At that time Section 2, Article IV was still part of the United States Constitution - the Constitution Abraham Lincoln twice took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend . . .” The Constitution the northern states had ignored and violated since they determined it was in their best self-interest to ignore and violate.
Oh, "preserve, protect and defend" -- sort of sounds like, if they go to war against us, we fight & defeat them, doesn't it?
But does it also mean the Compromise of 1850 must remain law forever, that Congress can never abolish a law Congress made?
Funny, I missed that section.
Was that the missing Article 8, section 1 which said: "whatever slavers want, slavers get"?
No, that was taken care of by the very same Compromise of 1850, making slave-catching a Federal responsibility.
In a nation with about 4 million slaves, how many actually escaped?
If we use the larger number, that's 1,500 per year or .04% (4 one hundredths of one percent).
The smaller number works out to 300 per year or 25 per month escaping through, what, five Northern states (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois) = 5 per month per state.
And from 1850 on, those were the responsibility of Federal officials to chase down & capture, not the states.
We also know that most, if not all, of those fugitive slaves escaped from Border States like Maryland or Kentucky, very few if any from the Deep South.
But you wish to convince us those were enough to drive Southern Democrats berserk, hair on fire, declarations of secession, Confederacy and war on the United States?
Seems a little, ah, overreacting to me.
What's the relevance of that?
The Constitution the northern states had ignored and violated since they determined it was in their best self-interest to ignore and violate.
LOL! The Confederates refuse to establish their third branch of government and treat their Constitution as an irrelevance and you claim Lincoln ignored and violated the U.S. Constitution? With a straight face, too?