The Republicans were the "progressives" in 1860. They were big city tax and spend liberals who wanted power so they could funnel money into their crony capitalist allies.
They didn't actually care about slavery, they just used it as a tool to get votes. What they cared about is taxing the South at 73% of total Federal revenues and spending the money on projects that benefited themselves and their crony friends later known as "Robber Barons."
They lost the war and they lost their criminal ownership of slaves.
It was completely legal under the laws of the United States to own slaves at that time.
Face it. Lincoln freed the slaves. Do you need to read his writings to understand it was a life mission for him?
I've read quite a bit of his writings. He was an excellent writer, and I do not doubt that he disapproved of slavery, but he was not as committed to it's eradication as people have been led to believe. One does not urge passage of the Corwin amendment and claim that slavery was an imperative moral issue.
Abolition of slavery was a tool that Lincoln used, but one which he had never intended to use when the war was launched against the South.
After it had become so bitter, Lincoln decided it was better to break their economy so as to keep them from ever recovering enough power to challenge Washington DC and it's New York Crony Robber Barons, again.
If he was doing it out of concern for the slaves, he would have done it in April of 1861. The fact that it took to 1863 to issue a decree to free some of the slaves in areas of the country he did not control, shows that it was a tactical move, not a moral move.
Even his own Secretary of State (William H. Seward) was so disgusted with his hypocrisy that he said:
"We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
If the war was about slavery, they could have started abolition with Maryland and Delaware. The fact that they tolerated slavery in the North all through the war demonstrates they weren't all that concerned with slavery.
they could have started abolition with Maryland and Delaware.
What Constitutional authority would have allowed Lincoln to abolish slavery in Maryland and Delaware?
You’re forgetting that all politics is local, and that politics is the art of the possible. He needed the border states, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, to be reassured that he did not have designs on their human chattels, or they would have either seceded from the Union or at least voted him out of power in Congress, and the midwestern farm belt and the frontiers were not particularly gung ho for abolishing slavery, either. He waited until the Union had scored at least one decisive victory, at Antietam, to avoid the criticism that he was fomenting domestic rebellion as a tactic to win a war that he could not prevail on through honorable means, as the British had done during the Revolutionary War. But even after Antietam, his party lost the mid-terms election, at least partly as an angry reaction to the Proclamation. But he announced the Proclamation to his cabinet as a Divinely ordained move, which they, being practical men, talked him into saving until a union victory for the above reasons. Lincoln himself was sincerely committed to abolishing slavery, but acutely aware that he could not just unilaterally impose that desire on the entire country, with political and regional realities being what they were. So whatever move he made was oriented towards limiting and curtailing slavery as much as the body politic would tolerate.
How much of what Lincoln faced in his day was a swamp, much the same as the one Trump is dealing with today?
Was it possible to just upend the institution of slavery in a matter of days or weeks?
Did Lincoln have to posture in order to build his plan?
Are you starting to understand now?