Here are some fascinating quotes regarding the economic factor and its influence:
"The North cut off from Southern cotton rice, tobacco, and other products would lose three fourths of her commerce, and a very large proportion of her manufactures. And thus those great fountains of finance would sink very low....Would the North in such a condition as that declare war against the South?"
Henry L. Benning
November 19, 1860
"In one single blow our foreign commerce msut be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins....millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employement."
Daily-Chicago Times
December 10, 1860
"The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shiping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more ships than all other trade. It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No - we MUST NOT 'let the South go.'"
Union Democrat, Manchester New Hampshire
Economic historian Philip S. Foner explains it clearly:
" It was also exceedingly logical that when all the efforts to save the Union peacefully had failed, the merchants, regardless of political views, should have endorsed the recourse to an armed policy. They had conducted their long struggle to prevent the dissolution of the Union because they knew that their very existence as businessmen depended upon the outcome. When they finally became aware of the economic chaos secession was causing, when they saw the entire business system crumblinb before their very eyes, they knew that there was no choice left. The Union must be preserved. Any other outcome meant economic suicide."
Not only was business going downhill, tax revenues dropped substantially, because the South, who had paid most of the Nation's tariffs, had left. In an editorial in the New York Evening Post on March 12, 1861, a month before Fort Sumter, the paper lamented:
"That either the revenue from dutues must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; and the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe....the present order of things must come to a dead stop."
Charles Dickens, the famous author summed things up pretty well. He said:
"Union mean so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North." He also noted that "Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it."
"Union mean so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North." He also noted that "Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it."
That is what I have begun to realize. So why all these claims that the war was fought to end slavery?
Because that sounds so much better than saying the war was fought to maintain the money streams into the Northern States.
If the leadership had told the truth, they would not have been able to launch a war. As much as people would have hated the massive loss of jobs and economic activity, the fair minded Christians, of which the nation was mostly composed back in those days, would not have consented to a war on their brothers for money.
Only by pushing the war as a moral crusade could they hope to Unite the North in an effort to slap the chains on their brothers in the South.
The "Free the Slaves" stuff appears to have been Goebbels like Propaganda.
Again, the truth would have not been able to motivate a vast military invasion. The Union soldiers that believed they were fighting for a greater cause were duped. The meatgrinder was created and operated to serve profit, not freedom.