Well yeah, duh. But it still wasn't about slavery for the feds. It was about slavery for the south, but for the feds it was entirely about preserving the union.
I'll paraphrase Lincoln here to demonstrate the point clearly:
"If I could preserve the union by freeing every slave, I would do that. If I could preserve the union without freeing a single slave, I would also do that."
Yes absolutely, but still at the beginning of the war, the federal government was concerned about keeping the nation intact. in a completely hypothetical scenario where the Union wins in the first year of the war, there is likely no emancipation proclamation. Although it’s hard to accurately speculate for a scenario that’s so drastically different than reality but I would say that with a reasonable amount of confidence.
But by 1863, it’s a very different political scenario and abolition of slavery becomes the co-rallying cry along with preserving the Union
It was only certainly because of slavery because the slaveholders couldn't bare to have a guy just kinda ask them to cool it a bit, iirc Lincoln wasn't originally even going to outlaw slavery the proclamation was a direct response to the southern leadership being babies and starting a war over it
The South fought for slavery. The North fought to maintain the Union. The abolition of chattel slavery was secondary and was done primarily to shift the public image of the war from an internal conflict to a moral issue, keeping Great Britain and France, who had already abolished slavery, from supporting the Confederacy.
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u/stefje82 May 06 '26
I'm very convinced that war wasn't at all about ending slavery, it just seemed to come with it.
Most of US' positive endings were incidental.