 The Slavery Excuse...
In the hearing of the various justifications for the 'late war', caused by the unwanted advances of the Lincoln Administration, under his own authority... we continually hear the word SLAVERY thrown around, as the cause for the Southern Secession, and ultimate justification that a 'good' was some how gained from the destruction of the Southern nation known as the Confederate government.
The implied message here, of course, is that SLAVERY was an egregious evil, and since the South had not yet adopted 'abolition' as a second language, then they deserved to be harrassed at fort Sumter, and literally forced back into the Union by an embarrassed president, who had given notice of his intentions to politically ruin the Southern Conservative states out West, and forbid the presence of the Southerner and his slaves in the territories, thus insuring a 'Republican Left' majority, and eventually, a full time majority of Republicans in Washington City.
Not ignoring that it was for a similar reason that 15 Northern states wished to secede from President Thomas Jefferson with his buying the land of the Louisiana Purchase (because the North thought that it would insure Conservative patronage to the Anti-Federalist Jefferson, and thus Northern interests would not be able to gain the upper hand in a majority of the states once this land was added), the declaration of the territories as FREE SOIL would mean that only the abolitionists and the Republican Left would be welcome out West... and would surely mean an easy majority, with which the North could play the 'tyrant' they had often feared seeing rise from the larger Southern Conservative states - since the very beginning...
While no such tyrant ever rose while the Southern Conservative idea of sovereign state government
was the majority in Washington City, it came literally moments after Lincoln's election, along with threats
and flip-flops on key issues. Many in the North thought Lincoln would be a peaceful man, because Lincoln had never given them any reason to assume anything else.
This is the question, then:
If the South was so hot to defend the institution of Slavery, could there have been a noble reason for this?
Several reasons which are noble that jump to mind are as follows:
1. Abolitionists are uninformed knee-jerk political parasites
who only want what they want RIGHT NOW, even if it means killing slave owners to get these slaves their freedom. John Brown was such a man, and he was so
far off-base that even the negro slaves failed to follow him.
2. To give a platform to these fools could very well bring about terrorism in the South equal to anything we might experience today in the way of terrorism...
3. SLAVERY is a fact of American Life. It was Constitutionally protected. Literally, to make such a claim about new states was unconstitutional, and ignored the Constitutional property protections completely...
If such was the way this new Left -Wing president was going to do business, then he is a loose cannon, and
dangerous...
250,000 freed Southern negroes did not want to see the other black slaves turned loose en masse any more than the Northern workers wanted to see it. Freeing these people en masse would mean scarcity of jobs for the freed blacks when some 4 million (or however many slaves) were released with nowhere to go, and nothing at all to do but starve to death, and the freed black men, (many of whom had bought their freedom themselves or earned it in some way), along with them...
The negro slave masters, who owned other negroes, did not want to see it, either. (estimated to be some 4,400 negro masters).
4. Supporting the institution of Slavery does not mean you own slaves, nor want to own them at some point, but it does mean that you understand the safety such provides
for the rest of the Southern country with regards to crime,
insurrection, and literally the safety of anyone in the South. To emancipate en masse would herald a holocaust
of starving negroes, disrupted lives, and terrorism...
All because some new political-correctness had seized Washington City... by a party of men who had historically wanted to live off the earnings of slave plantations and collect tariffs and taxes off their efforts, while sharing NONE of the internal improvements nor any of the other patronage incumbent with Federal appropriations of tax monies for political pandering...
5. The South also claimed the threatened loss of millions in property due to the unconstitutional illegalization of slavery in the territories... and all for political patronage to a party who had failed in both the Federalist and Whig forms since the inception of the Union...
Could these have been any of the reasons why the South thought it could get better terms out of the union than in it, or are they all just a bunch of 'slave-driving traitors to the Union', as they are shown to be in just about every official writing?
Could THIS have been what the South meant when it mentioned SLAVERY in its Declarations of the Causes of Secession?
Last edited by Beowulf; 05-27-2008 at 03:15 AM.
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