Imagine a group of states seceding over the right to commit infanticide (not merely the abortion of a few-day old life) and then years later people trying to distract by saying, “well, it wasn’t moral but the Union had no right to go to war to prevent them from continuing (and possibly expanding to more territory) that practice!”
Some of the same people who are die-hard pro-lifers (who often compare themselves to abolitionists, by the way) would never countenance such legal quibbling in the face enormity.
But to make themselves feel better, here are some revisionists. They’re everywhere, it’s not just this country.
I was in a flame war (I suppose) over my calling Jesse James a thug and murderer. Perhaps he WAS nice to his family and would have eventually left that life of crime and become a productive citizen but we don’t judge people by how well they adapt after being an unrepentant criminal and killer. His apologists were so wrapped up in the FEELING his legend created that they would justify his robberies (”oh, he was robbing trains and you know the rail companies were taking people’s land”) and his killings too!
It was odd. I never thought a Confederate dead-ender who killed innocent people and robbed them (not just banks or trains) would be defended into the 21st century. All because they did not want that legend tarnished because of some personal significance it had for them. They couldn’t tolerate defending an actual cold-blooded killer and robber so they invented reasons for it to salve their conscience.
Kinda like what we have on these threads (other than people who simply state their belief that secession should have been allowed and slavery isolated and cut off.) Considering what happened in the years after Reconstruction and into the SIXTIES, is it really that off to assume that the South would have maintained slavery into the 1900s? It went to 1889 or so in Brazil. It still exists in some places, so why would it not have continued in the South for another half-century or more?
The original "slavery will wither" argument was based on an appeal to the supposed uneconomic aspects of slavery. However, the expansion of the Southern cotton economy was spurred by the invention of the cotton gin -- and slavery provided the free human labor needed to supply the gins.
And, given that the pre-eminent controversy leading up to the Civil War had to do with the expansion of slavery, it doesn't really make much sense to argue on a basis of its withering.
It may be argued from our post-industrial perspective that later technological gains would have obviated the need for human labor, but it is not a particularly compelling argument if seen from the viewpoint of those who were viewing slavery at first hand, in a time when human labor was the paramount source of production, and when the expansion of slavery was the political issue of the day.
And, moreover, one can easily imagine an industrialized South making use of slave labor in more industrial tasks, as well as continuing their agricultural work. There is little reason to suppose that slavery would have withered at all, but for the moral crusade to end it, and the war that eventually carried the point.
“Imagine a group of states seceding over the right to commit infanticide (not merely the abortion of a few-day old life) and then years later people trying to distract by saying, ‘well, it wasn’t moral but the Union had no right to go to war to prevent them from continuing (and possibly expanding to more territory) that practice!’”
Your argument would be much stronger if Lincoln went to war to end slavery. We all know he didn’t. That was the end result, but the primary motivation was to save the Union. I am almost certain that without his deeply-held opinion that defending the Constitution meant keeping the Union exactly as it was, he never would have freed the slaves. He simply wasn’t an abolitionist until well into the way. The horrors therein convinced him that it needed a greater cause than his original cause, i.e. Union. Which says something about his original cause.