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To: heartwood
Doesn’t it follow then, that the actions of the South, succession, risk of war, were also about money?

Of course it was. It's always about money, but here is the difference.

Firstly, it was their money, and secondly, they had a right to be independent if they wanted independence.

What right did the North have to their money, and what right did the North have to stop them from being independent as the Declaration of Independence says they have the right to be?

The wealthy planter class wanted to hold on to their money making property, the slaves, and foresaw the eventual end of slavery if they stayed in the union.

As ugly as it was, this was their legal right at the time, and the people who coveted their money recognized that this was their legal right and even went so far as to offer further protection for that legal right by passing the Corwin Amendment through Congress.

And how would there be an "eventual end to slavery" with the Northern states passing the Corwin Amendment, which the evidence indicates would have happened if the seceded states had ratified it?

I have come to realize that making slavery the focus of the war is just propaganda and misdirection to take people's attention off of the money issues between the powerful Northern corporate titans, their pet representatives and senators in Congress, and their motivation in keeping that money stream from the South flowing into their pockets.

It's like saying we drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait because they were tossing babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. (Which was part of our propaganda justifying the war.) It is a argument meant to distract with an appeal to emotion.

Ignored is the serious economic reason why the war was prosecuted.

States had the right to leave the union as an implicit principal of the nation’s founding.

It was not treason to leave the union. It was treason, against the founding principals, to force states to remain against the wishes of their citizens.

It was also about morality. The implicit principals of the constitution gave the slaves the right to rise in rebellion, and arguably, the abolitionists the right to fight on behalf of the slaves.

John Brown tried to provoke a slave rebellion. Had he been successful, those same troops from Massachusetts that fought the confederates in the 1860s would have willingly marched down into the south to kill the rebellious slaves, and probably a lot of innocent ones too.

Something I learned which I did not know for most of my life is that the abolitionists were a tiny minority of people, and were considered "kooks" in that era. Most Northern people opposed slavery, but not for the moral reasons we are led to believe. Most of them opposed it because they saw slaves, as in people who would do work without pay, as a threat to their own economic well being. They had to trade their work for pay, and to them, slaves represented a threat to their income. Another reason why most people opposed slavery is because they hated blacks and didn't want them in their society. They wanted their society to have only white people and they saw slavery as a dangerous mixing of the races.

The only thing that could have morally justified the war was freeing the slaves.

Which is exactly how they presented it to the public. They killed 750,000 people to keep the wealthy and powerful robber barons and their pet congress in control of the economic output of the South, and they dared not let people focus on that.

Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union was not going to be easy for the other states, that many held it indissoluble without previous exemption.

But this is not an evidence based view, this is an emotionally based view. I have learned what I could of the arguments from both sides, and the people who argue for the right to independence have a lot more proof and better proof than those who argue that it is forbidden.

To my knowledge, the only supporting evidence from the founding era that the founders considered secession to be illegal are two statements by James Madison, and one of those is made 40 years after the fact.

All the other evidence argues the founders recognized the right of people to become independent of a central government they felt no longer represented their interests.

67 posted on 06/06/2023 8:52:41 AM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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To: DiogenesLamp

In spite of the Corwin Amendment, the abolitionists would have kept pushing.

Think of the Indian treaties.

What is signed doesn’t always hold.


76 posted on 06/06/2023 9:15:43 AM PDT by heartwood (Someone has to play devil's advocate.)
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To: DiogenesLamp
the only supporting evidence from the founding era that the founders considered secession to be illegal are two statements by James Madison,

Madison's statements concerning secession were taken out of context. Please see post #239.

(BTW - Mornin', DL! 🌞)

240 posted on 06/12/2023 5:26:10 AM PDT by MamaTexan (I am a person as created by the Law of Nature, not a person as created by the laws of Man.)
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