Slavery was a side issue and not even mentioned for the first two years of the invasion of the South. Lincoln was a racist who didn’t give a damn about the black man. He thought whites were superior to blacks and wanted them shipped back to Africa. The sanitizing of Lincoln is one of the greatest
hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people. He was a tyrant who caused the deaths of a million Americans. If the South had won, he would have been hanged from the nearest tree. He was a butcher. A two-bit railroad lawyer, doing the bidding of the railroad barons who controlled his every move.
Black slavery was the heart of the struggle between the states. As the history of “Bleeding Kansas” attests, the issue could not be resolved through the ballot. The South demanded that its “system” be allowed everywhere in the Union. To avoid session in 1850, the North —and at this time this included the Border states—agreed to split the difference, granting the southern half of the Mexican Cession to be slave territory, along with Texas but excepting Southern California. They also passed the Fugitive Law Act, which was as blatant a violation of States Rights as one can imagine, because its violated the principle that the State was the basic political unit of the Union. Under the Constitution, the State was the primary protector of the rights of its inhabitants. So the South was willing to violate the sovereignty of the northern states in the interest of its “Peculiar Institution.”
That is not entirely true. His plan to solve the black problem included deportation of blacks to the Caribbean as well as Africa.
Lincoln stayed at my ancestor’s plantation and gave my ancestor a special dispensation to use use slaves in Illinois, rented from Kentucky slave owners, for the purpose of mining salt to provide the Union Army.
The rub is, he would allow the rented slaves to escape, making his business a little part of the underground railroad, but that part of the story has been overlooked by modern day historians. It is so much easier for lazy history writers to portray him as a slave-owner (user) and therefore a villian, despite the facts to the contrary.
Did they have black helicopters back then?
Let’s get real here. The North was not fighting to end slavery. The South was fighting to preserve it. If they weren’t, then why did the Southern politicians always insist on extending it to the new states? And why did they not abolish it? It would have been a strategic master stroke. It would have removed the political barriers to Britain intervening.
Instead, Lincoln was able to outmaneuver them with the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed not a single slave.