[quote]Quasi-Tech wrote:
My history might be rusty, but wasnt the Civil War fought for the right for States to govern themselves independently, and only after the North started to win the war, did it become about free’ing the slaves?
[/quote]
No.
The war was always about slaves, but the southern States used claims of rights in lieu of saying we just want slavery.
But this is simplifying the matter, because the southern States considered slaves property, and the abolitionists’ efforts to free slaves as tantamount to removing their property. Which is true, given that slaves were considered property under law at that point in time.
So the slave debate/conflict became one where the abolitionists were fighting for an ideological cause, because the economic substance simply wasn’t relevant to them, whereas the folks in the southern States were fighting for their economic rights, as it were.
The war itself began because the leaders in the southern States got this idea in their heads that Lincoln wanted to free slaves, though he repeatedly said he didn’t want to do that because he knew it would lead to a bloody war, or at least severe violence. So when Lincoln got elected, they decided to secede from the Union. Lincoln said secession is actually not allowed in the Constitution, the folks in the southern States said it is.
And then an army raised under the flag of the CSA besieged a fort which sat on a strategic location, which Lincoln tried to resupply sometime later. The army fired on and forced the convoy back, and then later stormed and took the fort.
And thus began the war.
Anyways, the war didn’t initially start to end slavery because Lincoln saw it as a rebellion, and thus putting the rebellion down was priority. But the pertinent issue that the war began because of the issue over slavery always remained, and later on it became obvious to just about everyone in power that it had to be resolved here and now, or else there will be another war down the road if the U.S.A did manage to win and force the southern States back into its fold.
But because the general public didn’t much like the idea of freeing slaves when the army should be focused on wrecking the heck out of the secessionists, and because the border states still had a bunch of slaves and weren’t all that keen in freeing their slaves, Lincoln had to use a smokescreen that is called the Emancipation Proclamation instead of just going full out and saying the obvious.
And only once the war was nearly over did he have the political clout to outright try for the 14th Amendment, because by that point the general public bought the idea that the war really was about the issue over slavery.
And that’s why you still have people spouting nonsense that the war wasn’t about slaves.