Why is it that "State's Rights" always seems to be fighting for the wrong side... pro-slavery, pro-segregation, etc.? I don't like
any tyranny, be it federal, state, or the local dog catcher.
I wonder when we are going to hear the lie about how the South owned fewer slaves than the North? (HINT: read the census data, it ain't even close).
And it is kind of hard to reconcile the "slavery didn't matter" line with the actual statements of the Southern politicians.
Message of Jefferson Davis to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, from J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861-1865
Montgomery, April 29, 1861.
As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was not "to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity," but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
The protection of slavery seemed to be a paramout concern of Jefferson Davis. In total, he mentioned "slave," slaves," or "slavery" no fewer than 23 times in that speech (of which my quote is only a small part).
As another example among many, again citing the primary source material (as opposed to barmy revisionist "historians"), in The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States (one of two official pronouncements produced by South Carolina's Secession Convention), "slave" and its derivatives come up no less than 30 times. Its closing declaration is:
We ask you to join us in forming a confederacy of Slaveholding States.
That's an awful lot of talking about slavery for slavery to not matter to 'em.