How much longer would slavery have lasted if the South won the Civil War?

Great Debates
81

While I really am not obsessed with the Civil War and I’m not a carte blanche southern apologist- there are many horrors in which southerners have played a starring role- I get incensed when slavery is treated as so simplistic a subject as to say “southerners were bad and northerners were enlightened”. It’s bullshit.

The southerners of 1861-1865 lived in a land where slavery- HUGE numbers of slaves- had been a vital part of the economy and the population for more than 200 years. That is a very very long time; some of my families who were in the south during the Civil War had been here for TEN GENERATIONS by the time of the war, and every generation in an economy dominated by slavery. They had nothing to compare it to, they accepted it as it was, and while that wasn’t admirable it is most certainly human nature.
There was not a magic curtain on the Maryland and Kentucky borders where on one side people were rabidly pro-slavery and on the other side they were rabidly anti-slavery. Most northern soldiers couldn’t give a damn whether slaves were free, many if not most had never even met a black person and many abolitionists still believed blacks were inferior as a race and spoke of them in the most patronizing of terms.
The practice itself was, it hardly takes courage to say, brutally and inhumanly and systemically and intrinsically horrible, but it was also legal, always had been legal in some manner or form, was justified repeatedly in the Bible (Paul even specifically called on the Christian slaves of Christian masters to serve them well), and a period of time less than the temporal distance between us and World War 2 separated slavery from being a southern institution to being a much wider institution. Much of Central Park is built above a slave cemetery whose bodies were removed prior to breaking ground. It was economics and geography and agriculture, not humanity or enlightenment, that ended slavery in the north: as they moved towards an economy of artisans and small businesses and family farms and factories and as immigrants poured into their ports from Ireland and Germany and England and everywhere else, it was more logical and more productive to use free labor than to buy slaves. Period. It wasn’t because they suddenly woke up one day in 1763 and said “Slavery’s bad, mkay! Let’s embrace the man and woman of color and call them our brother and sister.” It didn’t happen like that; there’s no huge difference in the brain physiology of New Yorkers versus South Carolinians, and as with today most people’s morals and strongly held views were not coincidentally closely linked to their pocket books. (Bostonians didn’t think much was wrong with killing whales for their oil or posting NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs even though today we think both were very bad things and New Englanders wiped out their “Naturals” with European disease and violence the same as we did down here, and furthermore most southern states were founded by people moving south from northern Atlantic states- they were the same stock.)

The attitudes of the slaveowners themselves were barbaric by our standards, it takes no guts to say that, but they were neither simplistic or uniform. Many slaveowners were humane in some ways and brutal in others. Thomas Jefferson praised the ingenuity and intelligence of blacks in some writings, later becoming increasingly racist as his bitterness at being unable to free them was more entrenched, but at his most liberal and benevolent he was a man who refused to separate families and could be quite generous to his slaves while at the same time constantly redecorating and redesigning and renovating his two mansions enormous expense while going deeper and deeper into debt and ensuring his slaves would have be sold to the four corners AND while his enslaved work force lived on average 5 to a house and that house being 240 square feet. Meanwhile Jefferson Davis thought nothing of ordering all black men caught in uniforms and their white officers to be put to death on the spot and gave several of the most -even-by-1860-standards- racist speeches AND yet he violated the law of Mississippi by teaching many of his slaves to read and eventually sold his plantation to one of his former slaves. (When Davis’s last surviving son, J.D.Jr., was on his deathbed as a young man in the Memphis Yellow Fever epidemic he called for two people: his mother and the former slave Davis to whom Davis sold Briarfield.)

Speaking of Jefferson Davis, one of the great atrocities to befall blacks during the war involved the deaths of dozens of blacks who attempted to flee with Sherman. They were abandoned at Ebenezer Creek as the Confederate cavalry approached and many drowned while trying to flee, and all of this was on the direct orders of Jefferson Davis, but not the CSA president. This was General Jefferson C. Davis of Indiana, one of Sherman’s wing commanders, who detested blacks and ordered the pontoon bridge that conveyed his troops removed so they could not use it as they were slowing his progress. At the same time remember that there were numerous southerners who were hanged or who are anonymous to history because they never “came out” who aided runaway slaves as stations on the Underground Railroad. I mention this not to say “South Good/North Bad” because there was ample humanity and inhumanity on both sides, but to demonstrate that not all Southerners were monsters or even pro-slavery, not all Northerners were heroes or even anti-slavery, and the situation was way too complex to simplify.

