This is quite simplistic and wrong, and certifiably so. The war was not started purely because of business. It was started only partially because of business. Beginning with northern Quakers, Christian abolitionists became the moral force lobbying against slavery, and while outnumbered they seriously influenced the debate and the general northern view. When Ben Franklin ridiculed southern slave owners, he did not do so from a business perspective. He did it from a moral perspective, purely a moral perspective, turning the logic of the Declaration of Independence against them. Surely business was a part of many a northerner’s motivation, but business was not the pure motivation generally. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, for example, was not a business argument against slavery-- far from it. It was a moral indictment against slavery, and it caused many people to join the anti-slavery movement. The real fact of the matter is, the Confederacy was on the wrong moral side of the slavery equation. And despite its business perspective, the Union was on the right side. That is why it was so easy for Union soldiers to later sing
“As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free…”
These fellas knew they were right. You also know they were right, which is why you even now feel compelled to say you are not advocating slavery. But while you are not, for some strange reason, advocating slavery, the Confederacy did advocate it. It did it again and again, and sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths attempting to keep, amongst other things, the right to enslave others. They were wrong. When faced with the argument against slavery, the south should have at least recognized like Washington and Jefferson, that slavery was wrong and aimed to work constructively against it. But it didn’t. It literally gave a moral justification for slavery based on the alleged inferiority of blacks. The Confederacy chose to flatly reject the Jeffersonian principles upon which America even now rests. It was wrong.
Now I have heard too many pro-Confederates make an issue of the fact that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation late in the war. The real FACT is, Lincoln was a politician and did not want to anger the many northern Democrats, most of whom were sympathetic to the South. Despite issuing his Emancipation Proclamation late in the war, he was clearly on record, before the war and before even being elected, as being hostile to slavery, this, from a MORAL point-of-view. This is why Southerners seceded when he was elected. Lincoln thought blacks inferior to whites also, but he yet recognized their right to freedom by virtue of their humanity.
So he wanted to end slavery. He wanted to end it slowly by disallowing its westward expansion. He did not want to stop slavery where it existed because he recognized a constitutional right to slavery where it existed. He did not recognize a constitutional right to slavery as a principle, and so aimed to destroy slavery by disallowing its expansion, knowing that when southern soil was finally depleted of nutrients, slavery would end because cotton in the south would end.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to keep England out of the war, and that was a very astute political move to accomplish a higher goal. It worked. The North won the Civil War, and slavery ended everywhere. |
