No. Someone of moral character would put them in the ground.
We're Republicans. We believe in liberty. Our whole party was founded with the explicit purpose to do away with slavery. They declared their purpose and in a decade slavery was gone. The south had the chance to do it the easy way, or the hard way. They chose wrong.
The slave south was doomed either way, they just didn't know it until their farms were burning down around them. You can argue they had the right to use deadly force over tariffs, and it comes right back that the workers in the field had more right than that to resist with deadly force their enslavement.
They were lucky they had the option of surrendering to Grant rather than their field hands.
You can defend it all you want, but it mystifies me that anyone would try. It makes me think you are not a serious person.
Would they have started with the slaveholders that were close to them, such as Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and West Virginia?
Inquiring minds want to know if all the people in these Union slave states should have been killed because the Liberals in the North had suddenly decided that slavery, which had only been going on in the United States for "four score and seven years", was suddenly the worst thing ever!
They declared their purpose and in a decade slavery was gone. The south had the chance to do it the easy way, or the hard way. They chose wrong.
You write this as if Lincoln had not offered permanent protection for slavery. You write this as if Lincoln had not said again and again that he would preserve the Union with slavery intact.
How do you get the sort of cognitive dissonance that allows you to believe that the South (and the five Northern slave states) wouldn't continue having slavery absent secession, or if the war had ended quickly?
It's like you don't even grasp what happened, and just want to parrot a line about how evil slavery is, and how much you are personally against it. (which is a form of virtue signaling. We are all against slavery.)
The slave south was doomed either way, they just didn't know it until their farms were burning down around them.
So how was the slave South (and the slave North I presume) doomed? USA slavery had been going on for "four score and seven years", so what was going to change it legally? How was it going to be "doomed"?
You can defend it all you want, but it mystifies me that anyone would try.
And people always fall back to the "you are defending slavery" crap, when they ought to know that pointing out the war wasn't about slavery is not defending slavery.
It's like they can't grasp any other argument. They are programed automatons who knee jerk regurgitate "War is about slavery and *NOTHING ELSE* and HOW DARE YOU QUESTION HOW EVIL SLAVERY IS!"
Grow up.