J When I asked if the North had the right to force the South to stop slavery he tried to evade the question by talking about the immorality of slavery itself.
By natural law as we understand it today, any individual has a right to render aid to any other individual whose rights are being abridged.
The same right that you have to render aid to an innocent third party being dragged against her will into the bushes by a rapist, enables you to also render aid to a man held in slavery.
Similarly the same right that allows you to render aid to a man who is being robbed of his rightful property by an armed hoodlum.
By natural law, the man and woman held in slavery has every right to free himself, to request or accept aid in doing so. And every man has a natural right to render the aid necessary to effect the slave's freedom.
Perhaps, what you
intended to ask about was whether the federal government had any constitutional authority to force the South to end slavery.
THAT may well be a different answer, being a different question. But I think whether you intended to or not, you asked the appropriate question for this group to consider. Doubly so for those who assert a nation has no more proper powers than an individual in that nation has, or who consider the constitution itself to be racist (slavery explicitly permitted, blacks counted as 3/5ths of a person for representation purposes), anti-liberty, and statist.
The companion question to your question is, "By what right did slave owners or their government, presume to hold men in slavery? To force from them the fruit of their labors? To use women as mere objects for sexual gratification without any consent whatsoever? To buy, sell, trade, and profit in another man's life, liberty, family, blood, sweat, and work?"
I love most of Southern culture. And while there are fine aspects of New England Puritanism, in total, I find the know-it-all busybodiesm distasteful. I abhor what Reconstruction did to the South. The same men who effected that, persecuted my ancestors for their peaceful, consensual religious marriage practices. I recognize the hobson's choice the South faced with slavery by the mid 19th century.
But no thinking, rational, moral person today can justify or sugar coat slavery in the least. If every slave in the nation had actually be treated twice as well as Southern propagandists claimed they were, slavery would still have been an unspeakably horrific institution at complete odds with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. It had to come to an end.
Would that it could have done so peacefully. But it didn't. Perhaps had Lincoln lost the election. Perhaps had Southern forces not fired on Fort Sumter but instead appealed to their brothers in the North for a peaceful resolution. Perhaps....
But at the end of the day, no man, no nation, has a right to hold others in slavery.
What a shame your liberal friend and you both failed to see that with any clarity.
Charles