I ride the bus home from work 5 days a week with a really cool Hispanic guy from Refugio, Texas, a Vietnam vet, handsome as a Spanish Grandee and a true gentleman. He was telling me about his daughter who he named Xochitl. I mentioned that I work with 2 women of the same name. Then he said, “It’s Nahuatl, for flower, which was the language we spoke before the Spanish came.”

“Yes, I replied, but your ancestors spoke Spanish too.”

“Not until the Spanish conquered Mexico,” he said.

“No, I told him, your Spanish conquistador ancestors spoke Spanish. You told me your mother was Spanish, so, some of your ancestors spoke Nahuatl and some spoke Castilian Spanish.”

He still looked confused. People just don’t want to believe that the blood of the so called “oppressors” runs in their own veins. But they are the direct descendants of those oppressors.

“Funny thing is. Lincoln initially turned the Republican party down when they asked him to run for president on their ticket.”
“It wasn’t until the Republican party officials agreed that they didn’t expect him to abolish slavery by Presidential Fiat that he finally agreed to run.”

These statements are incorrect. Republican party officials did not say this to him. He could not have been elected on an abolition platform. The Republicans were very eager to avoid charges of abolitionism, which would have sunk them in the 1860 election. No candidate could have been elected on that platform, and party officials knew that. Seward, considered more radical than Lincoln in 1860, did not believe slavery could be abolished by

moddem1973.

Your facts are mostly right, but could use a little more understanding.

The South’s secession from the union had been building for some time, but was finally sparked off by the pending election of the first President from a, then still fairly new, single-issue abolitionist political party (That would be Abraham Lincoln, and the Republican party). The secession was all about slavery and the Southern state’s belief that Abraham Lincoln would abolish the institution.

So yes, the Northern soldiers were fighting to “Save the Union”, and the South was fighting for “States Rights”, but the reason behind it all had everything to do with the institution of Slavery.

Funny thing is. Lincoln initially turned the Republican party down when they asked him to run for president on their ticket. He believed (rightly so) that the President alone did not have the power to end slavery, and that it would require an act from congress to do so. It wasn’t until the Republican party officials agreed that they didn’t expect him to abolish slavery by Presidential Fiat that he finally agreed to run. Even when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he is said to have commented to a friend that he didn’t believe it had any legal power, but signed it anyway because it was bound to have an effect on the war effort. BTW, this isn’t to say that Lincoln wasn’t opposed to slavery. His opposition to slavery is well known. He just knew and accepted the limitations of the presidential office.

So, did the average northern soldier have an understanding of the geopolitical ramifications of the civil war? Likely some did and some didn’t. However, they were fighting for the union, and the union was moving inexorably towards the end of slavery, which the South was trying to avoid by seceding. So in effect, that is exactly what they were doing.

350,000 white people did not die to end slavery; any more than 250,000 soldiers died to save it. The 350,000 died to save the Union; the abolition of slavery was an unintended result of the war, not its cause.