I resent the implication that Lincoln and Jefferson were the two most well-read presidents. I think you may have forgotten about one of the most avid and voracious readers of classical, medieval, philosophical, poetical and contemporary literature. He was constantly admonishing his children to never be without a book, and he could quote most any author of the day as well as anyone. Plus, he smelled really nice and was really very handsome.

Sincerely,
Abigail Adams

I don’t see a lot of validity to this interpretation. The Emancipation Proclamation was indeed about sovereignty. The USFG could withhold “the right to hold another person as property” to any states that rebelled against it; the Northern slave states were unimpeded. It could, as a sovereign, do this because of its military power. The actual war was not itself fought on abolitionist grounds, but instead made a form of abolitionism politically necessary for the North, culminating in the 13th Amendment’s adoption many months after Lincoln’s assassination.

Further, to reduce the conflict to the moral or political legitmacy of slavery while eliding the question of sovereignty tends to exacerbate misunderstandings of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Ultimately, political and economic sovereignty over the vast majority of black people in the US was at stake in the Civil War, and the victory for the North only reconfigured the chains of control. Northerners and Southerners reallocated their profit sharing from the slavery system, but from any perspective that does not take the equation of chattel property rights to slavery as a given, the slavery system was simply put under new ownership.

Your correct choice of the wording, “the right to hold another person as property,” is largely the crux of the matter. If this is all that is meant by slavery, then slavery is solely an issue of national and state/local sovereignty, because all that is at stake is whether the state recognizes a particular property claim (and whether the formations of power that allowed this property relationship would continue – 3/5ths, Kansas-Missouri, border states, etc.) However, from the perspective of the enslaved peoples emancipation addresses only the political question of their legal status without addressing the cultural, social, economic complex of slavery. While Lincoln opposed the individual right of slave owners to have legally protected ownership of other individuals, in terms of actual positions on economic, political, or cultural sovereignty of the people kidnapped and bred for this purpose, Lincoln had little to say and did not demonstrate any significant leadership. Without a course of action to foment tangible sovereignty for the emancipated, Lincoln’s war has to be viewed in terms of reallocating political sovereignty over this massive class. Reconstruction briefly brought a new mixed form of sovereignty, but with the collusion of the North the terrorist forces in the South were allowed to deny sovereignty to Blacks while ensuring there would be stream of cheap labor emigrating to the North to break unions and so forth.

What absolutely needs to be written into the popular history of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln is that, by virtue of his limited interpretation of anti-slavery or abolitionist discourse, his vision of emancipation and the war against the rebellion ultimately was fought on the political terms that the South insisted it was being fought on. Had Lincoln been a moral opponent of slavery, intent on selling the US on a different racial vision of its populace and what needed to be done, things certainly could have turned out differently. Instead, Lincoln’s opposition was so grounded in an amoral conflation of slavery with property rights that the racist morality of the country ensured that slavery was maintained without the property rights to it.

The Amtrak line from St. Louis to Kansas City is the Ann Rutledge.