(1) The intensity of anti southern rhetoric had been rising exponentially in the North. How would you feel if you were heaped with vile calumny, were accused of every crime from cruelty to sexual madness and molestation and rape? The northern evangelical Charles G. Finney urged his fellow abolitionists to tone down their anti-southern rhetoric to a more responsible level, and avoid the extremes of accusation, particularly where the truth of the allegations was doubtful.

(2) The North was not alone in abolitionist sentiment, as numerous white Southerners, almost from the beginnings, had expressed reservations, and many hoped (or expected) to see the eventual end to slavery. There had been several mini-movements toward some form of emancipation in Southern churches, though each of those movements had ultimately been defeated.

(3) What northerners failed to see was that any form of immediate abolition would have been catastrophically disruptive not only socially and culturally but economically as well. I believe every single one of the numerous Southern white emancipationists from the days of the Founding, right on down to the days of Henry Clay and even Robert E. Lee, argued that ONLY a careful, considerate, responsible plan of gradual emancipation could work, if at all, and should include remuneration in value. If you are going to pay the workers for work performed, you must also compensate the owners for lost "property."

(4) If the gradual, compensated emancipation of the great Henry Clay had been tried, it very well may have worked, and at the very least would have averted Fort Sumter and its aftermath. But not only did white southern aristocrats shy away from the whole hot button issue, but white northerners reviled Clay as a contemptible slave owner. Robert E. Lee himself supported Henry Clay's compromise stance, both because Lee's natural inclinations were always pro-union and whiggish-leaning, in economics, but also because Lee saw that eventually, emancipation was necessary for the entire nation.

(5) The North was hardly innocent in the entire racial mess of human bondage, and its peremptory condescending tone so evident in much of the abolitionist rhetoric was hardly appropriate. Lincoln himself admitted the complicity of the north, economically, in the ongoing profits of slave-based southern agriculture. New York City profited immensely from the loans made to the South's King Cotton, and behind the scenes, northern business tended to be no less opposed to abolition than were white southerners. A few exceptions of course, existed (Lewis Tappan comes to mind).

(6) Few white Southerners these days are proud of the racist aspect of their tormented past. They just want a little fair treatment. Northern whites were hardly innocent on the issue of racial prejudice, as any glance should show. Lincoln as much as admitted the same, even owning up to his own prejudice and white supremacist inclinations. Irish and German Democrats in the North were notoriously copperhead in their prejudices. But as with anything difficult or tortuous, sometimes all we can do is hope for a change, seek and appeal for a better tomorrow. Martin Luther King Jr. (a Southern Christian and a patriot) reminded us that God can still wring good out of evil.

(7) The cruelties of slavery have been much flaunted (almost tabloid -style) by various muck-raking historians (who behave sometimes little better than unscrupulous journalists). Yet for all the hoopla, all the sentimentalism (and in essence, hypocrisy) over this issue, the fact remains that during the war years, when most white men were away fighting for their homes and families, and work on the plantations was left to a substantial extent to the women and the black slaves, there was not one known case of a slave taking advantage of this absence to commit insurrection or outrage or any major crime whatever. Not to say there were not run-aways, or the attendant pilfering of those who ran away. But as Ida B. Wells noted, there was neither mutiny, nor insurrection, nor outrage against white women during that period. It speaks well not only of the record of white southerners involved in the plantation system, as well as of the (essentially) loyal black folk who performed so much of the necessary work.