Lincoln said if it wouldve stopped the war, he wouldnt have freed a single slave, that means the war was not over slavery, period
The South plainly thought it was.
Jefferson, who was a slave-owning SOutherner, plainly said it best in 1840, and it only got worse over the next 40 years....
"But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
- Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, (discussing slavery and the Missouri question), Monticello, 22 April 1820.Birdwatcher
