Yeah, that's what I thought. As a fly goes straight for a pile of sh*t, so too do people immediately fly right to the slavery issue so they can "virtue signal" to the rest of us how much they are against it. That is not the point here.
Lost in all this is the fact that the Government was used as a weapon to force morality on people who did not want it, same as they are doing today at the behest of every progressive movement.
"There is too much sugar in people's drinks! Fine them or prohibit such drinks!
"Everyone should be forced to accept the goodness of "Gayness" so bake that cake or we will fine you by law!"
"Everyone should cut back their carbon footprint, to save planet earth, and if you don't do so, you need to be fined!"
"Vegetarian meals for the school kids!"
"Calling a transgender by other than their preferred pronoun constitutes a hate crime. We should put people in prison for hate crimes."
And so on. The notion that people who have morality different than that which is approved by liberal/progressives began with the Civil War. In fact, the aftermath of it was known as "the progressive era" and featured such ideas as banning alcohol, banning child labor, pushing for birth control and empowering women.
Now you may crow to the heavens how much you agree with what the "progressives" did regarding slavery, but the point remains that this entire business of using the government to force others to conform to liberal preferences, began with the Civil War.
And so did leviathan government power. Of course the age of corruption followed the Civil War as well.
The business of using government to force others to conform began well before the Civil War - government was used by one group of slaveholders to reinforce their power over the slaves, even over other slaveholders, to prevent them from teaching slaves to read.
See : http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/education/docs1.html
This wasn’t merely denying slaves education, just as Democrats do today to keep blacks on the plantation...it of course also had the effect of denying some slaves religious liberty by barring them from reading the full Bible for themselves, unfiltered.
What is more, they also brought on the Civil War by imposing their immorality on non slave holders in states to the north, forcing them and their officials to catch and return escaped slaves to their masters.
And all this before Lincoln.