Why did they break slavery? As of August of 1862, Lincoln was still saying that a peaceful resolution which included slavery was still possible. Even his emancipation proclamation protected slavery in areas under Union Control. As late as 1865, General Sherman, in a speech to a captured confederate city said that a year ago they could have still kept their slaves, but now it is too late. Why did they break slavery? Several reasons, most dominant among them I think is revenge. 1. They wanted to hurt the people who fought them as badly as they could. 2. Other reasons include breaking the South's financial back because at this point there was so much hatred that anyone with eyes to see could have told you the South would be bent on revenge, and they would have clearly turned all their economic resources to accomplishing this task. 3. Payoff political allies that wanted this. 4. Create a newly enfranchised voting class that could be depended upon to always vote Republican, and thus giving them power in Congress. Also there is the general fact that most people of the North hated slavery, and this would be a popular move in those states. But to clarify that, I need to make it clear that this hatred of the idea that people had "free" workers whom they didn't have to pay. This is distinctly different from hating slavery because you saw it as injustice. This was hating slavery because you saw it as a threat to people who worked for wages. It was slavery hatred motivated by self interest, not morality, and this was in fact the dominant form of hatred of slavery throughout the North. Those who hated slavery for moral reasons were the tiniest minority of the population, and were generally regarded as kooks by most people. Also, they had so badly wrecked the South's cotton export economy, that it just wasn't that big of a prize anymore, even if they could keep it's income routing through New York. Those years of blockade had allowed European competitors to create enough supply that the South no longer had the ability to control the market as they did before the war. Without that blockade, nobody would have ever been able to create new cotton plantations that would be capable of showing a profit. Because of the blockade, they were able to create these new suppliers, and once they existed, they would thereafter be critical suppliers to the European textile manufacturers. So the South's main business was mostly destroyed anyways. I would add a few more reasons. Lincoln, after having started the war at the behest of his Northern corporate fatcat political supporters for money and empire discovered to his horror that what he thought would be a cakewalk turned out instead to be a very bloody affair. Now he needed some "noble" cause to dress it up in - after all, lots of Northerners had been killed and lots more left crippled and maimed. It doesn't do to tell the loved ones of somebody who was killed or who had a leg blown off that it was all for money and empire no matter how true that actually is. People don't want to hear that. So, two years after they started the war, after offering slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment, after the Northern dominated Congress passed a resolution specifically saying they were not fighting over slavery they then discovered it had been "all about slavery". PC Revisionists have clung to that laughable war time propaganda ever since.
Perhaps in some grand-bargain with Confederates, but no such bargain was ever remotely contemplated and so the war went on.
By August, 1862 already:
Speaking of our Lost Causers, of course.
Looks like The BrOnanist is a Last Worder, eh?
I've often lamented in the past that the "genius" Presidents get us involved in F***ed up sh*t. Carter was supposed be "brilliant." Kennedy was supposed to be "Brilliant". Woodrow Wilson was supposed to be "Brilliant, and of course Abraham Lincoln clearly was "brilliant."
As is usual with "brilliant" intellectuals, they are often "too smart by half". They end up making a mess because they had the arrogance to think they knew what was going to happen, and it turned into a horrible mess because they overestimated their own powers of perception.
Yes, Lincoln lit the fuse on a very horrible war, and even though he was warned by his cabinet, he did it anyways because he thought he could handle it.
And yes, after so much bloodshed, they wanted to exploit a religious angle and claim it was "God's work." It was the only excuse that people would accept for all the horrors they brought to the people of both North and South.