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That was in response to the rest of the claims made obviously.

Really. Show me where the speech below was shown to be bogus.

Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858

Yes we've been over that. Lincoln was not talking out of both sides of his mouth. He said openly and repeatedly he was not an abolitionist. He never said anything to the contrary before very late in the war.

Actually, he spoke out against it frequently but acknowledged he didn't have the legal means to abolish it. In areas where people supported slavery, and your provided an example in Illinois, he claimed he had no intention of abolishing it to cheering crowds. I never denied that.

The same is true of the Republican Party in general. They went to great pains to make it clear they were not abolitionists.

Cassius Clay, and The Republican party's platform in 1856.

Because the original 7 seceding states turned down their offer.

That wouldn't have stopped them, if they believed slavery should be preserved. They didn't.

Like Lincoln, Hitler thought all power should be concentrated and that people who got in the way of his ambitions - like the plains Indians for example - should be ethnically cleansed.

You had to go there. Lincoln didn't get much of a chance to grab more territory given that he was dealing with the CW during his first term and was assassinated a year into his second, but that's something the entire nation has to answer for, not just Lincoln.

I don't have an answer for this.

Recognized by everybody. Take it up with Africans that their kings sold slaves to Yankee slave traders.

Do you also blame kidnapped women for the human traffickers who kidnap them?

Acts of war are only committed against sovereign entities.

The villages considered themselves sovereign entities.

A lot of people....not in the United States at the time. Most people in the United States were not abolitionists prior to very late in the war.

In 1858, Kansas joined a lot of other free states by voting to abolish their constitution and make Kansas a free state.

Were there a lot of people in the North who were not abolitionists? Yes, I'll grant that (no pun intended). The Democrats who voted against passing the 13th Amendment in 1864 were elected, but the Republicans who voted to pass the 13th amendment were also elected.

The slave trade carried on on a large scale in New England well after the grandfather clause expired in 1810. It was common knowledge. Minor officials took bribes and with a wink and a nod ignored the fact that slave trading was still being conducted on a large scale out of those ports.

I never denied it happened then. It happens now across the country, but that doesn't mean the country itself is doing it.

this is about the slave trade, not the Confederacy - keep up. I doubt millions were transported to what is now the US. The survival rates of those who were transported there was much higher than the survival rates of those transported to more tropical locations and particularly to produce sugar where conditions were often more brutal. Given the natural growth rate of about 27% per decade, it would not have required there to have been a huge number delivered to what is now the US to amount to a population of 4.5 million by the 1860s.

It is about the Confederacy. If slaves were bred as if they were animals instead of bought, then you can't blame anyone but the slave states for that.

A Republican wrote it and sponsored it. He did so at the behest of the de facto leader of the party Abraham Lincoln, and plenty of Republicans voted for it.

You didn't respond to my point, which was that the Republicans at the time didn't see it as giving the slave states anything they didn't already have. I know we look at it now and say it would have protected slavery, but at the time the Constitution already did. As I pointed out earlier, if the free states wanted to protect slavery they could have ratified it regardless of what the slave holding states did. They didn't.

Had they been free to settle there, it is obvious millions of Blacks would have migrated North immediately after the war. The Southern states were left destitute by the ravages of war, the massive theft of the occupation governments and by the massively high Morrill Tariff which tripled pre-war Tariff rates.

Millions did. In fact, many escaped to the North BEFORE the end of the war. The fact that it didn't happen as fast as you think it should have doesn't prove a thing.

The journey was not safe and plenty died along the way.

The risks were known and accepted, just as we take risks when we fly. Of course the risk is much lower now, but 600 years from now they may look at how we travelled through the air and marvel at the risks we were willing to take, just to go on vacation.

Irrelevant and you have yet to prove that that was why voters elected different representatives later on.

What needs to be proven? The Democrats blocked passage of the 13th Amendment in 1864, the voters voted them out, and the Republicans they elected voted to pass the 13th Amendment. I won't pretend I can read their minds, but based on their actions they got what they voted for.

Deflection noted. Tens of thousands joined the Confederate Army and thousands fought in the Confederate Army.

Confederacy approves Black soldiers

Davis had consistently said similar things.

Beginning in 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim "demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).

PR, nothing more.

1861...notice how he didn't talk about slavery here?

And Hitler didn't talk about genocide.

"The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control." Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861

This is consistant with his speech in 1858 where he said secession was about slavery and the elections of "abolitionists", his words, not mine, in the North. The only difference is he didn't come out and say slavery.

So you are correct in a way, in that he was consistent.

I never denied slavery was ONE of them. I never even denied it was an important reason for the strife between the regions. I do deny however that it was "all about" slavery or that slavery was the sine qua non of either secession or the war.

Then your argument is with JD in 1858.

Really. Show me where the speech below was shown to be bogus.

See above, already posted.

He said he had no desire to abolish it where it existed AND he was willing to protect it forever by express constitutional amendment AND he was willing to pass strengthened fugitive slave laws. He was no abolitionist.

Cassius Clay, and The Republican party's platform in 1856.

What elected Republican was an open abolitionist prior to the war? I'll wait.

That wouldn't have stopped them, if they believed slavery should be preserved. They didn't.

They were willing to offer it up as the very first bargaining chip to be sacrificed.....they just wanted to keep that sweet sweet Southern cash flowing North.

Damn Right I went there. Read 38 Nooses. Lincoln refused to pay the Santee Sioux the money they were owed under the terms of their treaty with the US. When they were starving on their reservation as a result of crooked Indian Traders, they revolted. When they were put down, the Union Army just grabbed whatever men or boys happened to be nearby and after "trials" lasting on average TEN MINUTES EACH sentenced them to death. Lincoln chose not to spare them and so he became the only POTUS in American history to order a mass execution.

