It is a stretch to infer that 30% is central to the overall South as a whole because of the economic reasons. Sure, 30% is a large part, but if you consider the concentration was not held in 2/3 of the population, it points to a smaller more influential group of whites with a lot of resources who had a lot of slaves that earned them more resources.
One might even think that some of the 2/3 who did not own slaves and were subsistence farmers, etc. who might have even wished to sell off some of the excess resented the competition by those concerns that owned a lot of slaves.
Additionally, your argument on the reasons for war is solely based on slavery and totally neglects the enmity between North and South, even in Congress, because of tariffs, N-S trade imbalance or inequities, or just plain bad blood between both sides like we have between Conservatives and Liberals today.
Please point to anywhere in my some tens of thousands of posts that I have said the war was solely about slavery.
What I have said is that it was the root and core reason for the hostility. All other issues could be, and were, compromised. Slavery by its very nature cannot be handled that way. Either people are enslaved or they are not.
Tariffs, for example, are often used as a or the reason for the war. The problem with this is that in 1860 tariffs were the lowest they’d been in the nation’s history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history#/media/File:US-Tariffs.svg
Perhaps more critically, do you really want to try to justify a massive war and its death and destruction over tariff rates, which northern consumers paid at exactly the same rate as southern consumers? Really?
Which are effectively the same Demographic groups. I read this the other day. It argues that the Civil war was really a continuation of a much older war between the English and the Scots-Irish.
Of course, the flag is not really the issue. That’s why normal people are caught off-guard whenever the Cult starts waving it around and ululating like lunatics. The real issue is the long War Between the Whites that started in the 19th century and continues to this day. We call this the Civil War and that’s a good label, but I prefer my label, as it is more precise. Civil War implies both sides were equal or the same or viewed one another in that way. They never did and they still don’t.In the 19th century, northern whites of mostly English ancestry used slavery as an excuse to attack and kill as a many Southern whites as possible. Those southern whites were of mostly Scots-Irish ancestry. The northern whites were ready to join their European coevals in the industrial, global age and they did not want those backward agrarian crackers holding them back. Slavery had to go and the people responsible for it had to be punished.
Interesting take on the topic.
