I’m a history buff, and just tonight through the wonderful Explorator was I able to read the story behind the actual unraveling of slavery that happened during the course of the Civil War.
It wasn’t a result of the war, as many people still believe, but it happened because of the war. It didn’t happen from the top, but as the result of a horse ride conducted under the white flag of truce. It all sprang from the conversation between the Union general, who was a wily and skilled lawyer back home in Massachusetts, and the Confederate colonel, who was Southern gentry. In the end, the general came up with a well accepted wartime rule that worked as well as balancing angels on the head of a pin, so that the peculiar institution which many didn’t want abolished, even in the North, with the many who were uncomfortable with its existence and its abolition equally, and even with the emancipators, could find a way to accept and live with the results. It wasn’t Fort Sumter, and it wasn’t the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was an in-between incident which should’ve never become a forgotten part of Civil War history. But if you read it and pass it on, it will not be.
Filed under: fact nugget, tribute
