We are getting old.

[pbrower2a]

(10-04-2016, 04:39 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-03-2016, 07:42 AM)Odin Wrote:

(10-01-2016, 06:39 AM)Galen Wrote: Truth is southern secession was a last resort measure because they could see no other way to preserve what they saw as their rights.  By the way Fort Sumpter was never in any danger of being seized, if it was the Confederacy would never have sent a peace commission in the first place.

THEIR "RIGHT" TO OWN OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. The Southern "way of life" was pure evil and deserved to be destroyed. As far as I'm concerned the Confederacy was something akin to Nazi Germany, it needed to be destroyed just like the Nazis needed to be destroyed.

Its not like Lincoln really didn't gave a shit about it until about 1862, all you have to do is look up his speeches and writings to figure that out.  The War Between the States had far more to do with economics and power.  Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner would have been perfectly happy to let the southern states go.  Without the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 slavery would have ended without war as it had everywhere else with the exception of Haiti.  It should be pretty clear from the Corwin amendment and its ratification by several of the more powerful northern states indicates that slavery was never an insurmountable issue.

Personally, I would regard ending slavery without the huge body count and the behemoth of Federal Government that we ultimately ended up with would have been a far better result.

But the slave-owners did not trust Abraham Lincoln. He did not recognize slavery as a glorious institution, so to the increasingly-extreme proponents of slavery, he was no better than a radical abolitionist.  That's about how the NRA sees someone who endorses banning people on the no-fly list from having firearms or (as I do) prohibiting the transportation of firearms and ammunition into a state in violation of that state's laws. (That is roughly the language of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the import of alcoholic beverages into a state in violation of that state's laws). I use a state's rights argument in favor of state gun laws. If the state of New York prohibits you from buying a firearm in New York, then you should not be able to buy a gun in Virginia and bring it into New York State.

I am tempted to believe that Abe Lincoln was going to use the British model of abolition (buy slaves from owners) to put an end to slavery in America. That would have solved the question of slavery once and for all in America without a war. The Civil War made such a sensible approach to slavery impossible. The price of freedom for blacks would be paid by soldiers who would die defending a slave system or destroying the slave system. No money could ever change hands in the transaction. The US government bought the freedom of slaves in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri with cash or bonds, just as the British did.

It was the US Army that insisted that Abraham Lincoln abolish slavery as it came into possession of slaves (who could not be returned to their recent owner)s, as Lincoln sought to destroy the agrarian system that fed Confederate soldiers and their cavalry horses.  The Union Army came in possession of much contraband: food and fiber stocks, railroads and rail cars, firearms and ammunition, livestock, and other stuff that the Union Army could keep in possession. Slaves were a different classification of property. The US Army did not want to own them. It also wanted slaves to escape to Union lines. It was willing to free them and hire them to work on fortifications and other objects of military usefulness.

The Army insisted that Lincoln free the slaves. Lincoln saw the logic of permanently emancipating slaves in Union custody as contraband and any who had fled their recent masters. The Confederacy collapsed in part because the escape of slaves to Union lines while the usual free laborers were off fighting starved the Confederate Army.