Slavery

[LincolnMan]

Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose had this to say:

The best definition of what the Civil War was all about came from Abraham Lincoln. It was a struggle "testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." The conception and the dedication he was talking about were that all men were created equal and that they all had a right to participate in the decisions that governed their lives. Beyond that, they had an obligation to abide by the principle of majority rule. The men who died at Gettysburg, and at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and on scores of other battlefields, had not given the last full measure of devotion to free the slaves, nor to establish a modern nation nor to create an industrial empire. They had died for the Union, and beyond that for the idea of democracy, so that the ray of hope sent forth by the American Revolution would never dim. If the Confederacy triumphed, the hope of the world's masses would come crashing down with the Union. The issue of the Civil War was democracy. Lincoln saw to it that the North fought to insure "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."