Henry C.K. Liu
Progress is always the illegitimate child of politics. The same ironic rationalization would apply to Richard Nixon, lifelong anti-Communist, who would be able to achieve as President a historic opening to Communist China in 1973 as a grand strategy in geopolitics, after a quarter of a century of ideological estrangement between the two powers, while a similar attempt by a liberal Democrat, such as John F. Kennedy, would have to face domestic accusation of being soft on Communism. Similarly, it would take an anti-abolitionist Abraham Lincoln (1806-1865), who would gain attention early in his political career as a pragmatic segregationist cloaked under the high-minded rhetoric of democratic ideals, to finally overcome his previous political rationalization and to make peace with his personal morals to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Lincoln would come into national prominence in the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the 1858 Senate campaign by shrewdly trapping his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861), into introducing the anti-slavery Freeport doctrine, permitting the new territories to exclude slavery in the name of popular sovereignty. The compromise proposed by Douglas, in spite of the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court a year earlier, in 1857, ruling that slavery could not constitutionally be excluded from any territory, would cost Douglas much popular support, particularly among pro-slavery Southern Democrats, even after his insistence on his personal indifference to the immorality of slavery. Lincoln, the man who would oppose the exclusion of slavery in the new territories with his perversely righteous and dubiously motivated declaration: "A house divided against itself cannot stand", and who would declare himself to be personally opposed to racial equality, would end up abolishing slavery for the whole nation four years later as a political expediency brought about by a poorly conducted, ongoing civil war, notwithstanding his earlier belief that while "Negroes" should enjoy the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness promised to all men by the Declaration of Independence, the extinction of slavery could only be a gradual and lengthy process, with no near-term target date.
American attitude toward the issue of slavery in her history is clouded by a fundamental conflict of its self-image and historical facts. The majority of Americans continue to be abolitionists in public and pro-slavery in private. It shows up in every debate on social issues.
Brett Knowlton wrote:
> ><< Questioning the motives and tactics of the North is not saying that
> > fighting slavery is wrong; >>
> >
> >Nonsense. That is exactly what was argued here, for anyone who paid
> attention.
>
> I wish I'd saved the old messages, because this is not my recollection of
> the debate at all, and certainly not my position.
>
> >The point that matters is that the Union's war effort became the chosen
> >vehicle for the slaves' war for emancipation. As Abraham Lincoln himself
> >attested, had that not been so the Union would have lost the war in two
> >weeks.
>
> First of all, the war was fought to preserve the Union, not to free the
> slaves. Had the North won the war in two weeks, it is unlikely the slaves
> would have been freed, especially in the border states. After a couple of
> years of savage conflict, pressure started to mount for punishing the
> South, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation (which even then didn't
> free the slaves in the border states) and reconstruction.
>
> Secondly, your claim that the Union would have lost the war in two weeks is
> simply wishful thinking.
>
> Brett