Your statement isn't founded in reality.
The two situations are not comparable, and the only one assaying a comparison is you -- by moral equivocation, as a form, as you show here, of recrimination.
The North was not "afraid" of the South -- the freesoilers may have labored under the false impression that the Territories would become dotted with cotton plantations if the Taney Court or Kansas-Nebraska really opened up the Territories to slave-operated farms and plantations. But in the years between Kansas-Nebraska and the outbreak of the war, that didn't happen.
The North had little to fear from the South; it was all the other way around, and the North's propaganda campaign was the source of tension.
You can use repression, if you can get away with it, but you can't appeal to universal moral standards if you've already violated them yourself.
There was no such "universal moral standard" as you claim. And your statement amounts to a declaration of open season on anyone who disagrees with you -- precisely the bombast used by the Abolitionists, which led to the John Brown raid and the dissolution of the American community -- or rather, to the recognition that it had dissolved.
You can try to get us to understand why Southerners acted as they did. And plenty of people will understand. But that's not enough for you.
Keep your paint brush off me. I've told you about that.
You want us to approve of that argument from necessity in this case, and to approve of secession and repression in this case, while condemning it in others.
Somehow I hear you champing at the bit to scratch your own moral itch across 150 years at the expense of someone who had all the right in the world, according to his lights, to live as he did. A little cultural imperialism, eh?
I don't care whether you "approve" or "disapprove" -- it's irrelevant. The job here is to keep one's eye on the ball, and not forget that the majority of the People were the ones who said what right and wrong were, and if you deviate from that, you are denying the People their sovereignty and their sovereign right to be wrong.
If you won't concede the People the right to be wrong, then you've established a principle -- a tyrannical one -- that someone else gets to do all the saying, and will you smell the coffee? That isn't going to be you.
The question is whether you are committed to the People enough to stand up for them even when you think they're really wrong about something, or whether you're willing to let someone twist your moral-issue dials and knobs to take the play away from you, the People, and everyone else.
I don't know how to put it more simply than that. You can't scratch this itch and win. Feed those people into the wood-chipper because of your moral snit, and your principles lose.
Few people today will look at the situation honestly and agree with you and with today's generally accepted ideas about racial equality. There's a gap between where you stand and what most Americans believe or want to believe today, that one could drive a train through.
It's a gap in time -- you have to allow for differences that big, in different societies 150-200 years apart. Do you think for a minute I'd sit still for a big Asian contractor running indentured contractors in here from Bangalore? Hell, no.
I've never met anyone as determined to miss the whole point as you. And then throw dead possums and skunks.
Other people probably see by now how you jump to the extreme case of victimization and base your arguments on it.
It was an extreme case. Someone jumped the good guys and stripped them of their freedom and sovereignty, and made them slaves of the State. State in the Orwellian sense, not the Constitutional one. Not the State with the Constitution -- the one with the Organs, and infinite discretion in policy, and personality cults, and memory holes.
When everyone does that -- when everyone thinks their back is against the wall and survival at stake -- then no rational argument or agreement is possible. When one person does it, that person lays down an ultimatum to others "give me what I want or else" with no compromise or rational solution possible.
That's what happened, all right. But the point I've been making up above is that it happened when the Abolitionists, stuffed with their Yankee-minister selfrighteousness, ended the conversation by bringing in the artillery of invective, changing the discussion into a moral micturition contest larded with absolute statements in absolute language, and nothing but bitter condemnation for anyone who didn't "get it".
By this time, doesn't pretty much everyone agree that the best thing for Southerners, White or Black, was to remain in the Union?
Yes. I think Alexander Stephens got it right, in his November 14, 1860 speech to the Georgia legislature which I linked above, alternative link here. That is the speech in which Stephens and Robert Toombs, who'd spoken the night before, engaged in call-and-response.
That would defuse tensions, by allowing Whites and Blacks to spread out, so that you wouldn't have potentially explosive situations where half the population were slaves and half masters or half of the ruling race and half of the subject race.
I don't know. Slavery, except for the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys of California, had just about run out of places to go.....a river valley here and there, and that's about it.
You also have trouble keeping the abolitionists and more moderate Republicans -- and the various factions in each group -- apart. Radical abolitionists did use a highly moralistic language to bring slavery back into public discussion. That was what they set out to do. More moderate Americans were certainly open to compromise. But the serious of political provocations in the 1850s drove both sides further apart. I doubt one can put the blame for that on any one camp or individual.
You underestimate Abolitionist strength in the Republican Party, I think. In 1860, Lincoln was the "moderate" (he said -- I don't think so), and Salmon P. Chase was the red-hot, and he nearly won the nomination. In late 1862, Lincoln almost lost the office to what would have amounted to a palace coup by a group around Chase, and he was threatened again in 1864 because of the danger of defections by Radicals. He handled both crises, but the essential strength of that wing was very great in both years.
