Who were the best…and worst U.S. Presidents?
Sunday, November 28th, 2010I disagree with your statement “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery….: [Click to read article]
Lincoln was elected on a platform that opposed expansion of slavery into the territorries. Lincoln made his anti-slavery views in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln also dealt with the issue in his Coppers Union speech before the election.
When Lincoln, an anti-slavery northener, was elected Presdient, the South expected that the slave states would become outnumbered by free states, and they would lose control of Congress, and would ultimately be forced to end slavery. In order to preserve slavery, they seceded. The Civil War was a Rebellion to Preserve and Expand Slavery.
Lincoln went to war to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. But Lincoln refused to say slavery was a rightful institution or agree to the expansion of slavery in order to avoid the South’s secession.
South Carolina was the first state to secede. In it’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” South Carolina complained, in part:
“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
The South seceded in order to preserve and expand slavery. Lincoln went to war to preserve a Union which he believed was intended by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to be perpetual.
Ross Arneson
