Cleaning Up Our Collective Act

[Hasbinbad]

The south wanted slavery in the new states (states rights).
The north wanted no slavery in the new states (but not abolition in the union).

Neither government wanted to abolish slavery in existing states.

Lincoln didn't want to abolish slavery in existing states. The Emancipation Proclamation was a military maneuver aimed at undermining the control of southern slave owners, and had nothing to do with any sort of philanthropy on Lincolns part.

It comes down to the south wanting to extend slavery into the west. That's basically what the whole debacle was over. Abolition was an unintended side-effect.

The south got rich by selling cotton to the north who got rich by turning it into thread and making cotton cloth or selling the thread to European countries to make linen.

Both sides were totally unethical.

[Humerox]

Originally Posted by Hasbinbad [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Lincoln didn't want to abolish slavery in existing states.

He would have if he could have done so. He expected it to wither and die via no new expansion, and by offering compensated emancipation.

His letter to Joshua Speed in 1855 pretty much summed up his feelings:

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].


All the key issues of the Civil War were tied to slavery. Schlesinger describes the ivalidity of the states' rights argument best imo:

"...states' rights “never had any real vitality independent of underlying conditions of vast social, economic, or political significance.

From the close of the nullification episode of 1832-1833 to the outbreak of the Civil War, the agitation of state rights was intimately connected with the new issue of growing importance, the slavery question, and the principle form assumed by the doctrine was the right of secession. The pro-slavery forces sought refuge in the state rights position as a shield against federal interference with pro-slavery projects.... As a natural consequence, anti-slavery legislatures in the North were led to lay great stress on the national character of the Union and the broad powers of the general government in dealing with slavery. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that when it served anti-slavery purposes better to lapse into state rights dialectic, northern legislatures did not hesitate to be inconsistent."