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Edited on Wed Nov-19-03 10:45 AM by ZombyWoof
Here's why:
In the decades leading up to the war, the southern slave-holding states grew increasingly agitated about their inability to expand slavery to every new territory. They had already been given a major concession in the original Constitution: Slaves, although having NO rights, were considered 3/5ths a person in order to boost the South's representation in Congress, and even more significantly, in the Electoral College, so the South would have more pull in presidential elections.
The south worried that the slave economy, since the halt to the importation of them, and no new soil to farm and work their labor, would weaken tremendously or die out, and wreck their "way of life" for good. No doubt the south was still a region of great poverty, and the end of slavery would be an adjustment too heavy to contemplate. What to do with the freed slaves? Many mainstream thinkers, from both north and south, suggested expatriation to Africa or Latin America to form colonies. Either way, ending slavery was an unthinkable option for southerners and sympathetic northerners.
So what to do in order to keep their right to slavery? A right sanctioned, and even given special treatment for the slave states, in the document?
They seceded from the Union, which is well, frankly, unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the government the power to quell insurrections. Secession is not a right granted in the document either. The Constitution does not contain a provision for undoing that which is its ostensible purpose for existing: The formation of a united, federal government, with its jurisdiction superior to the states. No court was going to allow, or had ever upheld before, secession as an unenumerated right either. Secession flies in the face of the document's reason for being. As a form of insurrection, it had to be stopped, constitutionally. As I said, the document did not possess the means for its unlawful undoing within it.
The south was going outside of the law in order to uphold slavery, which was increasingly meeting more and more resistance at its expansion - even as it was still legally sanctioned! They were "destroying the Constitution in order to save it". The south was scared, and went above the law. The only "self-determination" at stake here was their determination to disregard the Constitution when it was convenient for them to do so. Breaking with the Constitution is not something one takes up for convenience.
Lincoln was right. The Union had to be preserved for the sake of ALL Americans, north, south, black, white, and everyone.
Incidentally, I have ancestors who fought on both sides of the war, mostly in the Confederacy. My southern heritage goes back over 200 years. I say this because I am often one of the south's ardent defenders when it takes hits on DU. The Confederacy is not the south, however, and receives no justification from me. I leave history to be the judge, and Lincoln is correctly revered for his eloquent brief words.
Lincoln was the greatest orator and speechwriter who ever sat pen to paper in the White House. Read his second Inaugural if you have a chance. The force of his prose is amazing.
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