[jeffersondem]

“The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simploy because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset.”

If that view was correct - and you put it forward as if you think it may have been correct - then we can forever dismiss notions posted on this site that slavery would have continued indefinitely without Lincoln's wily, but virtuous, interventions.

In fact, the inevitability-of-slavery's-demise argument undercuts the blue-state premise that Lincoln's invasion of the South, and all the killings, were morally necessary at all.

Once 300,000 Southerners were safely buried, the North was able to dictate a new constitution and a new economic and political equilibrium to blue-state advantage.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "If that view was correct - and you put it forward as if you think it may have been correct - then we can forever dismiss notions posted on this site that slavery would have continued indefinitely without Lincoln's wily, but virtuous, interventions."

As per usual, you've selectively quoted to make your own point, while leaving out the very next words, which make mine:

"The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simply because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset.
Senator Davis would try, stalking into the shadows with infinite integrity and fixity of vision.."

I don't agree that in 1860 slavery was doomed, short or medium term, or that nothing could be done to extend its life.
Not so long as millions of men like Jefferson Davis were determined to do whatever it took to defend & expand slavery.

Indeed, with the Democrats elected in 1856 and the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott decision, by 1860 slavery was on the march -- in the territories and even potentially in northern non-slave states.
As that "wily but virtuous" Lincoln famously put it:

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State."

The Democrats' problem in 1860 was that Lincoln (Trump-like, imho) had gotten inside the head of their Northern leader, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, and forced Douglas to say some very unpolitic things about slavery which made Douglas unacceptable to most Southerners.
If Southern Democrats could no longer control their Northern Democrat partners, then their jig was up, and that is the point Jefferson Davis is wrestling with in his May 7, 1860 speech on the Senate floor.