Then you just shot any argument about Lincoln being a dictator to hell unless you prescribe Jeferson Davis to be, the irony isn't lost on me.
Jefferson Davis built railways in violation of the Confederate Constitution and sought to undermine Slavery while Abraham Lincoln
suppressed voting and arrested political opponents. If you see a moral equivalency between the two men, then you don't have a moral compass, simple as.
Furthermore, by the very quote given by you in support of whatever 'point' it is you are trying to make it only solidifies the harsh truth of the matter.
That point being that the Confederacy was founded on the ideals of slavery, sure you can argue on some other basis that Southern Nationalism may have existed prior to and really got started during the war only to slowly wane afterwards down afterwards, but Slavery was the coal and air that fed as well as stoked those flames to such heights, there is no getting around that.
It's really odd you seem intent on ignoring I don't deny it was the proximate factor, but that it's centrality rapidly waned as the war went on as I have shown. If Slavery was the sole motivating factor for Southern secession,
why didn't the Lincoln Administration's backing of the Corwin Admin fail to soothe Southerners?
In his inaugural address, Lincoln noted Congressional approval of the Corwin amendment and stated that he "had no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." This was not a departure from Lincoln's views on slavery at that time. Lincoln followed the Republican platform from the Chicago convention. He believed that the major problem between the North and South was the inability to reach agreement with respect to the expansion of slavery. Lincoln did not believe that he had the power to eliminate slavery where it already existed. However, Southerners feared that a Republican administration would take direct aim at the institution of slavery. By tacitly supporting Corwin's amendment, Lincoln hoped to convince the South that he would not move to abolish slavery and, at the minimum, keep the border states of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina from seceding.
Lincoln's March 16, 1861 letters to the governors did not endorse or oppose the proposed thirteenth amendment. They merely transmitted a copy of the joint resolution to amend the constitution. This was the first step to ratification by the states. After the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, important border states Virginia and Tennessee, among others, seceded. The Civil War began and the purpose of the Corwin amendment was greatly reduced. However, Ohio and Maryland ratified it, and the 1862 Illinois Constitutional Convention endorsed it.
The above is quite clearly only in support of my point, even Jefferson Davis knew that he would be skinned alive by his own congress should they learn of Kenner's trip and furthermore neither of the men had the means to deliver on that promise of emancipation, The Confederacy was built upon Slavery and 'States Rights' to protect that very institution, it's rich and powerful aristocracy were all mostly slave owners, even if say Britain and France bought into the idea before crushing the Union for the Confederacy the second Davis bring this up there is nothing to stop the Confederate States from just refusing to obey and dissolving the governing body before making a new one to represent those interest.
Except the historical record shows the complete opposite of what you just suggested, down to every detail within this paragraph. What do historians like John Majewski say?
Confederate railroad policy, in fact, provides a microcosm for understanding how secessionists crossed the thin line separating antebellum state activism and a powerful, dynamic Confederate state. On the face of it, most Confederate leaders seemingly opposed national railroads. During the Confederate constitutional convention, South Carolina's Robert Barnwell Rhett and other secessionists sought to prohibit the central government from funding internal improvements. The Confederacy, they argued, should never allow internal improvements (at least on the national level) to generate the evils of logrolling, budget deficits, and higher taxes. Rhett won an important victory when the Confederate constitution specifically prohibited Congress from appropriating ''money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce.'' The constitution allowed the Confederate Congress to appropriate money to aid coastal navigation, improve harbors, or clear rivers, but only if it taxed the commerce that benefited from such improvements. ''Internal improvements, by appropriations from the treasury of the Confederate States,'' Rhett's Charleston Mercury cheered, ''is therefore rooted out of the system of Government the Constitution establishes.''
States' rights ideology, though, eventually lost to a more expansive vision of the Confederate central state. As Table 6 shows, the Confederate government chartered and subsidized four important lines to improve the movement of troops and supplies. Loans and appropriations for these lines amounted to almost $3.5 million, a significant sum given that a severe shortage of iron and other supplies necessarily limited southern railroad building. Jefferson Davis, who strongly backed these national projects, argued that military necessity rather than commercial ambition motivated national investment in these lines. The constitutional prohibition of funding internal improvements ''for commercial purposes'' was thus irrelevant. That Davis took this position during the Civil War followed naturally from his position on national railroads in the antebellum era. Like Wigfall, he believed that military necessity justified national railroad investment. As a U.S. senator, Davis told his colleagues in 1859 that a Pacific railroad ''is to be absolutely necessary in time of war, and hence within the Constitutional power of the General Government.'' Davis was more right than he realized. When the Republican-controlled Congress heavily subsidized the nation's first transcontinental railroad in 1862, military considerations constituted a key justification. Even after the Civil War, the military considered the transcontinental railroad as an essential tool for subjugating the Sioux and other Native Americans resisting western settlement.
