To the contrary my friend. All my life I had been taught that the Civil War was a moral crusade to eradicate slavery because it was evil. This makes it implicit that the objections to slavery were moral objections, not self-interest objections. Look at Battle Hymn of the Republic:
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the Sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
[Chorus]
Glory, glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, glory! Hallelujah!
While God is marching on.
Invading other peoples lands to abolish slavery was "God's Work", or at least so we had been led to believe.
And now when I look at the facts of the relevant history, I discover most people in the North didn't really care about the slaves, they cared about wage and labor issues (same as today) and they hated "the man" (envy) who was getting wealthy from free/cheap labor. (Same as today.)
My point is that we have been misled, not to portray these people as bad simply because they had an opinion that derived from their own self interest. Most rational people do.
do you think slave-owners and other Confederates didn't?
The Wealthy slave owners were most certainly interested in their own self interest. The reason slavery spread through the Americas was the result of people looking out for their own self interest at the expense of others; A Constant human curse. (same as today)
If they do come around to considering the well-being of other people in some way, that's all one can ask for. That actually was the case for some abolitionists.
The abolitionists were the "true believers", the morally motivated folk, but they were a tiny minority compared to the rest. Today their equivalent would be the "Eco Warriors" and the "Animal Rights" kooks. Still moralizing at others, but commanding no significant following. (same as today)
My point, though, was that slave labor undercut the developments that would produce a modern economy, just as serfdom (and later Communism) did in Russia.
I am not following here. What you say might be true, but i'm not seeing exactly how it may be true. By what mechanism would a slave or serf economy inhibit development? Presumably the large contingent of free populace could do the same thing they did in the North.
Look at the map. Charleston didn't have the kind of population in its hinterland that Northern cities had.
No it didn't, but economic advantages can often work wonders. Las Vegas made the Desert bloom because the laws allowed for that sort of Development. Had Charleston an economic advantage over New York, the population and development would have been forthcoming.
Virginians and North Carolinians would be better served by the ports of Norfolk or Baltimore than Charleston. Alabama had Mobile (and New Orleans was closer than Charleston).
The way things stood prior to 1861, that is true, but in absence of conflict, and with trade developing between Europe and Charleston, that infrastructure would have developed in the subsequent years.
Now of course if Maryland had seceded with the rest of the South, they would likely be *the* major port of the Confederacy because they were much closer to the Existing European Trade.
Because they would have been different Nations, that law banning cargo shipments on Foreign Ships between US Ports would no longer have come into play. Ships could have unloaded/loaded cargo in New York, and carried it to Baltimore, Norfolk, or Charleston without being penalized by that law.
My point here is that the Wealthy elite of New England saw Southern independence as a fiscal threat to their businesses, and pushed the President to stop it. (same as today.)
It was that -- by the end of the war. But if anybody told you that the war started because Northerners wanted to abolish slavery and you didn't question it something was terribly wrong with your education. Or maybe not: to slaveowners at the time it certainly did seem like the Yankees wanted to take away their slaves when they elected Lincoln. Maybe -- since you agree with them about so much -- you're just honoring their perception of things. Anyway, I don't know how old you are or where you grew up, but 50 and 60 year old White Southerners who tell you they were taught in school to venerate Abraham Lincoln and never questioned this until they happened to read some book a few years ago, just aren't telling the truth.
You set up a straw man -- a weak argument that you can knock over easily and replace with your own (equally weak and vulnerable) argument. "Waaah, they told me it was all about how eeevil slavery was, but it wasn't. It was actually all about money." No serious historian says that most Northerners went to war to free the slaves, but few would agree that the war was all about Northern greed. There are a host of motivations in between those to extremes that you don't take into account.
My point is that we have been misled, not to portray these people as bad simply because they had an opinion that derived from their own self interest. Most rational people do.
No. It's not. You keep holding Northerners of that day to an unrealistically high standard that you don't apply to Southerners of the day or people now. And you justify that by crying about how somebody told you their motives were simon-pure and how you believed them all these years.
What's surprising isn't that Northern Whites weren't willing to sacrifice everything to free the slaves. No, what's surprising is that they showed such concern as they did about slavery -- that they weren't simply willing to benefit from business with slaveowners or unite behind the banner of White supremacy. Why they didn't is a result of a variety of factors that certainly go far beyond greed and envy.
You can, for example feel or oppose what's going on in Darfur or South Sudan or wherever without wanting to move there or welcome Darfurians or South Sudanese here. And you don't have to have an economic motive to condemn abuses there. Isn't human feeling enough? You can feel that Chinese prison labor gives Chinese industrialists an unfair advantage and still find something morally condemnable buying prison-made products. If there's something horrible, awful, unspeakable in Southern plantation owners having to pay tariffs, why is Northern concern about slavery undercutting free labor amoral or hypocritical?
