[Modernman]

slavery was important as a cause of the WBTS only to the 5-6% of persons (NORTH & SOUTH) that owned slaves.,

This figure is a distortion. The 5% number from the South only deals with legal title to slaves while the 5% number from the North (actually, just the four border states: MD, DE, KY and MO plus WV, since slavery was illegal everywhere else in the North) covers the percentage of families that owned one or more slaves.

If we compare the percentage of families in the South that owned slaves versus the percentage of families in the North that owned slaves, we come up with numbers closer to 33% versus 5%, and the numbers for the North are slanted due to the relatively high percentage of slave-ownership in Kentucky.

Put another way, the relevant way to look at this is what percentage of the population in the South versus the North benefitted from ownership of slavery. Furthermore, in the South, you have to factor in all the non-slaveowning Whites who benefitted from slave ownership by others. There was a good percentage of the white Southern population that worked jobs involving slaves (such as plantation overseers).

Slavery was the cornerstone of the Southern economy.

[stand watie]

don't you just WISH it was a distortion?? in point of fact, you are 100% WRONG, as usual, on this issue.face it, you have been LIED TO & made a FOOL OF on this issue, by the self-righteous, arrogant,self-serving elitists of the northeast.

SLAVERY was the cornerstone of the damnyankee economy for so long as the "peculiar institution" was PROFITABLE in damnyankeeland.

the slaveOWNERS of damnyankeeland hands are just as dirty as those of the southland's slaveOWNERS.

in the north, MOST of the slaves were owned by major corporations, like banks,insurance comnpanies & railroads, BUT located elsewhere (for example, the FIRST STATE BANK of BOSTON owned more than 5,000 slaves in the Carolinas, Missouri, Brazil & in Haiti.)

where your slaves ARE located has nothing to do with your MORALITY!

free dixie,sw

[capitan_refugio]

stand is well aware that about one-third of all southerners benefited directly from the practice of slavery. And many more benefited indirectly from that practice.

He is also aware of the importance of slavery in the ante-bellum southern culture. It was Congressman Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina, who said in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1860, "African slavery is the cornerstone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbaraism."