“Because of slavery, the average Southerner was better-off than average northerners,”
The average southerner didn’t own slaves because they were too expensive. The majority of slaves were owned by a very finite number of people. Northerners also owned slaves including officers in the Union army.
The slavery issue and abolition were pushed to gin up northern support for a war agains’t the seceding states. Most Northerners were not that interested in the issue and most did not support a war.
http://civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm
Those who owned slaves were also by definition the leaders of their communities. Slavery was the dominant economic and social institution.
The slavery issue and abolition were pushed to gin up northern support for a war agains’t the seceding states. Most Northerners were not that interested in the issue and most did not support a war.
Correct. Sort of. The problem is that if you go down this road you are saying that the war, when it started, was over the issue of slavery. Whereas most CSA apologists, to remove any possibility of the Union fighting for a noble cause, try to make the start of the war about tariffs or some such, with slavery only being dragged in years later as a desparate measure because the Union was losing the war.
The fact is that the war was always about preserving the Union, with emancipation added as a tool to accomplish that, with the nice side benefit of it being an indisputable moral cause.
Tell me, Georgia Girl, have you read Georgia's Declaration of Causes for secession? The word "slavery" is mentioned 26 times. And you claim that it was the north that was ginning it up as an issue?
If you actually looked at the northern sentiment in 1861, it was far more about preserving the Union and avenging the attack on Sumter than it was about slavery.
Here are some actual statistics:
In Mississippi and South Carolina nearly half of all white families owned slaves.
In Georgia, Alabama & Louisiana it was around one third of white families owning slaves.
In Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky it was around one in four white families.
In Arkansas about one in five.
In Missouri, Maryland and Delaware one in eight, or less.
Notice that these ratios track pretty well the sequence in which states joined the Confederacy.
In the Deep South, slave-owning was almost mandatory for anybody who wanted to "be somebody", and the vast majority of whites had close relatives -- brothers, counsins, uncles, etc. -- who owned slaves, so none could imagine life without them.
By 1860, Northern ownership of slaves was very rare indeed -- though they did still exist in some states, in small numbers.
But typical would be a private citizen from Illinois named Ulysses S. Grant, who inherited a slave from his southern father-in-law in Missouri, a slave Grant freed in 1859, before gaining renown during the Civil War.
Georgia Girl 2: "The slavery issue and abolition were pushed to gin up northern support for a war agains’t the seceding states.
Most Northerners were not that interested in the issue and most did not support a war."
The truth is the vast majority (90%+?) of Northerners cared nothing about slavery, in the South.
They did not object, so long as Southerners kept their slaves at home.
But what Northerners feared and strongly opposed was slavers bringing their "property" into free states or territories.
Southerners knew they must constantly expand slavery, or it would begin to die out, and hence their constant efforts to work the Federal Government to pro-slavery laws.
In this regard, we can review examples of the 1850 Missouri Compromise and 1857 Dred Scott decision if you wish.
But the immediate issue in 1860 was slavery in the territories -- that's what split the dominant Democrat party in half and elected minority Republicans, including Lincoln.
Finally, certainly in late 1860 most Northerners did not want war with the South, but over the following months and years northern opinion changed drastically, fully supporting the war to preserve the Union.
Indeed Northerners supported the war to a larger extent than many Unionist Southerners in places like western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, northern Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.
Unionist sentiment was so strong in such slave-states as Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri that none of them ever voted to secede, and all supplied more Union troops than Confederates by factors of two-to-one or more.
So, the dominant view among Northerners was that the Union had been attacked & invaded by secessionists forces which must therefore be defeated, and while they were at it destroy that "peculiar institution", slavery.