[Azure]

Originally Posted by jammies

The origins of the Civil War are considerably more complex, and only tangentially concerned with slavery. At first the freedom of the slaves was not even an official Northern war aim, it wasn't until the war had already gone on for well over a year when Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and began the process which would eventually end up in the 13th Amendment after the war was over.

That is not to say that the states of the South that seceded did not do so because of slavery; they saw (correctly) that the North was going to dominate the future of the USA, which went against the Southern domination that had happened up to the mid-1850s. When it became clear that no new states admitted to the Union would be slave states, and that the federal government was hostile to what they saw as the protection of "property", the secession was on.

However the federal government went to war not to protect and free the slaves, but to deny the right of secession. The successful prosecution of this war was the beginning of the vast expansion in federal powers that continues to this day and which is far different than the type of union originally envisioned by the founders, who wanted a much more decentralized model of government. So not every consequence of the Civil War is as positive as the ending of slavery.

Originally Posted by Displaced Flames fan

Great post Jammies. Azure alluded to some of that earlier, but you put it very concisely.

Well it is Jammies.



Great post.