Slavery was evil. It was also a national problem, not just a southern problem. Northern industrialists were up to their eyeteeth in the products and profits made from the institution, it was strictly a matter of climate and geography and agriculture that centered slavery in the south, and some of the worst violence directed at free blacks after the war occurred in northern cities. Less than a generation before the war Alexis de Toqueville, who was profoundly sickened and disturbed by the war, stated that he found entrenched segregation and racism more prevalent towards blacks (where they existed) in the north than in the south. Example:

[MR. CELLOPHANE]Hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.[/MR. CELLOPHANE]

82

In the above, Less than a generation before the war Alexis de Toqueville, who was profoundly sickened and disturbed by the war should read Less than a generation before the war Alexis de Toqueville, who was profoundly sickened and disturbed by slavery. And the role of Tevye will be performed tonight by Little Bucky Wilson, age 4 and a half. Enjoy your veal.

83

This always seems to come up in slavery/CW debates, and I fail to see the relevance. What does not owning slaves have to do with not fighting to preserve slavery? People fight for things that don’t directly affect them all the time.

We’re not usually able to judge the motives of each individual soldier in any conflict. The best we have to go on is the motive of the nation or army that those soldiers are fighting for.

The main (if not sole) reason for the Confederacy’s existance was the perpetuation of slavery. Period. It’s not like the Iraq war, where we have to go hunting for the evidence of avarice behind all those public proclamations of noble ideals and just wars. The leaders of the CSA quite plainly stated that they were starting a war so that they could continue to keep other human beings in bondage.

Why should we assume that the eighteen year old grunt was fighting for some nobler purpose? What nobler purpose was there?

We don’t cut the “Good Germans” the same moral slack, and Germany (at least the FRG) almost immediately began to atone for its sins. The South continued a system of brutalization for another century.

84

Jim Crow was a vile putrid gangrenous system, there’s no but to that.
Racial intolerance and injustice and legal disenfranchisement was not unique to the south- that is objective fact. The KKK for example was a far more powerful entity in the midwest than it ever was in the South (and the largest rally they ever held was in Long Island NY in 1923- 25,000 attended).
The same court orders that forced the integration of schools in Rockford AL also were used to force their integration in Hyannisport, MA (something that got a lot of press at the time) and the worst race riots of the 60s occurred in LA and NYC.

I have no problem conceding that racism was and still is a Southern social problem. I will not concede, because it is demonstrably untrue, that racism it is uniquely or even mostly a Southern social problem or even that we are the most racist people in the country. Non-whites have gotten skin-color-based shitty deals in every state of the union in every century and every decade, and MLK himself said racism was far easier to fight in the south because it was not closeted as it was outside the south. (Actually, today it is closeted down here, and it’s harder to fight.)

85

I’m not going to quote Sampiro’s whole post - I’ll just respond to the general gist.

I get the drift that the Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis were complicated guys vis a vis slavery. Individual Confederate soldiers were complicated, too. As was John Brown.

Chairman Mao (to get off the Nazi analogy jag) was a complicated guy, as were probably every one of the post-adolescent Red Guards during the GPCR.

For better or for worse, history (and Der Trihs) usually judges folks not by amount of good they do, but by the amount of evil they do. How do we remember Grant? As a butcher and a drunk. John Brown? A psycho.

By that standard, I don’t think it’s unfair to remember plantation owners as greedy brutalizers of their fellow men, or Confederate grunts as (at best) fools fighting for an evil cause.

And for the record, Marge Schott was mostly a cryptofascist loony, but also the catalyst for the most awesome season in baseball history. C’est la vie.

86

Many a decent historian DOES cut the “Good Germans” EXACTLY that type of moral slack. An 18 year old farm boy who is drafted into the army and fights on the Eastern Front against the Soviets is not tried for war crimes.

As for what nobler purpose? Let’s see, the industrial north controlled the banks that squeezed the south. The north controlled the tariffs that made the south sell their cotton to England, but forced the South to only be able to afford textiles from the North. The North was beginning the next shift in American government by creating a stronger federal government that would result in the populous North telling the South what to do.

Now - is that all a bit simplified? Of course - but it has enough truth to rally the vast majority of the South that did not own slaves to go and die for an institution that had no direct immediate benefit to them. They must have seen bigger issues than just owning a slave - like a bunch of hypocritical Northerners who would not do a damned thing for Negro, except free them in the South.

