George Bassett's hypothetical

Joined
Oct 18, 2019
Sometime between South Carolina's secession and Fort Sumter, George Bassett, a northern abolitionist wrote an excellent mini-book/pamphlet titled A Northern Plea for the Right of Secession. It's available for free online. I want to ask here about one particular hypothetical question/challenge he posed to those that denied the South's right to secede. I want to ask those of you that maintain that the South didn't have a right to secede (by which I mean not a legal right under the Constitution -- although I happen to think the South had an exceedingly strong constitutional case, too, but that's another discussion -- but rather an inalienable right that put anyone that disrespected that right in on the wrong side of history) how you would judge Bassett's hypothetical scenario. I'll quote Basestt first, but then I actually want to modify his scenario slightly to account for that happened at the start of the war, events which hadn't happened yet when Bassett wrote:


“Suppose the case reversed, and, instead of South Carolina desiring to secede from the Union, for the interests of slavery, Massachusetts should wish to secede, for the interests of liberty. Suppose the people of the latter should feel conscientiously bound to withdraw political fellowship and complicity with slavery, and to exercise their natural sovereignty in a just, humane, and impartial system of government,–would it not be oppression to coerce her to remain? Would not the combined tyranny of thirty-three coercing States be a more intolerable despotism than any single tyrant? Would it not be oppression for the general government to collect an involuntary tribute from an unwilling State, to support a government whose flag protects not only the crime of slavery but the African slave trade itself? … The friends of liberty and a free conscience should be careful how they sanction a principle against South Carolina, which may have equal power against the holiest instinct of humanity in the people of the Northern States.”

Or to rephrase that question as I'd like to ask it: If, as actual abolitionists (as opposed to Republicans like Lincoln that professed a willingness to defend and uphold the fugitive slave clause and for whom anti-slavery expressions were just a false pretense for pushing crony capitalism) mostly advocated in the years before the war, any of the Northern states had sought to secede rather than maintain a union with slaveholders and uphold the Constitution's protections of slavery, and if a Southern president had refused to allow a minority (or even a majority) of anti-slavery states to secede, and if Massachusetts had fired the first shots at a federal fort in Massachusetts that a Southern president had refused to give up, would you be defending Massachusetts and condemning that Southern president? If not, what would your argument be in defense of the pro-slavery South's war effort against the seceding abolitionists?
 
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