Hey! No need to get insulting! I'm just as profanely strident as anyone!!!
but the South went to war to preserve slavery.
I agree, but only in part. The second and equally-important part is that they didn't want to be bossed around by the North. I guess we call it States Rights, but it boils down to not wanting to be told what to do.
And the funny thing is, slavery would have been obsolete very quickly anyways. A machine is lot more economical than a human slave.
There also seem to be a bunch of other more minor reasons, but the two I stated, you should agree with... if you are being as honest with yourself as I am with myself.
I ended up researching the slavery issue in the United States from the opposite end. (The Declaration of Independence is what kicked it off.) I was actually researching Vattel's influence on the Declaration, and I found both topics crashed together at the juncture of slavery, so I followed the slavery history for a bit.
The trend is apparent. If you start at 1776, you see slavery slowly being abolished in state after state. It had become "passe", and the "better people" were now frowning on it. It had become socially taboo, and even the Southern Aristocratic wealthy class was growing ashamed of it.
The problem was, their states were more able to turn a profit on it than were those Northern states. It was harder for the Southern states to give it up because so much of their economic activity depended on it.
The Northern states also had the option to go sell their slaves in the South, and thereby not lose the money they had invested in them. The South had no such option.
Never the less, the social onus against it was growing stronger, and the wealthy classes would eventually have succumbed to all that social pressure, (the way wealthy classes always do) and slavery would have eventually gone away there too, in the fullness of time.
Hear hear, Laz. There are some seriously overwrought claims being made on this thread. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.