[buwaya]

The South was in a more desperate situation from the beginning - could it be that this abusive tendency was the effect of weakness rather than its cause ?

[LS]

I don't think so. If you look at the Confed Constitution, everything about it was designed to eliminate checks on Jeff Davis, while at the same time make sure that NO ONE ever did away with slavery. The document was a pure slave document if there ever was one.

The thing the lost cause guys don't get is that every time the Southerners had a chance to raise another issue as the main "sticking point," it always came back to slavery---because Lincoln was right: the country couldn't be half and half. Sooner or later, either slavery was right and had to be right everywhere, or it was wrong and had to be abolished everywhere.

[steve-b]

The South was in a more desperate situation from the beginning - could it be that this abusive tendency was the effect of weakness rather than its cause?

Nope. At the time the Confederate Constitution (which was, as Bensel notes, considerably more statist that the US Constitution) was written, it seemed entirely possible that the Union would just let the seceding states go.

The greater political autocracy of the Confederacy reflected the greater social autocracy of the semi-feudal plantation system.