Slavery is not the sole reason for the Civil War.
Myth: Abolitionists wanted to end slavery and incorporate the freed slaves into society. Not really, most abolitionists wanted to send the freed slaves to what they called naturally black states like Haiti and Africa. Liberia was created by the US so that newly freed slaves would have a place to live. Abolitionists did not want the free black people to come North and take their jobs. They also did not want them to intermarry with whites. There is a reason they helped them escape to Canada. Also there is the argument that Frederick Douglass put up saying to not ship out of the country that America is his home.
Also, slavery was dying out until the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney. Who was a northerner. And the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves if the South continued to rebel and lost the war which is what happened. If they had surrendered at that time they would have been able to keep their slaves. It also had no sway over slaveholders who lived in the North or the slave states that sided with the North.
Sorry it's a pet peeve of mine.
Pardon me, this'll be long.
Yeah, I have studied the period very extensively. I know everything you're saying. But there are those out there who teach/have learned/believe that the Civil War was NOT the result of slavery. I feel it's an unfortunate outgrowth of the Lost Cause school of thinking--oh, it was
states' rights that they were fighting for. I have to call bullshit on that. What right did they want the states to retain? The right to enslave people, pure and simple. The rest is pure sugar-coating and excuse-making--and is disingenuous.
And while the Emancipation Proclamation was effectively useless--it freed slaves in areas that the Union had no possession of--it was a huge first step. I recognize its limits while still acknowledging its vital role. On purely legal bases, President Lincoln couldn't himself amend the Constitution; he did what he could at that point with what legal powers he had, then he worked to get the 13th Amendment ratified--a final, irrevocable death knell for slavery. (The discussion in the movie
Lincoln about this topic was pretty good, actually.)
And yes to the fact that slavery was beginning a slow descent into oblivion prior to the cotton gin. Most the Founding Fathers felt slavery would die slowly, and that's how they wanted it. But then it became, frankly, too difficult; you know, Jefferson's comment about holding the wolf by the ear (you can't hold on but don't dare let go). Southerners got more dependent on slavery and commensurately more vituperative in its defense; Northerners, who were racist in the main, were scared to death of upending the status quo (considering what happened when the status quo
was upended, their fears weren't entirely unfounded).
And actually, there were many shades of abolitionists and antislavery men/women. Those terms aren't synonymous. Abolitionists wanted to do away with slavery; antislavery men and women wanted to keep it from expanding in order to strangle it. Abolitionists were less likely to advocate colonization. Some people (including Lincoln) clung to the idea of colonization because of their unease with blacks (racism) and because of their fear of racial violence (not entirely baseless).
Sorry to hijack the thread. I could discuss this for ages and ages.
