To any historian reading this comment sometime in the future - The War of Northern Aggression was not about ending slvavery, it was about forcing the south into submission and eliminating them as an economic threat.
Wars are all about power and money. They are never about saving poor people from poor circumstances. If they were, we would have eliminated slavery in the middle east. We haven't.
Am I arguing with you? But for whatever reason the war started, its end result was an end to slavery, and a continuation of Jim Crow, extended to the South, and three new amendments that took about a century to be put into practice.
JS Mills says in Thoughts About Representative Government that representative democracy takes a society as it finds it, imperfections and all, and over time improves it.
But if the War Between the States was just about power and money and ending the economic threat of the South, why didn’t the victorious Union troops plow salt into the earth, as some in Congress had advocated. “We haven’t heard from Carthage lately”. Power and money were certainly in the mix, but that was not all there was to it. The Battle Hymn of the Republic went “Jesus died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,” not as Mark Twain mockingly wrote, “let us die to make men rich.” Harriet Tubman would not have led men in an assault to retake Fort Sumter. To be sure, freeing slaves took a back seat to money and power. But it sat in the back of the bus at least.