The Republicians under Lincoln campaigned for abolution. Suppose the effort were different. Let slavery continue. Just focus on two evils. Make laws that families cannot be broken up; parents and young children must be together. No serious physical punishment. Instead of trying to change things that Pres. Washington, do things gradually. This is what Newt G. said about health care.
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In reality the slavery issue was settled when the first four states left the Union. These four states could have been left alone and slavery would have died a natural death. With Lincoln's invasion of the South, it forced the other nine states to join the Confederacy. This was the real cause of the war not slavery.
It is my understanding, and I do not claim to be an expert, that the United states is the only country that settled the issue of slavery by war.
Had slavery been the cause of secession - because secession was certainly the cause of the war - then there would have been neither secession nor war. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration, the proposed original 13th Amendment to the Constitution (the Corwin Amendment) had passed both Houses of Congress, been ratified by one state and signed by President Buchanan (unnecessary, but an example of the popularity of the amendment). The Corwin Amendment enshrined slavery in the Constitution in perpetuity; that is, it could not later be revoked. Ergo, the South had clear and eternal protection for their "peculiar institution." Obviously, if slavery had been the problem, those states already "out," South Carolina, Georgia and Florida I believe, would have simply returned and all would have proceeded as before except that the noisy and (on the whole) despised radical abolitionists would have had to go somewhere else to make trouble.
But that didn't happen. The Southern states departed because they were being (or had already been) changed from participating members of a republic into an economic colony of the rest of the Union whose money (the South paid 80% of the federal revenues) was being used for the benefit of Northern commercial and political interests. Seeing nothing ahead but political irrelevancy and a subject status in the nation, the Southern people by and large decided to leave the old compact and set up a new one as was their guaranteed right under the Constitution.
And, by the way, Lincoln NEVER campaigned for abolition. Indeed, he said that he had neither the right nor the desire to "interfere" with slavery. His entire campaign was one for high tariffs and "the American System" of corporate welfare.
