I find it a bit odd that he was simultaneously patriotic and a Confederate sympathizer, and I don't recall any indication of latent racism in our discussions.
Very interesting. Seeing that I share a birthday with Abe, as a youngin' I was always proud of this fact. As I grew older and researched more, I'm not so proud of it anymore. I can see his pov w/o holding any racist connotations myself.
Sounds like a good dude. Rip.
I edited out a fair bit I intended initially to include on my views. I of course grew up with a fairly mainstream superficial education about the Civil War, and how Lincoln fought to free the slaves and all that jazz. I eventually learned more about his abuse of power and corrupt connections to industry. Of course, I still thought wars had to have a good guy side and a bad guy side, and I read a lot of the confederate revisionist stuff. But the fact remained that slavery was a significant reason for the secession, and slavery was very explicitly enshrined in the Confederate constitution. The political class of the South was built on slavery just as the political class of the North was built on corrupt industrial connections. None of them were good guys, and they send millions of innocent poor folk to kill and die for them.
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I won't argue any of those points, as they are valid. However I would argue that slavery was already on the way out all over the world, with the US being the last real stronghold, on par with your South political class being built upon it. But the minds were changing in that it was not moral to own another human being. I feel many lives would have been saved if not for the civil war. Would slavery existed much longer than it did, I cannot say. But there were more than just slavery as reasons for doing what Lincoln did. He was a slave owner himself I'm sure you know ;)
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Conscription for Lincoln's war was slavery of the worst kind. The bloodshed was appalling. Lincoln should have allowed a peaceful secession instead of trying to maintain a military stronghold to tax confederate trade in the middle of a major port.
Unfortunately, abolitionists were a minority even in the North, and it wasn't until Lincoln turned the rhetoric toward a moralistic crusade against slavery in his bid for reelection that people started to see it as a patriotic duty to oppose chattel slavery. I think that infection of statism did a lot of harm, and of course, Jim Crow demonstrated the State's opposition to free blacks for decades after.
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Lots of truth there, for sure. Like most political wars, we could play the game all day and night of things we would have done differently. And talk about all the different hopeful outcomes. I would skip all that and go back to 1776, or maybe even a few years earlier and go from there :)
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