I do have a dog in this fight. I have an ancestor who fought for The Army of The Potomac. All due respect friend but the matter is simple. The South launched a violent war of secession to preserve an economy based on the use of slave labor. They enshrined that fact in their Constitution. It's popular to say slavery was dying out before the war began. If that was the case then why did the South go to war over it? And here's a question for you:If the South had won the war would they have freed the slaves?
And also:
As I stated The Founders won their war against the English Crown. The South lost the war they started.The bought only death and destruction on themselves and some 700,000 Americans.
So was the CSA evil because they started a war to preserve slavery or because they started a war and lost?
I propose the second line of reasoning is nonsensical—Would the Confederate cause have become just if 700k died and they emerged victorious? Also, if the blame lies on Lee and Davis, why not also on Lincoln, who could have opted to let the CSA go its own way and spared bloodshed entirely? Would the morality of the American Revolution be different if we had lost?—in fact, from a moral standpoint that willful separation is probably worse because we separated ourselves from an anointed monarch instead of a mutually agreed-upon Republic (unless one were to contend that Charles Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) was the real divine-right monarch of England... but that’s an entire other rabbit hole).
So it really comes down to the CSA’s explicit legal protection of slavery (and some other issues if you know your history... but we’ll just say it’s slavery). Would they have abolished it eventually had ?—I would say yes, considering that the rest of the hemisphere was also by the 1880s. Why did the South go to war over it?—the economy simply wasn’t ready for such a drastic shift (make $15/hr wages mandatory effective now, and you’ll see we can’t weather such a shift today either—but that one was an order of magnitude larger).
Were they right to do it? Probably not (and this would be true even if they won). However, they felt their cause of self-determination to be just—and this was recognized by the magnanimity of Lincoln, when he welcomed them back as fellow Americans, humbled but without need to be further humiliated.
Perhaps if Lincoln’s magnanimity had been fostered better in Reconstruction and beyond, maybe we could have prevented an additional 90 years of virtual African-American enslavement in the Jim Crow era and by the modern Democrat Party.
Perhaps you would do well to find some of that magnanimity that allows us to look at every person, slave or free, who lived and died under the Stars and Stripes or the Stars and Bars to be seen as what they really are: a fellow American.
Please, stop with the bs, ok? Slavery is evil and the South undertook the most destructive and costliest war in our history to preserve it. I believe I asked you a question: If the South had won the war would they have freed the slaves? I take people as they come and understand that God made us in His image and likeness and that one should never judge another too harshly, if at all because one can never know the trials and tribulations someone else is going through. But to the poltroon’s of the Old South, I’m sorry, they sought to keep an entire race enslaved for money. But they have gone to their maker a long time ago. They have received His divine judgment.
Thank you. I have long since grown weary of this claim that "winning" makes one morally right. It doesn't. The Nazis won plenty of times, but this did not make them the "good guys."
The Founders were not morally right because they won, and the Brits were not morally wrong because they conceded. Neither was the North morally right because they won, nor the South morally wrong because they lost.
The North kept legal slavery longer than did the confederacy, and this makes a mockery of the claim that anything they did was as a consequence of their concern regarding slavery.
The concern of the government in Washington DC was that a huge economic power might escape their control. All other considerations were secondary.