The war was not a program to end slavery, but rather a war to prevent the breakup of the Union, not to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was a political maneuver against the Confederacy. (No, I'm not siding with slavery, just pointing out a fact.) And the passage of an amendment did not require a federal program or the Emancipation Proclamation or a civil war. (Notice the lack of civil wars in relation to other constitutional amendments.) So no, there was no program to end slavery. As best I can discover, Lincoln didn't give a damn about ending slavery until the war made it politically advantageous to do so.
This is why I have no respect for libertarianism. You are making semantic arguments, UP. Whether there was a government "program" is not the point - not at all. The FACT is that slavery COULD NOT have been ended by "the people" no matter how concerned SOME of them were. It took the GOVERNMENT - by way of the Congress and the Courts - to abolish and then enforce the abolishment of slavery. Whether abolitionists got the ball rolling (of course they did) is irrelevent. Whether Lincoln had a political agenda (of course he did) when signing the Emancipation Proclamation is irrelevent. The South wanted to continue with slavery so badly that they decided to break the Perpetual Union they agreed to in the Articles of Confederation. It is all well and good - and correct - to say that the South wanted out of the Union because of what they correctly perceived as the Federal government overriding state's rights. So what? That hasn't got a thing to do with whether the government was required to assert and protect the rights of people unjustly oppressed. The civil war was fought over slavery, whether you wish to whitewash that fact or not. Of course many people who completely opposed slavery fought on the side of the South over the issue of state's rights, and rightly so. But the issue that took the struggle from a simple difference of regional temperment to a destructive civil war was slavery.
Similarly, it took the power of the courts to force the country to stop discriminating against freed blacks. JS is correct in pointing out that it was another century before blacks could even safely vote - let alone use the same bathrooms or restaraunts as whites.
You keep ridiculing the notion of using the power of government to protect people from the "big bad cruel world." Well I've got news for you. That's what a government is for. It doesn't exist to build roads. Private companies can do that. It doesn't exist to educate children. Families can do that. It doesn't exist to make the world fair. Nobody can do that. It exists only to protect, as best as possible, the rights of individuals. There is no question that the Federal government is far too big and has far too much power. There is no question that Lincoln and Roosevelt bear heavy responsibility for that. There is no question that the founders did not intend the behemoth that sits astride the hills of Rome in DC. But the libertarian response to that is to basically do away with the government and let the free market and personal choice rule the day. Sounds really great, except that my personal choice to keep blacks from living in my neighborhood or working in my business hurts someone else's chance to make a decent living or live where HE chooses. My personal choice to pay poor wages to workers, refuse them benefits, sell them necessary equipment and commodities at inflated prices using outrageous interest rates and otherwise manipulate my work force keeps them in fiscal bondage. Yes, those poor SOBs can go find a job elsewhere (unless I make it impossible by ruining their credit rating or putting them in a debtor's prison because of the money they owe me). But the conditions will be basically the same, because by and large unrestricted business practices mean unrestricted power to those with money - and restricted freedom for those without. Yes we need a free market to encourage competition and reward excellence, and too much government restriction is a bad thing. But the free market does NOT encourage good treatment of workers. Look at the way workers are treated in so-called "right to work" states (a misnomer of epic proportions). Benefits are minimal when they exist at all. Terminate at will practices make an employee subject to the whims of business owners or even mid-level managers who are free to end someone's livelihood because of their skin color, their religious beliefs, their personal differences with the boss or their refusal to sleep with them. It is just such evils of the free market that make the evil of labor unions necessary.
Socialism, of course, is a ridiculous idea. Communism is a proven disaster. The evils and the oppression of individual rights under such systems are well documented and rightly touted as reasons to promote capitalism. The Utopian notion that we will all share the land, the bread and the peace is hopelessly naive. But that does not mean that to avoid one evil we should lovingly embrace the other. Libertarians cry that relying on the government to protect our rights is cowardice. Baloney. We could, of course, all take up weapons and shoot each other until nobody is left. But some of us prefer a system of laws. We would like these laws created by people we choose to represent us. We would like those laws to be enforced when necessary without us resorting to taking up arms ourselves - it helps us get on with the day-to-day business of living without having to drop the baby and grab a gun every five minutes. We would like judges to handle disputes over those laws, punish those who disobey those laws, and protect the rights of those unjustly accused of violating those laws.
