You know, I find it odd that the vicious modern attitude toward slavery - universally shared by all who are 'up with the eagle, and down with the cross' on these pages - are not called down for being 'modern' in their assessments of the true Northern views of slavery from the period. Abolition was at best a minority. Lincoln said not to paint him with the abolitionist brush. Slavery was to Lincoln a tool for negotiating the willing return of the South into the will of his own party's political Northern manifesto... and had nothing to do with the blacks as people, or anything other than property.
Slaves do not vote, and neither do illegal aliens... originally. But when you confer upon them the status of a citizenship, and make them a citizen... when they do not have a vested interest in keeping the taxes down... why should they be able to freely vote themselves such largesse from the common purse at the expense of the residue who do pay for such things? There is nothing fair about it.
In the slave condition, they were as dependents upon their masters, like children. Children do not vote until they are emancipated from their parents by age (18).
Every civilized empire that has ever been has been created through a form of slavery. There has never been one yet that did not rely upon involuntary servitude. The institution has never died, and it has never been completely stopped. The
fact that the North would not allow the South to take their slaves and be rid of the North, who ever sought to live off those earnings of the South, in the most hypocritical way imaginable (tariffs), while calling themselves the Free States... which is a fantastic lie if you are still taking money from the very act, itself... should tell you that the South was ready to cease to be profitable, or anything at all... rather than to willingly continue under the Northern political agitations.
The vast amounts of sheer disgust that you read hereupon are in fact period feelings, though not towards slavery, at the time, as an art form... but rather of the 'hated' Celtic South, in its own right.
At least in those days, they had the good decency to own up to that, and say that it was Secession, and not so much over what Thomas Jefferson called The Noisy Pretenders to Exclusive Humanity - (the pretender bleeding hearts). This started way back in 1820...
Jefferson to Lafayette - 26 December, 1820
"With us things are going well. The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave, and that from Missouri is now rolling towards us, but we shall ride over it as we have all others. It is not a moral question, but one merely of power. Its object is to raise a geographical principle for the choice of a president, and the noise will be kept up until that is effected. All know that permitting the slaves of the South to spread into the West will not add one being to that unfortunate condition, that it will increase the happiness of those existing, and by spreading them over a larger surface, will dilute the evil everywhere, and facilitate the means of getting finally rid of it, an event more anxiously wished by those on whom it presses than by the "noisy pretenders to exclusive humanity." In the meantime, it is a ladder for rivals climbing to power."
It was not really Secession, so much as it was the political differences between the two white races, each culturally trying to control their own destiny. It is just that one was trying to do it at the expense of the slave-owning other...
Oh. I almost forgot. The neutrally-balanced benevolent internet will not give you the full quote unless you hunt for it. This is a reference to the earlier Firebell in the Night letter, concerning the Missouri Compromise... and this is the part which took place some months earlier, in April of 1820.
"...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence."
Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes (discussing the Missouri question), Monticello, 22 April 1820
Now, where to find my references:
Inter-library loan, for a few dollars postage!
The first book is entitled Reclaiming the American Revolution by William J. Watkins Jr. It is at the address below:
Oldham County Public Library 308 Yager Ave., Lagrange, KY 40031.
The second book is called Liberty, State, & Union – The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson by Luigi Marco Bassani. This book was written in 1963 and rereleased in 2010 by Mercer press.