South went to war to preserve life based on slavery

White House chief of staff John Kelly said the Civil War was caused by a lack of compromise. Yes, we could have avoided a war that killed 700,000 Americans by compromising the freedom of 4 million African-American slaves. In fact we had been compromising their freedom since 1776 to preserve our democracy.

But with the election of Lincoln as president, the South saw the writing on the wall, that continuing to compromise the freedom of their 4 million slaves was not going to last forever and eventually they would have to give up their way of life based on slavery.

So the South went to war to preserve a way of life based on slavery, rather than live in a country where “all men are created equal.”

Yes, Mr. Kelly, we could have prevented the Civil War by continuing to compromise. But by 1861, the time for compromising was over and the time for fulfilling the dream that a country based on the principle that “all men are created equal” should be preserved and, as Lincoln said, “....shall not perish from the earth.”

This story was originally published November 4, 2017 at 12:17 PM with the headline "South went to war to preserve life based on slavery."