the FACTS are that FEW people north or south cared a damn about the plight odf the slaves. almost NOBODY would have fought one skirmish over slavery, much less a major war.
saying that the war was about slavery is a LIE, nothing more & nothing less.
free dixie,sw
Aren't you going to cite that dead professor who told you that way back when? Please explain 250,000 members of the American Anti-Slavery Society by 1838. Did none of them actually care about the plight of slaves. And if that was the case, why was the south so afraid of them?
Concerning this point, Professor Potter wrote:
"One other belief shared by men of the South in 1860 was especially important because they felt just uncertain and insecure enough about it to be almost obsessively insistent and aggressive in asserting it. This was the doctrine of the inherent superiority of whites over Negroes. The idea was not distinctively southern, but it did have a distinctive significance in the South, for it served to rationalize slavery and also to unite slaveholders with nonslaveholders in defense of the institution as a system, primarily, of racial subordination, in which all members of the dominant race had the same stake.
"The racial prejudice against Negroes cannot, of course, be dismissed as nothing but a rationalization to justify subordination of the blacks, for in fact it was in part just such prejudice which had made blacks and Indians subject to enslavement, while servants of other races were not.... "Doctrines of race not only served to minimize the potentially serious economic divisions between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, but also furnished southerners with a way to avoid confronting an intolerable paradox: That they were committed to human equality in principle but to human servitude in practice. The paradox was a genuine one, not a case of hypocrisy, for the southerners were more prone to accept social hierarchy than men in other regions, still they responded very positively to the ideal of equality as exemplified by Jefferson of Virginia and Jackson of Tennessee.... [T]his only made the paradox more glaringly evident, and no doubt it was partly because of the psychological stress arising from their awareness of the paradox that southern leaders of the late 18th and early 19th centuries ... acceded to the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territories in 1787 and to the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808....
"By the 1830's, however, this notion had begun to lose its plausibility, fro even the most self-deceiving of wishful thinkers could not completely ignore the changes under way. In the lower South the great cotton boom was extending slavery westward across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and into Arkansas and Missouri. Texas was set up as an independent slaveholding republic. The traffic in slave between the new states and the older centers of slavery was probably greater in magnitude than the traffic from Africa to the thirteen colonies ever had been."
The Impending Crsis, pg 458-460.