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
But I will leave you with some quotes from on of the greatest president of this country. And some quotes from a traitor who was captured while fleeing in woman's clothing. However, I fear you are to blind to see the moral difference between the two.
Or perhaps you agree with Davis? I learned a different lesson in my 20+ years in the military. I served alongside people of all races and found some to be good, some to be average, and some to be bad. We were instructed at boot camp that it didn't matter if we were lite green or dark green, we were all green and all Marines.
Lincoln’s comments on slavery
"I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, "Speech at Chicago, Illinois" (July 10, 1858), p. 492.
"In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.... ....I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ``all men are created equal.'' We now practically read it ``all men are created equal, except negroes.'' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ``all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy." Abraham Lincoln - Letter to Joshua F. Speed, 1855
"I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, "Speech at Peoria, Illinois" (October 16, 1854), p. 255.
"What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle - the sheet anchor of American republicanism." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, "Speech at Peoria, Illinois" (October 16, 1854), p. 266.
"Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature---opposition to it, is [in?] his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri compromise---repeal all compromises---repeal the declaration of independence---repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.... ...The doctrine of self government is right---absolutely and eternally right---but it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government---that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another."
Abraham Lincoln - Peoria Speech, 1854
"This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."
---Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Henry L. Pierce, 1859
Jefferson Davis quotes on slavery.
"African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing." ~Davis
"My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses...We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude...You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be." ~Davis
"It [slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts...Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God - let him go to the Bible...I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation...Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments - in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized, sanctioned everywhere.". ~Davis