Posted on 08/12/2020 2:31:56 PM PDT by Jonty30
First you must understand it was not about slavery it was about the old sin of greed.
2nd you must understand the only jobs were powling behind a mule and working cotton mill. and of course you know after the war they took land and gave it to black persons and a cow or mule....
3rd There was no American money anywhere in the South. The people only had worthless Confederate money. The Southern banks could not loan out any money because they didn’t have any. To make matters worse, the price of cotton fell drastically on the world market. Before the war, most of the world cotton supply was grown in the South. During the last year of the war, the Black people stopped growing cotton, so England began looking for places in its colonies where it could grow cotton. The British planted very much cotton in their colonies, especially in Egypt and India. As a result, there was too much cotton on the world market. The price of cotton fell. Everybody in the South became poor. The economy of the South was in ruins. During the next eighty years, the world market price for cotton remained low. The South had nothing but cotton, so the South remained poor until World War II.
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~sergiy/amhistory/ch21.html
don’t let this thread rewrite history
That was during the war of 1812. Not at all true during 1860’s
Lincoln could have bought every slave in the South and resettled them in the North for a fraction of the human and economic cost of the Civil War.
Obviously, the North was never going to go along with that idea.
Free the slaves? Oh yeah, man!
Live next door to a former slave family, compete for low skill jobs with former slaves, and compete politically against a 4 million person voting bloc?
Um, no thank you - in both the North and the South.
You said, “For the easily manipulatable, it would have been about slavery.“
This is an astonishingly ignorant statement.
Some cared about slavery, but by and large, the Southerners only cared about slavery because most Southerners were just a notch above slavery themselves. They didn’t want the slaves released to compete with them for jobs.
******what jobs pray tell, oh i am going to fill out an application to farm with a plow behind a mule get the picture.
The southern states wanted their representation based on the entire population, free and slave. The north objected because that gave the south a huge over representation in Congress.
So they compromised and said the slaves would only be partially counted toward their representation in congress.
The Civil war had complex causes, and extremists of both sides of the slavery issue pushed the country to war. A compromise by gradual freedom and compensation to owners, which was Lincoln's solution, therefore failed.
Ironically, the plantation system would have been economically non viable in the near future due to other sources of cheap cotton, but the rich Southerners didn't want to admit this.
The small southern farmer fought to defend his land, the small northern farmer to prevent the disintegration of the union. So yes, the civil war was not bout slavery. But there were enough Christians who became aware of the evils of slavery that they were pressuring the government to eliminate this horrid system.
But what tipped the scales was not just northern industry, but immigrants and ex slaves fighting for the north. England's elite supported the south, but the industrial workers and anti slavery groups in England were strong enough to stop them, and after Gettysburg they decided the South would lose so decided not to help them.
And now the elites in the US is again letting extremists push the country to a civil war.
So please stop provoking each other on FR.
because wage-based economies
***** what wages?????? they worked for food and a place to live I grew up in the south...
So Lincoln was a “Liberal using the Hegelian Dialectic arguments?”
You really need to educate yourself on the subject. Find some history books published prior to 1920. Anything later and you run the risk it’s been revised by progressives. Bear in mind passions ran high on all sides. Divisions ran through families, states, congregations, and even individuals. It was a messy catastrophe, made more painful in that it was a war between brothers. There are no simplistic explanations.
You do realize free blacks owned slaves pretty much at the same rate as white?
In short, it didn’t.
One of the greatest ironies of the lie that the war of northern aggression was fought to free the slaves was, while Lincoln was reading his FIRST emancipation proclamation, slaves in Maryland (and still Delaware, IIRC) were loading federal trains with munitions to prosecute the war.
That’s a stone-cold fact.
Slavery ultimately becomes a net economic loss. Had the war truly been about slavery, Lincoln would’ve manumitted the NORTH’s, the Union’s slaves FIRST.
It was about control of sugar, tobacco, corn, fiber (cotton), the prices, the cut, and distribution by wealthy northern globalists.
The “Civil War” was America’s Second revolutionary war and the good guys lost.
In the long term, had Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation - as illegal, unconstitutional an Executive Order as has ever been written, proclaimed as law - stayed in the Resolute desk, congress voted to BUY then manumit, forbid slavery, it could’ve been done with far less loss of life, but the post war “carpetbagging” was a preplanned event and drove the south into deeper, nearly unrecoverable poverty and servitude for most of a century.
PS: argue all you want. I’ve been over this many times in the past 50+ years and am very clear on my understanding of events leading to, through, and after the war. I no longer respond to trolls on this topic.
Learn your history.
The South had coal. The South had cotton. The North wanted them.
“I think we can agree that it had nothing to do with caring about the slaves.”
Nope. The anti-slavery movement had been going on in England for 100 years. Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in the 1840s and gavanized the North against slavery. There is a strong Christian reason to ban it.
“I was thinking that 4 million sudden extra bodies in the poor southern economy would have the same effect as high immigration, keeping the wages of the poorest workers suppressed and it would keep the South from developing economically, while the North would benefit from their ownership of Southern industries.”
Unemployment wasn’t a problem. Labor shortages were the norm. We had more land and more jobs than people. We had very open borders at that time.
As it was, many free slaves stayed working on their former masters’lands as sharecroppers or hired hands.
That’s what I’m saying. The poor Southerners did not want to compete for jobs with about 4 extra million available workers. However, that would have been a good situation for northern industrialists who would have wanted a never ending supply of workers for their industries they owned in the South.
*****You have it backwards the South was getting wealthy by the day. GREED. the yankees did not like that and wanted the cotton and textile mills and they got them do a search for textile mills in New Jersey....
Lincoln even admitted the war of northern aggression was not about freeing the slaves, it was fought over preserving the Union.
100% wrong.
The north was deeply concerned about slavery, both on economic AND personal levels. The first abolitionist society in the WORLD was established in the 1700s in Philadelphia.
America’s first congress, the Articles of Confederation Congress, passed only two really important bills. The second of these, the Northwest Ordinance, specifically prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. As far as I can tell, this is the FIRST EVER ANTISLAVE LEGISLATION in the entire world. Virtually all of the northern states had manumission societies and soon abolition societies.
Economically, Lincoln himself spoke to the problem of slave labor vs. free labor, where slave labor would always undercut the price and value of free labor. Hence the phrase, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” well before the Civil War.
While it’s completely accurate to say that “some” northerners could care less about slavery, most had an opinion one way or another, and I venture to say a slight majority were strongly opposed-—though not abolitionists (who would force immediate abolition with no mitigation). Most people favored “gradual compensated emancipation” without fully getting that you could have no such thing because each new “compensation” merely drove up the price of the remaining slaves as they became more scarce.
See our discussions of this in “A Patriot’s History of the United States.”
Lincoln knew that and signed the Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862 which eliminated slaver in the District of Columbia. He also advocated a version of it for the slave states that remained in the Union but it was narrowly defeated.
Slave states had no interest in changing.
I do realize that some blacks owned slaves. But nowhere near the same rate.
You noticed that too, eh?
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