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To: x
That's just you. If you want to make that claim it's as true of the South as of the North -- more so if you leave the slaveowners out of the picture. But people aren't always on that wavelength.

If you ask the question you can expect some people will give that answer.

We don't have to ask the question. We can see by their actions. Before Lincoln was elected to the legislature, he was an officer in an organization dedicated to sending black people out of the country. The State of Illinois passed laws prohibiting black people from living in their state. Other Northern states passed similar laws to prevent Black people from living in their states.

But that doesn't mean that there was no recognition of the wrong of slavery -- especially among the abolitionists you attack and demean.

The Abolitionists were the only people in the North that opposed slavery on strictly moral grounds, but there were very few of them in the beginning, and most people looked at them the way we look at the "LBGT" people nowadays. They were regarded as kooks.

Here is what Charles Dickens (Very Anti-Slavery and very critical of the South) had to say about the Abolitionists.

"Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."

.

.

But whether it's slavery the US in 1860 or Syria today, you can have moral concerns about how people are mistreated without wanting all of them to move in next door.

So are you suggesting we should go over there with armies and kill 750,000 of our people to liberate these people? Of course we won't do that. They don't produce 3/4ths of our export trade, so there is no financial incentive for us to liberate them.

Lincoln was going to sell out the slaves if he could keep the money. (Corwin Amendment) This is a point that does not seem to be getting through to you. He didn't fight the war for them, he fought it to prevent the loss of the European trade, and to prevent the economic competition which the Southern states would bring.

126 posted on 05/26/2017 2:39:00 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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To: DiogenesLamp
You are so full of it. You lecture about not judging past figures by the standards of our own day. You apply that to slave owners and secessionists, but then proceed to judge and condemn the Northerners who opposed them by present-day standards -- or ideal moral standards higher than those of any era.

Pure material self-interest on the part of slave owners you turn into something moral or idealistic -- something you don't question or examine or challenge. The mixed motives of unionists you reduce to the purest materialistic pursuit of personal advantage without any moral component. There's no logic behind that. You've made up your mind what you want to think before and and don't let facts or logic get in the way.

If people in the free states simply accepted whatever was done in the slave states, you condemn them as not caring about morality. If they protested or fought back or challenged, you see them as hypocritical, hate-filled, and predatory -- things that you never say about your beloved slave owners. So you demand Northerners not interfere with slavery and vilify them for not interfering with slavery.

You are apparently one of those people who believe the only sin is hypocrisy and that believing oneself to be right puts one in the wrong. But you don't see that slave societies were as likely to be self-righteous and arrogantly moralistic as any other. "Northern hypocrisy" wasn't as big a theme at the time, because there was the much greater hypocrisy of those who lived off slavery and talked of freedom, justice, and Christianity.

You really are shameless.

148 posted on 05/27/2017 12:15:15 PM PDT by x
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