When the Confederate Congress endorsed Davis's position on railroads, outraged supporters of states' rights strongly objected. Their petition against national railroads—inserted into the official record of the Confederate Congress—argued that the railroads in question might well have military value, ''but the same may be said of any other road within our limits, great or small.'' The constitutional prohibition against national internal improvements, the petition recognized, was essentially worthless if the ''military value'' argument carried the day. Essentially giving the Confederate government a means of avoiding almost any constitutional restrictions, the ''military value'' doctrine threatened to become the Confederacy's version of the ''general welfare'' clause that had done so much to justify the growth of government in the old Union. The elastic nature of ''military value,'' however, hardly bothered the vast majority of representatives in the Confederate Congress. The bills for the railroad lines passed overwhelmingly in 1862 and 1863. As political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel has argued, the constitutional limitations on the Confederate central government ''turned out to be little more than cosmetic adornments.''
Desperation to avoid hanging or prison? Have you seen someone lose badly and yet they keep desperately playing because they are all in? Yeah, that is kind of a thing...
They had already been offered amnesty in late 1862, with Slavery to remain intact even.
They were again offered amnesty as a result of the Blair Mission in late 1864 and early 1865. They still continued to fight; if they were solely worried about their own necks, then why was this unless they were motivated by higher ideals?
Then you are blind, Southern agricultural staples (mostly cotton) grown through slavery at the time of the start of the Civil War made up three-fifths of America's (Not just the South's) total exports Southern plantation owners were the upper class of society who owned the News Paper's, local railroads, and donated vast patronages to the colleges of the day which perpetuated their ideals.
Why is that important? Because slaves made up a vast portion of The South's economy, if The North gained full majority of the Federal Government and legislated an end to Slavery (Which to them seemed inevitable and only a matter of time) the bottom keystone of the South's whole economy would drop out and everyone even the Southern Poor who owned no slaves yet who lived in slave heavy areas knew it.
Then beyond that there was always the fear that came what would happen after the slaves were freed, the Nat Turner Rebellion and Haiti's Revolution which were both extremely bloody affairs was always a present thought, there is a reason John Brown's Raid shook the South and most cheered his execution.
Then beyond that is the 'unwritten' fear of what would become known as 'Miscegenation' or 'Race-Mixing' the fear that if slaves became free both white and black would someday 'intermingle' which was really bad from their perspectives as the Victorian Era had birthed race science of African American inferiority which was whole handedly embraced and perpetuated by Slave Holders over the fifty years or so leading up to the conflict, who trough their influence (and printing presses) spread them to the masses.
I'm well aware of this,
and have in fact cited these statistics routinely. I'm equally well aware that for the vast majority of the South's population, they saw only indirect benefit from Slavery as shown by GDP per capita data. There is very little data supporting the notion your average Southerner benefited from Slavery directly and thus I would challenge you to back up these arguments with objective data.
So why would a poor white guy fight for slavery even though they own no slaves? It's because the slaveholder led them to believe that their interest were one in the same.
And yet, there's no evidence for this as things like the Cooperationists show.
It is notable that places in the South like Appalachia and places within the area like East Tennessee and North Carolina were much more pro-union and a big result of that was because there was less fears over slave rebellions given, they had much, much, fewer slaves and slave owners even if they had newspapers were less likely to indoctrinate illiterates.
Is that why every County in Appalachian North Carolina voted for secession? What about equally Slave free Southwest Virginia?
Southern Nationalism now is hardly worth mentioning in this thread, the idea of what a Southern nation would even mean or even look like is drastically different than what a person in 1861 would even remotely envision.
You were the one that brought it up by implying they were "pussies" for not continuing the struggle violently like Ireland did. It was necessary to correct the record in that context.