87

However, the standard is corrupt and in the interest of fighting ignorance we should not promote it. John Brown was not a psycho; Grant was not a butcher; Der Trihs displays a monomaniacal approach to life that relies too much on his personal feelings and prejudices and too little on facts.

It is a true statement that the majority of non-slave-holding Southern soldiers were fighting to defend slavery. That is a simple deduced fact born from noting that their new country had been founded on the principle of slavery and that they were fighting to defend it. Beyond that raw statement, lacking much context or any nuance, I would say that any generalizations that rely on either estimates of intelligence or declarations regarding ethics are useless. Such generalizations teach us nothing and permit us to make sweeping judgments that are nearly guaranteed to be false. Declarations of that sort provide no legitimate context to evaluate the mind of a person who was defending his home and his nation from a perceived aggression that had begun due to the rival oratory of politicians and the wealthy classes to whom he could never aspire to join while, at the same time, providing rhetoric that obscures any understanding of the actual choices faced by the people of the time.

This sort of declaration is no more helpful, I’m afraid, as it plays the same sort of simplistic moralizing (for our benefit) without actually addressing genuine concerns of the people involved. (The typical New York or Michigan farmer was no more interested in “hypocritically” freeing slaves than the the typical Georgian or Texan farmer was capable of acquiring slaves (brutally or otherwise). )

88

There’s actually a new book out, “What This Cruel War Was Over” by Chandra Manning, that looks at this question of what the average soldier, on both sides, was fighting for. She’s studied diaries, letters, regimental newspapers, etc, and came to the conclusion that slavery and attitudes toward slavery, was a major factor in why soldiers fought. She argues that, even from the beginning, southern soldiers saw the war, and their part in it as a defense of slavery, regardless of their own personal financial status or whether they owned slaves. Even those soldiers who didn’t own slaves and never would have been able to afford a slave, saw slavery as a personal good worth fighting for. And Northern soldiers, even those who disliked blacks and saw them as inferior, developed a real hatred for slavery and a commitment that it had to be destroyed as an institution.

89

You are correct - I can only claim to have meant to parse that a bit differently.

One of the interesting things I find in the Civil War is the need for a draft in the North (and the resultant draft riots) and the fact that non-slave owners volunteered in the South.

90

I’m curious: I don’t agree but I can see the argument that Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer were “monsters” where Indians were concerned. (The reason I don’t agree is that a monster is by definition not human and thus exonerates the men, while in fact Jackson and Custer were quite human [and on the whole ‘complicated’ issues, Jackson had an adopted Creek Indian son {Lincoier} he raised from infancy and one of the few times he ever cried in public was at Lincoier’s funeral- go figure}.) But for those who feel all planters were evil or monsters, do you believe that all white Americans who lived from James Towne (founded 400 years ago this month) to Wounded Knee (1890) were monsters?

For the first 3 centuries we constantly stole land and later mineral rights from Indians in all directions we could. We forced their removal, profited from the cession/theft of the lands, intentionally wiped out whole tribes with everything from the famous smallpox blankets to burning them alive to killing the animals they fed upon and burning their fields, broke every treaty they ever made with them, shot defenseless women and children dead and then took the land, etc… (For a fuller treatment read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials where several defense attorneys made use of this in defending the Holocaust.)

The killers weren’t just the Jackson’s and Custers either. Abraham Lincoln himself served in a military force against the Indians. Davy Crockett [who hated slaveowners with a glowing red passion and loved Indians] ate potatoes covered in sizzling grease from the flesh of a cabin filled with Indians he burned alive (ugh- just think of the starch and cholesterol). The Marquis de la Fayette who was one of the most militant anti-slavery activists of his time- a man who bankrupted himself freeing slaves and dividing land among peasants and alienated his greatest friends by condemning slavery- gladly accepted gifts of farms and building lots on land forcibly taken from Indians. Fortunes were made in every conceivable way in land speculation and development in the ceded lands.

