[BroJoeK]

Sherman Logan from post #215: "It was widely believed at the time and since that the Court was fully prepared to use the 5th Amendment to declare state laws abolishing slavery to be unconstitutional.
Wouldn’t have worked, of course.
But the decades of southern dominance in DC and the repeated caving in of northerners convinced many southerners that they could pull it off.
That the despised Yankees would never develop the backbone to resist."

Curious how few words would need to be updated to make yours a cogent comment on today's Democrats attitudes towards us "despised conservatives". ;-)

[Sherman Logan]

Quite true.

I suspect the reason is similar. The dominant group in the South were slaveowners, who to a very considerable degree based their lives on working for the defense and expansion of slavery.

Most northerners, OTOH, just wanted to get on with their lives and have the whole issue go away. There were exceptions, of course, the abolitionists. But right up to the outbreak of the War, abolitionists were wildly unpopular in most of the North.

Few conservatives derive their sense of personal worth from politics. Sort of by definition, we believe other things are more important. Government, and politics, should be limited. Liberals and radicals, OTOH, have no governor on their desire for power. Of course they routinely move the ball in their direction.

Sometimes they provoke a reaction they didn’t expect, of course. And that reaction often goes overboard in the other direction.