Thank you for an intelligent, reasoned and insightful response. I appreciate your taking the time and effort to respond. I can’t stand these ‘’Confederates in the attic’’ who believe in the glory of an evil system of human bondage and economic exploitation romanticized as though it were some kind of Manifest Destiny. I believe without the war slavery would have gone on much longer. Certainly if the South had won it would have continued, after allthat’s what they were fighting for. I’ve a personal stake in this. My great-great-grandfather served as a medical clerk with the Surgeon Generals Office in Washington as part of The Army of The Potomac. And I was born and raised in the northeastern New Jersey town of Kearny. Named after it’s most famous local son Union General Phil Kearny.
Crap. The Union had legal slavery. It was protected by the US Constitution. The Flag of Slavery was the flag of the USA.
Slavery was an *AFTER THE FACT* excuse to justify the bloodshed Lincoln launched to stop European trade from moving to the South and out of the Control of Washington DC.
You keep banging the drum of "evil system of human bondage" because the real facts don't fit your compelling need to justify the invasion and subjugation of people who wanted independence.
You force it to be about slavery, because you dare not accept it was about Independence. It wasn't about slavery when it began. It wasn't about slavery for the entire first year of the conflict.
It didn't become about slavery until January of 1863. It wasn't even about slavery then, because Union slave states were still holding people in "an evil system of human bondage." Except it wasn't so evil when they were doing it. In fact, Union states were holding people in "an evil system of human bondage" for 8 months longer than those evil Southerners.
It was about RAW POWER and CONTROL of money. 200 million dollars in European money that was about to be yanked from New York. That is what the war was about.