MT,
Making the point that all southerners were the same and had the same interests is nonsensical.
Making the point that self-determination is only good if those countries use it to conduct the policies currently approved by your state is nonsensical.
As many Northern seccesionists claimed, secceding from the South would have been their way to get rid of slavery in USA.
I am not going to argue that slavery was one of the institutions Southern states intended to keep for a while. I only claim that self-determination in general is the right of any people and that they would have eventually dismanteld those institutions themselves - under outside moral or economical pressure, under the influence of internal enlightenment, etc.
New York State certainly had slavery (not just african but tens of thousands of Irish men, women, and children effectively became slaves in the New World by being sold into indentured servitude) and certainly abolished it in teh course of natural historical process - without much bloodshed, invasion, etc.
On the Fourth of July, 1827, two centuries after it began, slavery ended in New York State.
The end did not come overnight, with a great thunderclap of insight that the owning of one person by another was morally wrong. The largest slave state in the North ended slavery only gradually -- as did the other northern states -- during a period of three decades, and only after a great debate.
Slavery was allowed to die a slow death in New York because such gradualism protected the economic interests of slaveowners, according to David N. Gellman, a lecturer in early American history at Northwestern University. Gellman, an expert on the abolition movement in New York State, was asked recently whether the policy of gradually freeing slaves had been a success.
``It certainly beats the Civil War, if that's the alternative,'' Gellman said. ``Unquestionably, from a moral standpoint, you would have to say no. But it's a human institution, and it's not easy to dislodge. It's a problem of political give and take, though it seems appalling that real human beings should be subject to this give and take.''
In 1817, the Legislature passed the law that ended slavery in New York State, to take effect 10 years later, on July 4, 1827. A loophole in the law that allowed transients to bring slaves into New York for a nine-month period, and part-time residents to bring their slaves into the state temporarily, was closed in 1841.
It is silly to claim that Norterners took their sweet time to free their own slaves but went to fight an extremely bloody war to make others do so just couple of decades later.
miko
