And before you say "This doesn't have anything to do with slavery, it was about their birthright, so I'm going to spam you will all of JD's comments saying secession wasn't about slavery", the only birthright he mentioned the right to own slaves, as the Confederate Constitution was deliberately written to protect.
That is simply flat out false. I have already posted this but clearly you need a refresher
"The resulting constitution was surprisingly similar to that of the United States. Most of the differences merely spelled out traditional southern interpretations of the federal charter. . . .
". . . it was clear from the actions of the Montgomery convention that the goal of the new converts to secessionism was not to establish a slaveholders' reactionary utopia. What they really wanted was to recreate the Union as it had been before the rise of the new Republican Party, and they opted for secession only when it seemed clear that separation was the only way to achieve their aim. The decision to allow free states to join the Confederacy reflected a hope that much of the old Union could be reconstituted under southern direction." (Robert A. Divine, T. H. Bren, George Fredrickson, and R. Hal Williams, America Past and Present, Fifth Edition, New York: Longman, 1998, pp. 444-445, emphasis added)
Nice try, but as you have already pointed out the Confederacy was already breeding their own slaves like animals anyway. This was their own disgusting form of protectionism.
What? Where did this piece of fiction come from? It is certainly not anything I ever said.
It was clear from the Confederacy's Constitution they were. Sec. 9. (4) "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
It was clear from the Confederacy's Constitution that they were not. There was nothing in the Confederate Constitution that would prevent a state from abolishing slavery or a state that had abolished slavery from joining. The provision you cited was for the national government only......ie it could not be forced on any confederate state. Again, I have already provided the quotes and the citations for this.
Statements like this are what make me suspect you're a leftist plant trying to make Conservatives look bad. You can't possibly think holding human beings hostage in return for military aid makes the Confederacy look like the good guys.
They weren't "being held hostage" any more than the US was holding slaves hostage. Davis offered to abolish slavery in 1864. It was only the slowness of the Confederate Congress that prevented him from doing so even earlier.
But let's change the players. Let's say Middle East terrorists took Christians as slaves, and threatened to hold them as slaves if they didn't get military aid. Would you still be defending them?
Again, the people living in 1861 did not take the slaves. Slavery was a system they inherited and had to try to figure out how to get rid of.
OBTH, abolishing slavery would have been unconstitutional according to the Constitution the Confederacy had just ratified anyway.
No, no it would not have.
They didn't see it clearly enough to go through with it, as a demonstration of their good will. Oh, I forgot, they were products of their time, so they couldn't see the evils of slavery even though they could see that other nations saw the evil in it.
Nor did the US. Is the CSA solely to blame for that? Countries generally aren't willing to impose drastic change potentially upsetting their economy during wars of national survival.
IOW, they knew they were on the wrong side of history, yet they held on to their slaves until forced to release them.
They could see the West was moving in that direction and offered to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid. Every criticism you would like to make exclusively of the CSA could have been made about the US at the time....or the Founding Fathers.....
They made it clear they thought slavery was theatened, and they knew the Corwin Amendment didn't give slavery any protections it didn't already have.
If they thought it was so threatened, why not accept an ironclad constitutional guarantee of slavery forever?
And once again, you rely on policies that failed to come close to ratification to make your point while ignoring the one policy that became law.
Once again you refuse to acknowledge why the Corwin amendment was not ratified and pretend it was owing to some fictional Northern opposition to it that simply did not exist.
Like you're denials about the importance of the Corwin Amendment, it's fiction.
FIFY
You mean like the Democrats forming the Confederacy to preserve their right to slave labor?
No. Firstly that did not happen. Nobody was worried about the continued existence of slavery in 1861. Also you have the sides reversed. It was the Northerners and the Republicans at the time who wanted centralized power. The Southerners and Democrats at the time did not.
I agree, but a lot of Northern states are part of that.
The Midwest for the most part is.....notice how the Northeast is diametrically opposed again.
the same old quote which you've posted at least 100 times and which does not address what happened years later snipped along with the declarations of causes 3 of 4 of which go on at length about the economic causes of secession.