Now, before you say “Well my great-grandmother was a Polish immigrant who came here in 1888” or “Custer was a madman but my great-grandparents were simple farmers in Iowa” or whatever, all were complicit. Immigrants who poured into America knew perfectly well that the lands they were settling, whether on the plains of Nebraska or in the slums of Chicago, were built on land stolen from “Red Indians” and that the government of this nation was still killing them. Pulp fiction and penny plays about American Indians were even more popular in Europe than in America; men as diverse as Göring and Einstein were huge fans of Karl May, a German writer whose books on the American west he never visited made him one of the richest writers in Europe, and May wasn’t even in the first or second generation of European writers to write books about Indians v. Whites.
Even illiterate Ukrainian immigrants would likely have known about American Indians. "Custer slaughtering whole families… man, that’s a shame, but I’ve got my own problems. And since they’re gone anyway might as well pan for gold/plow up this prairie/rush like maniacs for free land in Oklahoma/drain this Florida swamp.

Emerson and other elitists wrote of the horrors of the extermination of the Indians, but they sure as hell didn’t do anything about it. The SCotUS even said “it’s illegal to violate that treaty/steal that land/force those people west…but what can you do if the President just has his heart set on it? No sense losing sleep over it. Piss not upon my on my shoes and tell me it’s a Rain Dance. Our next litigants are on their way in…”. People flocked in droves to see captive Sitting Bull paraded like a dancing bear in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, hooped and hollered to see fat and old and wizened and utterly defeated Geronimo, his hair cropped, attired awkwardly in a ridiculous suit, riding in an automobile in Teddy Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Parade like a captured king in a Roman triumph or selling autographed postcards for $1 each at a Fair booth to feed his family and his people. They cheered to see Indians shot dead in the flickers and when sound and colored were added they cheered louder and as more insult cast Chinese and Japanese and Mexican extras as the Indians.

So were all Americans for the first 400+ years of our history monsters complicit in the destruction of Indian cultures? Was the monstrosity only reversed with the advent of revisionism? Or could they have lived in another time and another place where things like universal literacy and mass media and deluges of information were alien concepts, where men and women and children still literally died of starvation in city streets that were, incidentally, filled with hundreds of pounds of horse shit every day, where it was not even yet known that washing your hands and cleaning your instruments between amputations is a good idea, where families of 10 lived in 2 room houses, whole towns had depopulated overnight in cholera epidemics, syphilis was fatal, information travelled at exactly the same speed as humans (telegraphs were a very new thing and were never used to say “HI MOM AND DAD DOING GREAT HOPE YOU’RE FINE”), only a fraction of 1% of the population had ever heard Abraham Lincoln’s voice or Jefferson Davis’s nor had they ever seen a moving image of them).

I just don’t get how any one can judge an entire group of people from 1864, a time so recent that I knew people who knew people who were adults at the time but so distant that when a relative moved 200 miles away in search of new land it meant you would probably never see them again, where every family had dead babies, where most people had seen a hog’s intestines (with flies on them) and flies on feces (human and non) was a daily fact of life. But Geronimo looked kinda cool in the hat, at least in a “damn I’d love to kill just a few more white people” sorta way.

91

I never claimed that the other reasons that non-slave owners might have fought in the war would be necessarily “noble.” Boys of that age have been known to be a little misguided about what war is like. They sign up to be with their older brothers or to whip them some Yankee butt or to have an adventure or to get away from hard work on the farm.

These are also accurate reasons why young men fought for the South.

Valteron, I did not mean to imply that Gone With the Wind was in any way an accurate reflection of plantation life. But since working slaves to death and replacing them was not common on Southern plantations, I can understand why that was not a feature of a film that showed only two plantations in the same general neighborhood. The second plantation was Twelve Oaks.

The film itself was not intended to be about slavery or even the war. It was about a woman surviving the death of the Old South. It is rather intolerable in its portrayal of the house slaves.

Mammy was like part of the family and I have no doubt that she was loved and that she loved them. It’s just that she was so bossy. I don’t associate that characteristic with being “loving.” Yet she was.

I don’t know the extent to which slaves were brutalized. Much would depend on the plantation owner and the overseer. Whippings and other forms of torture that were used would go a long way toward intimidating the slaves into not even trying to escape. Besides, so many did not want to leave their families. However, once the families had been split up, I would think that would have been a big motivating factor to escape.

92

That’s kind of a pointless exercise, isn’t it? The soldiers on both sides were fighting for the same reason virtually every soldier fights for - their country had gone to war.

The real question is what were the people who actually took their country to war fighting for. The majority of citizens in the southern states may not have owned slaves. But I’m pretty sure that the majority of southern legislators who voted on secession did.

