Not a concession, an observation. Thanks!
The point that you cannot grasp is at the time there was no law against slavery. It was perfectly legal. It was also covered many times in the Bible, both New Testament and Old and never was it prohibited but it concerned how one treated his or her slaves, not whether one owned slaves or not.
Lincoln, instead of preserving the union, in the long run, as evidenced by the status quo, destroyed the union.
The point that you cannot grasp is that while the original Constitution made concessions to slavery as a necessary evil; neither the Constitution or the Founders regarded slavery as a positive moral good. Indeed, the express principles of the Constitution were in conflict on the issue of slavery. Therefore, in interpreting the Constitution it became necessary to interpret and understand it in light of the intent and understanding of the Framers---in light of the Constitution's genuine principles, as opposed to its prudential compromises with those principles. The governing principle (the principle which birthed the Revolution) was "liberty" for all as in "we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal". Not some men, mind you, not merely those with land or property or title, or the lightest skin, but all men.
The Northwest Ordinance declared declared that slavery would not exist in the lands governed by that Ordinance. The Missouri Compromise was entirely consistent with the Northwest Ordinance and, had it survived, would have accomplished over time exactly what the Founders intended, the extinction of slavery. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska act and the emergence of the positive good school of pro-slavery thought were entirely unanticipated by the Founders. But the argument for slavery as a positive good is, at bottom an argument that "might makes right". This nation however was founded in express opposition to such principles. Jefferson taught that consent as such can never justify anything intrinsically immoral. The movement to entrench slavery as a positive moral good then, was, in actuality, a movement to transmute the Founding from one grounded in liberty and the natural and equal "right of every man to place in his own mouth the fruit of his own labor" to one of enslavement, the very opposite of liberty. At bottom it also meant the negation of any idea of "self-evident truths" and hence, of everything the Founders stood for. In fact, John Calhoun called the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence "self-evident lies". To Calhoun, it was not self-evident that a black man and a white men were each men (notwithstanding the several hundred thousand mulatto children in the ante-bellum South that testified to their equal humanity). Calhoun's denial (and that of the intelligentsia of the South generally) of the humanity of Negroes presaged Hitler's denial of the humanity of Jews and Stalin's denial of the humanity of anyone "counter-revolutionary". (Incidentally, the homosexual rights movement, which also denies any moral authority to the "laws of nature and of nature's God" is merely the most current and popular iteration of the self-same legal and logical positivism that underlay the argument for chattel slavery as a positive moral good. Calhoun would have loved the sodomy rights movement!)
As far as the Bible and slavery, I could be less interested in debating that issue because this nation is not a theocracy. That said however, the New Testament teaches us to "do unto others as we would have them do to us". The Golden Rule, properly understood, is sufficient Biblical condemnation of slavery for me. In any event, however, I am relatively certain that nowhere does the Bible extol slavery as a positive moral good.
Jordan
