If you have to tell people what their nation consists of, that that said nation doesn’t exist.
Whether the south had blacks or not is about as relevant as whether Australia had aboriginals or not.

There is an unwritten and unstated but assumed rule that says that “Australian” means Anglo-Celtic or similarly ‘assimilated’ white European. As for the aboriginals, well, they’ve always been there and been part of the landscape, both literally and metaphorically. It is the anti-whites who write tomes to try and ‘prove’ otherwise, to prove that the nation is multiracial and one of immigrants.

Nations are BORN through natural progression and it is this natural progression which defines it.

Artificial multiracial states are carefully handcrafted and legislated, like Angeline Jolies family. All families have people who immigrated into it, so why is hers so artificial and contrived?

— Prometheus

An interesting aside:

On the idea that the South was not a nation because of its slaves, I remember a short quote in the Saturday Evening Post when I was about twelve. The quote was given and the reader was challenged to guess who said it.

The year was 1848. The hero of the moment was Kossuth, a Hungarian who was leading a demand for self-rule for Hungary, then past of the Austrian Empire. One of the major arguments against Kossuth was that the majority of the people in the area designated as “Hungary” were NOT Hungarians. Kossuth quite specifically demanded that HUNGARIAN rule it.

A member stood up on the Floor of Congress and made an impassioned speech in favor of the Hungarian claim. He specifically said that Hungarians were fighting the central authority of Vienna, and SINCE THEY WERE THE REAL CONTROLLING GROUP IN HUNGARY, they should have full US backing.

You have probably guessed that the congressman in question was Abraham Lincoln.

Bob had a question in his reply, and I’d like to take a shot at addressing it.

Bob wrote:

His second point is harder to dismiss so easily. Blacks were not considered PART of the Southern Nation, but the Southern Nation’s “way of life” depended on blacks. I am still mulling over that one.

In reply:

I suspect “the Southern Nation’s ‘way of life’” was based on a feudal social order, and a feudal economic system.

The average White Man in the South actually outnumbered the slaves, and had it worse than the slaves. After all, they had no “right” to protection, as the feudal Lords OWED those who were in fealty to them.

So, the Southern Nation – essentially, the transplanted Elite of London, many of whom journeyed to London annually – remained a feudal social order, and those who favored the War of the Northern Aggression looked at the black slaves as luxuries that were in the way of their imposition of an Industrial Age sensibility on a feudal, agrarian social order.

Ironically, Lincoln’s (Prussian!) policies – redemption of the slaves with money from the sale of Western lands, and their shipment back to Africa – would have worked in the South’s interests far more than Calhoun could ever have imagined.

                 — AFKAN