While I admire your order in defense of your own state and its principles I'm afraid you've been Duped, by Far and Away the most comprehensive evaluation of soldiers thoughts and opinions with accomplished by professor James M. McPherson, considered by most to be the foremost scholar of the Civil War. I don't know how many letters you read but on the whole only about 30% of those who fought in the Civil War were concerned with slavery one way or the other.
Of course, we've all heard of the Lost Cause myth, and I certainly share some of that fantasy, but not all of it. Certainly the original Southern states seceded over slavery for the most part.
but the war was not fought over slavery. war was fought to suppress Southern Independence and Lincoln made it abundantly clear that was his Aim“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If some would not save the Union unless they could also save slavery, I do not agree with them. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." I do not agree with those who would save the Union only if they could also save slavery. If some would not save the Union unless they could also destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.
NOt the only times Lincoln gave the opinion.
"You have dragged the Negro into the War. It is a war for a great national object and the Negro has nothing to do with it…” Explaining to Senator Browning of Ill. he says..."If the General needs them (slaves) he can seize them, and use them; but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition."
he president then went on to tell Mrs. Fremont, “The General should never have done that after the Fremont Affair in Missouri (Nevins, Frémont, Pathmarker of the West, p. 517). Frémont's Proclamation: In August 1861, Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, declared martial law in Missouri. Without Lincoln's approval, he issued an edict emancipating the enslaved people of all Confederate sympathizers in the state.
We are uncompromisingly opposed to all schemes the tendency of which is calculated to overrun the state of Indiana with a worthless & degraded negro population"
-Indiana General Assembly, 3/7//1863
similar sentiments
"Interest in slavery did not affect the loyal people of the Ohio Valley...But they had no marked sympathy with emancipation and were certainly not willing to risk their lives and their fortunes to compel their slaveholding kinsfolk & neighbors to free their slaves"
McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war."
ritain, held “New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States.” Representatives of these states came together in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a constitution and form a union.
During the ratification debates, Virginia’s delegates said, “The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” The ratification documents of New York and Rhode Island expressed similar sentiments.
At the Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” rejected it. The minutes from the debate paraphrased his opinion: “A union of the states containing such an ingredient (would) provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
America’s first secessionist movement started in New England after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Many were infuriated by what they saw as an unconstitutional act by President Thomas Jefferson. The movement was led by Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state. He later became a congressman and senator. “The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy — a separation,” Pickering wrote to George Cabot in 1803, for “the people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West.” His Senate colleague James Hillhouse of Connecticut agreed, saying, “The Eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government.” This call for secession was shared by other prominent Americans, such as John Quincy Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Fisher Ames, Josiah Quincy III and Joseph Story. The call failed to garner support at the 1814-15 Hartford Convention.
The U.S. Constitution would have never been ratified — and a union never created — if the people of those 13 “free sovereign and Independent States” did not believe that they had the right to secede. Even on the eve of the War of 1861, unionist politicians saw secession as a right that states had. Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, “Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical and destructive of republican liberty.” The Northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace."
Northern newspapers editorialized in favor of the South’s right to secede. New-York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): “If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.” The Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): “An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil — evil unmitigated in character and appalling in extent.” The New-York Times (March 21, 1861): “There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.”
don't doubt that some Indiana soldiers were abolitionists but the overwhelming evidence is that most of the soldiers in the north didn't fight over abolition where did the soldiers that South fight to preserve slavery a lot of them didn't like it. they thought because it was their country those individual states have been Sovereign Nations only 80 years before the same amount of time between now and the end of World War II.
I was very curious about slavery when I was young I'm old now when I was 8 years old in 1954 I went down to Louisiana to visit my grandmother my grandmother was Cajun and afro Creole mix he's exotic looking when she was not in the South people would ask about heritage we're in Hawaii increase are you part Greek etc she always smiled and said you got it. that was kind of her family nickname. She had an uncle we had his 100th birthday in 1954 he was in fact a former slave but he was granted manumission when he was about 6 years old right before the war. he had lost nothing is Cajun French was fluent you can also speaking French fluent Spanish and most eloquent English of that style try and not heard since then.
after that I made a point to study as many stories about slavery as I could I read all the WPA slave Americans and many biographies.Uncle Tousant, as he was calledAlso disappeared me of the fact that my ancestors on that side had servants. he told me that was a euphemism.
I suggest that any of you who are truly interested and yeah read the seminal books on that get a hold of the slave narratives they're all out there couple thousand of them. also for certain read-for-cause and comments by McPherson and the article by Walter Williams.
amazon.com/Cause-Comrades-Wh…
walterewilliams.com/were-con…