Give it a rest.
Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania
“no squeamishness upon the subject of slavery, no morbid sympathy for the slave.” “I plead the cause of free white men,” he said. “I would preserve to white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and my own color can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
Perhaps you could enlighten me. How does a Pennsylvania Congressman's speech bear on the reasons the South seceded? A brief reading of any of the secession resolutions passed by any of the states that seceded proves that slavery was the reason.
That the reasons the north used to justify keeping the South in the Union varied among the players matter not one iota.
I have no interest in a civil war do-over. My complaint is with those who mischaracterize the Declaration of Independence and its principles. The Declaration of Independence is the Touchstone of Conservatism; if we fail to understand its principles, this country is lost. As one American said
"but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.
He went on to say:
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Secession commissioner William L. Harris of Mississippi:
"Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality."