After the election of Lincoln, the South's choice was to leave the Union, or stay and let the federal government collapse their agriculturally driven economies.
Some choice.
Oh...My....God.
Well, now we know.
Where is the poster who complained about the the Lincoln posts ending in southerner revisionists being called racist? It is too bad that people who make good faith arguments about the right of sovereign states to secede under the Constitution get lumped in with this kind of stuff.
The Constitution provided for amendments. If slavery was outlawed by amendment, it might have been opposed by the south, but it would have been Consitutional. That was not in the offing in any event, only the prospect that someday in the far off future, with the creation of non-slave states in the west, the South might get outvoted someday. Based on that, they decided they had to leave.
What you call the their "agriculturally driven economies" others call brutal, immoral, debasing, un-Christian slavery. Any thinking human being in 1860 understood that it needed to be phased out, over maybe 30 years. A principled person might say get rid of it right away. A decent person does not suggest that the notion that it might have been eliminated through the political process would have been a bad thing.
I am stunned. Are there more of you here?
I'm not. When you can differentiate between the LEGALITY of slavery and the MORALITY of it, get back to me.
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Are there more of you here?
Thankfully, yes.
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I can already answer the question for you reciprocally.....
There are a LOT of you here.