By what mechanism would a slave or serf economy inhibit development? Presumably the large contingent of free populace could do the same thing they did in the North.
Businesses used slave labor. That meant they didn't have to pay decent wages to free labor. So free workers tended to avoid the South. Slaves didn't benefit from their own work as much as free workers would have, so they didn't put in the extra effort. Why did antebellum New York boom while Charleston and New Orleans lag behind? Are you going to say it was the Warehouse Act? Nonsense. New York grew because it was actually manufacturing things people actually wanted, while pre-Civil War Charleston and New Orleans weren't.
The South never had the potential to grow like the North until the advent of air cooling systems. It was great for plants, but horrible for humans.
You admit that. It was hard for Southern cities to match Northern ones in size before air conditioning. It wasn't just the heat. Yellow fever epidemics persisted in the Southern states down to the end of the 19th century. Even if a city wasn't directly effected, epidemics elsewhere in the South discouraged investment. So why do you go on about how tariff differentials could have made Charleston competitive with New York City? Why do you persist with that argument when you can see the obstacles to that happening?
That word, "slavery" is the answer to some, but not all, of the following questions:
"Protecting slavery" describes Confederate leaders' motivation, while "defending the Union" was more central to Northerners.
But yes, abolishing slavery, as Julia Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic proclaims, did become a "higher cause" helping to justify the Union's great expenses in blood & treasure for the Civil War.
Bottom line: Abolishing slavery was much more important to average Union soldiers than was, say, the Holocaust to WWII GIs, but abolition was not their first and foremost concern.
Defeating Confederates and preserving the Union was.
Sorry, but that's way, way too easy, and demonstrates yet again your abysmal ignorance of real history.
Did you ever go to a... you know, building they call, "school"?
How can you know so little that's actually true?
In fact, slavery has a long history going back at least to biblical times, and has at some point or another been practiced by every culture.
Slavery was only gradually and slowly abolished at different times in different places, and was both lawful and encouraged by Britain in all 13 US colonies.
So historically slavery was not the exception, it was the rule, and abolition was the exception taking many centuries, decades & years to gain acceptance.
And abolition was resisted the strongest in precisely those places where slavery was the most profitable, and slaves most in demand.
In 1860, no place on earth was more profitable for slavers than the US Deep Cotton South.
And no other place on earth was slavery more built-in to planters' "way of life".
Even today, some Southerners claim their ancestors loved their slaves like members of their own families, and DNA studies of US "black" people prove it.
x to DiogenesLamp: "My point, though, was that slave labor undercut the developments that would produce a modern economy, just as serfdom (and later Communism) did in Russia."
DiogenesLamp responding: "I am not following here.
What you say might be true, but i'm not seeing exactly how it may be true.
By what mechanism would a slave or serf economy inhibit development?"
This is actually a critical point, since by 1860 some slaves did work in Southern factories.
Yes, relatively few and far between, compared to growing Northern industries, but there were some in the South, and slaves could work in those factories as well as anyone else.
So by 1860 slavery represented an economic threat, not just to Southern agricultural workers, but also to factory workers.
This is what made the 1857 Supreme Court Dred-Scott decision so significant -- if now Southern slavers could bring their slaves into Northern states, and put them to work in Northern factories, then northern free-laborers (meaning paid workers) would be directly threatened economically.
For many threads now DiogenesLamp has argued that the Constitution itself forbids abolition of slavery, but in practical terms, no such understanding had any legal basis until the 1857 Dred-Scott decision.
DiogenesLamp on the possible primacy of Charleston SC: "The way things stood prior to 1861, that is true, but in absence of conflict, and with trade developing between Europe and Charleston, that infrastructure would have developed in the subsequent years."
In fact, there's no reason to suppose that Charleston would have any advantage over a dozen other Southern/Confederate ports, beginning with Norfolk, VA, Wilmington, NC, Savanah, GA, Pensacola, FL, Mobile, AL, New Orleans, LA & Galveston, TX.
Remember that all these ports were interconnected by Southern railroads and could easily transship people and goods from any one to any other port.
DiogenesLamp to x: "My point here is that the Wealthy elite of New England saw Southern independence as a fiscal threat to their businesses, and pushed the President to stop it. (same as today.)"
Your insane Marxist preoccupation with "the Wealthy elite" has blinded you to the fact that war itself was a huge "fiscal threat to their businesses" and so they would wish for it last of all.
Nor did Lincoln wish for war, or ever intend to start it.
In his inaugural he announced that Confederates could not have a war unless they themselves started it.
But that's just what they did, and so the Civil War came.