On Power: The Independent Institute | U. S. History | Civil War

On Power: The Independent Institute | U. S. History | Civil War: "Nothing illustrates how crisis fuels the growth of government better than the Civil War, or more precisely, the war against Southern secession. Historians endlessly debate the motives for the South’s secession and Abraham Lincoln’s violent effort to stop it. Southerners with an interest in perpetuating slavery surely feared for the future of their “peculiar institution.” But Lincoln’s reasons for preventing secession do not appear to have been related to slavery. His own statements indicate this, for example: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” His preliminary “Emancipation Proclamation” was not issued until September 1862 and applied only to areas outside his jurisdiction, that is, “within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States.“ The slaves under his authority, such as those in the border states and the parts of the Confederacy under Union control, were not freed during the war. Had slavery been the principal motive for Lincoln’s war, he might have found a way other than war to emancipate the slaves. After all, England and other countries had managed to do so peacefully."