If the Civil War was about states’ rights, why did the south rebuff Lincoln’s offer of a Constitutional amendment that would protect slavery in slave states? Up to that point, the slave-holding states had gotten almost everything they wanted from federal policy (Dredd Scott, Fugitive Slave Act, etc). Heck, Jeff Davis’s own VP said the Confederacy exists to permanently maintain the legal distinction between white and balck, and to defend the institution of slavery. Jeff Davis’ answer to the Emancipation Proclamation was to declare that all free blacks in the South and in northern areas conquered by the grays would now become permanent slaves.
Southern states had enacted censorship laws against abolition writings, and even included conscription of free white men against their will to form posses to search for escaped slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act made this federal policy for all states, slave and free, an obvious violation of states’ rights that no Confederate ever complained about. Dredd Scott, made by a southern SC Chief Justice, continued the South’s assault on federalism.
The Southern cause was never about freedom, either for blacks or whites. It was always about protecting the interests of a small, wealthy, planter aristocracy to the detriment of everyone else. That’s why WV split off from Virginia.
What has happened now is that the South lived under the yoke of Democrat tyranny and oppression for 150 years, and then finally woke up to what was going on and left the Democrats.
If the Civil War was about abolition, why did Lincoln campaign on shipping all Negros to another country?
President Abraham Lincoln was always against slavery on moral grounds. However, he was not an admirer of the black man, did not believe blacks should be granted the rights of American citizens, and did not wish that they be a part of American society. He believed that all blacks should be removed from the United States and resettled in some other country.
Lincoln on slavery: “The monstrous injustice of slavery... deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites- causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
Lincoln on Southerners: “If slavery did not exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did not now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”
Lincoln on freed slaves: “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.”
Lincoln on social equality: “What then? Free them, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people on.” “What then? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feeling will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not... A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.”
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation actually freed no one. He did not free any slaves in areas of the country controlled by the federal government. He freed only slaves in areas in rebellion, precisely where he had no control.
The Southern cause was never about freedom, either for blacks or whites. It was always about protecting the interests of a small, wealthy, planter aristocracy to the detriment of everyone else. That’s why WV split off from Virginia.”
Most asinine analysis possible. There was nothing that propelled the “winners” but conscripts, money and fear. The south rode for the planters? You have to be joking. You have turned true history on its head and spanked it.