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It is a disgusting, putrid and intolerable thought that people can be held as property! Luckily for us, their god given freedom vindicated by Lincoln and the multitude of warriors sacrificing their lives to defeat the evil slaveholders of the south. Property, indeed! Idiot.

And yet the prophets of Israel, beloved of God, told the children of Israel how God wanted them to treat their slaves.

Sorry, but you are thoroughly confuted, and the moral presumption of Yankee Congregationalist ministers in creating a new sin of "slave-owning" is disrobed and exposed as a sin of their own: seating themselves on God's own throne, and pretending to hand down judgments -- and death -- to their neighbors whom they disapproved.

Yankee animus against Carolinians went back to the 17th century and was already frosty by the 1730's, and I have a quote to prove it. The guts of it was, the Yankees were bluenosed Calvinists and the Carolinians were much more prosperous and not Calvinists and not bluenoses. They lived well and enjoyed life, they were prosperous and showed off their prosperity. Yankees hated that -- and it was none of their damned business in the first place.

Your moral judgment is misplaced. So stick it someplace more appropriate.

As for the Yankee ministers, their moral arraunt wound up getting almost 1,000,000 American fellow-citizens killed. So much for their high horse.

Slavery passed from the world in every civilized country but ours -- even in Russia, land of the czars and boyars -- without a civil war. So riddle me this, how did other countries manage to abolish slavery without killing a million people?

More to the point, if the Civil War was about slavery, why couldn't we abolish it peacefully? Or was it about killing people in the first place, and slavery was just a moral peg? What British screenwriters and playwrights used to call a "McGuffin" -- a pretext, an occasion, an idea not manifested, a conceit?

People who rant against the South for having had slavery 200 years ago, have an awful lot to answer for themselves, and you will find on this board plenty of people equipped to point that out to you.

And yet the prophets of Israel, beloved of God, told the children of Israel how God wanted them to treat their slaves.

I'm repeating myself, but Christians and Jews used to only get their haircuts a certain way, and not mix fabrics, used to not get divorced, used to not touch or eat pork and shellfish, used to not mix seeds in a field, used to not get tattoos, used to not wear gold, etc. The Old Testament, and even New Testament, is full of all kinds of things that Christians would laugh at these days.

Those things are all foolish in our eyes now, except for a few small Christian and Jewish groups who follow certain of those practices, just as slavery came to be seen as wrong by more and more people.

Yankee animus against Carolinians went back to the 17th century and was already frosty by the 1730's, and I have a quote to prove it.

I'll do you one better than a simple quote and point out that this movement was an extension of what was happening in England. Abolition really gained steam with Christian groups in England in the 1600s, and that movement plus the courts led to the abolition of slavery in England proper in the 1770s. It was carried over here with immigrants in the 1600s and 1700s.

When the Somersett Case was decided in England in the 1770s that initially freed the slaves in England, the founding fathers of this country were very much aware of it. There were even slaves trying to use the Somersett Case in court in Massachusetts to obtain their freedom.

In some ways, the Somersett Case helped contribute to the American Revolution. Some in the Southern colonies were very scared that some form of the Somersett Case would be applied to British colonies, thereby freeing their slaves, and some in the Northern colonies were angry that the Somersett Case wasn't being applied to British colonies and they wanted to speed things up.

Those in the South who were scared the Somersett case or other related cases would have been eventually applied to the American colonies had their fears confirmed when Britain abolished slavery throughout all of its colonies in the early 1830s.

More to the point, if the Civil War was about slavery, why couldn't we abolish it peacefully?

Money. Money can corrupt, and too many rich Democrats in the South were not going to give up their money makers. Their influence on matters of politics was great, hence slavery featuring so prominently in the declarations of secessions in several of the states. They took it one step further by ensuring that Congress could not remove their right to own slaves by enshrining it in the Confederate Constituation

The vast majority of Southerners didn't own slaves, and I would go so far as to say that many in the South felt it was wrong. Unfortunately for them, they were not the ones running their states.