I’ve never claimed that the Union went into the Civil War to abolish slavery. It’s patently absurd to say the South went in for any other reason other than preserving it.
No its not. Its patently absurd to say the South went in order to preserve it when they could have preserved it simply by staying in....or by accepting the North’s Slavery Forever constitutional amendment.
“No its not. Its patently absurd to say the South went in order to preserve it when they could have preserved it simply by staying in....or by accepting the North’s Slavery Forever constitutional amendment.”
Now here your crazy train leaves the rails at two points as it careens down the mainline of the revisionist express.
First, just because they COULD have kept slavery doesn’t mean secesh THOUGHT that way. Southern Democrats viewed the Republican Party as such a threat to the institution of slavery that they, as I pointed out in a previous post, had already threatened secession if the GOP won in 1856.
Now in fairness to Johnny Reb, imagine how Second Amendment supports would react today to the election of a Democrat to the White House who openly supported the end of private gun ownership by any means necessary? Not representing any one region, gun owners would not likely move for secession but there would be hell to pay. The difference of course between these two scenarios is that Republicans really didn’t want to outlaw slavery in the Southern states by force at that time, and Americans don’t have the same easily offended mentality that Southerners had then. Plus the Second Amendment is not a morally indefensible abomination like slavery. But if it came down to gun confiscation today I’m sure violence would ensue.
The second place you jump the tracks is suggesting that Southerners only wanted to preserve slavery. They planned on expanding its reach. That’s what drove the Compromise of 1850. Oh, by the way, the Feds took over the public debt of the State of a Texas in that act. Damnation on those scurrilous Yankees for always financially oppressing those poor beleaguered gentlemen of Dixie! But I digress. Southerns wished to spread slavery into new territories, be they within existing American borders or into Carribean islands, or even parts of Mexico.
Southern secession resembled nothing less than a personal duel writ large. The honor and virtue of the South was at stake, and no low down, cotton pickin’, scaliwag mudsill was going to walk all over us!