The last stanza includes this statement: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
This lends credence to the off-heard claim that the north was “fighting to free the slaves.”
Here's the problem with that: the US constitution enshrined slavery when the document was ratified by the slave states, and erstwhile slave states, of New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland.
I think there were others. Yes, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia also voted to include slavery in the Constitution.
If anyone took up the bayonet to overthrow slavery, they were taking up arms to overthrow the US constitution. There is a word for that.
Too bad the north didn't overthrow slavery peacefully with a constitutional amendment. Before the war. It would have avoided some hard feelings. And over a half-million dead.
The US Constitution doesn’t “enshrine” slavery. The word isn’t even mentioned, except in their emancipation.
Very good historical point. The North broke the Constitutional agreement.
Slavery was certainly one of the bones of contention that started the civil war. If it was not the central mission at the beginning of the war, the North certainly came to demand it by war’s end.
A rather idiotic suggestion, given the times. There were 15 slave states. If they had not ratified it would have taken 31 states voting to ratify. Do the math.
Far from "enshrining" slavery, the Constitution recognized it could be controlled or outlawed by Federal Government (see Article 1 Section 9).
jeffersondem: "If anyone took up the bayonet to overthrow slavery, they were taking up arms to overthrow the US constitution.
There is a word for that."
"Rebellion" describes the Confederacy's war on the United States, so the United States in 1861 did not "take up the bayonet to overthrow slavery," but to preserve the Union against rebellion.
At the same time, however, "Contraband of war" was acknowledged & practiced by all.
For example, Confederate armies in Union states grabbed any freed-blacks they could as "contraband" for return & sale as slaves.
By contrast, Northern armies declared as "contraband" any fugitive slaves who fled into their lines, then hired them to serve the Union cause.
That was as much as the Union could constitutionally do before passing the 13th amendment in 1865.
By early 1865 everyone North & South understood that the price for Confederates losing the war would be abolition.
The only question at the Hampton Roads conference (February 1865) was whether slave-holders would be compensated or not.
Confederates chose "not".
I saw awhile back where the most definitive and accurate number produced so far places the casualties at 750,000 dead as a direct result of the war.
I've also seen it asserted that an additional 2 million Southerners subsequently died from starvation, disease, and exposure as an indirect consequence of the war.