And everyone in the South was doing the bidding of these "slave owning aristocrats"? Please! Most Southerners did not own slaves and my guess is that they didn't care much about the "slave owning aristocrats." I'm not sure what was a Ponzi scheme about slavery. To be sure, ordinary Southerners would have cared about admitting only "free" States because it would have caused their interests to slide further in Washington. I'm not sure how Lincoln was going to block expansion of slavery into the territories. Wasn't that one of the things that the Dred Scott decision said the Federal government did not have the power to do? The non-slave-owning Southerners might have been worried about all those emancipated slaves in their midst but one of the things "Honest Abe" promised was that the existing Slave States could keep their slavery and that he would support enforcement of the fugitive slave laws. So there was not supposed to be any forced emancipation under Lincoln and such fears would have been unfounded.
ML/NJ
Yep. That's pretty much true.
LOL. You have obviously never read the propaganda spread by the Southern Secession Comissioners -- the paid propagandists of the slave owning aristrocrats. Here's an example. Speech of Fulton Anderson [Mississippi Secession Comissioner] to the Virginia [Secession] Convention
This action of the Convention of Mississippi, gentlemen of the Convention, was the inevitable result of the position which she, with other slaveholding States, had already taken, in view of the anticipated result of the recent Presidential election, and must have been foreseen by every intelligent observer of the progress of events.I As early as the 10th of February, 1860, her Legislature had, with the general approbation of her people, adopted the following resolution:
"Resolved, That the election of a President of the United States by the votes of one section of the Union only, on the ground that there exists an irrepressible conflict between the two sections in reference to their respective systems of labor and with an avowed purpose of hostility to the institution of slavery, as it prevails in the Southern States, and as recognized in the compact of Union, would so threaten a destruction of the ends for which the Constitution was formed, as to justify the slaveholding States in taking council together for their separate protection and safety."
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last.
But, in defiance of the warning thus given and of the evidences accumulated from a thousand other sources, that the Southern people would never submit to the degradation implied in the result of such an election, that sectional party, bounded by a geographical line which excluded it from the possibility of obtaining a single electoral vote in the Southern States, avowing for its sentiment implacable hatred to us, and for its policy the destruction of our institutions, and appealing to Northern prejudice, Northern passion, Northern ambition and Northern hatred of us, for success, thus practically disfranchizing the whole body of the Southern people, proceeded to the nomination of a candidate for the Presidency who, though not the most conspicuous personage in its ranks, was yet the truest representative of its destructive principles.
The steps by which it proposed to effect its purposes, the ultimate extinction of slavery, and the degradation of the Southern people, are too familiar to require more than a passing allusion from me.
Under the false pretence of restoring the government to the original principles of its founders, but in defiance and contempt of those principles, it avowed its purpose to take possession of every department of power, executive, legislative and judicial, to employ them in hostility to our institutions. By a corrupt exercise of the power of appointment to office, they proposed to pervert the judicial power from its true end and purpose, that of defending and preserving the Constitution. to be the willing instrument of its purposes of wrong and oppression. In the meantime it proposed to disregard the decisions of that august tribunal, and by the exertion of bare-faced power, to exclude slavery from the public Territory, the common property of all the States, and to abolish the internal slave trade between the States acknowledging the legality of that institution.
It proposed further to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and in all places within the Territory of the several States, subject under the Constitution to the jurisdiction of Congress, and to refuse hereafter under all circumstances, admission into the Union of any State with a Constitution recognizing the institution of slavery.
Having thus placed the institution of slavery, upon which rests not only the whole wealth of the Southern people, but their very social and political existence, under the condemnation of a government established for the common benefit, it proposed in the future, to encourage immigration into the public Territory, by giving the public land to immigrant settlers, so as, within a brief time, to bring into the Union free States enough to enable it to abolish slavery within the States themselves.
I'll allow Southern Secession Comissioners [from Alabama] Garrott and Smith explain the Ponzi trap the slave owning aristrocrats found themselves in and why expansion of slavery was a vital necessity from their point of view.
Letter from Isham Garrott and Robert H. Smith of Alabama to the Governor and legislature of North Carolina The election of a President of the United States, of any opinion, however heretical, and however much calculated to disturb the public mind, would, of itself, we think, be considered by our people is of secondary importance; but the recent Presidential election is the inauguration of a system of Government as opposed to the Constitution as it is to our rights and safety. It ushers in, as a settled policy, not only the exclusion of the people of the South from the common Territories of the country, but proposes to impair the value of slave property in the States by unfriendly legislation; to prevent the further spread of slavery by surrounding us with free States; to refuse admission into the Union of another slave State, and by these means to render the institution itself dangerous to us, and to compel us, as slaves increase, to abandon it, or be doomed to a servile war. The establishment alone of the policy of the Republican party, that no more slave States are to be admitted into the Union, and that slavery is to be forever prohibited in the Territories (the common property of the United States), must, of itself, at no distant day, result in the utter ruin and degradation of most, if not all of the Gulf States.Alabama has at least eight slaves to every square mile of her tillable soil. This population outstrips any race on the globe in the rapidity of its increase; and if the slaves now in Alabama are to be restricted within her present limits, doubling as they do once in less than thirty years, the children are now born who will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors. Our people and institutions Must be secured the right of expansion, and they can never submit to a denial of that which is essential to their very existence.