No it didn't.
"Lincoln said at Springfield on June 18 that the condition of the Negroes in the United States had deteriorated sharply since the era of the fathers, "and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years"
And yet harshness was no real part of the temper of Americans of the South, who differed no whit from Americans of the North. The main excitant impulse was fear, and they wanted to protect the institution, not to penalize the individual. It was because the free Negro menaced the institution, because manumission undermined it, because all self-help systems for the slave corroded It, that pro- slavery men urged new legislation. Their object was not to surround slavery with an atmosphere of terror. It was to shore up an institution built on quick- sand and battered bv all the forces of world sentiment and emergent industrialism.
Ruffin was personally the kindliest of masters. The unhappy fact was that it had become impossible to safeguard slavery without brutal violence to countless individuals; either the institution had to be given up, or the brutality committed.
The legislators of Louisiana and Arkansas, of Alabama and Georgia, with humane men like Ruffin and the Eastern Shore planters of Maryland, had faced this alternative. They had chosen the institution. The Richmond Examiner stated their choice in unflinching language:
It is all an hallucination to suppose that we are ever going to get rid of slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so. It is a thing that we cannot do without;that is righteous, profitable, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern society as inherently, intrinsically, and durably as the white race itself. Southern men should act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant, in letters of fire, that the negro is here, and here forever—is our property, and ours forever—is never to be emancipated—is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days.
This has the ring of the Richmond publicise Fitzhugh, and would have been repudiated by many Southerners. But Jefferson Davis said, July 6, 1859, "There is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery." Senator A. G. ' Brown said September 4, 1858, that he wanted Cuban, Mexican, and Central American territory for slavery; "I would spread the blessings of slavery . . . to the uttermost ends of the earth." Such utterances treated slavery as permanent, and assumed that it must be defended at every point."
-- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton
The slave power COULD have given up slavery -- that was the sense of the time. But they wanted to go backwards, not forwards.
And the war came.
Walt
No it didn't.....WhiskeyPapa
Ummmmm.....Walt.....My point is that fifty-something year old politicians picked a fight and then hundreds of thousands of teenaged boys and twenty-something year old men ended up having to settle the matter on the battlefield.
What do you mean, "No, it didn't"?
No it didn't.
Wlat the fool