Quote:The problem I had with you in the other thread was your statement that the civil war had nothing to do with slavery.  No one would disagree that history is a lot more complicated than one sentence like "the noble north fought to free black slaves from the evil south."   But slavery was the entire cause of the civil war.   The rise of the abolitionist movement in the north, the growing polarization of the country over the issue of slavery, the perceived threat to the "property" of southern plantation owners, the election of Lincoln, who was seen in the south as an abolitionist, the dispute over admission of new states and whether they should be slave states or free states, the south's fear that the balance of power in congress would tilt in favor of the free states, and that would lead to the abolition of slavery, these were all issues that led to southern secession, and they all had to do with slavery.  

 

No issue has ever polarized this country like the issue of slavery.  

 

When the south seceded, the north went to war to preserve the union.  But the war was caused by the south seceding, and the south seceded over the issue of slavery.   You can read it in the articles of secession, and in the correspondence of southern politicians, which spell out quite clearly that the cause of the south seceding was northern abolitionism. 

 

Lincoln did a lot of things that were definitely unconstitutional, to be sure.   He abolished habeas corpus.   In fact, the whole constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 is debatable.   That's one of the reasons for the push for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery in January 1865.  

 

But what really gripes me is people who try to minimize the role slavery had in causing the civil war.   And your statement in the other thread that "the civil war had nothing to do with slavery" makes me believe you have an enormous gap in your knowledge of history.

 

I see people like you occasionally, whose political beliefs have led them to cherry-pick historical facts to support those beliefs.  I think that is what is happening with you.  Your belief in states' rights, and your belief that federal power should be minimized, has led you to minimize the parts of history that are inconvenient for your political belief.   You want to minimize the parts of history where federal power did something good, and states' rights was in support of something bad.  In the Civil War, states' rights were invoked in support of slavery.   You would like to ignore that.     

 

I'm not ignoring it, I have no problem telling you the South was beholden to slavery and slavery is immoral and wrong. You say the federal government did something good, that's where I disagree. Lincoln and his war on the south wasn't good, or noble, if anything it represents one of the darkest points in our history. I have no desire to white wash the tyrant like behavior of Lincoln. There was no greater good achieved that justified the death and destruction of the Civil War. Ending slavery is the excuse used to justify some of the most grievous of acts against the constitution in our history, the reality is slavery would've ended here like it did everywhere else with out the Civil War. The Civil War wasn't about the North ending slavery it was about Lincoln holding the union together at all cost.

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