IMHO slavery was a symptom, secession was the disease. at the onset of hostilities, Lincoln’s priority was saving the union.
slavery was a symptom, secession was the disease.
Abraham Lincoln comment on the National Bank Act, February 1863
He was right! He saved the union but the republic was destroyed as a result!
Lincoln's own quotes documented for future generations coming back to reveal the true story of the so called great emancipator.
Lincoln and racial equality is there for anyone who wants to read it. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, he said, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races, and I have never said anything to the contrary.” He went on in the same speech in Ottawa, Ill., in 1858 to say that he was not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office and not to intermarry with white people. Also, he supported the Illinois constitutional change in the 1840s that prohibited the immigration of black people into the state of Illinois. And his career-long position on the race issue was colonization. He advocated sending every last black person in America back to Haiti, Central America, Africa – anywhere but here. In his eulogy of Henry Clay in 1852, he said, “There is a moral fitness to the idea of returning to Africa her children …” He repeated that in a message to Congress in 1862: “I cannot make it any better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization.”
I have to disagree. Look at the contrafactual:
If there had been no slavery, or had the Southern states endorsed a "phase-out," would there have been a Civil War?
Absolutely not.
While early in the 1800's there were leading Southerners who spoke openly about phasing out slavery, by the time we got to 1860, all such talk had disappeared.