Quote:
Originally Posted by Chewbaccus
I've always held on to an argument I came across in my junior year of high school - that the Proclamation was issued to make the war about slavery in order to use moral superiority to forestall any English or French intercession - military and/or otherwise - on the Southern side. To wit: post-Proclamation, as much as the English and French may have wanted to check the development of America as an economic rival, they could not rouse their populace to fight on behalf of (what was then perceived to be) the continuance of slavery.
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That was the conclusion of the paper I wrote.
It was a twofer but the bottom line was foreign intervention was the only way the CSA was going to survive. They lacked the men and material to continue. The South actually debated freeing their slaves as a way to increase manpower. We forget that even for slaves the South was home and the blue army was foreign. The Northern Army was full of immigrants who considered freed slaves to be competition for jobs. The slaves were not universally treated well by the invading army, creating weird dynamics in places where slaves were treated decently (inside the context of the times).