Re Letter to the Editor, “President Lincoln was a traitor and other ‘truths,’” Free Press Oct. 18-20 edition:

While some may intentionally disregard logic in making claims that the Civil War was not precipitated on the desire to maintain enslavement and subjugation of people of color, whom were referred to as the inferior race, the truth is there actually weren’t many reasons for secession.

Although often veiled in coded language, like “domestic institution,” when referenced in the Confederate States’ secession ordinances, there is little room for doubt by a literate and logical person in realizing the intention.

War had been avoided amid 80 years of intense political conflict at the federal level regarding slavery, as Georgia’s legislature acknowledges in its own secession ordinance: “The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen.”

Five of the seven states that seceded from the Union did so within two months after Abraham Lincoln, the well-known abolitionist senator from Illinois, and his abolition-hungry political party won the presidency. They identified the threat of losing slavery as their reason for seceding.

Texas seemed to capture the sentiments of all five: “[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”

The remaining two states that seceded from the Union prior to the battle at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in 1861 issued general ordinances as a matter of procedure.

Those who fail to acknowledge the timing, context and statements of the first seven seceding states may be guilty of being traitors to logic.

OMARI AL-QADAFFI

Richmond