re: #285 HappyWarrior

Yeah it’s a lie and incredibly stupid too. And I get tired of the Democrats as a whole from the 1860’s made out to be pro-secession. That wasn’t the case. That was the Southern Dems. Lots of Northern Dems who were not only pro-Union but some of them even became some of Lincoln’s top generals, Winfield Scott Hancock comes to mind. I will grant that the Republicans were the only party not to have secessionist and pro slavery elements but the remnants of the Whigs certainly did. Like Civil Rights itself a 100 years later, I’d say a lot of the divide on secession was based on region. I believe it’s been shown that Northern Democrats voted for the Civil Rights legislation at a same or even greater rate than their Republican colleagues and as I said yesterday, the Republicans showed how serious they were about the entire issue when they decided to nominate Goldwater in ‘64 rather than a proven Civil Rights champion like Rockefeller.

Yeah, not so much. The Republican Party was like most political parties, split into factions that tried to pull it hither and yon. While there was no overt support for secessionist states in the party, there were those Republicans who felt that the Southerners weren’t wrong when they said slavery was a legal matter and one that the Feds had no business poking their noses into. Really, had the war ended prior to Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s likely its lasting legacy would be that viewpoint that states don’t have the right to secede and slavery would have been abolished in a much more gradual fashion.