It was not my intent to suggest he ran as “TGE” and I don’t believe that I have. It is my position that the mantle of Great Emancipator has been, IMO, undeservedly placed upon him post hoc by those pushing a political narrative that the war was primarily about ending slavery when in fact it was about retaining the southern states. My comments were directed at those who swallow that narrative. Yes slavery was dead after the war, along with the southern economy and bid for independence. Look, I don’t question the immorality of holding humans in slavery, but if you negate the legitimacy of the southern drive for independence over issues of property and national self determination, what does it say of the original colonial revolt? Why were the slaveholders of 1776 any more entitled to nationhood than the slaveholders of 1861? I think they probably weren’t, so we build myths about the war and its causes that appeal to emotion and patriotism to obscure the uncomfortable realities.
I would argue that there's a difference between the reasons that led the nation to war in 1861 and the reasons that, over the course of the war and in the decades that followed, emerged as important.
I'd also argue that the binary "either/or" reasons you give aren't mutually exclusive.
Why were the slaveholders of 1776 any more entitled to nationhood than the slaveholders of 1861?
Ah, well there you run into political theory and philosophy. I tend toward a view that no one is "entitled" to nationhood, and that it's a construct established by facts on the ground, not by abstract notions of "natural law" or "entitlement." To claim otherwise is to open a can of worms in which any group, any area, anywhere can claim an "entitlement" to nationhood.
I don't fault the southern states for launching a rebellion and trying to establish their independence. What I object to is the notion that it wasn't a rebellion and was instead some irresistible legal process that no one had any right to oppose once they said the magic words.
It's really very simple, and it's contained in the DOI. Which is a moral document. It proclaims who has a right to independence. None of the Founders were so stupid they didn't realize any group with sufficient firepower could obtain their independence by force, so they didn't even discuss that issue. The DOI covered whether they had a right to be free, not whether they had the power to win their freedom.
And that moral right existed when a revolution was for the purpose of securing the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being denied by the existing government.
A revolution for other purposes and in particular for the purpose of denying those rights to others was by the very terms of DOI merely a wicked exercise of physical force.
The men of 1776 did not launch their revolution to protect and extend slavery. In fact, they pretty universally expected the institution to gradually disappear.
The men of 1860 by their own words seceded specifically to protect their institution of slavery. Which means that by the moral principles expressed in DOI it was unjust.