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@selah-chelyah Thanks for inviting me into this conversation!

There are a couple of things I’d like to clear up, having studied a rather extensive amount of books and articles on the Civil War.

First of all, just a quick spelling correction, you’re both spelling the term as “succession” when it’s really “secession”.  “To secede’ is very different from “to succeed.”  The south did not fully succeed in seceding.  😛

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, I first want to state that I am a Southern supporter.  I want to state that now because I feel like some of my arguments and explanations may make it sound like I support the North.  So, here goes.

You are correct in stating that the war was fought over secessionism, and that the states were seceding because they thought their rights were taken away.  However, one of the biggest factors among those rights was the right to keep and own slaves.  In the years leading up to the war, many of the major powers of the world had already freed their slaves, including England, (a few of you may be familiar with William Wilberforce) and there was a lot of “peer pressure” on America to do so as well.

At the same time, America was expanding its western borders, and settling in new land, preparing to mark new states in its western territories.  Many of the northern states had put in place abolition laws, and there began conflicts among the representatives in congress as to whether the new western states would be free or slave states.  The south believed each individual state should have the right to choose whether slave owning was allowed, and the north wanted to simply have the government demand the laws in the new states.

So, the problem the southern states had was about government control of the states, but a large part of that had to do with the slave laws.

Now, with regards to why the Emancipation Proclamation was not put in place until the middle of the war:  At the start of the war the south was heavily favored by both the French and the English.  They stayed out of it for the most part, but were sending supply ships to the southern borders and giving other support (which I don’t know much about.)  Lincoln became afraid of the foreign support the south was getting.  He sent ships to the south to block the foreign aid from entering the borders, but he worried that the south would begin to get actual support possibly in the form of armed forces from France and England.  To prevent this, he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, officially turning the war into an issue of slavery.  Since France and England had already freed their slaves and taken a stance against slavery, they could not openly support a side that was officially fighting to keep slavery.  So they backed off, and Lincoln could focus solely on the south.

Slavery was not a big issue for Lincoln – he wanted the power and the unity of all the states as one.  But he was willing to use slavery as a bargaining tool to keep the other world powers out of the fight. (Someone said his stance on secession changed, and that’s possibly that he received power, and realized he wanted to keep it.  Power corrupts, as the saying goes.)

One little note on the Emancipation Proclamation…it didn’t free any slaves.  It specifically stated that only the slaves in the seceding states were to be freed, and none of the slaves in, for example, Maryland (which was a slave state that did not secede) were freed.  The problem is, the Confederacy had formed its own country, so he was basically saying that he was freeing slaves in another country.  It’s almost like saying “prisoners of Switzerland, we declare you all free” which does absolutely nothing, except state that if we won a war with Switzerland, we’d free all their prisoners. (yeah, I just picked a random country. 😉 )  Since the north did win, the slaves did get freed, but if they hadn’t, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been nothing but a piece of paper.

By the way, if anyone disagrees with me, or wants a debate, I am willing to discuss and research more history; this is just what I’ve discovered so far and what I believe at this time.

@his-bard @anyone-else-in-this-conversation