Since slavery was Constitutional prior to the Thirteenth Amendment, it should come as no surprise that only extra-Constitutional action could bring an end to it.
If all fifty states supported abortion as a right and the federal government insisted that it was murder, which side would you be on?
Personally, I am sick and tired of the persistent Dixiecrat claim that modern leftism vindicates the Confederacy. It does nothing of the kind.
The Republican party was not an abolitionist party. It was a nonextentionist party. Abraham Lincoln had not the slightest intention of interfering in the internal affairs of the slave states, and the Dixiecrats know this (some of them even admit it). They seceded because they had been in the process (thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Dred Scott decision) of extending slavery into every state and territory in the country, with no way to keep it out. Anti-slavery Northerners had to sit and watch escaped slaves being captured and chained in the streets of their towns and were told they had to like it. The people of Kansas were told that if enough immigrants from Missouri came over and outvoted them to introduce slavery, well . . . that was democracy in action--sort of like our own illegal aliens today.
Neither the Dixiecrats nor the Left is telling the true story of our Civil War. It was not a proto-Marxist crusade to free an inherently subversive population (and if that population was "inherently subversive," they never should have been brought over here in the first place). Neither was it a "noble battle for states' rights." Both of these claims are sheer propaganda and hooey.
My ancestors are not Democrats who became Republicans in 1964 or in 1932. My ancestors were Southerners who fought for the Union and have been continuously Republican since Lincoln. And a lot of Southerners fought for the Union just as a lot of Northerners fought for/sympathized with the Confederacy.
I honor and respect the Confederate dead. Unfortunately, this is not reciprocated. My ancestors, who followed their consciences exactly as did the Confederate soldiers, are vilified not only by neo-Confederates but by palaeo-conservatives as inhuman proto-Communist fiends. Being a Southerner, I detest this slur on my ancestors and the ancestors of all the brave boys in blue who were just as brave and honorable as the brave boys in gray.
There has always, from the very moment the Constitution was ratified, been two schools of interpretation of that document and of the Union it created. One is the Jeffersonian school of a strict construction and a "compact among sovereign states." The other is the Hamiltonian: loose constructionism and the United States of America as a Nation (you know, like China under Chiang or Spain under Franco, two "centralizing tyrants" one never hears neo-Confederates criticize). Both of these are valid. They are both as American as apple pie. And the neo-Confederates and "palaeo"cons who insist that the interpretation of the Jacobin sympathizing deist Thomas Jefferson is "the official and true interpretation of the United States Constitution" are parroting a falsehood.
Hamiltonianism is still American, and it is still every bit as legitimate as Jeffersonianism. And a Hamiltonian will rebel against an evil, tyrannical government every bit as soon as a Jeffersonian--without having to eviscerate his bible with a razor blade to do it.
Not wanting to get into a civil war argument that will never be settled, I still don’t understand why the North would not “allow” the South to seceed. You can spout all kinds of crap but the bottom line is they needed the agriculture to survive.
And one more thing, your rambling doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to this “dumb old red neck racist sister marryin’ hillbilly southerner”. And I still will not welcome you to Texas when we get the hell out of your union.