“Bullshit, you ignorant POS.”
Brilliant refutation, filled with wit, bibliographic references, scholastic achievement, and gentlemanly conduct. You have done a great job at representing your cause.
Maybe you should believe the southern leaders quoted below that were living at the time.
In an abstract sense the state’s rights argument is correct. It was all about the Southern States “right” to violate God’s law. (Exodus 22:21 Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.) Unfortunately that falls apart because rights are given by God, and God does not give the “right” to sin without consequence. I suggest you read Judges chapter 19 and 20 to see how God commanded the country to respond when one state or tribe refused to enforce justice. The State of Benjamin was burned and almost everyone killed. Only 600 remained alive, when tens of thousands were killed.
Henry L. Benning, Georgia politician and future Confederate general, writing in the summer of 1849 to his fellow Georgian, Howell Cobb: “First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere — in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.” [Allan Nevins, The Fruits of Manifest Destiny pages 240-241.] Later in the same letter Benning says, “I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union.”
G. T. Yelverton, of Coffee County, Alabama, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention on January 25, 1861: “The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.”
Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, again, December 27, 1860: “Mr. President, it seems to me that northern Senators most pertinaciously overlook the main point at issue between the two sections of our Confederacy. We claim that there is property in slaves, and they deny it. Until we shall settle, upon some basis, that point of controversy, it is idle to talk of going any further.” [Quote taken from The Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 201.]
“We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.” - New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 from: Horace Greeley, quoted in Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 173.
Representative Benjamin Stanton, Republican of Ohio, January 15, 1861: “Mr. Chairman, I desire to state, in a few words, what I regard as the real question in controversy between the political parties of the country. The Republican party holds that African slavery is a local institution, created and sustained by State laws and usages that cannot exist beyond the limits of the State, by virtue of whose laws it is established and sustained. The Democratic party holds that African slavery is a national institution, recognized and sustained by the Constitution of the United States throughout the entire territorial limits, where not prohibited by State constitutions and State laws...All other questions about which we differ grow out of this, and are dependent upon it...” [Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., (Appendix), p 58]
Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall; December 11, 1860, on the floor of the Senate; “I said that one of the causes, and the one that has created more excitement and dissatisfaction than any other, is, that the Government will not hereafter, and when it is necessary, interpose to protect slaves as property in the Territories; and I asked the Senator if he would abandon his squatter-sovereignty notions and agree to protect slaves as all other property?” [Quote taken from The Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 58.]
“Brilliant refutation”
The reappearance of that ancient lie deserves no better than I gave it, and its repetition has no claim on “gentlemanly conduct.”
“Maybe you should believe the southern leaders quoted below that were living at the time.”
In this day of the Internet, any idiot can find quotations, or alleged quotations, that purport to support any conceivable position on any subject.
Maybe you should believe the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence instead of cherry-picking a few things you like and calling it a day.
Great quote. What the neo-confederates conveniently leave out of their states rights argument is the fact that Dred Scott forced northern states that outlawed slavery to enforce it within their own borders. A lot of northerners who were willing to live and let live on the issue found they could no longer do so. They had to either abolish it altogether, or take part. States rights for me, but not for thee.