But there's a key point here which very few people seem to grasp.
Many people like to say, "slavery was America's original sin", as if the US Constitution was a good idea except that somehow or other, slavery got included.
The key point to grasp is that slavery was not some afterthought somewhat accidentally added to the Constitution.
Instead, slavery was a precondition, first for the economic viability of Southern colonies, and then for the very existence of the United States as a single country.
In other words: without accepting slavery in states where it was lawful, there could have been no United States and no Constitution, period.
The reason is simple and obvious, though largely forgotten these days: if the new US Constitution had been anti-slavery, the South would not have ratified it.
And, in 1860 every Northerner fully understood this, that's why the new anti-slavery Republican Party opposed slavery in the North, and in US territories which didn't want it, but never before the Civil War advocated restricting slavery in the South.
The reverse is also true. If there had been a line item in the Constitution declaring that slavery was legal, the Northern states would not have ratified the Constitution. Hence no United States. The restriction of slavery to the South was a direct result of the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857. Prior to that court case, the efforts of the abolitionist movement was to get the U.S. Government to outlaw slavery. After Dred Scott, they realized that there was no legal route for the Federal Government to end slavery in the States where it was legal. The abolitionists changed their efforts to preventing the introduction of slavery into the territories of the U.S.
Instead, slavery was a precondition, first for the economic viability of Southern colonies, and then for the very existence of the United States as a single country.>>>> thx i do remember that in my reading then, would it have been better or possible to create a republic based on not accepting those pre conditions seperately? and what would we have had without the south in the new republic. could we have actually survived 1812+ without the south to defend? don’t know thx for the pushing the thot buttons in my head.