piercethevale
Well-known member
That is such a tired old explanation ... used as an excuse to try to get rid of it....and btw, there was no "Confederacy" when the Constitution was drafted, but I understand what you meant.
It's partially the truth as to why it was created... and regardless of whether slavery had been in existence at the time would have likely still been included in the Constitution. There were a great many other differences between the States that gave cause for such considerations.
Primarily it was of consideration for the differences between those of agrarian inclinations as to those with industrial aspirations... which the Civil War mostly eliminated anyways... that war was begun more for the fact the South's cotton was being taxed with most of the taxes going to support Northern industrialization. Slavery was considered by most to be a doomed institution in another generations time. Was it worth the nearly 2 million lives that were lost to free about 4 million slaves that would have been free in another 20 years or so? ...not to mention a centuries worth of resentment for the vindictive manner by which the U.S. treated the South afterwards for the following 30 or 40 years? As my mother would say a few times to me during her years, "That war decimated the gene pool of the United states, it took the lives of most of the best young men we had."
Knowing the differences in the makeup of the populations, by ancestry, political ideology, and spiritual beliefs I'm convinced had the South won the war, they would have told the North "to now go about their own business" and that would have been the last of it...and very likely abolished slavery themselves before 1890.
The racial bigotry that existed in the South thereafter was far more a product of the North's attempt at humiliation of the South by putting unqualified former slaves in positions of gov't and judicial authority... it caused extreme resentment, partially due to as how those former slaves wielded that new found power. [payback's a b****, isn't it?]
What do you think Germany would be like presently if Truman and, or, Eisenhower put all Jews in positions of gov't and judicial authority in Germany after W.W. II? ...and the Jews were highly educated people... [by that I mean no slight to the level of intelligence, intellectual capacity and potential of the Black race in general...it's only an issue of formal education at the time of these historic periods that I'm talking about here.]
Black Americans, from what I have witnessed in my 67 years on Earth, are subjected to far more vehement prejudice in the States that were a part of the Union than in the States that were a part of the Confederacy. Granted, there weren't the "Jim-Crow" laws in the North as there were in the South but the North had some pretty repressive and prejudicial laws all the same... and some "un-written" ones that are downright despicable. While I've never been to Louisiana,, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida or South Carolina, I've been to every other State that was a part of the Confederacy, including Missouri and Tennessee. I got to spend sometime in a few of them, particularly Texas, and what I witnessed on a "neighborly level"...that is in those communities I spent some time in... was, far more for the greater part, amicable relations and unpretentious friendship between the races.
I witnessed far more prejudice and bigotry among my "White" neighbors and school mates growing up in Los Angeles than I ever witnessed in those Southern States I spent time in... and far more again from people I met in New England, the Rust Belt, and some mid Western States.
I've seen a great noticable reduction in such the last 30 years...the present lot that is under 35 being the most racially tolerant ever... both ways... and I hope that each succeeding generation reduces it by as much.
The most oppressive example of which I can think of at this moment being the city of Boston.... they even looked down their noses at anyone from any State in the South, period... unless they had some high mucky muck English pedigree of an ancestry but even then still considered to be something inferior to themselves.
