Replies

DiogenesLamp to x: "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)"

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.