LOL
Totally different. If the South had ended slavery and then seceded there would not have been a war. Today there is no over riding moral imperative.
With regret
@bilo that is not correct. Lincoln's often-quoted response to Horace Greeley's editorial of 1862 -
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.â€
- makes clear the relative urgency he placed on abolition versus union. Had his war aim been abolition he would have issued the Emancipation Proclamation immediately after Ft. Sumter and also freed slaves in the union-but-still-slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. But Union men fought on Southern soil for nearly two years before the Proclamation, when there was no policy of abolition, and slaves in the union states were not freed during Lincoln's lifetime.
Furthermore when Union and Confederate representatives met at Hampton Roads in February 1865 to discuss a negotiated peace settlement, Lincoln was still willing to negotiate on slavery, but not on union.
It has become fashionable among historians, both professional and amateur, to assert that the "Civil War" was
solely about slavery; this is probably a reaction to "Lost Cause" ideology which disregards slavery even as a cause of secession. But had the Confederates seceded for completely different reasons, there is no evidence Lincoln would have let them go.
