Your inference is your own problem. I've laid out that Southerners had a number of rights that were violently abridged, and in about 300,000 cases, terminated, by Abraham Lincoln's political initiative to take the North-South dispute extraconstitutional and solve it by a trial of arms. That he arranged very carefully to make the South the apparent aggressor is recorded by his personal secretary, John Nicolay, and his very busy hidden hand has been exposed by nolu chan, rustbucket, and other posters to this thread who have brought and posted original documents and eyewitness accounts of the actions that led up to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which Nicolay properly recognizes as the fruition of a subtle policy on Lincoln's part.
We have to recognize Lincoln's responsibility for starting the Civil War, and I personally have been interested in a deeper inquiry, about whether Lincoln came to office with a war policy, or simply defaulted to one when other initiatives failed. That is still an open question -- but it is now a question, and that is a beginning.
To recognize the rights and political aspirations of others is not to advocate them. You have drawn a number of incorrect inferences about my position, on the way to attempting to stifle my voice by fabricating accusations calculated to terminate my posting privileges. You can desist from those charges now.
The important point here, which I addressed in my #2633, is that Lincoln disturbed the relationship of the People to their federal government, which is a current problem of governance that needs to be remedied. But before anything can be done about the remedy, the problem and its origins have to be understood correctly, and the mythography of Lincoln and the Civil War stand in the way of this understanding.
It has to be understood, if we are to address the problems Lincoln and the Civil War created, what exactly it was that the Republicans did wrong in abolishing slavery, what damage they did, and where the equities lay before Lincoln drew the sword to cut the Gordian knot of internal contradictions in American political theory and practice.
To map out the equities requires that we honestly take into account the rights of the Southerners, including their right to security, and that we treat them and their rights seriously. That requires us to lay aside the Abolitionist propaganda that has occupied center stage first in Unionist accounts of the war, and now in the Marxist ones that are being deployed for current political purposes, to attack the modern Republican Party and its conservative backbone.
Saying that Southerners of 1860 had property rights in slaves and a theory with which they justified those rights, is not to say that it is desirable that people be invested with property rights in, and high dominion over, other people today.
You disserve the cause of clear thinking when you attempt to attack me with ad hominem arguments that I am an advocate of slavery. I've been clear on the record on this, that I am not, and that I don't subscribe to 19th-century racial theories. Now, on further reflection and review, don't you agree?
It's not just that they thought had the legal right to own slaves. It's that they constructed moral defenses of slavery and sought to expand the area where slavery was legal, making much of slavery's superiority to free contract labor. And you largely go along with their moves in practical politics, though you may have different opinions on theoretical questions.
Maybe people could consider you "post-pro-slavery" in the same way that some Europeans today are "post-communist" or "post-fascist." That is to say they are greatly attached to a form of society that they recognize can't or shouldn't be realized in the present day world.