[colorado tanker]

The point is that free territories becoming free states raised the future possibility of a 2/3 Northern majority in the Senate, at which point the Constitution could be amended to abolish slavery.

Please, I've heard the economic arguments before. The fact is the South seceeded because an opponent of slavery was elected President. Had Douglas won the election, there would have been no secession. Davis and especially Stephens made it very clear that the election of an abolitionist was the triggering event.

Lincoln tried desperately to head off secession, making several concessions to the South on the slavery issue because his overriding priority was keeping the Union together.

[GOPcapitalist]

The point is that free territories becoming free states raised the future possibility of a 2/3 Northern majority in the Senate, at which point the Constitution could be amended to abolish slavery.

No it couldn't - not as long as Lincoln's 1861 amendment was adopted. Lincoln got the amendment through Congress and it was on its way to ratification when the war broke out. Without a war, it would have become part of the consitution and permanently barred Congress from doing anything of the sort.

[marron]

One of the neat things about the study of history is watching how ideas take hold and eventually a consensus forms. People do what they do for myriad reasons, coming from many different points of view, and nevertheless at some point it all comes together and history moves forward a notch. Flawed human beings doing what flawed human beings do.

If you understand slavery as being a benign institution, or even a positive good as the slavers did, then you aren't going to understand what happened to you when the hammer comes down. It is never going to seem fair. It will seem improper that flawed people presumed to make a moral judgement and act on it. But if you understand it as a positive evil, and you study the "how" of it, how anti-slavery sentiment took hold and eventually brought down the institution, you see a fascinating interplay of motives, religious, economic, self-interest, altruism, all intermixed and combined. You will see the same mix of motives on the other side.

Any time, perhaps every time you take a moral position and go into a fight, you will see people at first opposing you, and then if you hold your ground, beginning to shift your way, sometimes out of conviction, sometimes for the sake of self interest, sometimes as a combination of the two. But they begin to shift.

I have seen it even with current affairs, as coalitions form around a moral idea, and execute a plan, each member of the coaltion doing so for their own reasons, and yet it comes together and it happens. Part of being a leader is the ability to attract people to a cause; they will explain their actions to themselves a thousand different ways, but they will come. And you make it happen.

The historians will hate it that some of the members of the coalition seemed to have joined for reasons other than altruistic ones, but that is all hindsight. The goal has been acheived, and in the aftermath it will be hard to find anyone that will admit to opposing it.