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To: Non-Sequitur; dbehsman
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. --Mississppi Declaration of the Causes of Secession

Incomplete quote, and selective. The slavery issue was indeed prominent in Mississippi's thinking -- cotton was the state's entire livelihood -- but your selective quote provides no context and no idea of the Mississippians' degree of apprehension of the full consequences of uncompensated emancipation and (as they feared) imposition of black political equality, which would necessarily turn Mississippi into a balkanized and bitterly divided society, as well as an impoverished one, overnight. Which Reconstruction did, in fact, accomplish. As the declaration points out, in the sections you omitted, such a political scheme could only have been the product of the deepest malevolence. Here is the full declaration:

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact, which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

While the Mississippi declaration gives prominence to the slavery issue, other declarations gave other causes and reasons as well, and your quotation from Mississippi's declaration is therefore selective in the first place, so that your selective quotation from it is doubly selective. Which is what your side does all the time. Then you complain when Southerners try to supply the balance and bring in the missing material, and you pretend that they are trying to mislead, and most importantly, to exculpate their ancestors from your bitterly accusatory, Marxist-inspired "deconstructionist" finger-pointing.

The eleventh through 17th paragraphs list a litany of political complaints and apprehensions that describe, even if there were no slavery issue at all, a situation of the most extreme bitterness among the compacted States, and the summary paragraph that begins, "Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it," describes the political conclusions the leading Mississippians drew from their generations-long confrontation with New England's reflexively directive, bullying attitude toward other regions of the country.

The issue here is clearly the Mississippians' apprehension of the impending total loss of their ability to govern themselves in a Union run by a Lincolnite political machine, on a basis of rigorous exclusion of the South and its interests from federal policymaking. The transformation, moreover, of federal into national policymaking is another issue less emphasized but clearly apprehended, in the references to "subjugation" and "degrad[ation]", by the Mississippians.

And this is in a document that, as I pointed out above, places more emphasis on the slavery institution than some of the other States' declarations.

232 posted on 07/26/2006 3:40:32 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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To: lentulusgracchus
Then you complain when Southerners try to supply the balance and bring in the missing material, and you pretend that they are trying to mislead, and most importantly, to exculpate their ancestors from your bitterly accusatory, Marxist-inspired "deconstructionist" finger-pointing.

Marxist-inspired? Give me a break.

The eleventh through 17th paragraphs list a litany of political complaints and apprehensions that describe, even if there were no slavery issue at all, a situation of the most extreme bitterness among the compacted States, and the summary paragraph that begins, "Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it,"...

Let's see. Eleven through fourteen complain about abolitionists. Absent slavery I don't see what they would complain about. Fifteen is, I assume, a reference to John Brown. Absent slavery Brown wouldn't have left Osawatomie. Sixteen and seventeen I have no idea what they are talking about. and in eighteen they complain about a Constitutionally valid election and the new administrations hostility to, tada, slavery. So even when you're trying to say that the southern rebellion wasn't about slavery, it was still about slavery.

And this is in a document that, as I pointed out above, places more emphasis on the slavery institution than some of the other States' declarations.

Because defense of slavery was the overriding reason for the southern rebellion.

236 posted on 07/26/2006 4:02:24 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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