As economics includes the natural resource bases to which a government may avail itself, including those occupied or conquered, it is inherently obvious that your understanding of history is on par with your understanding of economics. Any war over territorial dominion is a war involving economics.
Books have been written on the topic, but I suggest you avail yourself of an encyclopedia and look up the causes of those wars. I will not write volumes here in rebuttal to indicate the obvious.
Their profit margins in the 10 years leading up to the war had never been higher.
Again, economics apply. If your profit is higher (by expanding the size of your operation, like the vanishing independant farmers of today are being absorbed by larger operations), then there is in one sort of reckoning, only an increase in the amount of money the government is taking from you if you cannot effectively trade with whom you wish without punitive tarrifs.
As an analogy, if you make $20,000 per year, your income tax (bottom line, how much paid)is a relative pittance to the person who makes $100,000 per year.
If that tax is percieved as being unbalanced on a regional basis, if Californians paid Federal income tax at twice the rate New Yorkers did, y'all would have your dander up, too.
The leaders of the times were not hell-bent on freeing slaves, with the exception of a few Abolitionists. Especially Northern leaders who would see a rapid diminuition in taxable trade as farm econcmies collapsed. The slaves were the labor which harvested profitable, but labor-intensive crops. Some, such as tobacco, still have no effective mechanical means of being worked or harvested.
For Southern leaders to advocate forced manumission would have been tantamount to to the Iowa Governor advocating a tractor ban in Iowa.
So don't expect to see comments from the political leaders of the times.
However, when one does the simple arithmetic on how much it costs to feed, clothe, house, and provide health care for an employee 24/7/365 versus paying a wage and letting the employee fend for themselves, the equation works out toward manumission. Contrary to tedious Northern stereotypes of Southerners, then and now, simple arithmetic was not beyond even the 'aristocracy'. Manumission was on the rise. I suggest you do further research into how many slaves were owned, including those owned by free blacks.
I heartily reccommend sources published prior to the revisions of the 1930's, and especially prior to the 1960's, whence much has been obfusticated by political agendae, especially those of the NAACP and the Reparationists.
I'd like to see your documentation on that. If you do any research, you will find that mamumission rates peaked in the 1830s, and fell off rapidly afterward. Those peak rates were in the Upper South states where slave labor was becomming less and less profitable. With the advent of King Cotton the wealth of the Upper South was not in it's products, but in its exportation of slaves southward. But the mid 19th century, slaves were not only a necessary source of labor, but had also became a valuable commodity in themselves. That dynamic drove the slavery expansion issue leading directly to the Civil War. The need to open new territory and demand for slaves to keep the value of slave property high was what caused the split.
The greatest 'cash crop' was not cotton, tobacco or rice. It was human flesh.
Now THOSE are fighting words... Merry Christmas from the Midwest.
Your 'simple arithmatic' fails to include the following into the equation. First, there was no alternative available for slave labor. Immigrants provided the most ready source for inexpensive labor in the North and they were almost non-existant in the south. Second, southern society saw blacks as fit for slavery and nothing else. The suggestion that millions of slaves be freed and integrated into southern society, living where they wanted and voting and everything, was alien to everything that they believed. The southern aristocracy fought the rebellion to protect their property, and so did the poor southern white. Slavery protected their place in society as well.
Manumission was on the rise. I suggest you do further research into how many slaves were owned, including those owned by free blacks.
I have done the research. The fact is that manumission was NOT on the rise. Most southern states had laws preventing or limiting manumission. And the slave population of the south rose about 20 percent between 1850 and 1860. That does not support your claim that it was a dying institution.
I heartily reccommend sources published prior to the revisions of the 1930's, and especially prior to the 1960's, whence much has been obfusticated by political agendae, especially those of the NAACP and the Reparationists.
For example?