A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union

Feb. 2, 1861

"Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States [in the Union] to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially  the blessings of peace  and  liberty to her people.   She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation,  that  she  should  enjoy  these  blessings.  She  was  received  as  a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery -- the servitude of the African to the white  race  within  her  limits -- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race,  and which her people intended should exist in all future time.  Her institutions  and  geographical  position  established  the strongest  ties between  her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the nonslaveholding  States, since our connection with them? . . .

In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between  entirely  distinct  nations,  the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now  strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the [supposed] equality of all men, irrespective of race or color [or talents and abilities?]-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. (A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union, Feb. 2, 1861.   http://www.lsjunction.com/docs/secesson.htm 

Comment by Vance J. Beaudreau, September 7, 2005:

It is true that the old Testament and the New Testament seem to indicate that the descendants of Ham, namely the son of Ham, Canaan, were to be servants in the tents of Shem as proclaimed by Noah.  Noah apparently gathered that the mark God placed upon Cain for his crime of murdering Abel was that of blackness of skin, kinkiness of hair, bluntness of nose and protruding lips.

Aegyptius, a direct descendant of Cain, was the wife if Noah=s son Ham and apparently had black skin.

In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus told his disciples that he was not sent except to the lost sheep of Israel.  (The seed of Canaan was forbidden to be mixed with that of Abraham or in the line of David.)  The Lord called the woman of Canaan a dog.  Yet when she persisted in begging him for help with her daughter, he granted her request.

Yet I can see no excuse for the enslavement of the descendants of Canaan or any other group of humans by a different group of humans.  I subscribe to the prohibition against involuntary servitude

found in the replacement 13^th amendment of the U. S. Constitution.   Nevertheless, the proclamation that all men are created equal stands as a  naked lie, except only in the sense that they should be equal under the law and in civil opportunity for their quest to improve themselves.  Nor should one race be held above the other in civil opportunity.  Thus, race based programs like Head Start and Affirmative Action clearly place one race above another and are unconstitutional thereby.