Reply #25: Without agitators

[Pab Sungenis]

there would be no legislators. It's a happy marriage when the agitators make way for the legislators.

As for Lincoln, without abolitionists there would have been no Lincoln. And Lincoln nearly wasn't Lincoln anyhow. He opposed ending slavery in existing states, just wanted to stop its expansion. The South overreacted and started the Civil War.

If it wouldn't have given him an edge in the prosecution of the war he wouldn't have issued the Emancipation Proclamation. And that Proclamation didn't free all of the slaves, either, only those in the 11 states in the Confederacy. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware were all slave states that might have stayed slave states.

It was the Radical Republicans who were influenced by abolitionist agitators (and many of whom were abolitionist agitators themselves) who pushed the 13th Amendment to end slavery and forced the former Confederate states to ratify it (along with the 14th and 15th) as conditions of reconstruction.

There's a lot of credit to go around.