No, not really. A complex set of circumstances were present between the North and the South which led to the conflict that saw nearly 620,000 people die. The popular view that the Civil War was a conflict over slavery with the North wanting to provide freedom to those people that were enslaved in the South is a distortion of the truth. The issue of slavery did play an important role in the Civil War. However, the fight over slavery between the North and South centered on who had the jurisdiction over the institution of slavery in the individual states. The South embraced the position that the states should be sovereign and that the federal government was overstepping its rightful bounds by attempting to regulate and restrict slavery in all states. The North believed that the centralized federal government held the right to dictate this policy to the states.
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The war was really a conflict between those who believed that God's law was the foundation of the social order and those who believed that man could, by instituting his own law, perfect society. That was what Abolition was all about. That's why nearly every member of the Transcendental Club was a leading Abolitionist. Abolition wasn't an end to itself. It was a tenet in a set of tenets which included egalitarian feminism, universal public education, and socialism, stemming from the worldview of Unitarianism, which inevitably results in a flawed understanding of the one and the many and redemption by the State rather than Christ.
Buaidh no Bas,
Andrew R.
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