“The word slavery appears one time. The term slave does appear often, I agree.”
And you hung your hat on that?
sheesh.
“The word slavery appears one time. The term slave does appear often, I agree.”
And you hung your hat on that?
Wait — Beck clearly used the word “Slavery.” He hung HIS hat on that.
That said, the term “slave” is used several times in several locations, usually in terms of protecting the rights of the individual States to determine whether or not slavery continued as an institution. In other words, slavery was predicated on the principle of States Rights, States Rights as a Principle was NOT created as a principle to support slavery as an insitution.
There is NO arguing that slavery was, by our standards today — and by most standards 150 years ago — an evil institution. Even Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee & “Stonewall” Jackson said the same. That’s why they did not own slaves (they released them years before), yet they served in the Confederate Army — because the war was about far more than that single institution.
But the thread that ties the Confederate Constitution together is not slavery, but States Rights. Can one then conclude that because slavery was a “moral wrong,” States Rights” and secession must also be excluded as options on some moral, ethical or political basis? I think not. Yet that is what is often argued by those who oppose the very idea of the Confederacy in the Civil War.
So, if Southerners acknowledge that slavery was a moral evil that needed to be abolished, can there be an honest discussion about the necessity of the states retaining their rights to nullification, and in dire cases secession?
Perhaps THEN we can begin to find common ground to fix the foundational issues that STILL haunt our nation over a century and a half later...