It kind of rankles you when someone throws in your face the fact that New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland and Rhode Island have slave state histories. These states could have prevented the U.S. Constitution from incorporating slavery. There is a reason they didn't. They did not want to.
Now, tell this board how four states forced nine other states to agree to slavery against their will.
They wanted a big country. They didn't want to have a competing country a few miles away. They weren't anti-slavery at the time -- though they were moving in that direction. Nobody denies that all the original states had slavery during the Revolutionary era, but that's not what we were talking about.
You said: "You might say that in 1861 the Deep South was motivated by a desire to preserve the Constitution." I wouldn't say that, because I recognize that equating slavery with the Constitution is fallacious. Also, it's strange to say that repudiating and rejecting the Constitution is somehow preserving it.
Lots of rubbish & nonsense to unpack in those few sentences, pal.
First of all, Founders like Thomas Jefferson believed that slavery had been imposed on Americans by the Brits, against Americans' will.
That was one item among many in Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration.
Second, almost immediately after declaring independence in 1776, several states set to work abolishing slavery, such that by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, most Northern states had already begun abolition and soon after the others followed.
So there were strong abolitionist sentiments amongst Founders in 1787.
Third, even Southern slave-holders like George Washington said that if he had to chose between slavery and Union, he would chose Union.
Fourth, however when push came to shove, there could be no Union in 1787 without acknowledging slavery in the Constitution, and so it was.
Rightly or wrongly, our Founders pushed the great issues of abolition onto future generations.
For Founders it was enough just to unite the Nation in 1787.
Bottom line: without slavery there could be no Union in 1787, so Union came first, abolition second.
And that is also precisely the sequence of priorities followed by Lincoln in 1861 and beyond: Union first, then abolition.
“Thomas Prentice Kettell’s book was refuted by Stephen Colwell’s The Five Cotton States and New York, a pamphlet of 1861.”
First, nowhere is it stated, other than the poster, that Kettell’s work was ‘refuted’. In fact, Kettell was an economist that published reputable journals, books, and magazines. Colwell was a pamphleteer, and not an economist.
Kettell based his commentary on U.S. Treasury and census data. Colwell changed the data to serve his purposes as found on page 27 of his work where he uses the following term regarding U.S. Treasury data: “We therefore give the...sum with the addition of fifty percent” and offers his conclusion with the caveat that “It appears from this approximation...”.
Over the next several pages Colwell uses phrases such as “We shall not err greatly...”, “...which may be safely estimated...”, “the population would have...” and many more.
These are not the writings of an economist.
In fact Colwell was a socialist, writing against the free enterprise South.