>>> "Gar Lipow"
All true. But also true is that the South would not have started the war if they had not felt Lincoln's policies would have doomed slavery. Dishonest Abe's policies were in a day to day sense very timid; but in another sense, because they denied the Southern slavocaracy the near absolute dominance they had over the American scene on issues affecting their interests, those policies were also radical. ___________________________________ CB: Yes, and as Gar says, Marx had a lot to say on this ,more specifically that because the slave mode could not intensify production, because slave's couldn't be trusted with more efficient technology, slavery _had_ to constantly expand territorially in order to survive. So, Lincoln's initial position that slavery could persist where it existed but could not expand to new territories was a death sentence for slavery.
Marx also wrote a sketch analysis of Lincoln's political character in which h e calls him a petit bourgeois lawye r but a sort of common man who rises to the historical
challenge and with a sense of humor when he emancipates the enslaved, illustrating Hegel's idea that comedic logic
is superior to grandeloquent logic. He also calls those hacks Washington and Jefferson "revolutinoaries".
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2000w42/msg00161.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/10/12.htm
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com