[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

As flattering as that is, what kind of reason is that to like anyone?

I simply meant in that you are quick to apologise at the first hint that you may have caused unintentional offense. And you think about things, and don't automatically assume you are right, but look at all the facts carefully.

ve got, like, 400 more from Lincoln and his cabinet and a number of Northern newspapers, if you'd like to hear any. I've managed to find my old books since our last discussion on this topic.

Maybe next time we talk. Or in a PM in case no one else is interested.

I'm not so sure about that one. There are a lot of first-hand accounts by slaves where they describe their unwillingness to seperate from their masters, even after they were freed. There are also a lot of accounts of slaves who couldn't wait to get away from their masters.

One thing to explore is not so much accounts of abuse, but try to count how many ran away. Also there is some photographic evidence of abuse, but I found something I'm going to have to buy:
http://www.paperlessarchives.com/afr...e_testimo.html

I think that most of the SOuth was caught in the same quandry that Jefferson found himself in; slavery was an economic neccessity, but also an abridgement of human rights. At the same time, there was a social perspective that African natives could be "trained" into being "good people", hence the paternalistic attitude towards slaves.

Jefferson's conundrum was that he couldn't see how thousands of poorly educated and untrained workers could survive in the world without some kind of education. That, coupled with the Virginia law that required all freed slaves to leave the state within one year, had him totally flustered. Madison was accused by a friend of his of being a hypocrite, writing about freedom while owning slaves. The friend had a unique solution: He sold his plantation and moved the entire household to Kentucky, where he divided it equally between himself and all his former slaves. They then set up their own society. I can't give his name at the moment because the Madison biography I have it from is a library book.

Blame it on the Marine in me, but I simply cannot accept such "prudence" as a mark of success.

Okay, it's the Marine in you.

Actually that might be partly true, as we are all victims of our backgrounds. Lincoln as president might well have foreseen the possibility of further dissention if he tried to free the slaves in the border states. We do have to consider every possibility, and there is no way for us to know what was actually in his head at the time.

The South already had a desire to end slavery, and I think that a little more time and diplmatic effort would have resolved the problem.

Possibly, but that's true of both sides. Should the South have not seceeded, and looked for a better solution? I think so, but I wasn't there, so my opinion is no better than anyone else's.

And also no agreement with them, I presume?

Nothing one way or the other. A true argument deserves consideration. That I don't disagree was meant to indicate that I consider them 'worthy' arguments, i.e. ones that deserve more than a quick answer.

That's okay, I just want people to question what they think they know about the causations of the Civil War.

Question everything you think you know, I always say. Somebody who is sure he 'knows' something is usually wrong.

In that case, Lincoln was not so shrewd, after all. he was obviously well aware of the economic pressures that gave rise to the conflict, why did he do nothing about them if he was so great? To me, he's just another wartime politician, no more, but much less, as he sanctioned violence against fellow Americans for economic gain.

What could he have done? The seceeded before he took office. He had been in office less than a month when the shooting began. While I do believe he was incredibly shrewd in maneuvering the South into firing first, I also believe that by that point the economics were a moot point. His goal was to preserve the Union, and that could no longer be done with political manipulation. If there was no war, there would be no reunion (at least not immediately), and he almost certainly believed that the nation would not survive as two separate countries. Sooner or later the Southern coalition would start to fail (as it did when the Confederate Congress instituted a draft and States started talking about secession from the Confederacy), and at that point the British and the French would be more than glad to 'befriend' them.

The whole 'American Experiment' was still pretty much that at the time. For Lincoln, failure could possibly mean the failure of the whole thing. Possibly not true, but I believe that was foremost in his mind.