Lincoln and his armies didn't just free the slaves. Slaveholders, too, were freed from a culture of dependency which led too many of them to erroneously believe that they could not take care of themselves any longer and that they could not face the world without the assistance of slaves. Just read Mississippi's declaration of secession. The slaveholders had degenerated to the point that they could see no possible way forward without slavery. Slavery was no longer seen as an alternative, but a necessity, a full-blown addiction. Generations of them had been virtually raised by slaves. Slaveholders were progressively weakened by their indolence and dependency. Most of the slaveholders managed to adjust to the loss of slavery. Admittedly, some could not be reconstructed; a few of them even moved to Brazil.
Now, nearly every American, North, South, East and West, is grateful that Lincoln and the Union freed both the slaves and the slaveholders from the pathology of slavery. Nearly everyone now is opposed to slavery. Slavery is over and gone for good; it's not coming back.
There is nothing that happened 150 years ago that compels us to govern ourselves in any particular way today. Lincoln does not rule us from the grave. We as a people need to take personal responsibility for the choices we make today.
This is really tiresome, and somewhat off point.
1. Slavery is a very old, very undesirable institution that we are well rid of. 2. Lincoln didn’t go to war to free the slaves. 3. Except in Haiti and the US, slaves in the Western Hemisphere received their freedom peacefully. 4. An independent Deep South that did not have the benefit of the Fugitive Slave law of 1860 would have been hard pressed to maintain the peculiar institution for that reason alone. When other economic considerations are taken into account, such as the declining demand in the 19th Century for unskilled labor and the unsustainability of a “cotton culture” became apparent as a result of cotton plantations in Egypt and elsewhere became apparent, slavery would certainly have been ended everywhere in the US, probably much as it had been in Brazil. 5. What is the italicized “and it’s not coming back” phrase supposed to mean? No one wants slavery. 6. Ideas embedded in institutions and uncritical minds do rule us. In that sense, there are many dead men who rule us. To say it isn’t necessary that we follow any particular set of ideas is true in a purely logical sense, but it also ignores the intellectual inertia of cultures and individual minds.