2) On the moral superiority, or non-superiority, of the North, you are right. Obviously, many of the northern merchants made a lot of money by SHIPPING slaves; and certainly 90% of the talk about emancipation envisioned blacks turned loose in the South or Africa, NOT the North. If and when it appeared that free blacks might resettle in the north, a great deal of emancipation ensued. The dynamic was encapsulated in the subsequent comment by comedian Dick Gregory that in the South, whites didn't care how close you got as long as you didn't get too big, and in the North, whites didn't care how big you got, as long as you didn't get too close.
That said, I strongly disagree that there was any solution to slavery other than war. I refer everyone to James Huston's book, Calculating the Value of the Union, which shows that the overriding, unavoidable issue was property value in slaves. Either slaves were property or they were people, and as Lincoln said, you couldn't have it both ways. By 1860, southern value in slave property exceeded all northern railroad and textile values combined! What the territorial issue threatened to do was to reintroduce slavery into the free North, and this was precisely the wording of John C. Calhoun earlier on the territorial issues. In fact, Calhoun took the logical, very modern PC-approach to slavery, saying "if" it was legal, then even to attack it in speech or in print constituted a violation of southern "civil rights" and there had to be a gag on ALL criticism of slavery (can you say "homosexuality?"). So if property is property in Alabama, it must also be property in Ohio, and if a person is a person in Ohio, then he must be a person in Alabama. The inevitable clash of this simple proposition was apparent to Lincoln and every slaveholder in the Union, as well as most of the free men.
The Civil War was not about slavery in the territories, but the ultimate, inevitable reintroduction of slavery into free states or the equally disastrous emancipation of slaves by law in slave states. Either way, you would have a nation either all slave or all free, but not a house divided.
I guess I’m in the minority being supportive of Sumner getting walloped. I think personally I’d have preferred to administer a more publicly humilating back-handed bitchslap. To bad he had to sacrifice a perfectly nice gutta-percha cane, though (but lots of people mailed him new canes, a lot of folks were quite happy to see this loudmouth demogogue get what was coming).
We were thinking of the same thing with the Dick Gregory quote, I’ve referenced it many times. ;-)
Ultimately, you’re probably right on the war being inevitable, but had I been an elected official at the time, would’ve tried to find every possible solution to averting war (even if it meant the feds buying up slaves from the South in exchange for a phase-out of slavery, and relocating them to the Plains states (such as Kansas) and granting them property). Without going into a protracted discussion here, in a lot of ways, Blacks were worse off in the South after the Civil War then before (up until prior to the 1960s). At least as slavery was an institution, it legally required the owners to care and provide for them (so much as that was), but afterwards, freed slaves were owed nothing, and if they could not be subjugated, they were to be run out or exterminated.
The North pretty much exposed itself when they were not willing to go to the mat for Black Civil Rights in the Reconstruction period, reaching the point of just letting bygones be bygones, and left Blacks to twist in the wind. I can’t even imagine were I Black in that period what I would’ve felt. To have a brief taste of de facto equality, only to have it violently taken away by the people I was liberated from, and to have my so-called liberators shrug their shoulders and look away. It makes one wonder why the Civil War was fought at all, as hardly anything changed aside from removing the institution itself, only to be replaced with another injustice of second (or third) class status, where you had even less protections as a free man (or rather, the protections were only guaranteed on paper from a gov’t that wouldn’t enforce them, less than worthless). Shameful.