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A Wannabe Tom Paine
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Please excuse me for interrupting your discussion. However, I would like to give an opinion from an onlooker (an Englishman fascinated by US History). It seems to me that **** and negrophobia was widespread across the United States in the antebellum period. Many Free States maintained racist constitutions that excluded the free Afro-American from full citizenship and some actually prohibited African Americans from living in them - or so I seem to remember from my undergraduate days! After all many abolitionists want to expatriate the freed slave to Africa because it was thought impossible for black and white to live side by side. The fundamental division between Free and Slave states was not racism, but Free Soil and Free Labour versus Unfree Labour and a slave owning plantation aristocracy; the belief that every man (particularly White American) should have the opportunity to better himself, to become an independent producer versus a dependant labour system controlled by an oligarchy. Lincoln was a racist (particularly by modern standards), but he ardently believed in an economic and political system in which every American had the opportunity to better himself through his own efforts, including the freed Afro-American. His debates with Senator Douglas in the late 1850s show this. Slavery denied this opportunity not only to unfree Afro-Americans, but also to the poor Whites who lived within its confines. Slavery apologists resorted to contradictory paternalist arguments that they did not believe themselves; hence the intensification of slave oppression and a sustained attempt to federalise slavery in the 1850s. Lincoln was a racist. Jefferson Davis was a racist. Grant was a racist. Lee was a racist. But this is irrelevant. Ultimately, regardless of racial beliefs, one side sought to impose a liberal political and social system on the American empire of the 1850s and the other sought to extend a reactionary system which condemned millions of black men, women and children to perpetual servitude and the vast majority of its white citizenry to crushing poverty and political impotence. Northerners who fought for the Union were not heroes and Southerners who fought for the Confederacy were not villains, and vice versa. But the former cause contained so much more justice within it than did the latter.
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