Titan6,
And here's the "If you disagree with me you're a racist" line. Sorry kid, doesn't wash. If you're trying to make a point, that's only going to make you look like a fool. Now if your motivation is to prove to yourself how you're in some unfathomable way superior to an untermench who dares disagree with you... well, everyone's got their own pet delusion or two.
You might want to read up on the means Lincoln used before you go singing the praises of holding a nation together by force and fear. Prison camps for anyone who spoke out or wrote in opposition to him isn't american.
It's easy to fault the south for slavery, but at the time that was hardly exceptional. If the civil war was over nothing more than slavery, it'd have been one hell of a lot easier for the federal government to have, if abolishing slavery was the goal of the Lincoln administration, to have done so, and compensated the former owners for their financial loss. Certainly seems a lot more reasonable than 4 years of war, over 600,000 dead, and 100 years of bitterness and scapegoating blacks for the southern defeat.
Of course this requires one to consider that Union's causus belli was the fact that the people of the CSA had that mistaken and peculiar notion that that one person could own another. Nevermind that line of thinking being contradicted by Lincoln's own orders to the US military, and that the emancipation proclamation was made only after a Union victory a full year after the beginning of the Civil War, was limited in scope to avoid offending border slave states still in the Union, and above all to effect public opinion in europe to end British and French aid to the CSA.
As to the issue of slavery in the south in the mid-19th century, politics is about perceptions. The perception at the time was that the prospect of ending slavery was akin to if today, your property is condemned so the town can get more tax revenue from having a Wal-Mart put there, or the issue we on THR are most concerned with, infringement of our human right to self defense and bearing of the means to do so. In the south in the 1860s, slaves were property. Judge it all you want, but at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that you do so as a person in the 21st century with 21st century attitudes.
Neither side took the "high road" in the matter while the option of a peaceable solution was available. And neither side behaved during the conflict in any fashion we'd today consider "american", except maybe the officers and soldiers on both sides. Slavery was immoral, and Lincoln ruled as a tyrant. In the end, both got their due, slavery was abolished, and Lincoln got a well deserved bullet.
Accounts always settle out.
