My response interspersed below at *
1. The quality of a slave’s life is a side issue used by apologetics. Slavery is wrong. The quality of life that they had previously is inconsequential.
* You obviously missed my assertion that slavery is wrong. I think the word you are looking for is “irrelevant”, not “inconsequential”. The relevance was that the South has been demonized for the institution of slavery, in a very cruel period of time where the North was much more brutal, Europe was worse, and these were the “civilized” nations.
2. If slavery was not a key issue, why is it mentioned in the documents legally pronouncing the secession, and why did Lincoln run on an abolitionist platform? Indeed, the entire purpose of the Republican party at its inception was to bring about an abolitionist country. Attention, scholarly and relevant quote ahead:
* Where did the war start? Ft Sumter. Why were shots fired? It had nothing to do with slaves. Lincoln did NOT support abolition. While emotions were high about slavery & it waqs mentioned in the articles of secession, the CAUSE was tariffs.
On May 26, 1860, one of the Republican party’s leading orators, Carl Schurz of Wisconsin, addressed a Milwaukee audience which had gathered to endorse the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. “The Re publicans,” Schurz declared, “stand before the country, not only as the anti-slavery party, but emphatically as the party of free labor.” Two weeks later, Richard Yates, the gubernatorial candidate in Illinois, spoke at a similar rally in Springfield. “The great idea and basis of the Republican party, as I understand it,” he proclaimed, “is free labor. . . . To make labor honorable is the object and aim of the Republican party.”1 Such statements, which were reiterated countless times by Republican orators in the 1850’s, were more than mere election-year appeals for the votes of laboring men. For the concept of “free labor” lay at the heart of the Republican ideology, and expressed a coherent social outlook, a model of the good society. Political anti-slavery was not merely a negative doctrine, an attack on southern slavery and the society built upon it; it was an affirmation of the superiority of the social system of the North—a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man.
* So?