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It would have been bloodless had the Union just said "okay let's have slavery." But they didn't do that. They laid down their lives instead. Like I said befor
by PostOnce 5y ago
It would have been bloodless had the Union just said "okay let's have slavery."
But they didn't do that. They laid down their lives instead.
Like I said before, picking out only the things we dislike and overlooking positives isn't productive or honest to ourselves.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> It would have been bloodless had the Union just said "okay let's have slavery." No, because that’s what the Union said—that preserving the Union was more important than abolition. The South declared secession and attacked federal facilities anyway. The South’s overweaning fear of the distant future possibility of abolition backfired and accelerated it.
- adamcstephens 5y agoThe Republicans were only trying to avoid expansion of slavery, not elimination of it. They fought to maintain the Union, not abolition. Only later did they free the slaves, and as an act of war more than freedom.
- PostOnce 5y agoHow about these 178,000 men, of whom about 35,000 died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops I don't think their primary motivation was preservation of the Union, I think it was abolition. Let's not pretend preservation of the Union was the only major factor, or that abolition was entirely a back-burner concept, it had been building steam and popular support for decades. Sure, preserving the Union may have been the main concern on a realpolitik level early on, but that doesn't change the fact that abolition was the writing on the wall and had been for decades.