Really? I think you have more faith in the US army's ability to improve
> people's lives than I have.
>
But aren't you the one claiming that the US army pretty much singlehandedly improved people's lives via the Civil War?
(I'm tempted to respond to your crude sermonizing of several messages ago with some of my own - "Is the subjugation of women such an incidental to you that you don't mind if it is or is not abolished?" - but will refrain.)
But that is a false opposition. Nothing happens by economics alone. There
> would have had to have been some kind of conflict for the slaveowners to
> have been forced out of their social position.
>
Well, yeah. That "logic" could be used to justify armed intervention to end pretty much any social nastiness in the world.
> Crazy, really, to differentiate the 'economic reasons' from abolition which
> was both an economic and a social reason.
>
If you're claiming that the Union's decision-making class was motivated to go to war by abolitionism, you really are going to have to put some kind of proof on the table.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."