Agree the context was the "Congress of the Confederate States".
Good. So you finally see that no state in the CSA was prohibited from abolishing slavery nor was any state which already had prohibited from joining. The only constitutional prohibition was against the central government from dictating to the (confederate) states.
I have the Confederate's Constitution telling me what it was about. I don't need to read a fluff piece from an author whose only qualification that you care about is that he says what you want to hear.
Fluff piece snipped.
What? Where did this piece of fiction come from? It is certainly not anything I ever said.
From post 644, "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."
This wasn't fiction. You were largely correct on this point.
They weren't "being held hostage" any more than the US was holding slaves hostage. Davis offered to abolish slavery in 1864. It was only the slowness of the Confederate Congress that prevented him from doing so even earlier.
He offered to do it to get military aid, not because it was the right thing to do. That's "being held hostage".
It was clear from the Confederacy's Constitution that they were not. There was nothing in the Confederate Constitution that would prevent a state from abolishing slavery or a state that had abolished slavery from joining.
I already agreed with you in my last post that the prohibition in the Confederacy's Constitution applied at the federal level, which you acknowledged at the end. Yet this is the first of multiple times you've made this reply.
Abolition would have been unconstitutional at the federal level, meaning the Confederacy's Constitution forbid the federal government from forcing the states to give up "the right of property in negro slaves", its words. JD offered something that was unconstitutional.
I hope I don't have to clarify that again.
Nor did the US. Is the CSA solely to blame for that? Countries generally aren't willing to impose drastic change potentially upsetting their economy during wars of national survival.
There is a difference. When abolition was passed, the slaves were freed, unconditionally. BTW, the Republicans made their first attempt in 1864 while that war "of national survival" was waging, but were blocked by the Democrats.
They could see the West was moving in that direction and offered to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid. Every criticism you would like to make exclusively of the CSA could have been made about the US at the time....
Except the US ultimately got abolition done, in 1865, and would have a year earlier if Democrats weren't trying to protect "states rights". Fortunately enough Republicans were elected to pass abolition the following year.
or the Founding Fathers.....
Unfortunately true.
If they thought it was so threatened, why not accept an ironclad constitutional guarantee of slavery forever?
I guess nobody thought to ask them when they said it, so I'll conclude they meant it.
Once again you refuse to acknowledge why the Corwin amendment was not ratified and pretend it was owing to some fictional Northern opposition to it that simply did not exist.
All but a few Union states had abolished slavery, and slaves who escaped tried to make their way to those states. Additionally, over 100,000 escaped slaves joined the union forces. That tells me more than some amendment that failed to pass.
FIFY
How original.
No. Firstly that (of national survival) did not happen. Nobody was worried about the continued existence of slavery in 1861.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
Also you have the sides reversed. It was the Northerners and the Republicans at the time who wanted centralized power. The Southerners and Democrats at the time did not.
If you buy the argument that it was about states' right then I can guess why you would see it that way, but the Democrats made it clear that voting against abolition was about states' right.
The Midwest for the most part is.....notice how the Northeast is diametrically opposed again.
There are a lot of red areas in the Northeast, but the metropolitan areas are deep blue. If secession happened, a lot of areas in the Northeast would be on the red side. Your attempts to paint all of them with a broad blue paint brush will not help if that's what you want to see happen.
the same old quote which you've posted at least 100 times and which does not address what happened years later snipped along with the declarations of causes 3 of 4 of which go on at length about the economic causes of secession.
Why should I believe the slave holding states when they said they had other reasons, when they could see how the western world saw their states' rights to own slaves?
So you finally see...
Finally? We only just started discussing the Constitution itself two or three posts ago.
that no state in the CSA was prohibited from abolishing slavery nor was any state which already had prohibited from joining. The only constitutional prohibition was against the central government from dictating to the (confederate) states.
That's right, and it made JD's offer to abolish slavery unconstitutional. Like the Corwin Amendment, it was an offer with nothing behind it.