Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 23: The "cornerstone" of the Confederacy (hint: it was slavery)

The following is an excerpt from an 1862 pamphlet by John Waddington, a Congregationalist minister, published in London "at the Request and Under the Sanction of the "Committee of American Correspondence" and titled The American Crisis in Relation to Slavery. Waddington here addresses the motivation for Confederate secession from the Union:

All doubt as to the point must be removed by a reference to the "Message of JEFFERSON DAVIS, President of the Confederate States." Amongst the grievances which led to secession, MR. DAVIS says: "A great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the Slave States from all participation of the benefits of the public domain, acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which Slavery should he prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be entirely worthless."

Mr. [Alexander] STEPHENS, the Vice-President of the Confederate States, in his address at Augusta, Georgia, July 11th, 1861, fully concurs in this testimony: "The new Constitution (of the Southern Slave States in the South) has put at rest for ever all the agitating questions relating to their peculiar institution - African Slavery as it exists amongst us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. The prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature: that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, the corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man ; that Slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Mr. Stephens adds the blasphemous comment: "The stone which was rejected by the first builders is become the 'chief stone of the corner' of the new edifice." [my emphasis in bold]

The latter speech has gone done in infamy as the Cornerstone Speech.