It is hard not to turn cynical these days and the older you get the harder it is. Experience will do that to you.
The South Seceded after makibg ckear they would not accept the election of Lincoln who, with many others, exoressed their disdain fir skavery abd viwed nit to allow expansion of slavery in new states.
There was no call for ending slavery as it was thought the dissolution of such would tear apart the republic.
The south made good on their promise to secede and form the confederacy, while the North made clear their doing so would result in economic sanctions to bring them back into the union...peacefully.
Enter Fort Sumter...
FAFO rules demanded war and it was on...
It was a little bit like Tiger Woods who was in the living room watching a football game, when his wife walked in and asked “What’s on the TV?”
“Dust” replied Tiger.
And that’s how it started.
Slavery was the #1 reason for the South secession, but it wasn't the only reason. The #2 issue for the 1860 election was called the Morrill Tariff, and tariffs were a huge issue in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The South constantly complained that the tariffs were designed to protect Northern industrial interests while the Southern raw materials industries had to compete directly against the rest of the world. The money the tariffs collected was used to build things like an expansive rail system up in the North and the South comparatively got left out.
Ping
Ping
When has a powerful centralized government ever given up power without killing lots of ‘her’ people? Sure it’s simplified ignoring all the politics and Ft. Sumpter, but history has proven that governments love killing their own citizens to retain power. The Civil War just introduced the killing fields to industrial scale methods of killing using obsolete Napoleonic battle tactics.
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.This was the passage removed from the Declaration of Independence, or the southern states would refuse to support independency.
The northern states (minus a few shipping merchant delegates) were intending to end slavery from the very founding of the nation. In 1776, it wasn't about bankrupting the south to steal their land from them; to Thomas Jefferson it was a moral call end an abomination before man and God.
The above passage was replaced with "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us."
-PJ
I have a question.
Are you a moron?
(It’s a rhetorical question).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The North was waging economic warfare against the South, in many forms, for many years before the Civil War, and they didn't care one smidgeon about the slavery issue. Many northern states had slavery up to and into the Civil War years.
IMO, the war was principally one of economics in that the North wanted to keep agricultural South as its own for better terms, dictated prices and in a captive-producer situation. They didn’t want the South to sell produce to other countries and their majority legislation made it difficult for the South.
To complicate things, slavery was used as moral tool even through the majority of farmers, etc. in the South didn’t own them - couldn’t afford them. Slavey was for big plantations and rich Southerners.
To have a Second Civil War today would be difficult because there isn’t just one Ft. Sumpter. There are dozens. Name any Democrat city in the South.
You’re overthinking it.
The north didn’t want to end slavery or punish the south per se. The North had its interests and the south had their interests. Slavery was certainly a part of it, but in the lead up to the war, Northern interests were much more in containing slavery than ending it. The southern interests were heavily against this containment strategy because containing slavery meant restricting a commodity that they had cornered the market on.
Somehow that story doesn’t get told much, history written by the victors I guess, but as northern-aligned states ended their slavery practices, slavers in those areas often sold their slaves to plantation owners in the deep south rather than free them because they didn’t just suddenly get religion about Negroes being people all of a sudden. A freed slave is worth nothing, but a slave who is going to be freed if he stays where he is can still be worth money if he’s sold in a southern slave market.
The North didn’t secede from the South, it was mostly ok with the status quo (and remember that the terms “north” and “south” are only really the political classes and business leaders of each section of the country, most of America in both the north and the south were ignorant to (or disinterested in) what was going on in those days with slavery, and even folks like Lincoln who morally opposed slavery from a young age would be considered quite racist by modern measures.
The U.S. was part of a worldwide movement to end slavery. By worldwide, I mean the parts of the world ruled by Europeans. In 1834, slavery was ended in the British colonies. In 1848, slavery was abolished in the French colonies. Slavery was ended in most of Latin America by 1850, and in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. Serfdom, a close cousin to slavery, was ended in Russia in 1861.
Toward the end of the century, there was a convention to end slavery joined in by the Christian and Muslim nations, and also the independent nations of Africa. There were some holdouts in Asia. In 1848, the U.N. abolished slavery worldwide.
Seen in this context, slavery was under siege not only here, but throughout the world. The slave states of the U.S. felt isolated and threatened. Their way of life, as they saw it, was being questioned, and they were being accused of being immoral to own slaves.
