150 Years of Treason -- December 20, 2010

150 years ago today, 20-December-1860, a convention in South Carolina declared that the state was going to secede from the United States. I am aghast that some people claim that the war was not about slavery. The root cause of the war was slavery. To get people in the North to fight, Lincoln emphasized that he wanted to preserve the Union. To get non-slaveholding people in the South to fight, its leaders stressed that the evil Northerners wanted to impinge upon their rights. The trouble is, the right the leaders most wanted to defend was the right to keep fellow human beings as chattel slaves.

One person mentioned on the internet today that a union is not a union unless members have the right to secede. He said the European Union is a union because member states can secede. He said a union from which states cannot secede is an empire. He ignores the basic reasoning of Abraham Lincoln, that the United States, despite its name, is not a union of states, it is a union of people. That is why the preamble of our Constitution begins "We the People," not "We the states."

The image of the South Carolina congressional delegation, which withdrew from Congress, is from the 22-December-1860 Harper's Weekly.