Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire OMG Another Civil War Thread!

The reason that Lincoln went easy on slavery during the first part of the war was that he didn't want the four remaining slave states to secede.

At the outset, Lincoln said he would not interfere with slavery where it existed but it could not be extended to the new territories. But the cotton states knew that, as states were created from these territories, the South would eventually be out voted and slavery would be ended.

As for the remaining slave states, Kentucky said it was neutral but the South invaded it, causing much anger against the South. Maryland was occupied by the Union Army as was Missouri. Delaware saw which way the wind was blowing. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to deprive the South of slave labor and eliminate any chance that England and France would come to the aid of the Confederacy.

Was Sherman's march necessary? Yes. In 1964 Jefferson Davis still thought the South would win. Why? Because voters in the North were getting fed up with all the casualties and Lincoln could lose the 1964 election. In fact, Lincopln himself thought he would lose. McClellan, his opponent, would let the South go. But Sherman's capture of Atlanta turned the sentiment of the voters.

Was secession legal? No court has ever ruled on that question. But if the South could secede, then other states could also secede. And southern states could secede from the Confederacy. The United States would soon be like Central America. Lincoln's point was that since the US was the only real democracy in the world back then, secession would eliminate democracy from the face of the earth. The war would determine whether "any nation conceived and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could survive and the goal was that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln was right. The federal government encroachments since then, which many of us resent, only exist because the people are dumb enuough to want things that way.