[PJeffQ]

The election in 1864 wasnt a referendum on the EP...

and did you cut and paste that section from somewhere else? or do you always use the word negros or are you usually more PC? (negroes is the correct spelling)...

[Sparticle]

I think you have trouble believing that slavery was real. It was destructive: physically, economically and psychologically; and to everyone faced with it.

[Non-Sequitur]

The election in 1864 wasnt a referendum on the EP...

No, by that time it was a referendum, in part, on the 13th Amendment. The amendment had been passed out of the Senate and had passed the House, but not by enough votes to be sent to the states. Lincoln ensured that the 13th Amendment was added to the Republican platform of 1864, ran in part on his support for it, and helped get enough Republican congressment elected in November to ensure that the amendment passed out of the House in January 1865.

[Sparticle]

The Reconstruction era was clearly a time when the winds prevailed for black empowerment in the South. It was only when Republican politics became so corrupt that "bloody-shirt" politics lost its moral appeal, and the sincerity of many (certainly not all) "converted" rebels gained currency, that Northerners forgot about blacks in the South.

[ravinson]

The election in 1864 wasnt a referendum on the EP...

Perhaps not entirely, but it certainly was a referendum on the way Lincoln had been managing the war, and the EP was viciously attacked by the Democrats.

and did you cut and paste that section from somewhere else? or do you always use the word negros or are you usually more PC? (negroes is the correct spelling)...

Sorry for the typo, but my comments are my own, and I use the word "negro" because that's what blacks were called in the 1860's.