Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

John Tierney "celebrates" the Fourth of July by saying that the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were bad for the Blacks:

Disunited States of America - New York Times: On Independence Day, would we all be happier with even more independence? What if government of the people meant that the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them?... [N]owadays Northerners have their own reason to lament. The South is gaining seats in Congress at their expense, and four of the last five presidents have come from the South.

If the South were a separate country, Northern liberals wouldn't be ranting at George W. Bush and Pat Robertson.... Southern conservatives wouldn't have to fight for moral values against godless Yankees.... Politics in both countries might be less partisan, even civil. I realize this prospect sounds farfetched, but it's not crazy to imagine that the South could have become independent....

[T]he optimistic scenario of Jeff Hummel... [who] believes slavery would have collapsed quickly if the South had been allowed to peacefully secede and the North had simply stopped returning runaway slaves. Unable to stop slaves from escaping, Hummel argues, the South would have been forced to abandon the system, and freed blacks could ultimately have been better off than they were during the Jim Crow era.... I side with Hummel's optimism...

Most people think that having rights and property is better than not having rights and being property. But not Tierney.