If one really believes that something is wrong one is going to use moralistic language to condemn it.
Maybe, maybe not.
You do the same with respect to Alexander Hamilton. You regard him as evil and condemn him in the strongest terms.
I think Hamilton was a supremely egotistical man seized by a wicked idea: I'm so much smarter than these other people. They want a republic. They want liberty, they want this, they want that. Well, screw them. We'll do this my way -- and I'll just tell them they have all those other things. Because getting what I want comes first.
I think Hamilton was a practitioner of natural law, and he was Nature's winner. Soooo..... Worse , he was an attorney, so he could justify anything to anybody and make them think they were stupid even to ask him what he was doing.
a I mean, the guy tried -- and succeeded! -- to con the entire Constitutional Convention! And he hoorawed States and everyone else he needed, into ratifying the Constitution: he and his postmaster buddies held people's mail, interrupted their subscriptions, and then sat around writing letters and columns about them, running them down, selling them the idea that EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE STATE -- NAY, ON THE ATLANTIC SEABOARD was all for ratification. The Antifederalists had a Majority -- and he beat them, unfairly, and never even blinked. What does that tell you?
So what good can come of a con job?
Hamilton was wonderfully efficient. Richard Brookhiser has just written a new book about him -- you can probably find it in 20 seconds with a metasearch, I saw it yesterday -- that lists his virtues and accomplishments, which included founding both the Bank of New York and the New York Post. The problem is, he aligned himself with a Hobbesian principle of government -- even a Nietzschean one -- that served him very well, but not the People's liberty. I doubt that he ever cared about the People; he was too smart to care, too smooth to let slip that he didn't. I think that was Hamilton. And in subserving Hobbesianism and efficiency, he foreshadowed men like Albert Speer and Fritz Todt and Bernard Baruch and John Kenneth Galbraith, who integrated their societies' political and economic Organs into Orwellian war machines.
Now we do hope that politicians will be more open to compromise and peacefully working things out. But sometimes the common middle ground crumbles beneath them. That happened in the 1860s, but it wasn't entirely the fault of one side or the other.
True. And my whole point is, rather than kill 620,000 men on the battlefield, it would probably have been better if the two sides had separated for a while, to hope for a reconciliation later on, as long as the Confederates, against Stephens's better advice, were determined to leave the Union.
Moreover you're all for checks and balances when it comes to what others can do, but want absolute sovereignty for yourself. Double standards like that are human and natural, but not justifiable. There have been extreme subjectivist or egotistic philosophies, but I doubt most thinkers would agree with your position.
If you look back at conservative thinkers of the last three centuries, there's long been a distrust of radical Rousseauvian ideas, and an emphasis on natural law and the rule of law rather than cultural relativism or absolute group autonomy or group self-determination above all.
Some times the valuation of procedures and precedents and universal principles may go too far but there were real reasons for emphasizing law and comity rather than sheer will and self-assertion. Those who've taken the path of radical relativism and absolute will have generally come a cropper and caused much pain in the world. I don't know how we can condemn radical Rousseauvian ideas in other parts of the world while we exalt them at home.
Of course there were plenty of opportunities for the expansion of slavery in the 1850s. There was some discussion of slaves being employed in mining. And they were already in use in industry in Virginia and Tennesee. Slave labor also played an important part in Southern railroad construction. Expansion to Mexico, the Carribean, or Latin America was discussed.
Slave owners considered that it was very much in the interest of Southern states to make slavery legal in Kansas or Nebraska or New Mexico or Oregon, even if it only involved personal servants and household help at first, since it would create a base of slaveowning voters who would side with their Southern peers. And if slavery could be imposed in principle upon states and territories, it's as likely as not that ways would have been found to use the opportunity in real life.
If the Missouri Compromise or the Northwest Ordinance or Northern personal liberty laws could be overturned, and the return of runaways and right to move slaves anywhere in the country could be guaranteed, what a boon that would be for slave owners. It would mean fewer worries about runaways or about losing power in the country. And it would mean that the influence of free working people in the country would decline.
I don't argue that all these ideas were realistic, but they were all under consideration in the slave owning states in the years just before the Civil War. Consequently, Northerners had some fear of what was in the works. Our friend Lentulus knows all that, but those darn monkeys. Lentulus has some fear of outsourcing, but the monkeys don't see that Northerners perceived a similar threat in the rise of slavery. Or maybe the chickens fear losing their jobs to Bangalore, but Lentulus doesn't want to see anything from an Northern perspective, and can't make the connection between slavery then and outsourcing now. Those bad monkeys just won't stop. They're making some mess.