If it hadn’t been for his passing, it wouldn’t have been ratified. If it hadn’t been for the disenfranchisement of southerners who took up arms, it also wouldn’t have passed. Then it would have been down to the usual political wrangling, and with or without his signature, the same conflicting factions would have made sure it went nowhere.
The Civil War wasn’t fought on purely altruistic grounds on the one hand, nor purely to preserve slavery on the other. Nobody fights a war over a single issue. There are always ulterior motives, corruption and lies. Somebody gets rich off the bloodshed, and afterwards the victor paints an altruistic face on what was really an ugly business. But slavery was definitely at or near the heart of all the commercial interests that lead to war, and those interests were erased by the ruin that Sherman wrought marching through the South, burning and looting. No more king cotton or warehouse act politics, and no more slavery, either.
For an interesting read, I’d suggest Lin Yutang’s A Moment In Peking, the history of an upper-class Beijing family From the Boxer’s Rebellion through WW II, especially the passages where he describes the conditions leading to war with Japan.
That is a mouthful. I rue the day of his untimely demise. His assassin thought the South would rejoice and welcome him as a hero. Instead, he was hunted down like the dirty rotten scoundrel he was, with little if any Southern comfort. Worse yet, the North came down twice as hard on the South due to the actions of that idiot.
The first words spoken, to break the silence in the room where Lincoln gave his last breath, with his Cabinet crowded around his deathbed, were, “Now he belongs to the ages”.
I like to think that the South would have been treated in a kinder, more gentle manner, “to bind up the wounds”, etc. I also like to think that there would be no talk of “reparation” today if Lincoln had been able to complete his task. But, what I might speculate is neither here nor there.
So much that followed had as much to do with his untimely demise than what he had done up to that point. Alas, “If it hadn’t been for his passing.....”
And to think, his assassin began to hatch his plot after hearing Lincoln give a speech in which he spoke of giving the freed slaves the right to vote.
Otherwise, I enjoyed your post. You say a lot. The Civil War was not begun, ostensibly, over a single cause. The Northern cause was to preserve the Union and the Southern cause was to preserve the Confederacy. But the South doubled down and made Slavery their cornerstone. So......