And much later. Many brave Americans remained loyal to and fought for their King.
My point was that the Confederacy had AS MUCH right to rebel as the colonists: legal, moral, or otherwise.
I will cheerfully agree with you on the legal and otherwise parts. Moral, not so much.
The DoI is pretty clear that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which governments are properly set up: protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You simply cannot extract from the DoI a right of revolution whenever you feel like it.
Since I do not believe the South was in any way being deprived in 1860 of their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," I think they had no right at all to revolt, under the criteria specified in the DoI. Particularly since their revolt was specifically and explicitly to protect an institution which deprived other men of their right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The DoI is at bottom a moral document, making a moral cause to justify revolution. IMO the seceding states failed to meet that standard.
“You simply cannot extract from the DoI a right of revolution whenever you feel like it.”
Actually, we do as the DoI says. We have the right to say who will govern us, and if the opposing side doesn’t like it and attempts to use force to prevent it, well, you’ve got yourself a revolution.
>>Since I do not believe the South was in any way being deprived in 1860 of their rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,”
The federal government had determined that the only ports of entry for European immigrants was in the north, so northern businesses had easy access to a cheap and easily-exploited labor source. There were also tariffs and laws to make it hard for southern states to ship their goods directly, requiring them to go through northern businesses.
The industrialized and commercialized north had decided that the southern states were to remain poor and agricultural and to be subservient to them for finished and imported goods.
If the south could have gotten Irish and other poor immigrants fresh off the boat to work in their fields, I’m sure that they would have sent the blacks back to Africa. After all, renting labor for slave wages is much cheaper than the cost of ownership. Because, that’s exactly what motivated the northern states to suddenly become anti-slavery after a century of making money off their import.