I was discussing slavery, and the Founders’ perhaps too optimistic expectations of its end.
Do you suppose Patrick Henry himself, who would have died for liberty and ‘abhorred’ slavery, thought it would take more than two hundred years to end it and all of its vestiges? Did he think it should just carry on until people in the States decided on their own to abolish it, despite the abomination of it?
In the 1780s, everyone thought slavery would slowly die out. Then in 1793, a Massachusetts inventor named Eli Whitney turned cotton into a highly profitable commodity.
Suddenly a declining institution was a growing institution because cotton cultivation and harvesting required a labor intensive work force.
Money often drives morality. People tend to see anything that makes them money as "moral."
Do you suppose Patrick Henry himself, who would have died for liberty and ‘abhorred’ slavery, thought it would take more than two hundred years to end it and all of its vestiges?
I'm not sure that I should put Patrick Henry's opinion at the time above that of the voters who seemingly chose slavery.
Did he think it should just carry on until people in the States decided on their own to abolish it, despite the abomination of it?
I'm not sure what he thought or whether it should have a greater say than other people's opinions of the time, but I think most thought it would slowly wane until it was gone, just as it had done previously in other states. It would just take longer in the South because there was real profitability to be made from slavery in the South, unlike in the cooler climates of the North.
But I don't think the Civil War was really about slavery. The evidence for this is the passage of the Corwin Amendment, which would have kept slavery legal in the United States indefinitely.
If they wanted to fight a war about slavery, why would Congress try to amend the constitution to keep it legal?
The Civil War was about the fact the Southern states (who were paying 72% of all the taxes) were leaving and taking their money with them.
The Southern economic production was something around 750 million dollars per year, and much of that money ended up in the North. 200 million of that was trade with Europe in 1860.
The South's leaving would not only deprive Northern industries of cheaper costs for Southern products, it would have caused all the Northern port cities to lower their tariffs down to 13% like the Southern states had done with their port cities. (They even said they would do that in newspaper articles from that time.)
The Federal Government was not at all amused at this prospect.
"Slavery" is the red herring of the war. The US government was perfectly fine with slavery continuing indefinitely, but they weren't going to tolerate states leaving and taking all that money out of their control.