So far you're arguing that its ok to violate the constitution to do what YOU think is necessary, much like a dictator would violate to ensure HIS policy, yet you would crucify someone for adultery and lying to the public (yes they are violations but not of the constitution). Where do your loyalties to the constitution begin and end?
I am not saying that at all. And perhaps you need to take a closer look at the Constitution. And if you are so upset about how Lincoln really didn't have an opinion toward slaves when he started the war, perhaps if you take a closer look then at why the war was necessary in the first place and what it accomplished, you might come to some epiphany.
And by the way, on october 4, 1854, at the age of forty-five, Lincoln made a speech denouncing slavery in public. He declared that he hated the current zeal for the spread of slavery: "i hat it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery istself." Then in peoria,he said, "The great mass of mankind consider slavery a great moral wrong. [this feeling] lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice, and it cannot be trifled with...No statesman can safely disregard it."
In his first inaugural address, he uses the Constitution as an example of why the South may not secede legally. "I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Contstitution the union of these states is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. Again, If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of states in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
.....It follows from these views that no state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that
resolves and
ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any state or states against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances." And then of course, the south shot at them.
But also, he makes an excellent point later on in this speech: "All profess to be content in the Union if all constitutional rights can be maintatined. Is it true, then, that any right plainly written in the Constitution has been denied? I think not....shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by state authority? The Constitution does not expressly say.
May Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.
Must Congress protect slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say....If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease There is no other alternative, for continuing the government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them,
for a minority of their own will divide and ruin them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority. do you see where he's getting at with this? We'd have like a trillion different countries if you could just secede whenever you wanted to.
Also, when it comes to endorsing souther secession it is not enough to point out Lincoln's failures in his position on slavery. MOre important is whether one group may leave a larger group that it had been part of--and in the process take along unwilling third parties. The seceding group definitely does not have that right. The right of peaceful exit from a contract may not be given to those wanting to leave who intend to take along hostages.
Seceding from the American union could perhaps be morally unobjectionable, if you choose to see it that way. It isn't that significant whether it is legally objectionable because, after all, slavery itself was legally unobjectionable, but something still had to be done about it. So when one considers that the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way were, in effect, kidnapping millions of people--most of whom would rather have stayed with the union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation--the idea of secession no longer seems innocent. And regardless of Lincoln's motives, when slavery is factored in, it is doubtful that one can justify secession by the southern states.
