Honestly, I don't see why this is such a big deal for you.
Because it matters. If we're going to have an actual debate here, instead of me asserting I'm right and you asserting you're right and both us talking past each other, we have to be willing to offer actual evidence for our claims. You claimed that some portion of the Provisional Congress for the first few states to leave the Union was in favor of removing universal suffrage. I need to know
what proportion, and what their actual chances of seeing that through would be. After all, I don't think a single Confederate State would have listened if the Confederate Congress (which, by the way, was a
different body from the Provisional Congress) tried to tell them how to handle suffrage.
You need to be able to demonstrate that people of this kind of opinion were in a large enough majority to be able to capture legislative control of each of the individual Confederate states. In order to even
begin doing that, you need to be able to show that they made up even just a majority in the Provisional Congress itself.
Your whole argument rests of a bed of evidence that is paper thin. Beef it up or admit you are just basing the whole thing on supposition.
It's like it's a perfect unwillingness to admit that in different times different concepts were viewed differently.
Look man, the facts are the facts. Reality cannot contradict itself. We can see things in different ways, but that's an artifact of our flawed, limited perspectives, not any variation out in the universe itself. Put up or shut up, stop trying to dodge.
The people opposing it weren't unanimous, per se. There were some Confederate nationalists who were just fine with universal manhood suffrage....who spent the war playing with their slaves on their plantations and never heard a shot fired in anger while the poor people died in carload lots. The assembly in Montgomery of delegates of the seven states that created the Provisional Confederate Government was the furthest thing imaginable from representative of a Confederate *nation* and the four states dragged in in the spring of 1861 never really had any kind of unified Confederate sentiment as it was, hence why all four of them had the most well-known miniature Civil Wars and we have now West Virginia out of what was northwestern Virginia. The people who made up the Confederate government were not very nice people, and almost none of them qualify for democratic politicians.
You need to learn to concentrate here. They 'weren't unanimous'? How do you know this? What did each faction number? When you speak of the people who were comfortable with universal suffrage sitting home on their plantations,
who are you talking about?
You run on generalizations. Generalizations aren't facts, they're an order of magnitude removed from facts. They're facts viewed through a badly designed telescope from ten miles away.
I want
facts. If you want to
prove your argument you need more than just generalizations.
No, I'm willing to say that conscription was a moral necessity in both *sides*, one of which was a nation and the other of which was well-organized rebellion. There was no Confederate nation.
You're actually right. The Confederacy was made up of the whole or part of at least three different nations.
What made conscription a moral necessity?