re: #290 Targetpractice

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.

I actually didn’t know that. I thought the GOP circa 1861-62 was strongly opposed to slavery or at least the expansion there of which was what the subject of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates were about, not abolition in itself.