The Pope should have kept his nose out of our affairs.
Coming in on the pro slavery side would hardly become
the successor to Peter and representative to our Lord on earth.
you are mistaken, the pope supported the south not lincoln.
Maybe the French should have kept their nose out of our affairs in the Revolution period too?
Just a historical FYI rahbert, the South was not entirely the “pro-slavery side.” The North was pro-slavery too at the time. Some of the northern states were slave states, Lincoln said the war had nothing to do with slavery, and General U.S. Grant said that if he thought the war was about freeing the slaves, he would turn in his sword and fight for the other side. Grant was also a slave owner before, during and after the war.
In contrast, General Robert E. Lee was an abolitionist. Many Southerners shared his views. President Jefferson Davis requested land owners to promise their slaves freedom in exchange for military service. The abolition movement was growing in the South before the war. The 13th Amendment that legally freed the slaves, (not the Emancipation Proclamation), was ratified by many Southern states before many Northern states.
The historical fact is that the Civil War was a conflict between TWO slave nations - the USA and the CSA. Granted, the USA had already banned slavery in some states, but the same movement was growing in some CSA states as well. Historical revisionists have spent a little over 100 years trying to paint the Civil War as some idealistic holy crusade against the injustice of slavery. That image doesn’t hold up to the historical facts. The Civil War was mainly about money, particularly taxes and resources. What the South did was no different than what the Founding Fathers did during the American Revolution. Both were acts of rebellion and armed insurrection. Both attempted to establish free and independent nations. Both were dominated by slave economies. The only difference between them is this. In the American Revolution the rebels won. In the American Civil War they didn’t.
Lord John Acton, one of the most liberal Catholics in Europe was sympathetic to the Confederacy, as was much of the aristocracy of England and Europe. The sympathy was not because of any sympathy for slavery but because Lincoln was trying to hold the country together by force of arms and often in violation of the law of nations. When in 1830, the Belgians seceded from the kingdom of the Netherlands, the matter was settled by international diplomatic negotiation. A treaty was signed with Prussia as one of the signators and England another, guaranting the borders of Belgium. Ironically, in 1914, the German invasion of Belgium was one reason why England went to war with Germany. One reason why Europe did not take more effectice action against the United States, by say recognizing the Confederacy, was that Bismarck, the German chancellor, was forcibly uniting the German states under Prussian rule by a plocy of “blood and Iron,” which is what Lincolns was doing in America. In the South, the Civil War was long called the War for Southern Independence, and whatever moral standing Lincoln acquired for ending slavery, he lost by his policy of agression. One has to see things not as we know them but in the light of the situation in the 1860s. Liberal opinion was divided, and ironically, so was “conservative.” Bismarck disliked Lincoln for his radical notions of democracy.