became exhausted in every sense. Mentally, emotionally and physically. Finally the northern delegates threw in the towel and said “slavery will die out on its own anyway.”

Needless to say, there were some pointed observations that this line went against every scrap of Biblical wisdom available, and the exact opposite proved true right up until the end.

Look at the rate of manumission in Maryland as markets changed from tobacco farming to growing produce for the growing cities of Washington DC and Baltimore. The practice of using immigrants to load hogsheads on the ship rather than place slaves in the hold. With increased immigration, the economics of slavery were starting to fall apart. Why risk that investment when an immigrant could do the job, and if they got killed, hire another? (Why do you think the Irish ended up in so many hazardous jobs: Teamster, longshoreman, powder monkey, miner, police, firefighter, to name a few.)

With industrialization, too, the number of slaves needed was dropping, and the South stood on the threshold of those developments when war broke out.

The war was not over slavery, but ultimately economics. Had slavery been the seminal issue, Lincoln would have declared all the slaves free at the onset, not waited until 1863.,p>And yes, with rare exception, I firmly believe the economics of hiring help which could be dismissed on a whim and letting them fend for their provender out of their wages would have been far more attractive than purchasing a slave and being vested in their welfare to the point that nothing short of providing food, clothing, housing, and rudimentary medical care risked the loss of that investment, for the lifetime of the slave.

the war you started by shelling Sumter

I guess you're willing to overlook the occupation of the island in Charleston Harbor.

You must also be willing to overlook the invasion of Mississippi and other States of the Confederacy.

The history isn't pretty.

ML/NJ ("Honest Yankee')