House votes to remove Confederate statues from Capitol

Lincoln was not in favor of of outlawing slavery...Stopping the expansion of it

That's true at least as far as the election of 1860 is concerned. Lincoln ran on the official party platform of non-expansion of slavery, which made him disliked both by radical abolitionists in his own party and by much of the South. He became an abolitionist by/before 1863.

Lincoln made a strategic and public relations mistake with the Emancipation Proclamation. Until that point, he could make the case that the war was about preserving the union rather than about ending slavery. Most in the Union and a significant minority in the South supported that goal. After the Emancipation Proclamation, it was all too easy to paint the Union war effort as a fight to end slavery. Even many Unionists who were willing to risk their lives or their son's lives for preserving the union (rightly) didn't see ending slavery as a cause worth dying for, even if they opposed slavery in principle. And furthermore, the Confederacy would have probably sued for peace much earlier had Lincoln not sided with the abolitionist wing of his party as the war progressed.

I must respectfully disagree. I don’t think the emancipation proclamation was a mistake. With it Lincoln changed the war from just saving the union, to one of saving the union and freeing 4.1 million enslaved people. This guaranteed that no foreign power would recognize the confederacy as a nation.

I don’t think anything would have changes Jefferson Davis’s mind about continuing the war. He was dead set on winning and when was attempting to escape and continue the war in some fashion when he was captured.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.