Monday, March 17, 2014
On the Civil War Having Been Fought Over Slavery 1
"The sole object of the war is to restore the Union. Should I become convinced it has any other object, or that the government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the abolitionists, I pledge you my honor as a man and a soldier I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side." Ulysses S. Grant, 1862.
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Grant did not resign after the Emancipation and seems to have had a change of view:
"“THE CAUSE of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.”
― Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, Vol. 2
Easy to make that statement AFTER the war and there wasn't any reason to resign after the E.P. because the document didn't make slavery illegal at all and if anything codified it (even allowing slavery to continue in the Confederacy if those states returned to the Union by 1/1/1863).
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