Yes, we fail to realize (aren't taught) that the War Between the States wasn't about Southern slavery.
It was a totally unnecessary war since only a decade or two would have brought all US slavery a natural death. It was simply untenable morally.
Yet, the passions ran so high that war became inevitable. The North would not yield, and the South was determined to have things there way. What an absolute tragedy.
It was a totally unnecessary war since only a decade or two would have brought all US slavery a natural death. It was simply untenable morally.
Yet, the passions ran so high that war became inevitable. The North would not yield, and the South was determined to have things there way. What an absolute tragedy.
Hard as it is to imagine the US without the territories it took from Mexico in the Mexican War, that war was morally questionable if rather inevitable considering the osmotic pressure of the dynamism of the US economy/population on the porous (yes, even more porous then than now) Mexican border. But having taken the territory, the US had to decide the question of slavery in those territories - and it was utterly unable to do so peacefully.The moral issue of slavery is a fascinating issue since, as Thomas Sowell points out, slavery was an ancient and global institution with which Christianity, from its inception, had always coexisted (see St. Paul's letter to Philemon in the Bible). Yet, Sowell points out, when Christendom became dominant (as expressed in the global span of the British Empire, encompassing a third of the globe both geographically and in population) Christendom became militant against slavery. And only then was the institution suppressed - to the extent that it has been.
The slaveholding Christians of the South were becoming anachronistic. They were at the top of the food chain so long as they did not accept the paradigm of equality, and they were at risk of a race war if they did accept it. They were uniquely situated to resist the change, and they resisted it aggressively by pushing to extend the domain of their "peculiar institution." Had the politics gone differently in the border states, they might have prevailed. And gradually become more anachronistic. Interesting times, as the Chinese would put it.