Civil war: (n) a war between citizens of the same country.

If you know something is right, the best way to live is to go ahead and do it. Putting things off that we know are inevitable just makes us look stupid in the long run.

When the politicians involved in the American Revolution got together to form a Constitution, all of them, in their own ways, knew that slavery was wrong.

Some didn’t care.

Some believed it was more right than wrong.

But the main authors of the Constitution, from Madison on down, were fully cognizant that it was absolutely ridiculous to think that one man could own another
man. Matter of fact, they constantly lamented to one another that they “wished there was more they could do.”

It was their habit to free all of their slaves upon their death. So from 1776 until 1860–a span of eighty-four years–there was an ongoing debate about whether anything of significance could be done to curtail slave trading in the United States of America.

Laws were passed and ridiculous compromises achieved, but in the final fifteen years leading up to the American Civil War, it was obvious to most deeper-thinking Americans that this issue was going to lead to a battlefield where blood was shed.

It doesn’t make any difference if you’re talking about conflicts between a man and a woman, arguments within a family, or in the case of the United States, an open, seething contradiction, stinking right under our noses.

The longer you put something off, the more intense the division and painful the solution.

The Civil War could have been stopped when we started the nation.

It’s just too bad that the forefathers were more concerned about the right to bear arms than about the eternal need to free the slaves.