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.
You may have the text of the Confederate Constitution. Too bad you can't understand it.
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.
That does not mean Southerners were "breeding" them on a massive scale as you claim. That population growth rate was on par with the natural population growth rate of the White population at the time. It was not massively higher. There was no captive breeding program for slaves.
He offered to do it to get military aid, not because it was the right thing to do. That's "being held hostage".
And Lincoln only issued the EP in 1863 as a military measure, not because it was the right thing to do. Ergo, Lincoln and the Republicans and the North were holding slaves hostage too I by your rhetoric.
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.
It may have been unconstitutional depending on how it was done. The national Confederate government would have had to get each Confederate state to go along in order to enact it. They could have applied moral pressure (ie "we obtained allies on the promise we would do this, as Southern Gentlemen we have an obligation to keep our word, yada yada yada") and maybe some limited financial pressure but they could not have forced it upon the states. That much is true.
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.
Abolition wasn't passed until after the war. I DO find it funny though that when I mention the Corwin Amendment failed only because the original 7 seceding states turned it down you say it doesn't matter because it wasn't enacted. Then you go on to claim that the push by some to abolish slavery in 1864 does matter.....even though it wasn't enacted. You can't have it both ways. Context either matters or it does not. Pick one.
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.
The US won the war and so got the chance to get it done. There is no telling when the CSA would have. Maybe they would have enacted it at about that time had they gotten the foreign military aid they sought and promised to abolish slavery as one of the conditions for that aid. We will simply never know. And again, see the point above how context suddenly matters when its convenient for you to claim it does but somehow doesn't matter when its inconvenient for you to admit.
Unfortunately true
I made this point to PC Revisionists back in the early 1990s about 30 years ago. You cannot condemn the South of 1861 without also condemning the Founding Fathers. The South did not change much between 1776 and 1861. The North changed a lot. The South did not suddenly any mysteriously morph into the equivalent of the Nazis as many Leftists like to claim. Who do modern Leftists think the Southerners of 1861 were? They were the sons and grandsons of those who fought for Independence from 1775-1783. Jefferson Davis' father was in the Continental Army. Robert E. Lee's father was one of Washington's finest cavalry commanders. The Southern troops they raised and led were the next generation, the grandchildren.
I was of course told that I was a nut and a conspiracy theorist for ever thinking the Founding Fathers would be condemned by Leftists or the Stars and Stripes would be condemned like the Confederate battle flag, etc etc. Well.....here we are. I was right. Leftists were full of it as always.
I guess nobody thought to ask them when they said it, so I'll conclude they meant it.
Obviously they did not secede over slavery. Else they would have accepted the Corwin Amendment. They did not.
Once again you refuse to acknowledge that the Corwin Amendment was not only not ratified because the original 7 seceding states rejected it and pretend it was owing to some fictional Northern opposition to it that simply did not exist.
FIFY
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.
So the US had slavery and tens of thousands of Blacks also fought in the Confederate Army. That more were willing to join the side that was vastly better supplied and fed at a time of extreme hardship comes as little surprise.
PC Revisionist propaganda snipped
Beginning in late 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). Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination." - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 83
“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.” Union Colonel James Jaquess
“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.” Jefferson Davis
Davis rejects peace with reunion https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/jefferson-davis-rejects-peace-with-reunion-1864/
"Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,"…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power." Jefferson Davis 1848
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
"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
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.
Everything the Republicans of the time did even after the war was about centralizing power in the hands of the federal government by hook or by crook, and trampling on the states. The whole 14th amendment which never lawfully passed is a testament to that.
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 Northeast is dominated by Leftist elites who seek to centralize all power, dominate that central government and line their own pockets at the expense of everyone else. That has not changed in over 150 years.
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?
Follow the money. They had every economic interest - slaveowners and the overwhelming majority who were not slave owners alike - in wanting to be able to set their own economic policies and in not seeing themselves taxed for others' benefit. This was basically the same cause that motivated the Founding Fathers to secede from the British Empire a few generations earlier.
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.
That's why President Davis could not simply empower his ambassador as a plenipotentiary himself. He needed the consent of the Confederate Congress. He needed to be able to tell the individual Confederate states that their elected representatives had agreed to this in order to get them to go along with it.