this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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well if we're being semantically accurate here. It didn't start because of slavery, slavery on its own very rarely does anything. It was the disagreement between the north and south on slavery itself, that caused the civil war. And of course, the iconic "states rights, to have slavery, but we dont talk about the slavery part because that's inconvenient and makes us look bad"
I mean it gets worse than that. You can really put it down to a southern overreaction. Lincoln was pretty upfront about being against the expansion of slavery and admitted prior to his presidency that he did not believe the president had the authority to outright end it. If the south had not seceded and started the civil war over their unfounded fears of losing slavery then it's very likely that slavery would have existed in this country for a few more decades.
The Lincoln - Horace Greeley correspondence really makes the country look bad on the issue overall, especially when you look to the Congress of Vienna's statements on slavery which occurred roughly 50 years prior to the American Civil War.
Edit: Before someone loses their mind, yes the war was about slavery, just going further in detail.
and now, as a semi tangentially related trinket, texas thinks that they have the power to secede from america.
It only gets deeper.
I can't remember the exact details, but I read years ago that Lincoln actually made an anti-abolitionist joke involving talking about hanging one in a speech while running for senator.