I touched on this topic earlier. The dog days of summer seem like a good time to re-open the subject.

Consider the issue of secession:

Congressman Abraham Lincoln, speaking in the House of Representatives in 1847, said, "Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world."

Apparently, this didn't apply to American Southerners in the 1860's.

In 1845, merely fifteen years before the Southern states seceded, many New Englanders were so opposed to the admission of Texas to the Union, that they threatened to withdraw from it. They were led by John Quincy Adams.

In 1806, Senator Plumer of New Hampshire was so outraged by the admission of Louisiana that he stated: "The Eastern states must and will dissolve the Union and form a separate government on their own; and the sooner they do this the better."

What about slavery?

Everybody knows that the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 "freed the slaves." The truth is that not a single slave was freed because of it! The document referred to "all slaves in areas still in rebellion," not the ones in those parts of the Confederacy already occupied by Union forces, nor those in border states, or anywhere else. Obviously, the slaves in the "areas still in rebellion" could not be freed by the Proclamation, and Lincoln knew that they would not be. His purpose in issuing the proclamation was to incite those slaves into a rebellion of their own. In that, he failed.

It was, of course, the 13th amendment that actually did free the slaves.

Did the North corner the market of righteousness on the slavery issue? Not exactly.

General Robert E. Lee freed his slaves before the war started. On the other hand, Julia Grant, wife of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, still owned three slaves at the END of the war. She rented two of them out, but the third was a maid who traveled with her.

When Richmond fell, Mrs. Grant journeyed there from Washington, accompanied by this maid, to visit her husband. Thus, at that moment, the only slave in the former Confederate capital who was not freed belonged to the wife of the commanding general of the Union army!

But here's the topper:

After the war, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was imprisoned for two years, awaiting trial on charges of treason, stemming from his leadership role in the South's effort to establish itself as an independent nation.

His release came after a finding by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, that there was nothing in the US Constitution that prohibited the secession of states.

Uh...then why did they have the war?