Lots and LOTS of people like that idea, including some guys that met in Philadelphia back in 1787. Those guys had the same kind of disagreements that we are having. They did not, as a group, endorse big government or small government. They agreed generally that government should be run by the people, and not the other way around. But they differed greatly on how it should be done, how the government powers should be distributed and how the people should get to communicate their wishes to the government. But they hammered out a compromise - a miracle, in Washington's words. Contrary to libertarian beliefs, they did NOT intend it to be the final solution to the argument. They understood - discussed widely and openly - that future generations might choose to modify the agreement, reinterpret it, or possibly reject it altogether and adopt a new form of government. None of them, however, rationally endorsed the idea of doing away with government altogether - and this was a bunch who had just in the last decade overthrown their centuries-old government in favor of a new form that had so far proven ineffective. Irrespective of differences in philosopohy, the men gathered in Philadelphia had seen the dangers of a weak confederation of states. They recognized that governments were necessary, if a necessary evil. They understood and stated explicitly that the function of the government they wanted to have was to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." They did not view government as an end, but as the means to an end.
Of course, the system that they envisioned has been modified and reinterpreted. Many of them - probably most of them - would disapprove of the behemoth that the Federal government has become. There is no question that many of them would have rejected ever signing the Articles of Confederation or even the Declaration of Independence had they known what was coming two centuries later. They did, in fact, far more severely restrict the government than our current system does. But the fact is, the government has changed, by means approved of by our founders, under circumstances that were legal (even if the circumstances that led to them were not). Yes, Lincoln overstepped his bounds. But the South broke a union they had agreed to as perpetual, and the evils of big government are no worse than the evils of slavery. Being forced to run your business in compliance with repressive regulation stinks. Being forced to obey rules from a government of which you do not approve or you feel inadequately represents you is annoying, stifling and maybe even oppressive. Tell it to those who were held in slavery. I'm thinking you'll get a sympathetic ear to a point. Then they'll ask you when they get to vote for overseer. The system our founders created was not perfect. It was intended to change as society changed. It had an apparatus to accomplish that and, for better or worse, the post-war amendments were legal. We chose, as a nation, a new path with those amendments. A very large part of the nation had the feeling that those changes were necessary to make an even more perfect union.
You're not the only one who disagrees with them - then or now. But BT's question about whether ending slavery was a good thing IS a valid question, because it was the action of the government - not the people - that did that. You ridicule it because it does not fit in with your conception of what we are debating. But it fits right in. It is right to teach that Lincoln saved the union and ended slavery because that is what happened in a nutshell. No, Lincoln did not do that single-handedly, but Washington is not really the father of our country either. Neither was John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. Lincoln's decision to prosecute a war to enforce the perpetual union, whatever the legality and whatever the agenda, did in fact reunite the country (albeit over much protest) and effectively end slavery. The argument that the South planned to end slavery eventually, or that Lincoln had a forty year plan that got accelerated for political reasons does not in any way negate those facts - and they are facts. The point that the Emancipation Proclamation had no teeth and only the amendments really accomplished the feat does not negate Lincoln's contribution. The EP (and the war itself) doomed the institution of slavery. The war reunited the nation in spite of the slave state's desires to build a new nation, conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition that not all men are created equal. The final congressional action and the eventual ratification were only dotting the i's and crossing the t's.
Libertarians claim that wanting the government to protect you from the big, bad world is cowardice. One can equally claim that wanting the government to turn a blind eye on abuses of power in the free market, discriminatory practices and wholesale destruction of the environment is another form of cowardice. The fact is, most libertarians (and conservatives in general) will tell you that they do not endorse abuse of workers, or destruction of the environment or discrimination in housing. Most of those who makes such claims are sincere. But just as too much government empowers those who would use the police powers of the state to oppress individuals, too little government empowers those who would use their economic power to do the same. That's why I would no more vote for Ron Paul than Hillary Clinton. Evil has two faces. The fact that they look in different directions does not make one less evil than the other.
