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Originally Posted by GlobalExplorer
I also think that Neal got it all wrong with bringing the Confederate soldiers into the discussion. Because most people in the North didnt give a **** about the slaves. Freeing the slaves was just a shrewd move by Lincoln, it at the same time hit the South at his most vulnerable spot, and raised the political price of foreign intervention. Saying that the South was evil because it was a slave country is pure hippocrisy, because the only difference was that they couldnt do away with it as easily and quickly as the North, which the North used in its favour.
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I see a big problem with that argument. It is true that soldiers always fight for more basic causes than their leaders claim. The southern soldiers also couldn't have cared less about secession, or state's rights; they fought because they percieved that the North had invaded their states.
But when you bring up Lincoln and his causes, you ignore the fact that he was, before the war, indeed a proclamed abolitionist; and you disregard the fact that the states' right to secede came up in the first place because the southern states, in their own articles, declared that they were seceeding because the northern states wanted to use the federal government to take away their slaves (which wasn't entirely true, but then that holds for pretty much every argument made on both sides of that war, and probably most other wars as well).