Why would anyone who wants to advance the cause of "liberty" advance the cause of a culture predicated upon slavery?
It’s the “liberty” to do any damned fool thing that they felt like doing regardless of consequence. Sounds just like today’s liberal democrats, doesn’t it?
No one here is attempting to advance the cause of slavery, we are merely pointing out that in the pantheon of moral justification, the acknowledged right to leave a larger Union was the founding principle upon which our own nation was based. And that right does not require that the reasons for leaving be just or fair.
That the Southern States reasons for exercising their rights did not meet the moral preferences of the Northern states is immaterial to the fact that they still had a right to leave.
Well, I think you’re focusing too much on slavery and the South. The fact is, Lincoln was the first President to fully embrace political pragmatism, deciding to ignore both the spirit and letter of our founding documents in order to accomplish his goals.
Some people focus on the fact that his goal was supposedly the noble idea of freeing the slaves, but that is actually irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to us living today WHY Lincoln decided to veer from the previous tradition of governing according to Constitutional principles. All that matters is that he did so, and virtually every President after him followed in his footsteps, evading Constitutional limitations at every opportunity in order to advance their own agendas.
We can see now, in hindsight, the perils of that choice. Not every President has noble goals; just look at the current one for an example. Once they took for themselves the power to ignore Constitutional limitations, it was inevitable that power would be used to undermine the Republic, sooner or later.