Nice side step of my analogy with irrelevant arguments. Nowhere did I say the north was not racist. Most people in America were. However if we were to quantify the morality of the population on the subject of slavery in this period most peoples moral compass would say that the abolitionist who advocated total equality between the races were most morally correct( let’s mark that as our top of the scale, say a ten).
Lincoln with his often expressed belief that all men everywhere should be free would be a 7-8.
And the confederates/slave owners who ran the confederacy and believed that blacks were ordained by God to be slaves would be a 1. Or most morally wrong.
If racism really bother you that much you must really hate the leaders of the confederacy.
Side step? You wrote,
"However the southern states did secede to protect slavery. Why? Because the Republican Party was the Pro-freedom party, just as they are the pro-life party nowadays."
That statement certainly appears to be equating the Republican Party with the north. Besides, not all slave states seceded, and it is doubtful that even a majority of the Republican Party was pro-freedom.
You also wrote,
"The southern Democrats were the party of anti-freedom, just as democrats are the party of anti-life now."
That is also a mischaracterization. Many, and possibly even a majority of, Republicans were "anti-freedom" for non-whites. This is typical of what is found in the literature:
"The Republican party made careful efforts to dissociate itself from public identification with the abolitionists and their doctrines. During the campaign Republicans frequently declared themselves the true "white man's party." Horace Greeley proclaimed that the Republican party "contemplates PRIMARILY the interest of Free White Labor, for which it struggles to secure the unoccupied territory of the Union." Democratic orators charged that Republicans intended to abolish slavery as soon as they had a chance. "That is not so," roared Greeley. "Never on earth did the Republican Party propose to abolish Slavery…. Its object with respect to Slavery is simply, nakedly, avowedly, its restriction to the existing states."
"Little wonder that abolitionists were sometimes disgusted with Republicans. "The Republican party means to do nothing, can do nothing, for the abolition of slavery in the slave states," said Garrison. "The Republican party stands on a level with the Fugitive Slave law." Josephine Griffing complained that Republican leaders were covertly trying to discourage abolitionists from holding meetings during the campaign, for they feared such meetings might jeopardize Republican success. "Their great effort," wrote Mrs. Griffing, "is to convince the public mind that they are not Abolitionists, and the Abolitionists, that they hate slavery as much as they do. 'For by their sorceries were all nations deceived.'"
[James M. McPherson, "The Struggle For Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction." Princeton University Press, 2014, pp.35-36]
Many Republicans, including many abolitionists, were seeking a white-only America. Many of those that supported freedom for the slaves, wanted that new-found freedom to be exercised somewhere else, and not in their backyards – not in this nation. Even their efforts to keep slavery out of the new territories were designed to create a white-only culture.
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "Most people in America were. However if we were to quantify the morality of the population on the subject of slavery in this period most peoples moral compass would say that the abolitionist who advocated total equality between the races were most morally correct( let’s mark that as our top of the scale, say a ten)."
True, but they were a small minority. For example, in the 1844 Election, won by Polk, the abolition party (the Liberty Party,) with James Birney at the top, won less than 3% of the vote.
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "Lincoln with his often expressed belief that all men everywhere should be free would be a 7-8."
Lincoln was one of many republicans who sometimes claimed that slaves should be freed; but, if so, not in this nation.
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "And the confederates/slave owners who ran the confederacy and believed that blacks were ordained by God to be slaves would be a 1. Or most morally wrong."
