[lentulusgracchus]

[You, quoting Robert E. Lee] "Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people. Save in her defense, I will draw my sword no more.”

That was pretty much what sectional discourse had become. Don't forget that the Wide Awakes and various abolitionist societies were marching under banners of black-and-white stripes with slogans in the canton like "NO UNION WITH SLAVERS", that kind of thing. Never mind that not one person in a thousand, even in New Orleans, could be even remotely called a "slaver", and only a fraction of the population had ever owned a slave, much less a gang of 10 or 12 or more.

Slavery was a rich man's arrangement -- like H-1B's and L-1's and offshoring and plant relocation to Mexico and illegal immigration. Even the Canadians are fighting it now: the Athabaska Tar Sands are a fabulous energy resource and need to be ramped up with new mines. But rather than hire Canadians, who are unionized, employers are making contracts with labor "contractor" firms, who then do the necessary dirty work by saying, "well, we tried to find workers at the below-market wage we want to pay, so <phony sigh> there's nothing to do but petition the provincial government for relief, in the form of permission to import 1,500 foreign workers whom we can pay those yummy low wages we like."

Sierra Oscar Sierra, in other words.

People in the South could no more do anything about what rich merchants and agriculturists wanted, than fly to the moon -- nor more than, as it turned out, the Knights of Labor could do about working conditions in the industrial North.

[4CJ]

But rather than hire Canadians, who are unionized, employers are making contracts with labor "contractor" firms, who then do the necessary dirty work by saying, "well, we tried to find workers at the below-market wage we want to pay, so there's nothing to do but petition the provincial government for relief, in the form of permission to import 1,500 foreign workers whom we can pay those yummy low wages we like."

Post-war was no different, with the yankees doing the same to attract "Coolies" to work on the railroad, instead of hiring millions of free blacks. I wonder why?

[fortheDeclaration]

Boy, to hear you guys talk, slavery didn't even exist in the South!

Maybe it was all a Yankee myth put forth to justify conquering the South?

The deep South fought for slavery expansion.

The border states that remained loyal to the Union would not even give up their slaves for compensation.

The South had developed a philosophy (supported by certain Christian churches) that slavery was a right that had to be defended like a property right.

If slavery was so unimportant to the 'noble freedom loving Southerners' why then was it written into their Constitution as a explicit right?

The U.S. constitution never directly mentions slavery because the Founders expected it to eventually to end.

The Confederacy was intent on making sure that never happened.