Quote:
Originally Posted by JMintzer
You should consider ALL of the things the Civil War was about...
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And you should understand that while there were many issues of conflict between the two sides of the war, the only one that the south could not, and would not abide, and would not compromise on, was the issue of slavery.
As a matter of fact, the north was willing to allow slavery to continue in the states where it was already established. It was the disagreement about whether or not new states would be allowed to become slave states, based upon their own volition, as opposed to a Federal prohibition on the institution of slavery in new territories and eventually the states that they would become, that was the ground upon which they would not compromise.
Nobody here is saying the north was innocent of the sin of white supremacy over the negro (using the accepted terminology of the time). In fact there was no allowance for equality for the black man, following the Emancipation Proclamation.
Given all of that, as proclaimed by Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy was founded on the principle that the White Man was superior to the Black Man, and it was the White Man's right to hold the Black Man a slave, and the war was fought to preserve that ideal and that institution.
To claim otherwise is, to borrow from another thread, to claim "the grass is blue".