Virginia, which Lee considered his home and country, along with the upper States of the South, did not secede until President Lincoln began preparations to invade those lower Southern States.
Those lower States wanted freedom from the high tariffs the North charged for raw materials. The lower states did not invade the North but tried to expel the Federalist forces.
Slavery ended peacefully in many other countries and if the North had simply existed as a, “safe place” for slaves to flee to it would have ended that particular institution without the loss of 750,000 Americans. The dissolution of the Union would have led to the peaceful dissolution of slavery as the slaves would have had a place of refuge.
The North uses the abolitionist cause as a red herring to justify it’s imposition on the South and attacked in order to control their economic resources. The war was not fought to free slaves as the Northern historians have written. That was used to force federal power over federalist ideals. https://www.thegreatfiction.com/2015/01/17/could-slavery-have-ended-without-the-civil-war/
While that may be a true statement, it isn't true that the North was a "safe place" to which slaves could flee. Because of the "Dred Scott" decision and the fact that it was federal law to mandate state and local government assistance to accredited "slave hunters" who were hunting escaped slaves in the North, there was no "safe place" in the North. Anyone assisting in the escape or hiding of escaped slaves was guilty of a federal offense, which was not likely to change without a sea-change in the attitudes of Southern politicians in Washington and elsewhere.
Which did not happen until after the South had begun the war at Fort Sumter.
Those lower States wanted freedom from the high tariffs the North charged for raw materials. The lower states did not invade the North but tried to expel the Federalist forces.
Tariffs had virtually nothing to do with it. Defense of slavery was the most important reason for the Southern actions by a large margin.
Slavery ended peacefully in many other countries...
Other countries did not have regions willing to launch a bloody and protracted rebellion to protect their slaves.
Agreed.
I think Jackson was the brains of Lee’s operation.
People don’t realize that the United States was a much different place back then. The states and the people granted power to the federal government, not the other way around. In essence, each state was a separate country and their first loyalty was to their state.
Another thing lost in the shuffle is the fact that states voluntarily entered the union. Why can’t they just as voluntarily secede from it? Otherwise involuntarily forcing a state to remain in the union against its will is a form of slavery itself.
It’s also my understanding that:
-The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time rendered an opinion stating that very thing, that states can just as voluntarily secede from the union as they can join the union, and Lincoln threatened to imprison him.
-Lincoln also imprisoned 20,000 newspaper reporters and editors during the war, for writing stories he didn’t like.
-Lincoln also imprisoned the entire Maryland legislature during the war because he feared they’d vote to secede.
-Lincoln’s much heralded Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the Confederacy, an area he didn’t control. The northern slaves weren’t freed until the end of the war. His Emancipation Proclamation was only an effort to create a slave revolt in the Confederacy.
-Lincoln is on record repeatedly calling for all the slaves to be rounded up and returned to Africa.
-Before the war, the states had the powers the Constitution prescribed. Lincoln ended that, creating the foundation for the federal behemoth that we now have.
-His original war aim was to preserve the union. He eventually changed the war aim to free the slaves, and at that point he had wholesale desertions from his army.
I always love to remind people that FIVE SLAVE STATES remained in the UNION, as SLAVE STATES.
After Lee surrendered, several of those states remained SLAVE STATES until the passage of the 13th Amendment eight months after the war ended.
So the last flag to fly over legal slavery in the USA was the stars and stripes.