Where do you get that idea?
Of the verbal tricks: people are taught that the war was based on slavery. That’s the general view and it has been reinforced in academia and in popular culture. Citing slavery as the primary cause tucks everything away in a tidy box with two morally separate compartments. It lets people believe they’d never do a thing like that. But the problem is that it dehumanizes one and lionizes the other. It distorts the record and lets people believe they’d never do a thing like that. It’s not history, its ideology.
The seceding states all said that the conflict was about slavery.
Finally, I agree that Southerners did become adamant as tensions escalated, but this is unremarkable given the circumstances. Southerners faced the loss of their property and livelihood. There was also Bleeding Kansas, Nat Turner and Harper’s Ferry and the fear that their slaves would eventually outnumber them, acquire knowledge and arms and do what humans do.
So you admit that the war was about slavery, in contradiction to your last paragraph.
BTW, slaves did outnumber whites in South Carolina, which is exactly why the rebellion started there.
Where do you get that idea?
The United States (under the Articles of Confederation) borrowed a lot of money during the Revolution to pay for the war. So did each of the states.
After the War, the southern states started paying off their debts, with 83% paid off, with exception of SC. Most of the middle and New England states did not pay down their debt much.
When the first government under the Constitution came into office, Hamilton, with the support of Washington, proposed that the USA pay off all outstanding federal and state debts at face value to the present holders.
This caused much uproar, as states that had already paid much or all of their debt felt abused, as did those individuals who had sold debt instruments to speculators for pennies on the dollar.
But it eventually passed, partly because of a bargain whereby the national capital was sited in the South.
http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/statebuilding/section9.rhtml
If you want to see it that way, go ahead.
What I'm curious about is: why slavery? Why couldn't the evil southerners understand that hiring migrant labor at subsistence wages for planting and harvest seasons was not only morally superior, but more economical? Could part of the reason been that there were no institutions to lend cash money to pay such labor?
As to the the fear of slave rebellions--some of these received material support from the Northern abolitionist and the Federal government did little or nothing to punish the responsible parties. That point was about safety from outsider promoted mayhem, though slaves were both justification and agency.
Here's what I think: the root of the Civil War wasn't slavery but property. I hate to put it in such terms but in fact slaves were bought by their owners and maintained by their owners' expense. Owner's livelihoods were dependent on their slave's labor. Slaves had been recognized as property since the founding of the country. Then, after industrial production had gained solid footing and removed an increasing portion of the country from agriculture, they insist that Southerns dismantle a generations-old system and that they surrender their property and means of subsistence.
Around 1862 I think,after the emancipation proclamation, Lincoln proposed compensated manumission within the loyal slave-holding states. The proposal was defeated but a similar one passed for DC. Too bad such a solution, along with a large-scale system for paying freedmen for their labor, was never seriously proposed before the war.