"The North" never claimed to be "out to free the slaves," at least not in the beginning.
In the beginning, for the North it was all about preserving the Union.
But for the South it was all about protecting slavery, period.
And not against an actual threat from the North, mind you, but rather against a perceived potential threat represented by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln.
An election which, imho, the South engineered!
Yes, Southern secessionists wanted Lincoln elected, so they'd have an excuse to secede.
That's why they split up the Democrat party, dividing their votes, thus giving minority Republicans enough to win.
Smokin' Joe: "The whole moral high ground seeps into the morass of deceit and subsequent villification of entire peoples while stealing their birthright in the name of Manifest Destiny."
Don't know what you are talking about, sounds like a bad dream to me.
The facts are, the South seceded and fought to protect slavery.
The North fought first to preserve the Union, then only later to abolish slavery. Don't know what "vilification" or "deceit" you mean, or how "Manifest Destiny" might fit into this.
Smokin' Joe: "It cost 600,000 lives and uncountable treasure to end an institution which would have, for the most art, died a natural death due to changing economic paradigms."
I don't agree. In a free market, all the supposed "economic disadvantages of slavery" are accounted for in, and adjusted through, the purchase price of slaves.
And my understanding is that in 1860, prices for slaves had never been higher.
That has to mean slaves were hugely in demand, to the point of actual shortages.
Now let us suppose that 20 or 40 years later farming machines begin to come along which increase worker productivity.
Do these machines not also make slaves more productive?
And even if there is suddenly a "surplus" of slaves, doesn't that only make the market price of a slave cheaper, thus easier for more whites to afford?
So, why would any white southerner want to give up slavery if prices for slaves were suddenly so cheap?
How refreshing. After dozens of threads where people argue that the North was freeing the slaves, rather than maintaining an economic stranglehold on the South through the preservation of the Union, we approach the truth.
Considering Calhoun was decrying the tarrif structure imposed to the disadvantage of the South in the 1820s, I think it is really safe to say the threat of forced manumission was seen as an economic sanction. Nothing will cause a people to cling to any institution so much as the threat of destroying it by force, when they themselves might have abolished it in good time. You claim there would have been no willing abolition in the south, but, what of the North? Industrialization and the relative economy of cheap immigrant labor over slave ownership, as well as the incessant cultural change brought by the drum of abolition were indeed taking their toll on the institution. That the South would not have followed the same course is a stretch. The South was industrializing, albeit at a slower rate than the North which had a head start. That the South was burned back into a largely agrarian economy was no accident, the wealthy and powerful of the North remained so, and had the upper hand in the post war development of the rail and steel industries.
The whole moral high ground seeps into the morass of deceit and subsequent villification of entire peoples while stealing their birthright in the name of Manifest Destiny."
Don't know what you are talking about, sounds like a bad dream to me.
For millions, including my most of my wife's ancestors, it was. It was the generally the period just after the War Between the States, unless of course, you were from one of the Eastern Tribes, where it came earlier, marked by treaties which were subsequently violated, and the theft of millions of acres of land by deceit or force, with the resources on and under them. This included the forcible relocation of vast numbers of people in forced marches to areas which amounted to camps, the sequestering of children into State-run schools with limited or no family contact, forbidden even to speak their own language.