Positions hardened on both sides. Instead of viewing the problem as an economic problem, slavery was viewed as a moral problem. In the north, slavery had been ended following our gaining independence from England mostly through gradual emancipation. In the British commonwealth, it was ended through compensated emancipation. These methods of ending slavery softened the economic blow to slave-owners. But, with the hardening of positions, civil war became more and more inevitable.
I’ll talk a little bit about tariffs. Yes, there was the tariff issue. But this was overblown. In the south, everything was blamed on the tariff. The north was growing in population, in industry and in railroads, in banks and financial capital. Why? The tariff! Yes, the tariff favored the north (and domestic manufacturers) at the expense of the south (and also other agricultural regions). The tariff contributed to the Civil War, but wasn’t the primary cause.
Analogously, after the Civil War, every problem of the south was blamed on carpetbaggers and their allied scalawags and free Negroes. So, instead of joining in the emerging world order of capitalism and free and equal citizens, the South created a Jim Crow system, and condemned itself to poverty relative to the rest of the country for another hundred years.
From a celestial view, God was not going to allow human slavery to despoil this nation any longer.
Your entire premise is false and reflects the product of public education and over a century of indoctrination. Slavery was an issue but was not the cause of the War of Succession.
First, it was never a civil war. A civil war is conflict between factions struggling for control of the central government. Nothing like this took place. The South wanted no part of the central government. The South wanted to secede from the government, the union. The South wanted to establish its own government. It was a war of secession, not a civil war.
Second, the South sought secession because of taxation without representation. You heard that right. The war was not fought over slavery, although that was an issue, one Lincoln said he would concede to preserve the union. Northern states voted themselves tax revenues from the South and the South was not receiving its fair share of taxes. That was the main cause of the war.
Third, the North invaded the South. You were likely never taught this in public school. Fort Sumpter is in the South. The North was resupplying the fort in preparation for war. The first shots were fired to prevent this and the war was on.
Your entire premise and thinking is based on propaganda and false education.
>The only conclusion that I can draw is that the North wanted to buy up the South for pennies, so they would own the land and be able to grow cotton at the lowest cost to them.<
To answer your own question you have to determine if the North did eventually buy up the South for pennies on the dollar.
EC
The Civil War along with the blockades to Southern ports forced to English whose textile factories were languishing without the cotton Imports, to look towards Egypt and inituated the cotton agriculture abd export in Egypt which brought about the Muslim Brotherhood and all the other crap that we see today.
What you say you “know” is simply wrong. Slavery was not threatened in the US. There was no real public support for abolition. Abolitionists routinely got absolutely trounced in election after election everywhere. They couldn’t get more than single digit percentages of the vote anywhere.
Both Lincoln and the Northern dominated US Congress said over and over again that they were not fighting against slavery. The Congress passed a resolution to that effect and a constitutional amendment that would have expressly protected slavery effectively forever passed both houses of Congress with the necessary 2/3rds supermajority, was signed by the president, was ratified by 5 states and was endorsed by Lincoln in his all important first inaugural address.
Once again, Slavery was not threatened in the US.
I can see your question from a modern lens, and wonder if that was the play. Just a land grab.
When I look at it from a historical position, monetarily the South didn’t absolutely need the slaves. They could produce cotton and sell it elsewhere, especially with improved cotton gins. However, Slavery had become a way of life for the rich, something that generations had grown up with. For the rich and powerful, they had no intentions of giving up culture for the fancies of the North. The many people in the South, most didn’t have ,or ever have slaves. They had no care about slavery, and that was some 80% of those Confederates who fought for the Confederacy. The choices were made by the aristocracy, and most of the citizens never went more than 50 miles from where they were born.
Abraham Lincoln pushed the war, he pushed it by occupying military bases in Confederate States, and by essentially blockaded Southern ports. Ft Sumter was fired upon for this policy. Historically, Lincoln wanted a union even if slavery continued. The Union could have outlawed slavery and purchased the slaves as compensation, but refused this option. The war ended costing far more than reimbursement for the property lost by policy change. It’s very complex, but after reading much on it over my lifetime, the people lived different lives and clearly had a different moral compass and beliefs.
I doubt it was ‘just’ a land grab. It ended that way in many respects, but probably had no plan.
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“The North” was not intent on ending slavery. The last Northern President before Lincoln (Pierce) was pro-slavery, or at least accommodationist.
What happened was the AntiFa/BLM of its day formed a political party (the Republicans) and managed to elect a President who was willing (illegaly) to go to war to end secession, and since conquest of the Confederacy released lots of slaves, who got turned over to the Army (which absolutely didn’t want them) - Emancipation, which was never policy, happened more or less by accident.