“I see that in a certain portion of the territory of the United States at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. Whosoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”
Perhaps I was fed a reductionist view of the Civil War in grade school, but this seems to challenge core assumptions we were taught.
My view of the Civil War was further shifted when I learned that Lincoln’s idea of ending slavery never implied amalgamation of former slaves into white society— something he was openly against. He literally tried (and inhumanely failed) to deport all the black people to a remote location.
Before the War, Lincoln publicly complained that the slave states were breeding all the unwanted “mulattos”. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederacy, almost like it was a war tactic.