(Cont. from Part 1) Emory Walker seems to pretty much buy into the pro-Confederate pseudohistorical view of the Civil War, as when he says: "[T]he chief causus belli was not slaveholding per se but rather the question of the right to secede."
I've posted about this canard before. But no matter what the ex-Confederates may have said after the Civil War, no one was in any doubt in 1860-61 that the slaveholders pushed for secession to defend slavery. Not least because they were saying very clearly that was their reason.
It is worth noting that Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves as his first act; instead, that was nearly his last act in the Civil War.
Which means what in terms of the role slavery played in starting the war? The war didn't start because Lincoln emancipated the slaves. The war started because Southern slaveowners were (irrationally) afraid of the threat Lincoln might be to the slave system.
And "nearly his last act in the war"? You see this kind of weird word game all the time in pro-Confederate versions of the war. Some basic chronology: April 12, 1861 - Rebels fire on Fort Sumter, officially starting the war; September 22, 1862 - Lincoln releases "Preliminary" Emancipation Proclamation; January 1, 1863 - Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect; April 9, 1865 - Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox.
At that moment, citizens of northern cities were busy lynching
black freemen and rioting against the draft.
Word games again. This guy is presumably a liberal Dean supporter. Yet he's parroting a completely pseudohistorical, pro-Confederate view of the Civil War. Yes, there was anti-black violence in the North, including the bloody New York antidraft riot of July, 1863. But what does that have to do with the fact that the Southern slaveowners seceeded and started the war in 1861?
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