Preserving the Union

When I was a child, I sometimes thought how difficult it must be to be president of the United States and to be a Christian. The Cold War was going strong, and the threat of nuclear war loomed. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. deterred each other with their buildup of nuclear weapons and their expressed willingness to use them if it became necessary, God forbid. Nuclear war would have meant millions of deaths, perhaps the end of civilization.

That never happened, although the weapons are still with us. And we have had countless other wars. Civilian casualties have happened, sometimes deliberately and sometimes out of carelessness. In World War Ii the Allies deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in order to end the war. A terrible question as to whether it was worth it or was it necessary.

Our Civil War resulted in the death of around 750,000 soldiers, two-thirds from disease. How many civilians died I do not know. On the Union side, the war was fought primarily to save the Union, but after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the end of slavery also became more prominent. Lincoln presided over the war and in the end emerged victorious, and with the victory America entered into a Second Revolution, where slavery was abolished throughout the country, equal rights were ensured to all regardless of race, and the federal government kept troops in the former Confederacy in order to ensure these protections.

Unfortunately, Lincoln did not live to see these changes. Even worse, these rights were erased with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and Supreme Court decisions that eviscerated the Reconstruction amendments and related legislation. It took much struggle over the next 100 years to restore these rights.