This is a very important quote that Americans need to be enlightened to. The actual sentiment is vile and horrible, but that's what many abolitionists felt. Even these vile racists, however, thought that slavery was wrong and immoral. The only white American I have heard of who expressly accepted the equality of the races by this time was Thomas Jefferson, who, as a young man, stated that whatever Africans lacked in mind and body they made up for in heart and soul, and who, by the time of his death, decided those differences were simply the result of social situation, not nature. He had inherited all his slaves and fought in the Virginia legislature for years for the right to release them (at that time it was illegal except in rare circumstances). The Civil War was in a large part about sovereignty and states' rights, as well as a friction between the North, which ran on a capitalist economy, and the South, which ran on a feudal economy. It was a friction between two different economic stages of development. Tarriffs are much more important to the cause, and they were ones that favored one developing economic system while punishing the old one. Now, let it be known that the call that slavery was important to the Civil War stems from A) the Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed slaves in the Confederate states in response to France and Britain about to assist the South and who could not join a war for slavery; and B) politicians running around claiming "they're going to take your slaves" much like they currently go around yelling "they're going to take your guns."