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You guys don't get it. The Declarations and Ordinances of Secession were legal arguments, not a press release. They were meant to allege Breach of Contract, that contract being the US Constitution.
There is no legal argument in decrying the attacks on the "beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law." That's not legal, that's agitprop.
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The reason the agitation over slavery was a breach of the constitution is because the Fugutive Slave act was part of the Constitution because the whole country made it so because all white people in the 1800's (and before) thought blacks were inferior and needed to be subordinate to the white race.
The Fugitive Slave Act was never a part of the Constitution, where do you get this stuff?
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The Declarations were essentially an excuse to leave the Union.
So they picked slavery as a cause to rally around because they felt it made them look better?
A Constitutional History of Secession by John Remmington Graham is the best book I have read on the legal arguments of secession. Even reading the comments on Amazon has good info about it.
*The Fugitive Slave Clause was part of the Constitution, not the act. My mistake.
The Fugitive Slave Act was never a part of the Constitution, where do you get this stuff?
I'm on your side in this argument, but the above actually is wrong. The Fugitive Slave Act was the law passed in 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850, it was designed to strengthen the already existing Fugitive Slave Clause that is indeed in the US Constitution.
Article Four, Section Two, reads:
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No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due
The Declarations and Ordinaces of Secession did, indeed, contain a lot of 'Obiter Dictum' commentary about Africans being inferior and better off as slaves, which seriously 'shocks the conscience' (as courts have put it)of most Americans. It's so reprehensible what those old-timey people thought that the emotions behind it cloud the real legal issues, which are pragmatic and very exact.
Most of the dysfunction in our country comes from when rich people think anything that is profitable can't possibly be immoral, or that it's not relevant if it's immoral where profit is concerned. That's where we get slavery and Universal Default and predatory lending practices in general and the ridiculous 17:1 (or whatever it is now) fractional reserve lending ratio.
A Constitutional History of Secession by John Remmington Graham is the best book I have read on the legal arguments of secession. Even reading the comments on Amazon has good info about it.
*The Fugitive Slave Clause was part of the Constitution, not the act. My mistake.
Yeah, right I will read a book by a far right wing Libertarian that believes there was a 9/11 cover up. Also a far right wing Christian that believes conservatism without Christ is a fallacy. No thanks. I may as well read the other crackpot DiLorenzo.
Did you ever try reading Shelby Foote? James McPherson? Bruce Catton? Walter Edgar? Eric Foner?
Instead you read a book by a lawyer that tries to get fluoride out of public water systems.
How bout reading Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew?
Did you ever try reading anything outside your echo chamber?
Here is a list of very good books about the Civil War. Read one of these.
With regard to the argument that the southerners were exercising their rights as outlined in the Constitution's per-amble where it stated:
It should be pointed out that the rebellion was not against an oppressive "form of government", it was against the outcome of a fairly staged election held within the laws of the prevailing form of government. Those are not the same things.
Proof is in the fact that once they had rebelled, what form of government was set up by the Confederates? It was one which was a duplicate of the government against which they were rebelling. It featured the same executive/legislative set up, it relied upon elections to limited term offices to determine who would get to exercise power.
In no manner did the Confederate Constitution differ from the US Constitution in basic form. Some specific laws were different, but not the primary means for conducting governmental business and making determinations regarding who would rule.
Further, how can a government be described as "oppressive" when it was unaltered from the state in which it had received legal approval by the voters of the southern states when they ratified it?
Finally, does it make even a tiny amount of sense to rebel against a government, and then cite the very document which you are repudiating with your rebellion, as the source which makes your rebellion legal? That is bogus picking and choosing of which parts of the US Constitution one will recognize on a given day. "This document no longer has any authority over me...and we know this because the document says so." So what? You have already repudiated that document, you no longer enjoy any of its protections if you have declared it invalid and without authority over you.
So, this business about a Constitutionally approved right to overthrow the government created by that Constitution, is a non starter.
I agree with much of what you've written here. Slavery was the 'sine qua non' of the American Civil War, the essential or necessary condition, without which, in all probability, the War would not have been.
It's pretty clear this is the case when you compare the Constitution of the Confederate States with the Constitution of the US. Here's a line by line comparison:
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