When the War was over, Northern carpet baggers did buy up a lot of southern properties for pennies or less on the dollar. So in a way, that economic goal was attained.
But slavery and economics were not the only considerations. Years of newspaper and political party rhetoric had stirred up ill feelings and hatred on both sides. Rational behavior and thinking were hard to find. The country was a tinderbox waiting for a match. Gee, it must have seemed a lot like what we are experiencing today
No, because in 1860 Northern business interests weren’t united on policy towards the South. Many were closely connected to the South, especially through the cotton trade, and didn’t want anything to change. Some rich people (and many not rich people) were worried about slavery expansion, or opposed to slavery in principle. Others didn’t care one way or the other about slavery or what happened to the South, though once war started they may have wanted the Union to be preserved.
Once war started, the expectation and the wish on both sides was for a short, victorious war. If the the North won a short war slavery and the economic and environmental conditions in the South wouldn’t have changed. Everyone would know that slavery was eventually on the way out, but that would have taken time.
One thing that one or two precient souls predicted before the war was that abolishing slavery meant that wealthy Southerners could put their money into buying land, rather than slaves, resulting in a sharecropper system like the one that eventually did develop after the Civil War, but nobody was predicting that Northerners would sweep in and buy up all the land.
There were some Northerners who moved South after the war with political or economic or moralistic ambitions, the famous “carpetbaggers” in southern eyes. But even before 1860, Northerners moved South, Southerners moved North, and everybody moved West, seeking their fortunes. Though it’s forgotten now, Southerners helped settle the Midwest, and Northerners settled in the Lower Mississippi Valley and helped build up the cotton business.
South Carolina was ALWAYS the agitator
Which is why Sherman thought it humility.
The notion that the Civil War was caused by the desire of nothern banks to end slavery so they could buy up the south on the cheap — defies history and logic.
Northern banks made money off of slavery.
Slaves were often literally the collateral for loans to plantation owners. Ending slavery would cause loss of capital. Northern banks also financed external trade of southern slave-produced agricultural products, internal trade, and northern manufacturing.
Agricultural land without labor has little value. Slavery was the prevalent source of labor in the antebellum South. For the northern banks to profit from buying up southern lands, they would need a new source of labor — and fast to void disrupting trade and manufacturing interests.
British Isles/European immigrants were flooding into The North and what was then the West of the US, where they found their dream of lands to own and work as free farmers. Compared to that, immigating to the South to compete with blacks free or otherwise, for work-intensive crops like cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar cane, indigo, etc., help little attraction. Much better to grow wheat and corn further north and west.
Internal and eternal immigration revised the allocation of political power within the US, populating new States with free farmers who tended to oppose slavery morally, but did not want to compete with it enomically. New States even completed for immigrants by extending voting rights to all free men, etc. The whole dynamic of political power in the US disfavored the South and slavery. Southern oligarchs who owned vast numbers of surplus slaves needed new slave territories/states so they could sell off their human capital. The US was clearly not going to accommodate that, so they oligarchs sought alternatives (in particular, they lusted after Central America aand the Caribbean).
You are leaving out the immense opposition to slavery for the evil that it was, by trying to make it economic issue .
The vast majority of Americans saw the evil of owning humans and were strongly opposed to it.
People in small Ohio towns didn’t elect Lincoln so they could buy cheap plantation land .
They weren't intending to end slavery. In March of 1861, the Northern controlled Congress voted by a 2/3rds margin in both the House and Senate to pass the "Corwin Amendment."
This amendment would guarantee legal slavery in the United States until every last state gave it up voluntarily.
Lincoln called for this amendment to be ratified in his first inaugural address.
So no, the North wasn't really trying to end slavery. They were trying to stop the South from leaving and taking all the money they were earning from their trade goods, with them.
The Civil war was about money. We've all been taught it was about slavery, but it was really about the 700 million per year in Southern produced goods that were traded with the North and Europe, and who would control that trade and most especially who would get that money.
That is all the war was about.
That gave the Confederacy enough size and resources to make the Civil War a long and bloody contest. Formally, for the first phase of the Civil War, the Union's war objective was not the elimination of slavery but preservation of the Union. At least initially, the South preferred to talk mostly of the South's right to be independent. Yet a close reading of the articles of secession passed by the state legislatures who joined the Confederacy show that the preservation of slavery -- often referred to gingerly as the South's "peculiar institution" -- was the reason why the South wanted independence.
Looked on dispassionately, one notices the haphazard way in which the Civil War began. There was no ultimatum by the North over slavery, simply the election of the antislavery Lincoln as President. After Lincoln was elected, he attempted to soothe Southern anxieties over slavery. Only after Gettysburg in July of 1863 did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation effectively ending slavery. Even then, it was framed as a war measure instead of a full-on abolition. The formal and complete abolition of slavery was not written into the Constitution until the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 -- well after the end of the Civil War.
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