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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If the civil war was about slavery why did Lincoln wait two years to outlaw it?[/quote]

Because Lincoln isn’t the one who started the war. Southern states seceded because the believed that a US government headed by Lincoln would be hostile to slavery, limit its spread to the territories (Lincoln had this as a stated goal) and eventually outlaw in existing states (during the election he explicitly stated that he would not seek to do this). In a 4-way election, Lincoln was elected with 0 southern electoral votes, which signaled to many southerners that 1) they were now a permanent political minority in the US, and 2) slavery’s days were numbered.

They seceded because they believed slavery would be safer outside the Union than in it. This is clear if you read the secession ordinances states published where they laid out their reasons.

I should also note that not everyone in the South was on board with secession in the winter of 1860-61. The immediate secessionists (Fire-Eaters) were loud, organized, and steamrolled over their opposition, which tended to be disorganized and favor a variety of approaches (uncompromising Unionism, wait-and-see, etc). And some Unionists opposed secession less because of political ideals than because they believed that slavery would actually be safer in the Union than in a weak, fledgling Confederacy.

So the war began not because Lincoln wanted to end slavery (although he was no fan of the institution) but because southerners wanted to preserve it. Lincoln’s initial war aim was purely to preserve the Union. It was as the war progressed - and thanks in part to the actions of enslaved people who ran to the Union lines whenever the army came near, as well as the arguments of men like Frederick Douglass - that Lincoln came to see emancipation as both a useful strategic tool and a great moral aim of the war.

-historian of the 19th century South[/quote]

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