Frankly, your incessant virtue-signaling is annoying. Perhaps this will help knock you off your pedestal:
"When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten. In the happy contemplation of the Treasury of Virtue it is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the Union. It is forgotten that in July, 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the War was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state but only to maintain the Union. The War, in the words of the House resolution, should cease "as soon as these objects are accomplished." It is forgotten that the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on September 23, 1862, was limited and provisional: slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states and only if they did not return to the Union before the first of the next January. It is forgotten that the Proclamation was widely disapproved and even contributed to the serious setbacks to Republican candidates for office in the subsequent election. It is forgotten that, as Lincoln himself freely admitted, the Proclamation itself was of doubtful constitutional warrant and was forced by circumstances; that only after a bitter and prolonged struggle in Congress was the Thirteenth Amendment sent, as late as January, 1865, to the states for ratification; and that all of Lincoln's genius as a horse trader (here the deal was Federal patronage swapped for Democratic votes) was needed to get Nevada admitted to statehood, with its guaranteed support of the Amendment. It is forgotten that even after the Fourteenth Amendment, not only Southern states, but most Northern ones, refused to adopt Negro suffrage, and that Connecticut had formally rejected it as late as July, 1865. It is forgotten that it was not until 1870 that the Negro finally won his vote—or rather, that very different thing, the right to vote.
"It is forgotten that Sherman, and not only Sherman, was violently opposed to arming Negroes against white troops. It is forgotten that, as Bell Irvin Wiley has amply documented in The Life of Billy Yank, racism was all too common in the liberating army. It is forgotten that only the failure of Northern volunteering overcame the powerful prejudice against accepting Negro troops, and allowed "Sambo 's Right to be Kilt"—as the title of a contemporary song had it.
"It is forgotten that racism and Abolitionism might, and often did, go hand in hand. This was true even in the most instructed circles, and so one is scarcely surprised to find James T. Ayers, a clergyman and a committed Abolitionist acting as recruiting officer for Negro troops, confiding to his diary his fear that freed Negroes would push North and "soon they will be in every whole and Corner, and the Bucks will be wanting to galant our Daughters Round." It is forgotten that Lincoln, at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858, formally affirmed: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." And it is forgotten that as late as 1862 he said to Negro leaders visiting the White House: "Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.... It is better for us both to be separated."
"It is forgotten, in fact, that history is history.
"Despite all this, the War appears, according to the doctrine of the Treasury of Virtue, as a consciously undertaken crusade so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in Heaven, like the deeds of the saints, to take care of all small failings and oversights of the descendants of the crusaders, certainly unto the present generation. From the start America had had adequate baggage of self-righteousness and phariseeism, but with the Civil War came grace abounding, for the least of sinners.
"The crusaders themselves, back from the wars, seemed to feel that they had finished the work of virtue. Their efforts had, indeed, been almost superhuman, but they themselves were, after all, human. "God has given us the Union, let us enjoy it," they said, in a paraphrase of the first Medici pope entering upon his pontificate. Men turned their minds outward, for external victory always seems to signify for the victor that he need spend no more effort on any merely internal struggle. Few shared the moral qualms expressed by Brooks Adams in an oration pronounced at Taunton, Massachusetts, on the great centennial of July 4, 1876. He demanded: "Can we look over the United States and honestly tell ourselves that all things are well within us?" And he answered: "We cannot conceal from ourselves that all things are not well."
"Brooks Adams, with his critical, unoptimistic mind, could not conceal it from himself, but many could; and a price was paid for the self-delusion. As Kenneth Stampp, an eminent Northern historian and the author of a corrosive interpretation of slavery, puts it: "The Yankees went to war animated by the highest ideals of the nineteenth-century middle classes.... But what the Yankees achieved—for their generation at least—was a triumph not of middle-class ideals but of middle-class vices. The most striking products of their crusade were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South. Among the masses of Americans there were no victors, only the vanquished." And Samuel Eliot Morison has written of his own section. New England: "In the generation to come that region would no longer furnish the nation with teachers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians, sired by abolition out of profiteering."
[Robert Penn Warren, "The Legacy of the Civil War." Harvard University Press, 1961, pp.60-66]
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "If racism really bother you that much you must really hate the leaders of the confederacy."
If racism bothered you, you would not be extolling the virtues of Lincoln and the Civil War-era Republican Party.
Mr. Kalamata