Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
When you live in an area that has ABOLISHED slavery, you are--and have inherited a tradition--of abolition. You cannot call a people that has abolished slavery anything but abolitionists, even if they remain quite racist in general. You would not call the average racist today pro-slavery either. Furthermore, while very few blacks lived in the North until WWI and the Great Migration, you have to call bullshit on that argument, because so many blacks only lived in the South because of slavery. You can make Marxist arguments about the economies of the North/South all you want, but you cannot blame the North for having been smart enough to grow an industrial economy. Especially since the North had abolished slavery before rapid industrial growth ever began to occur.The North didn't oppose slavery, they were largely indifferent to it, and if any of them did favor abolition, it was only under the condition we move all blacks out of their society completely. By your own admission, politicians of the day would be committing political suicide to run on the issue of abolition. So, this tells us that the overwhelming public sentiment was either indifferent, or opposed to abolition.
The passive US policy of containment of slavery, is not emancipation. Allowing and accepting some slavery, would never lead to emancipation, it is illogical and foolish to reach such a conclusion. As we've already established, the institution of slavery was in decline, we had stopped importing slaves, Britain had banned slavery. But the US Supreme Court and US Congress, continued to condone and support the institution of human enslavement, right up to the Civil War, during the war, and in some cases, after the war.
What WAS the issue, was Federalist intervention in state affairs, which the Constitution forbids. This was the case regarding the debates over the Western Territories and whether to make them slave states or free states. It wasn't the issue of which one, it was the issue of the US government making that decision. The Confederate viewpoint was, our national government is a confederation of states, and the states hold the power. The individual states should be allowed to decide whether to be free or slave, it was their Constitutional right. Instead, the US Government intervened, and this was the root of the fundamental reason for the Civil War.
Slavery was a lesser issue of property rights and ownership, as previously determined by the SCOTUS. Southerner's didn't determine slaves were their property, the SCOTUS told them they were. Yet, here was the Federal Government threatening to unlawfully seize what the SCOTUS had defined as their property. Again, in contradiction of the Constitution. Had the SCOTUS or US Government, at any point in time before the war, renounced human enslavement and outlawed the practice in the US, and declared Africans to be humans and not property, this would not have been a legitimate issue for the South.
As you have twice ignored already, I pointed out already that a radically anti-slavery candidate nearly won in 1856, and only lost due to the presence of a strong 3rd Party candidate. Perceived anti-slavery (and pro-Catholic) sentiment may have sunk Winfield Scot (Whig) in 1852, but then he represented a party that had just launched its very last campaign ever as a major party.
Your arguments demonstrate why democracy and populism are such failures, and why Southern politics ultimately ruined this country. If we claim a right to every action/activity/object under a category of some sort, then we deserve the fascism that will ultimately follow in the wake of our moral decay. A republic is based upon moral principle and virtue. Ours is also founded upon Natural Rights, meaning that a group of individuals described in our own Constitution as "persons" cannot be enslaved under the guise of localism.
Also, you keep talking about slavery after the war. Fucking prove it already.