re: #111 Mostly sane, most of the time.

Here are the numbers:

Union: 22 million people
Confederacy: 9 million people, 3.9 million of whom were slaves

The Emancipation Proclamation meant that the South suddenly had 3.9 million people inside their borders that had a powerful interest in seeing them lose.

Ayep, slavery goes, they lose their economy. Or, rather, they have to start compensating their former slaves for their work, something that man of the plantation rich were never going to accept.

It’s why I always get a kick out of the Neo-Confederates who like to talk about how we could have had a peaceful emancipation, with slavery gradually going away. A fantasy that has kept going for decades.