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Originally Posted by myboynoah
Help me understand. When the North went to war, was it to free the slaves or to prevent the South from splitting off? Was Lincoln primarily motivated by slavery or by keeping the country together? I have to believe it was the latter, not the former. That's how nations react when some parts want to leave.
Sure slavery was the subtext, and AA's correct, but wasn't the North's initial and overiding motivation to keep the Union a union?
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The South split off because they saw the North was finally bent on ending slavery. Lincoln wasn't exactly an anti-slavery hawk, but he was intolerable to the South becuase they knew he planned to end it one way or another. He preferred to end it other than by war, but he would end it by war if it came to that, as events would show. The South saw that and split off. There would not have been any secession but for the disagrement over slavery.
This wasn't that long ago. A majority of Americans were a lot more enlightened then than we give them credit for being. All of our great thinkers, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, the James brothers, any viable political candidate in the North, virtually all Northern clergy (except Brigham Young?), condemned slavery. Europeans had seen the light. The dawn of the industrial revolution was at hand. Slavery was a primitive, atavistic, barbaric institution, and the North wasn't going to tolerate it going on in America much longer. That is why even when a moderate opponent of slavery was elected, secession still ensued shortly thereafter, becuase Lincoln was from Illinois. The war was about slavery pure and simple.
Archea, my saying southern slave owners who financed and foughtin the war were evil is not an empirical matter. It's a value judgment. What more evidence do you need than they owned slaves and were willing to kill to continue doing so. Slaves escaped and they hunted them down and caught them like animals. I choose to call that kind of conduct evil, and I submit I'm on firm footing doing so. I think every form of racism is evil.
Creekster says that those type of judgments aren't that helpful when analyzing history, and I understand and respect what he's saying. But I think it may add clarity to make them every now and then. We don't shrink from calling Hitler and Stalin evil. What went on in the South was evil to a lesser degree of amplitude. It's not a common thing to call the Confederates evil because they became our countrymen after the war, but maybe the moral clarity of calling what they did evil would have prevented Jim Crow and a lot of other permutations of racism that continued long after slavery.