But the story gets even worse than that. The rest of the tribe was ethnically cleansed from Minnesota and was starved in a Union Army camp. Then when they were dropped off in the Dakotas, the federal government made sure it was in the Fall after the harvest season so they would starve again. Then members of the Lincoln administration through their connections, were able to snap up large swathes of land in Minnesota that had belonged to the Santee Sioux at knock down prices and flip it immediately for huge profits. Oh but wait! It gets even better. The federal government treated the nearby Winnebago the same - and they had not even participated in the uprising.

Do you also blame kidnapped women for the human traffickers who kidnap them?

We're not talking about the slaves here - the victims. We are talking about the African kings who enslaved and sold them.

The villages considered themselves sovereign entities.

They were ruled by kings. The kings tended to sell off political opponents, nearby tribes that had been defeated in wars, disfavored people, etc.

In 1858, Kansas joined a lot of other free states by voting to abolish their constitution and make Kansas a free state.

By late in the war views had changed...on both sides. Davis got approval from the Confederate Congress to offer emancipation in treaties of recognition being negotiated with Britain and France while in the Northern states, people had started to come around to the idea of abolishing slavery. Remember that the EP in 1863 had been wildly unpopular and even sparked desertions in the Union army and a massive riot in New York.

I never denied it happened then. It happens now across the country, but that doesn't mean the country itself is doing it.

It was widespread. There was an awful lot of complicity in slavery and profiteering from slavery in the Northeast in particular. I've never denied the share of blame the Southern states are due for still allowing slavery, but the myth of the virtuous North is something I will always call out. The North deserves a massive share of the blame as well.

It is about the Confederacy. If slaves were bred as if they were animals instead of bought, then you can't blame anyone but the slave states for that.

Its tough to generalize but in many cases slaves were allowed to marry and had families. They were not generally "Bred as if they were animals". and because I know you are going to challenge this, see below:

The U.S. slave population increased by an average of 27 percent per decade after 1810, almost the same natural growth rate as for the white population. This rate of increase was unique in the history of bondage. No other slave population in the Western Hemisphere even maintained, much less increased, its population through natural reproduction. In Barbados, for example, the decennial natural decrease from 1712 to 1762 was 43 percent. At the time of emancipation, the black population of the United States was ten times the number of Africans who had been imported, but the black population of the West Indies was only half the number of Africans who had been imported. Of the ten million Africans brought across the Atlantic by the slave trade, the United States received fewer than 6 percent; yet at the time of emancipation it had more than 30 percent of the hemisphere's black population. (Ordeal By Fire, pp. 34-35)

McPherson notes other interesting facts: Although Southern law did not recognize marriages between slaves, 66 to 80 percent of slave marriages were not broken up by their masters (Ordeal By Fire, pp. 35-36). Not only did many if not most slaveowners permit their slaves to marry, but some masters allowed their slaves to earn money and in some cases to buy their freedom (Ordeal By Fire, p. 34). Economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman contend that not only could slaves earn money and rise to responsible positions in the slave system but that in some cases they received a greater share of the product of their labor than did many factory workers in the North (Time on the Cross, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974; see also John Niven, The Coming of the Civil War, Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1990, pp. 160-161).

Abolition doubts notwithstanding, thousands of slaves were married in Southern churches between 1800 and 1860. For example, out of a total of 1,228 marriages performed in Episcopal churches in South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia in 1860, at least 460, or 38.1 percent, were slave weddings. At many times between 1830 and 1860 more slaves were married in the Episcopal churches in some states than were whites. Between 1841 and 1860 Episcopal ministers performed 3,225 weddings in South Carolina; 1,705, or 52 percent, of these were slave marriages. (The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 169)

and no, I'm not saying slavery was anything other than awful so let's not go there. What I'm saying is they were not generally "bred like animals" and that marriage seemed to be the norm - yes even during slavery.

My point is that the Republicans and the Northerners at the time were not abolitionists and whatever objections they had to slavery, that was the very first thing they were willing to offer up in order to keep Southern Cash flowing northward whether it be tariff revenue for subsidies and infrastructure projects or by servicing goods produced at least in part with slave labor. What the North most wanted was profits/money. Any qualms about slavery were a minor considering compared to lining their own pockets.

Millions did. In fact, many escaped to the North BEFORE the end of the war. The fact that it didn't happen as fast as you think it should have doesn't prove a thing.

Millions? No, not millions. Large scale Black migration to the Northern states did not start until about 1890. What this shows is that for the first 25 or so years after the war, Blacks simply couldn't move to the Northern states. The laws in place in the Northern states prevented it - as they were designed to do.

The point is that what kept Blacks in the economically devastated Southern states was the laws in place in the Northern states - not anything else. They simply had nowhere else to go.

Public sentiment in the Northern states did not support abolition until late in the war.

Confederacy approves Black soldiers

As has already been established, many thousands of Blacks served in the Confederate Army long before the Confederate Congress finally got round to approving it.

PR, nothing more.

What PR? He was talking to Confederate Senators and Congressmen then later Northern military officers at about the same time there were massive desertions in the Union Army and rioting in New York City over the EP.

And Hitler didn't talk about genocide.

And Lincoln didn't talk about ethnic cleansing.

He said consistently that neither secession nor the war were "about" slavery. He had said in the Senate for years that what the North - specifically New England - was seeking was to profiteer and build up their industry at the South's expense using the federal government as "an engine of Northern aggrandizement".

So you are correct in a way, in that he was consistent.

Yes, he was.

Then your argument is with JD in 1858.

Jeff Davis consistently said it was about the economics and not about slavery. He was right.