True enough. That's exactly what the slaveowning leaders of the Confederacy did.
What is the difference between slavery and ghettoized immigrants paid sub-living standard wages?
Spoken like a true Marxist. Even low wage jobs provided people with the income to work their way out of poverty, and you could move around if you didn't like any particular job.
A highly skilled slave could buy his or her way out of slavery if his or her master would agree, but most couldn't. That's quite different from the condition of the Northern poor at the time.
In any case, you're railing against the wrong people. Blame the English who kept the Irish in destitution, not the Americans who gave them jobs. Or maybe the comparison between the British in Ireland and the slaveowners int the Old South is too close.
If the North could not rely Irish immigrants, the war would have been over in two years with recognition of the Confederacy. Then the absorption of MD, DE, MO, and KY into the Confederacy would have occurred, leaving the Midwest wondering if they really had any ties to New England.
Sort of like they wondered in 1860 if they really had any ties to the South? Ties between East and West were more solid than those between North and South by that point, yet the rest of country still wasn't willing to write off the South.
In any case, would it have been a good thing for the country to shatter, for North and South, East and West to go their separate ways? That you apparently think so, says a lot about you.
“In any case, would it have been a good thing for the country to shatter, for North and South, East and West to go their separate ways? That you apparently think so, says a lot about you.”
That you support a war that consumed an entire generation and achieved nothing but the destruction of half the country says a lot about you. Bite me.