In the end, it took an anti-slavery president and a brutal civil war to end slavery across the union. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on a platform hostile to slavery, several Southern states ceded from the Union, created the Confederacy and seized and attacked federal forts. The Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens explained that Thomas Jefferson’s idea that all men are created equal was a lie, and that: ‘Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the
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