[Uncle Sham]

"And the North's view was that ultimately it was primarily the South's responsibility to reform and find ways to accommodate and freely and productively employ her liberated slaves."

What to do with freed former slaves was indeed a dividing issue as the north tried to install policies that would keep them in the south. The north did not want blacks moving north and taking their jobs nor did they want blacks living among them. They were more racist than the south in this regard. The south did not wish to be used in this manner nor should they have.

Both sides knew the problems involved with freeing the slaves and one side, the north, wanted to keep those problems in the south. The north had become rich running the slave trade and using tariffs and dock fees, etc. to chisel out 40 cents out of every dollar earned by the south. They made almost as much profit off of slavery without the headaches of having slaves. These are the kind, benevolent folks who won the war and have been urinating on the U.S. Constitution ever since.

[Rockingham]

Rarely does a free people want wide-scale disruption of their way of life, which is why the North resisted the mass migration of freed slaves. And most freed slaves preferred to remain among family and friends in the region whose geography, climate, and culture they knew. What was so bad about Reconstruction's goal of assuring that freed slaves were permitted to live in te South and treated fairly as citizens in full?

Yet, even as the North did not want a mass migration of freed slaves, the North long had a substantial and prosperous population of free Blacks before the Civil War, sometimes with remarkable biographies impossible for free Blacks in the Old South.

There are, for example, Pierre Toussaint, a former Haitian slave. A hairdresser in New York, his talent and good spirit made him prosperous and his devout Catholic faith led him to a life of virtue and generosity. He is now honored as Venerable and on the path to full sainthood. Pierre Toussaint's remains lie in the crypt below the main altar of Saint Patricks, the first layman interred there.

Or consider Solomon Northup, a free black from Maryland who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Eventually, after twelve years, he was able to get a letter to his family. They mobilized Maryland's officials on his behalf, and Louisiana authorities helped by issuing writs and sending deputies to rescue Northup. He returned home and wrote a remarkable and lucid account of his experience.

Instead of secession and a civil war, the South ought to have remained in the Union and sought a national plan for gradual, compensated emancipation. Out of pride and arrogance though, the South rejected the Constitution because Lincoln was elected with a platform that would have mildly limited the expansion and enforcement of slavery.

In defeat, the South's partisans spun an elaborate false tale of the South as a victm of unconstitutional machinations. Go back and read the speeches and articles of secession by the Southern states. They make quite clear that secession and the civil war were about keeping slavery without compromise and little else.