What does this post mean?
I think it’s a Call of Cthulhu reference.
Using the same broad brush, this was true of the North at that time too. And I think one can spin off different counterfactuals as to which way history would have gone from there. The Northern government might have used the trauma of losing the Civil War to bind the states together into a strong system of federal supremacy, or it might have been irrevocably weakened – once the South fought its way out, other blocs of states could threaten to do so too, unless the Union government left state powers alone.
Still, having a hostile North and South staring at each other across the Potomac might force both governments to become stronger at the federal level for reasons of national security.
Economically, though, the South lacked much of a middle class. Under any government structure, a southern white man would either have been rich, with many rights and advantages, or poor, with almost none.
Remember that all the talk about “states rights” was a rationalization after the South lost. The actual Confederate Constitution didn’t strengthen the rights of states vs the Confederate government, and most notably took away the freedom of a state to ban slavery.
A good side by side comparison can be found here:
Yes, when South Carolina seceded they issued a public proclamation giving the reasons why they were doing so. The only mention made of states rights was against them. The South Carolina government said the federal government was wrong for having allowed states to decide on their own whether or not they could restrict slavery. South Carolina said slavery was a national right and Washington should have overruled any state which tried to limit it.
Are you saying that it’s crazy to have your capital on the border of a hostile enemy? 
If you have the luxury of a really big country… yes!
Heheh, so size does matter. 
States did give up some rights in the Confederate constitution, however it is a long held *misbelief *that it forbade states banning slavery.. The constitution of the CSA is modeled after the constitution of the USA, and Article I of the CSA constitution governed the powers of the federal legislature in the CSA. In Article I, Sec. 9, Clause 4 of the CSA Constitution it says: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
That is only a restriction on action by the Federal legislature.
Article IV of the CSA constitution contains some further text relating to slavery:
So what that basically says is that:
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If any State in the CSA were to ban slavery, then citizens of other CSA states would still have the right to bring their slaves into that State and travel through that state with their slaves; and the local ban of slavery would not cause those CSA citizens to forfeit their slaves.
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If any State in the CSA were to ban slavery, slaves escaping from other parts of the CSA would be required to be given up by the authorities of said state back to the legal owners of that slave in the other state. (Essentially this is the fugitive slave law enshrined in the CSA constitution.)
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All new territories will be areas in which slavery is permissible.
But there is nothing in that which would explicitly ban a state from passing a state constitutional amendment or law prohibiting the owning of slaves. However because of the exceptions, if say Virginia banned slaves, it would not be totally “slave free” because slaves from the rest of the Confederacy could be brought into Virginia and the simple act of them entering “free soil” would not emancipate them.
So for the CSA to be truly free of slavery all of its states would have to individually ban slavery. Additionally if all of the states banned slavery the part about the territories would have to be changed by constitutional amendment or you’d end up with a totally slave free CSA which through legal loop hole would still permit slavery in its non-State territories.
As far as I can tell, the CSA constitution neither explicity upholds or explicitly rebukes judicial review. I believe it did mention someting about common law, meaning that court rulings would be considered to establish stare decisis.
The CSA would never have survived as an independent nation. Even if, by some miracle, the CSA’d won the war, or caused enough of an issue that the Union backed off and let them go, I think the best case scenario would’ve been about 10-12 years before the bottom fell out of the economy and the whole thing collapsed. The South didn’t have the industrialization or the infrastructure to maintain itself. Could it have industrialized? Of course, but not with the people in power who *were *in power – they were all dedicated to maintaining their large-scale plantation-based agricultural society, a society that was dying even then.
It would’ve ended up with the US regaining most or all of its former Southern states, with perhaps parts of Texas reverting to Mexican control.
And considering Mississippi just officially banned slavery in 1995, I wouldn’t hold my breath that without strong federal pressure to do so, the Confederate states would move at any determined speed towards some kind of reconciliation with the North and with their own people. The CSA would have been an evil blight of a nation doomed to die through rebellion or outside invasion.
This would make my commute a bitch. I would probably have to drive myself rather than have my slave/chauffeur do it, which would be a pain, and I wouldn’t even be able to bring my nanny, butler and personal body servant with me when I went to a show at the Kennedy center. Damned Yankees.
I doubt many poor whites in a victorious Confederacy would have ever supported slave revolts, or legal efforts to end slavery. They would not accept social equality with blacks, and they would not have wanted to compete economically with free blacks. The fact that a costly war had been fought to defend slavery would make it emotionally difficult to end the institution even after it became economically dysfunctional.
A victorious Confederacy would have been a terrible country. I can easily imagine it being an ally of Nazi Germany. Even if the slaves were freed, the free blacks would be subjected to a second class citizenship more constraining than Jim Crow legislation. I cannot imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream,” speech on the steps of the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Virginia.
I wasn’t addressing or discussing what the States would have done, only the specific factual claim that the constitution of the CSA prohibited states from banning slavery.
Well it wasn’t exactly an immediate priority, was it? 