That's why Southerners are still disgruntled about the whole thing today: they feel like Lincoln used a popular stance on one moral issue to hide the fact that he was trampling all over another, less popular and less well-known moral issue that they felt was nevertheless bigger and more important.
A subset of people who live in the south even still talk about the civil war much less take sides. It is usually the uber-nostalgic, super-fundamentalist, racist subset of white southerners. Many of who were are not even old enough to remember the civil rights movement.
This is coming from a grandson of a southern white preacher from Georgia who has lived in the south the majority of his life and is married to a girl from the mountains of North Carolina.
And slavery wasn't just noise. It was the issue. No amount of self rule would have given the southern states to decide the fate of the western territories.
Slavery was the catalyst for the Civil War (or as the Southern extremists call it, "The War of Northern Aggression") it provided the impetus to begin the war in the first place. That is the South was bitter and indignant at the self-righteous North for the North telling them to get rid of their #1 economic source, aka slave labor in the cotton fields and other crops, In addition this free slave labor made many of these Southerners, especially the politically activated ones, rather wealthy and very reluctant to give it up.
The southern states basically gave away the 1860 election, and probably had no future cards left to play except threatening secession in order to get their way on national issues. Then 7 states bolted as soon as the election results were in. I just don't see the states rights moral high ground here.
Agreed, when you are morally wrong, you are wrong no matter how much tap dancing you do.
However, the North didn't really hold that much of a morally high ground either in the cause of abolition, as the majority who went to war with the south DID NOT do it because they wanted to free the blacks in the south. Many did it because of patriotic, peer pressures and other reasons to keep the union together as well as to protect their own interests.
Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.
Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
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