TW, your reflexive arrogance is incredibly off-putting and undercuts the rest of your post. This is hardly the first time. Grow up.
I've evidently read a lot more about the period than you have.
Toughen up. More importantly,
read! Not the intellectual cotton candy of people you agree with. Engage in the hard intellectual labor of reading people with whom you
disagree and thinking for yourself why you disagree with them.
As for the rest of your post, I'm not sure what you're responding to. You seem to be attacking a strawman argument that no one in the North held racist views, be they scholars or elected officials. This is certainly not an argument that I've made -- people are racist today, so why would I begrudge the 19th century of racial discord? -- so I have frankly no idea why you're addressing it.
Because when you are presenting a disembodied quote it shows an incredibly shallow understanding of a complex period in American history.
Racist quotes abound from the period. We can all note how racist they were, but we live in a county in which a black man has served as president without the sky falling in.
People from this period did not have the benefit of that experience. They could not imagine how emancipation would play out. They had two examples to go one: Haiti and Jamaica. In Haiti, the black population
murdered the entire white population. In Jamaica, the tiny white population left and the island went into an economic tailspin. It was possible that the South would just become an economic basket case (which is what in fact happened due to the war to prevent southern independence). But the alternative of a genocidal race war was a very real possibility for white southerners in 1860,
whether they owned slaves or not. (John Brown's first victim in his "war to end slavery" was a free black man). In fact, Republicans (Lincoln friend John Wentworth of Chicago) predicted that would be the result and even tried to bring about that end (Republican senators William Seward of NY and Henry Wilson of Mass., for example, knew about John Brown’s murderous raid on Harper’s Ferry a year and a half before the act and told no one). Which is why the non-slaveholding white population joined in the fight for independence suffered 25% fatalities. They did not believe they were preventing the emancipation of slaves (most did not own slaves). They believed they were preventing the
genocide of their families that is why they fought so hard and so long.
Actions are far, far more significant than mere rhetoric and scholarship. Why were Davis' and Stephens' words singularly important? Because they were detailing the beliefs which compelled them to break away from the Union and form a new nation that legally enshrined human bondage. They described the institution of slavery as foundational to their ideal government. They wrote protections for it into their Constitution, as did multiple southern states.
This is where you are wrong. Mr. Secession, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, said that once the South left the Union, the problem would be keeping northern states out of the southern confederacy.
Rhett said:
If the North were to allow us, from their stupid fanaticism, to dissolve our union with them, I am satisfied that it will require not more than two years’ experience, to reconstruct a union with them, if we could trust them, upon just such terms as we shall think proper to dictate. The difficulty would be, not to get them into, but to keep them out of, a Southern Confederacy.
No point, Rhett believed in importing the moral problem you had just seceded from.
This was because, as Thomas Jefferson foresaw, a moral principle can wreak terrible havoc on the body politic (like abortion opponents in today's America, but much worse). In the debate over the admission of Missouri as a slave state, Jefferson wrote:
Thomas Jefferson said:
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. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Toombs and Davis described the "cornerstone" of the system, at least as far as they saw it, as something else. And Stephens, by the way, was an anti-secession Georgian (having been a Whig before the demise of that party). Having been defeated in his political
efforts to prevent secession, like George Wallace a century later, he decided never to be "outdone" on the issue of the relations of African-Americans.
Here's the difference: Lincoln may have held racist views, but he didn't break away from the Union in order to ensure the continued enslavement of blacks. He ultimately freed southern slaves.
Actually, no. Lincoln's belief, up to the last few weeks of his life, was that it was best to deport African-Americans "home" to Africa. They could not remain in America after emancipation.
Davis trained his slaves on his plantation to understand and apply the legal system of trial by a jury of one's peers, to prepare them for the day when they would be free.
Neither created the system of African slavery, but which one had the more humane reaction to it and set about preparing for the day when African-Americans would be free?
While certainly a decision that was largely tactical during the war, he also campaigned fiercely afterwards to establish the 13th Amendment, banning the practice of slavery in all states and territories.
My goodness. Have you
ever read the text of the original XIII Amendment (2 March 1861)?
Original XIII Amendment said:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
No amendment abolishing slavery would
ever be made to the Constitution. This amendment would have made slavery forever up to the states.
Forever. Read, man! And think!
What did Lincoln say about that amendment?
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address said:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service ... holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
Lincoln had no problem making slavery permanent and irrevocable. As long as the African-Americans stayed out of the north and the west.
He won, obviously, and the U.S. Constitution was amended. Your attempts to paint him as some racist equivalent to Confederate leaders is absurd. Actions matter.
Indeed. When a federal officer declares his intention to violate both the principles of democracy and the provisions of the Constitution, I think the honorable thing is to refuse to participate. One may not be able to stop it, but one does not have to participate and support the endeavor. That is a distinction worth remembering, in my view. Slavery is gone forever (and good riddance to it), but the question of the extent of federal powers is as alive today as it was in 1861.
Okay, to humor me a bit (I have not earned this privilege, but please humor me) and answer two questions:
1. When did the United States become a unitary state from which a member state could not legally leave? Don't pontificate, please just give me a date.
2. Which provision of the United States Constitution delegates to the general government the power to overthrow, by military force, elected republican state governments and replace them with appointed military governments? Please just give me the chapter and verse, "Article ___, Section ___."
I think you will find the exercise enlightening.
