Sandy Creed

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: As the Civil War deepened and as the blood and sacrifice on both sides became more profound, Abraham Lincoln began seeking an edge to improve the Union’s chances of prevailing. After a stream of good news from the West earlier in the year, by summer 1862 Union military fortunes had fallen on hard times. Lincoln began to consider striking a powerful economic and, as it turned out, military blow against the rebels. He had begun to formulate an Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln started looking for the opportune moment to issue it, meaning he needed a Union victory so as to insure that such a revolutionary and precipitous move might not seem to be an act of desperation.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Southerners were determined to preserve slavery and willing to fight for the independence that would insure that institution’s continuance. Northern Democrats supported the Union but were split between those who favored the war to force the South to give up its quest for independence and those who wished to treat with the South to effect a voluntary restoration of national unity. Yet, both War and Peace Democrats were absolutely opposed to any notion of interfering with slavery. They were united in their desire to preserve a white America and rejected abolition in any form.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: American political parties are essentially coalitions with a variety of opinions and social and economic impulses gathered under a single political tent organized to recruit, fund, and elect candidates for office at various levels. The bigger the tent, so the theory goes, the greater the party’s success.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: When the Civil War began there was a decided difference in its perceived purpose North and South. The Confederacy desired its independence primarily so that it might preserve its way of life, most particularly the institution of slavery. Southerners were quite clear. The Yankees could let them go out of the Union without a fight, but they would indeed fight if pressed, and their purpose was to maintain slavery. The Southern constitution expressly protects the institution of slavery and the ownership of slaves. Though a minority of Southerners actually owned slaves, the Confederate enterprise, its economy, its society, and its military initiatives and strategy were all designed to preserve that peculiar institution. Asserting states’ rights was the South’s clarion intellectual formulation, but the region departed the Union because it clearly saw that with every passing year American society was become more and more hostile to the state’s rights in maintaining slavery.