93

Is that “the real question”?

Is that what determines our value as human beings? Our own choices have nothing to do with it?

94

Bingo.

Another point is that the south was invaded. When Beauregard fired on (his former friend, mentor, and professor) Anderson at Fort Sumter, not a man was killed and it was a reasonable target for a seceded state. It was in the middle of Charleston harbor, it was not even finished yet, and the occupation of the fort in the middle of the night was, quite understandably, seen as a hostile act. Not a man was killed in the shelling (yes, I know, one died later when a cannon exploded while saluting the flag AFTER the surrender)- it was a bloodless victory, all men were allowed to leave with their freedom and dignity and even given a salute. At this time, Virginia and North Carolina and Arkansas have not even seceded yet- they haven’t made up their minds.

Lincoln immediately declares war and calls for 75,000 volunteers.

Virginia quickly made up her mind. Then North Carolina quickly made up her mind. It’s not like they can airlift those men into the other states- they’re going to march right through Virginia and North Carolina, and VA and NC have a helluva lot more love for the other southern states than for the prospect of 75,000 northern soldiers.

75,000 does not pack such a wallop today, but consider the times: that was twice the population of Charleston. Only New Orleans had a larger population in the Confederacy. Only 10 cities in the nation had that many people (census). Do you greatly care whether the issue is states rights or slavery or whatever when a man you already don’t like from a region of the country you already don’t trust has armed and equipped 75,000 men and pointed them towards you? And your state has already seceded- you had no more to do with this than you ahve with the invasion of Iraq, but there are 75000 men pointed at you.

Are you likely to say “You know, I hate the prospect of more people than I can conceive of coming towards me heavily armed and shooting, but on the other hand they’re only really mad at the slaveowners and I’ll just tell 'em “That weren’t me what captured Sumter” and they’ll let me be, and having read over the matter and read all the Dummies books and Wiki articles I’m not at all convinced that we have the right to secede as described or that slavery is a moral and just issue, so I’m going to sit this one out and maybe take the kids out and watch as 75000 men walk around the South shooting people.” Hell no. You’re going to say “Let me get my gun and I’ll meet you in Virginia.”

It’s almost impossible to translate into terms we can comprehend today what the knowledge of this many people with the absolute assurance of many many more to come being hurled into Virginia of all places (roughly to the South what England is to the U.S.) would be like. Remember that most people lived on farms or in communities of a few hundred; Atlanta had 9,000 people and was considered a big city. Most people had never travelled more than 20 miles from their birthplace unless it was to relocate. And Virginia is the eggshell- if it’s broken there’s not a hell of a lot to keep something from getting to the other side, so it’s not just Virginia’s fight: it’s ours. I don’t know if people toppled dominoes at this time but I’m sure they had some notion of the domino effect.

Of course in the end it would be millions- a monumentally inconceivable number- coming straight for them. There really were men driving people off of their land, burning houses and crops, stealing horses and mules and livestock, killing other farmers, and eventually arming black people and telling them to shoot at white people. At this point you’re lizard brained: you don’t give a shit if this is about state’s rights or to protect the plutocracy, you’re protecting your family, and the longer the war goes on the madder you get. Soon somebody you know well has been killed or died of disease because of these invaders and your farm has gone to hell, so you’re even more dedicated. Slavery has little to do with it by this point.

Anyway, sorry for all the hijacks, but these men didn’t leave their little farms just because they had a hard on for keeping blacks enslaved. If you were to read that Mexico and an alliance of Central and South American countries had just poured over the border in an armed assault on California and New Mexico, you probably wouldn’t be too interested in their motives or think “well, I’m sure we started it”, you’d just say “If it sings Besame Mucho shoot it!” because today California, tomorrow your neck of the woods.

95

again, I can’t see how slavery could have lasted…it was so fundamentally inefficient. If you had a plantation staffed by slaves, you had no incentive to mechanize-and the education that your slaves would need (to operate machinery, work more efficiently) went directly against the mind control that was a big part of the system. This was evident by the late 1850’s-the big plantation owners were already facing financial difficulties, because their operations were so inefficient. hence the need to spread slavery to the new territories of the west- farms in the Western territories(staffed by free lboreres and machines) would rapidly drive the old paltations out of business.
It was an archaic, economically inefficient system, that lasted as long as it did by circumstance. there is no way it could have survived past 1900 or so.

