Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire More Proof That The Cival War Wasn't Over Slavery

Tara Ross

On this day in 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee decides to make a stand! His decision would lead to the bloody Battle of Antietam.
Federal forces were then reeling from their defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run. (See August 30 history post.) That battle had left Union General John Pope’s army retreating toward Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln soon merged Pope’s army into General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.
“[D]estroy the rebel army,” Lincoln ordered McClellan.
In the meantime, Lee had decided to invade Maryland. He divided his men, sending some towards Hagerstown and some towards Harper’s Ferry. His directive was written down in Special Order 191—which turned out to be a big problem!
Would you believe that some hapless Confederate soldier used a copy of Order 191 to wrap his cigars? And he dropped those cigars in a field where they were found by two Union soldiers! McClellan was ecstatic, reportedly remarking: “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.”
Hmm. Perhaps it wasn’t quite that easy. A Confederate sympathizer overheard the conversation and got word to Lee that his plans had been discovered.
Fortunately for Lee, the notoriously cautious General McClellan took 18 hours to get his troops moving once he learned of Lee’s order. Lee took the opportunity to block some mountain passes that McClellan would need. On September 14, a battle waged for control of these passes. The battle didn’t go too well for the Confederates, but it did at least delay McClellan’s movements a bit.
McClellan finally made his move on the morning of September 17. Union forces snuck through a cornfield and attacked Lee’s men. The battle quickly became intense. One participant, historian Paul Boyer writes, remembered that the cornfield “was so full of bodies that a man could have walked through it without stepping on the ground.”
A second phase of the fighting occurred on a road that would later become known as Bloody Lane. Confederates became trapped in a low-lying portion of the road. Thousands were killed or wounded.
As if that weren’t enough, a final phase of the battle occurred at Antietam Creek. The Union forces eventually outlasted the Confederates simply because of their overwhelming numbers. They might even have won, except Confederate reinforcements from Harper’s Ferry arrived on the scene at just the right moment. As night fell, the battle was effectively at a stalemate.
The casualties were staggering. According to historian James M. McPherson, the casualties during that single day at Antietam were twice the casualties of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war COMBINED.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Lee retreated back over the Potomac the next day, leaving Union forces in possession of the field. It was a costly (and bare) Union victory, but one that Abraham Lincoln was determined to utilize. Five days later, he issued a proclamation. The Confederate states had until January 1, 1863, to return to the Union. If they did, they could keep their slaves. Any state that refused would be subject to Lincoln’s planned Emancipation Proclamation.
Not one state returned to the fold. Instead, Lincoln would issue his Emancipation Proclamation, a document that freed slaves in the Confederate states, but not the northern states. (Yes, there were some.)
What if the Confederate states had taken Lincoln up on his offer? Would we still say that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery?
*** Special note! *** Please don’t forget to LIKE or COMMENT in order to enter my free book giveaway. SHARES are also much appreciated. More info can be found in the comments, below.
-------------
Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright © 2013-2017 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the Facebook “share” feature instead of cutting/pasting.
Permalink: http://www.taraross.com/…/this-day-in-history-battle-antiet…
#TDIH #OTD #AmericanHistory #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory‬

https://www.facebook.com/TaraRoss.1787/posts/1175223512579253

The Republicans who declared war on the South didn't give a rats rearend about the slaves, but they did use them as an excuse to wage war on the South. If one takes the time to actually study history, and not just cherry pick the parts out that suit them, they will quickly see that Lincoln as far more interested in preserving the Union, and therefore keeping the South under the control of the North, than he was with freeing any slaves.

"The Confederate states had until January 1, 1863, to return to the Union. If they did, they could keep their slaves."

These words prove that the Civil War was about slavery. It was fought over the right for any state to deny any Constitutional protections to any of its people.

How-in-the-Hell does preserving the Union put the South under the North? Pure Neo-Confederate propaganda.

Why did Lincoln not free the slaves held in the North under the Proclamation?

"The Proclamation was based on the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces; it was not a law passed by Congress."

I would say that slavery was just one of several agent causes of the war and that secession was the end cause.

You can throw in taxation and probably more as agent causes. Few things happen in a vacuum.

Proves nothing. Lincoln explicitly stated BEFORE the Confederacy attacked Union troops and ships that he was even willing to support a new Constitutional Amendment making slavery permanent if that's what it took to prevent a war.

The Confederacy knew such an Amendment would never pass, needing 75% of the states to ratify it and there was no way that 75% percent of the Union would go along with the evil that was slavery. So they broke off and started a war.

That's right. Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery (although that would have eventually happened anyway) but there wasn't any support in the North for expanding slavery to the West. Lincoln should have massed troops in Kansas and called it a day.

Davis did not give Lincoln that chance.

Tough to argue with this.




P

John Marszalek: Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University
"When Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office, the last thing on his mind was starting a civil war that would consume his entire presidency. He did, however, believe that he had a constitutional duty to prevent the breakup of the Union, which he and so many Americans viewed in mystic terms.
Preserving the Union meant doing what it took to prevent its dismemberment. Fort Sumter became the symbol of the ability or inability of the national government to maintain control over its territory, and the ability or inability of the Confederates to eject Federals from what they considered to be their land. Lincoln knew he had to hold on to that fort or admit the success of Confederate secession and the dissolution of the Union. Jefferson Davis and the Confederates believed just the opposite.
Ironically, both Lincoln and Davis hoped that the other side would go on the attack first and thus lose the moral high ground. Lincoln held fast, but the Confederacy blinked and Southern cannon opened fire on Fort Sumter.
Did Lincoln’s actions to preserve the Union maneuver the Confederates into going on the attack first? Historian Charles Ramsdell certainly thought so in his famous Journal of Southern History essay in 1937. This was hardly the case, however. Southerners were only too happy to attack the fort on their own. Whether Lincoln tried to resupply Sumter or not, it seems probable that the South would have attacked anyway. The Confederacy had gone too far already in its determination to be a separate nation to do anything less."

Was slavery legal when the war began?

Well, I'll give it a try anyway. The slaves, rightly or wrongly, were not "people", that is citizens, of the states in which they were held. They were property. Constitutional protections do not apply to property, except that it cannot be taken from a citizen without just compensation, which I have never heard of being offered to the slaveholders. The slaveholders thus were the ones being denied Constitutional protections. $.02

They weren't being denied anything, because there was no law or Constitutional Amendment to free the slaves prior to the South starting the war. An Amendment never would have passed, since the South had more than 25% of the states.

They were afraid of that happening, but it hadn't happened yet.

The war was fought over states rights, not slavery. Simply coming back into the union would have preserved slavery, thus no need for the war.

It could have been offered at any time. Was there ever an effort made to negotiate a buy-out for the slaveholders? I don't know. Fact remains, the slaves were not citizens of the states they were in and so they were not being denied any rights; they had no rights to be denied. Not saying it was right, but just that that's how it was.

Yup, the right to own other human beings.

Oh, and the Nazis didn't murder all those Jews; they died of typhus, or prickly heat, or toenail fungus.

If the north cared about the slaves, why did the 1st 13th amendment get passed? Who passed it? What did it say?

Not a fan of slavery, but not that big a fan of paying their ancestors not to work indefinitely, either.