Slavery of course, and the ABC tonight demonstrated it, has never ended.
However industrialisation introduced industries that would never be
adaptable to slavery.
However open slave markets still exist in some Nth African countries.
Of course slavery in a more modern form is well established in the
west of China. It makes a good reason to ban trade with China.
The UN is obsolete because China has the veto.

Totally agree Mr O, Lincoln did not want war, and it wasn't popular in the North, particularly after a few defeats. If allowing slavery to continue in the South would preserve the Union, then slavery would have continued. World opinion may well have seen slavery end in the 1880's or 90's in America. The agricultural base of the South could have easily continued with poorly paid black works. As slaves were by far the biggest single asset owned by a very wealthy elite of Southerners, the question of loss of property rights would have come up at some stage, and maybe Federal compensation would have solved that problem.

After Gettysburg, riots in New York by mostly poor Irish immigrants seen wealthy whites driven from their homes, and black institutions, a school, and a hospital burned, several blacks were lynched in the streets by the mob. Federal troops were brought in to restore order, reports at the time put the death toll at several hundred. Before the war the Northern elite had also grown fat indirectly from slavery, northern industry had prospered, banking, insurance, transportation were all tied to slavery. The ships that took cotton and other crops from the South to Europe on the return voyage would bring slaves from West Africa. Many of these ships were owned, financed and insured by Northerner's. New slave auctions took place in Washington and other northern cities.

The Civil War in no way economically freed the black, just the opposite, at the outbreak of the Great Depression living standards for Blacks in the rural south were the same as they had been in pre civil war days, that's when they were slaves.

Bazz, look at the position of women in Afghanistan, they are seen as men's property, nothing more, they have no rights, this is true in several Arab states. I watched something on the ABC which said that only recently women in Afghanistan had been given the right to have their name included on a child's birth certificate, not just the fathers. Women are denied property rights, they are officially left out of everything. Women who even mildly protest these abuses, risk imprisonment, beatings etc. Was it Saudi Arabia that made the great leap forward recently and said women can drive a car?

Children sold into slavery in African diamond mines. Much of the physical slavery has gone from the world, but economic slavery flourishes in many third world countries. Million of people world wide are economically enslaved. Even in Australia some people are literally owned by the banks! Well maybe not literally but close enough.

Paul1405,

Yes it is very complex. There was a lot more to the story than just freeing slaves from Southern bondage.

Interesting that the vast majority of slaves were owned by the small class of Southern 'aristocrats' and not the hoi polloi so what were the everyday people fighting for if it was not to protect their property in the form of slaves?

I assume they feared that their towns and communities would be inundated by masses of freed slaves if the elites could not contain them on the plantations and their livelihoods would be affected by having to compete with cheap labour. Effectively it would be a case of emancipation becoming a Southern white man's burden.

You excel at it.
ttbn,
I'd like to move a motion to award him/it the Gold medal for it !

individual,

It wouldn't be so bad if he actually argued on the subject, not all the irrelevant rubbish that has nothing to do with it. How Lincoln and the Vietnam war has anything to do with with the release of the virus, or Communism slaughtering it's own people is seen only by another crank, Mr. Opinion.