96

There was a draft in the Confederacy, too, which began earlier than the draft in the North (which makes sense, the CSA had more manpower problems.) While the CSA never had anything like the New York draft riot, there was a good deal of draft avoidance, especially in Georgia and North Carolina, where the governors were anti-draft.

97

It’s not entirely a pointless exercise. Sure, obviously the soldier is fighting because his country is at war, but looking at soldier and “average people” accounts can help you understand how people at the time viewed the war and the reasons for it.

98

I believe I remember a quote in which Jefferson Davis said after the war that the CSA could have won if everybody had done their duty, an obvious reference to draft avoidance.

Also, there is a fascinating reference in a Wiki article to the fact that Robert E. Lee actually backed a plan to free the slaves and enlist them in the Confederate Army!

". . . . (Lee’s) support, towards the end of the war, for enrolling slaves in the Confederate States Army, with manumission offered as an eventual reward for good service. Lee gave his public support to this idea two weeks before Appomattox, too late for it to do any good for the Confederacy.

In December of 1864, Lee was shown a letter by Lousiana Senator Edward Sparrow, written by General St. John R. Liddell, which noted that Lee would be hard-pressed in the interior of Virginia by spring, and the need to consider Patrick Cleburne’s plan to emanicipate the slaves and put all men in the army that were willing to join. Lee was said to have agreed on all points and desired to get Negro soldiers, saying that “he could make soldiers out of any human being that had arms and legs.”"

The civil war and slavery are indeed more complex issues than we might suppose.

99

Please help me out here. This seems very ironic if true.

If I am correctly interpreting this Wiki article about Robert E. Lee and this article from the National Park Service about Ulysses S. Grant, it would seem that Grant, the Northern Commander, had slaves working for his benefit (although he personally was not a slave owner after 1859) until 1865, whereas Lee would have ceased to be a slave owner upon the entry into force of the Emancipation Proclamation on Januray 1, 1863, and the fact that it would have applied to Virginia.

This article by the NPS is about White Haven, the Missouri Farm Grant lived on because it belonged to his father-in-law:

“In Mary Robinson’s July 24, 1885, recollections, during an interview for the St. Louis Republican memorial to Grant following his death, she noted that “he always said he wanted to give his wife’s slaves their freedom as soon as he was able.” In 1859, Grant freed William Jones, the only slave he is known to have owned. During the Civil War, some slaves at White Haven simply walked off, as they did on many plantations in both Union and Confederate states. Missouri’s constitutional convention abolished slavery in the state in January 1865, freeing any slaves still living at White Haven.”

On the other hand, it would appear that Robert E. Lee, in keeping with the provisions of his father-in-law’s will (of which he was the executor) freed some 63 slaves (which he controlled as executor but did not own) in 1862, in the midst of the Civil War.

Now I am not clear if Lee still owned any slaves personally after freeing his father-in-law’s 63 in 1862, but if he did own any, they would have been freed by the coming into force of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

But the EP would NOT have applied to any slaves at White Haven, because it did not apply to the “border” slave states that had remained loyal to the union.

It is possible that there were few if any slaves left at White Haven by January of 1865. But if there were, then technically, Grant and his family were slave users (even if he was not technically a slave owner) two years later than the Confederate commander!

Even more amazing is that legalized slavery continued to exist in Kentucky and Delaware, until the entire institution was finally wiped out by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865. I wonder if there were any Union Army Officers in those two states who legally held slaves for almost three years AFTER the EP?

100

Neither Grant nor Lee supported slavery. Each acquired slaves as gifts/inheritance or through marriage. Each freed those slaves over whom they had ownership fairly soon after acquiring them, (although their wives appear to have been somewhat less swift to follow suit). However, Grant was coming from the position of preserving the Union, not from a position of freeing the slaves. Lee was coming from the position of defending his home state, not from the position of defending slavery.
To repeat a point made several times in the last day: the overall issues are much more complex on the personal level.

On the broadest level: the South seceded to preserve slavery; the North went to war to prevent secession. The “philosophical” aspects of slavery prompted the political actions of the South, but far less so the political actions of the North, and the personal decisions of the persons involved were all over the map.

Note, also, the observation that Captain Amazing reports from Manning’s book:

The Southern soldiers began with a view that slavery was worth defending; the Northern soldiers (later) came to a view that it needed to be destroyed. However, even that generalization cannot be uniformly applied to every soldier.