Was the Civil War necessary? Could it have been avoided? Was it a great failure, or "just" a great tragedy? Did its blood-soaked horror, and the century-long aftermath of poverty and continued injustice, make up for its defeat of overt, manifest slavery?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, as a black American, has his own perspective:
'The brutal culmination of that war may not have allowed us to ascend into a post-racial heaven. But here is something I always come back to: In 1859 legally selling someone's five-year-old child was big business. In 1866, it was not. American Slavery was a system of perpetual existential violence. The idea that it could have been — or should have been — ended, after two and a half centuries of practice, with a handshake and an ice-cream social strikes me as really wrong.'
The Unromantic Slaughter of the Civil War
Was the Civil War avoidable — or was it the culminating violence of a quieter war that had already been going on for centuries?
It is unfortunate that in a article on the ‘Unromantic’ issue of the ACW, so many Americans seem to hold a romantic view of the North’s aim.
When the US president said ‘I won’t do this’ (force abolition) the electorate didn’t believe him. (He was Republican… hmmm…).
The North fought to preserve the Union for the usual reason the US goes to war – Resources. In this case not oil but cotton. The US was a fledgling economy, and without cotton shipments to France and Britain effectively had no exports, yet still needed to import.
Freeing the slaves was a ploy to keep Britain and France out of the war – The north feared the longer the blockade went on, the more likely Britain and France would have helped the South. Freeing the slaves made the CSA ‘the bad guys’, and stopped that help.
” My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
Lincoln considered Blacks inferior to Whites, and they should not marry. However slavery was the last in a line of ‘States rights’ that ended up making them ‘the baddies’
Northern motivations in the American Civil War were more complex than “It was all about the slaves” (and more complex than “It was all about the cotton”).
Lincoln’s a good example of that complexity. He was strongly anti-slavery from the beginning of his political career — but for a variety of reasons (competition of slavery with free labor; the adverse effect that slavery as an institution had on the nation) which had only a passing association with black civil rights. He did believe blacks were inferior to whites (as most did), and did not think (as many abolitionists also did not) that blacks and whites could long live together; he supported both gradual and compensated emancipation schemes and (re)colonization plans through at least 1863.
That said, there are indications that his opinions changed late in the Civil War as he began to actually work with a number of prominent blacks.
Freeing the slaves played a number of roles — part of it was diplomatic, as noted. Part of it was an attempt to rob the South of labor that was supporting the war. Part of it was a reflection of what was already happening as areas became occupied by the Union Army (though, even there, exceptions to the EP were made in certain districts where Lincoln was trying to court Loyalists).
All that said, anti-slavery (and, as white troops came face-to-face with freed black slaves, and dealt with black soldiers in the Union Army, a growing acceptance of blacks) did play a major role in public opinion in the North.