You say Lincoln didn't kill 700,000 fellow Americans? Then who do you think did? I remind you that the Civil War began when the North's military marched on Virginia a scant four months after the above words were uttered. The answer is that it is Abraham Lincoln who did that. The South wasn't the aggressor. It only defended itself.
Your post berates me for supporting slavery. You say that you are offended. I don't support slavery, and *I* am offended that you would level such a heinous accusation against me.
What I support is STATE RIGHTS. What I support is the CONSTITUTION - something you have claimed until now to support as well. It's clear that you aren't sincere.
The North agreed to a Union with the South knowing full well that the South had slaves. Had they been honest and told the South up front that slavery and the Southern way of life would be outlawed by a Northern President's decree, I assure you that the South would NEVER have joined.
Per the 10th Amendment, rights not prohibited to the States by the Constitution are supposed to be reserved to the States. THAT INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO SECEDE - which you will find, if you read the document again, is *not* discussed. Therefore, the South had that right.
If Lincoln believed in the Constitution and had truly been motivated by a desire to eliminate slavery, he could have done so LAWFULLY - by passing laws and amending the Constitution. But he did not. He marched his army into Virginia and began murdering Americans.
Is this a Presidential action you care to defend? By what right can a President do that?
What if President Obama decided today that he didn't like something in YOUR state and did the same thing? I'm sure history could later gin up a bogus motivation for why he did this to you and make him look magnanimous, but the truth is the truth: That he would have been a criminal, murderous President, precisely as Abraham Lincoln was.
You ask "WHEN was this abhorrent SOUTHERN practice of SLAVERY going to end????"
Correct me if I'm wrong - I don't think I am - but wasn't the trend throughout the civilized world already moving quickly and decisively toward the elimination of slavery?
1803: Denmark bans import of slaves to its West Indies colonies.
1807 - Britain ends the British Atlantic slave trade.
1808 - The U.S. bans the slave trade.
1811 - Spain abolishes slavery.
1814 - Netherlands abolishes slavery.
1817 - France bans slave trading.
1833 - Britain orders the gradual elimination of slavery in its colonies.
1846 - Denmark eliminates slavery.
1848 - France abolishes slavery.
1851 - Brazil abolishes slavery.
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, though slaves are subject to a 20 year apprenticeship.
1861 - The Netherlands abolishes slavery in its Dutch Indies colonies.
1861 - President Abraham Lincoln initiates war against his own people.
1862 - President Lincoln proclaims the emancipation of slaves to take effect in 1863, a full YEAR AND A HALF INTO THE CIVIL WAR.
After a year and a half of his illegal WAR AGAINST AMERICANS, Lincoln announced that the slaves were free. If that had been the point of the war, don't you think he would have done it sooner? Like, BEFORE the war? Noooo. Lincoln waited until he'd already killed a hundred thousand people or more.
The real reason for the Emancipation Proclamation, micro, was so that slaves would fight against fellow southerners. In other words, it was a war strategy, not a war REASON.
What Lincoln did was despicable. He really did kill 700,000 Americans at a time when the country's entire population amounted to just 31 million. That's one citizen out of 40. One man out of 20. Hundreds of thousands of others wounded. Ten million devastated.
If a comparable war were fought today, seven million Americans would die - nearly TWENTY TIMES our World War II losses.
And it destroyed the South, HALF THE COUNTRY, causing damage the South has not fully recovered from even today.
Now, I threw a lot of facts at you in order to try to answer the reasonable question you asked of WHEN, without Lincoln, the abhorrent Southern practice of slavery was going to end.
At the very outside,it would have happened within 30 years. By 1900, nations still holding slaves had become pariahs in the civilized world. VERY few remained and I am certain the United States would not have been among them. One by one, ALL the western countries were pressured to give up slavery and, one by one, they did. I see no reason why the United States would have been any different.
So, to answer your question, 1895 or EARLIER.
Lincoln chose NOT to apply the pressures other countries did to eliminate slavery without war. Noooo. Lincoln went straight to killing Americans, Americans in states that had joined the United States freely, knowing that they had a Constitutional right to secede should that union ever prove to be untenable.
Why didn't Lincoln employ legal means to get what he wanted? Because he was a tyrant, micro. A murderous tyrant.
So, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. What was it about?
It was about Lincoln's contempt for the 10th Amendment. It was about his desire to establish an AUTHORITARIAN, UNCHALLENGEABLE Federal Government. Until then, states held real power in this country. After the war, they no longer did. The Central Government could force its will upon any of the individual states regardless of the Constitution, the 10th Amendment or the agreed-upon terms under which they had joined.
Now, did ANY of this sound like I am a believer in slavery? I remain offended that you would accuse me of such a thing. I maintain that Abraham Lincoln was our worst President ever, BY FAR, not because he freed the slaves but because he killed 700,000 of his own brothers in order to gain tyrannical control over the nation. History has turned him into Saint Abraham because the war ALSO accomplished something good (though that 'something good' was going to occur in less than 30 years anyway. Do you want to dispute this? How long did it take South Africa to disavow apartheid once the rest of the world applied massive economic pressure against it to do so? Not long. 15 years. Nobody had to kill South Africans in order to convince them that they needed to change.)
700,000 casualties was far too high a price to pay in order to expedite something that was going to happen anyway. But, we've already covered that and the elimination of slavery wasn't at all why the sonofabitch marched on the South. That's just what the history books tell us, history being written by the victor, after all.
History lies and I am surprised that you don't see that.
| 
