If they had, they would have started by passing a constitution amendment abolishing slavery. They did the opposite. They overwhelmingly passed the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. This alone proves, unequivocally, that the North did not go to war to end slavery or free the slaves.
(This post is Chapter Two of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., available on this website)
War measures halfway through the war, such as the Emancipation Proclamation that freed no slaves (and prevented close to a million slaves from achieving their freedom), have nothing to do with why the North went to war in the first place.
More @ Charleston Athenaeum Press
The protective tariff was the cause. If the South seceded, they took the revenue of the United States with them.
ReplyDeleteLincoln could have tried a negotiated settlement (VA, NC, TN, and AR begged him to do so), but he wanted a fight. It's why he tried an illegal income tax.
I was taught this in school; you may or may not have been, but this all changed when the Lefties took over the teacher unions and installed them in every school district in the country.
Excellent article but I noticed he didn't mention the fact that WVA was illegally admitted into the union.
DeleteA lot of what Lincoln did was illegal (kind of like a white Ozero) although getting the consent of the VA legislature would have been problematic.
Deleteproblematic.
DeleteYes, zilch!
It is one of the great paradoxes of history, that to end slavery in the South, the North enslaved their own population (draft) and to fight that, the South freed their own slaves (ammunition for service in the army).
ReplyDelete--generic
Might be the greatest.
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