Civil War: Northerners Consciously Fight For Union AND Abolition

From today's NY Times Disunion column by C. Kay Larson, "Michael Thompson's War."  Mr. Thompson was a farmer from Illinois.

This column is another of the perfect refutations to the constant, non-thinking, uninformed accusations that defenders of the Lost Cause throw up:  "The North wasn't interested in slavery or in abolition."  On the contrary, as in my own family, there was a huge number of Northerners who understood and approved that the war was being waged to preserve the Union and that preservation was inextricably entwined with slavery.  For the point of Secession and the war for the CSA was to expand the Slave Power throughout the hemisphere.

See this, from the column:

But Thompson’s character comes through most forcefully in the March 28 letter written to his wife. In it he asserted what many fighting men from the northern Midwest were feeling, as the war neared its second anniversary, especially given the antiwar sentiments of many remaining on the home front:

We are done carrying on this war on peace principles. Our armies that are in the field are determined to prosecute this war to the bitter end. … They spurn with the utmost contempt those traitors in the north who would sell themselves and their posterity to a relentless foe that would reduce them and us to be mere vassals to a set of aristocratic slave holders and traders in human flesh whose vital principle is the few to dictate, the mass to serve.

And this, in response to a Texan who said migrated Northerners to his state were the most fervid in defense of slavery:

Thompson responded that the opposite held true in his neighborhood. The Southern families he knew were the strongest in opposition to the Rebellion. Thompson wrote that they, like thousands of others in the “Deep North,” look upon slavery as a curse to mankind, a curse to society both in a civil and religious sense.

In rearing up families in luxury and ease with a domineering spirit, lounging in idleness and vice, frowning on anyone who should do anything for themselves, looking upon those that would cook a meal’s victuals or would curry his own horse ignominious.

This class hates slavery. They have a conscience. They see the evil that slavery places on society. They flee from it as they would flee from the wrath to come. They move North to a land where universal freedom prevails, where labor is looked upon as meritorious, where all are permitted to read the Bible, where all are on an equal footing in regard to procuring an education, where all can worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences and where the Wealth is with the masses and not with the favored few. Such is the class that moves North and they are opposed to this rebellion from the fact that it strikes at the very root of the society that they have moved North in search of and because the South is waging this war to break down free institutions and establish a government with slavery as its base and that the few should lord it over the masses.

Thompson was speaking as much for himself as for others. If the Union war effort didn’t begin with an ideology, by early 1863, following the issuance of the final Emancipation Proclamation, “freedom” for all citizens surely became the Northern watchword. Federal arms were protecting blacks, and no longer would Northerners fear becoming “white serfs of Southern nobility.”

As a Massachusetts private wrote his wife, “‘I do feel that the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend and if we are overcome then farewell to freedom.’”

Mitchel Thompson did not survive the war. On Aug. 20, 1864, he was in a unit that escorted a telegrapher near Fort Donelson to repair a line. A squad of 11, including Thompson, detached to seek out local guerrillas. They were attacked by more than 100 drunken guerrillas. The Union men fought fiercely; most refusing to surrender, even after their ammunition ran out. They were killed regardless. One soldier was carried wounded into a home by local women and murdered on the couch where he was laid. Only four of the men survived to tell the story. One was Marion Morrison, actor John Wayne’s grandfather. Mitchel Thompson was last seen alive, behind a tree reloading his rifle. 

It's always been a puzzle, this claim out of the defenders of the Lost Cause, that no one in the North cared about slavery per se, when the Slave Power prophets and proselytizers constantly howled that northern Abolitionists were conspiring to destroy slavery and their owners' special way of living.  If no one in the North cared about slavery, where did those Abolitionists come from?