[piece-itpete]

This is an excellent discussion.

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

..... Jefferson saw black people as less than human. Had he not, he would not have had ownership. Had he not, he would have made sure that his Constitution did not allow for slavery to remain in place in the new union. If his fellow founders objected to that, he would have been free to withdraw his collaboration and support and simply let the other slave owning founders write the Constitution that did not address the issue of slavery, without him. I don't see the "differences" as gigantic at all. Minimal...pretty much.

I thought politics was the art of the possible? They created a system that did succeed in freeing all here. The south would've had a slave empire.

And they did another thing that shows character - they agreed to a system that made absolutely sure they would eventually lose power. These were an exceptional group of men.

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

Generally the people of the northern states.had little concern for the slaves in the south. Certainly not enough to fight and possibly die for any slaves. Lincoln could have easily lost whatever popular support he had for maintaining the Union had he made the primary goal abolition and not Union. I believe at a particularly difficult time, he commented to the effect that should he make the issue freeing the slaves, half the Union army would desert, and a half dozen more states would secede. For most of the war he walked this tightrope.

I caught an excellent little thing in one of the biographies of him I've read, that he wasn't particularly worried about losing the second election because he knew the Midwesterners would have never allowed a foreign county to control the mouth of the Mississippi.

Pete