No, I leave that to you.
Even so, August 22, is well after Irvin McDowell set out for Richmond with orders to stop Independence, not slavery.
Yes, by more than a year.
You can't make "Abolition of Slavery" a reason for going to war, after the fact.
Nor have I ever said it was. Slavery was the Southern motivation for their war. It was not the Northern one.
If you say that Lincoln was writing that he would free none of the slaves at the same time he was sending around drafts of the emancipation proclamation, it certainly sounds like double dealing to me.
It was not the Northern one.
And yet discussions of the civil war always end up with justifying it because of the abolition of slavery, when even you admit that this was not the aim of the war.
Suppressing Southern Independence was the aim of the war, and Abolishing slavery was an ex post fact addendum.