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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Third, there was no reason for South Carolina or Georgia to agree to form a Union with Pennsylvania or Massachusetts without the very concessions they achieved, and when those concessions were ignored and trampled on, they voluntarily left the union they had voluntarily joined.

But none of those concessions were ignored or trampled on. The concessions made to the slave states in the Constitution were:

  • The trans-Atlantic slave trade not to be abolished before 1808 (spent by the time of the Civil War)
  • The fugitive slave clause (still operational on the eve of the Civil War)
  • The three fifths clause (still operational on the eve of the Civil War)
  • Implicitly, the fact that the powers of the federal government did not extend to regulating slavery within a slave state (something that the Corwin amendment, which Lincoln did not object to, would have made explicit and permanent).

The main stated grievance of the South in the 1850's was about the extension of slavery to the new territories captured in the Mexican-American war - there had already been a convention in Nashville in 1850 where several states threatened to secede if this was not permitted. But this issue was in effect resolved in favour of the slave states by Dred Scott. The stated grievance of the South in 1860 was that Lincoln's personal views on slavery made him an unacceptable president.

Unless you want to argue that Dred Scott was rightly decided (implying that the Northwest Ordinance was unconstitutional, despite being broadly supported by the same people who ratified the Constitution), secession was a fit of pique at losing an election, not a response to wrongdoing by the federal government.