The Union said the Civil War was about nationalism and slavery, but it’s more accurate to say it was political. As has been stated, political power back then, as today, stems from money. Northern politicians were industrialists, Southern politicians were wealty agriculturalists; As agriculture was labor intensive, it benifited more from slavery. Whether it was more political strategey or progressive influence (probably both, but the debate rages on) the northern political party (ie the new Republican party) wanted to disallow slavery in the new expanding territory in the West. Without slaves to work the fields, the Southern states would not be able to expand their fortunes, and thus their political power. Feeling they were being disenfranchised several states declaired their “independence”. (Interesting to note, even though several southern states did not initially leave they Union, they clearly had sympathy for the Seperatists. It is only when Northern troops were sent into the rebelling states that they declaired for the Confederacy.)
I’ve often wondered if technology had advanced a bit faster (or slower), would the Civil War have even happened? The invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the wealth of the South, but resulted in a need for even more slaves to plant and pick cotton. Had the combine harvester been invented earlier and the need for slavery been eliminated (or at least greatly reduced), would there have been an eventual rift between North and South anyhow?
The reality was that the southern plantation system was like somebody set out to design an economic system for failure.
First is the point I already made: the south refused to join in on the industrial revolution. And it was going to happen. If somehow the entire United States decide to embrace a pastoral existence we would have become a third rate subsidiary to places like England and Germany. It wasn’t hostility. It’s just that industry makes more money than agriculture. So agricultural societies are poorer than industrial societies. It’s not the industrial societies making the agricultural societies poor; it’s the agricultural societies refusing to make themselves rich.
Second is economic stratification. It’s easy to have a society full of poor people. And surprisingly, it’s not too difficult for a society to create rich people - even primitive pre-literate societies managed to accumulate some really rich people at the top of the pyramid. What’s really difficult is to develop a middle class - a substantial group of people who have some money in their pocket. And that’s the group you need to really make an economy run.
And the south was bad at this. They had a handful of plantation owners at the top who were wealthy. And there was a bunch of slaves at the bottom who essentially had nothing. But there weren’t enough people in the middle. There was obviously a middle class and a working class in the south. But they were much smaller than their northern counterparts. And there was a steady drain of middle class and working class southerners leaving the south to relocate to the north or to the western territories where their opportunities were better. So the south lacked the group that produced economic growth.
Third was the cost of slavery. Slaves may work for no wages but they still need to be housed and fed at their owner’s expense. They need to be raised from birth or purchased as they reach a working age. Slaves don’t have any incentive to work so the threat of force must be constantly applied to keep them working (and to keep them from revolting as well). And slavery was increasingly unpopular among world opinion and this caused indirect costs the slave-owners had to bear.
Fourth was the fact that while the plantation owners were agriculturalists, they were surprisingly bad at agriculture. In a scientific era, southern plantation owners had almost no interest in the science of agriculture. They mostly ignored idea like crop rotation, fertilizers, erosion, soil composition, pest control, and developing new crops. And the result was that they ruined their fields - the productivity of an acre of plantation farmland was constantly declining. And rather than trying to figure out why, the response was to just plant more crops next year which would hasten the decline. This was the reason southern politicians were so obsessed with national expansion - they needed new farmland to settle.
Fifth was the fact that most plantation owners were poor businessmen. They didn’t see the financial aspects of running a plantation as befitting their status. So they hired people to run their business affairs and paid these people with a share of all the money they handled. And while they might look down on these people as sordid merchants (who were often northerners) the system represented a constant drain of capital out of the plantation.
So nobody set out to destroy the southern plantations system - its demise was self-inflicted.
I wouldn’t dispute that the “plantation system” was inefficient and most likely headed to eventual obsoletion, but it seems to me you’re judging it from a 21st century standpoint. Of course it wouldn’t work today… but then again the “industrial system” of that time couldn’t compete today either. Actually, I’m fairly sure our own manufacturing economy (U.S.) is being supplanted today by a post-industrial system. Why would the Southern wealthy change the way they did business if it was still working for them? Their wealth and power was such that Northern politicians were afraid they would purchase large swaths of the new territories and keep out “free-soil” farmers. It is only today, in our enlighted modern age that we will give up the old ways that make the wealthy more wealth and embrace new technologies that are safer, healthier and better for society as a whole! (Cough…fossil fuels…cough!) :rolleyes:
Like I said… the old system is gone, and the world is better for it. But don’t try to tell me that politics didn’t bring about the change. There’s not a war that’s been fought that didn’t revolve around religion or politics. (Which are the same thing, now that I think about it.)
You made it half way through the paragraph. That’s something I suppose. Allow me to repeat what I wrote:
Maryland and Delaware both had slave-holding minorities (there were only 1800 slaves left in Delaware in 1860) that wanted to secede and join the Confederacy. But both states had a non-slave-holding majority that wanted to stay in the Union.
This is a good time to point out that none of the southern states put secession up to a general vote beforehand. The state legislators, who were almost all slave owners, voted to behalf on their constituents, many of who did not own slaves.
Sure politics was a factor. But not the way you’re claiming. What happened was that the non-slave-holding parts of the country kept growing faster than the slave-holding parts of the country. Representative democracy being what it was, this was reflected in a gradual loss of politic power by slave holding areas.
Like I said, nobody had to kill slavery. Everyone could see it was dying without any outside help being needed. And that includes the slave owners - they saw their way of life was declining.
Northern politicians weren’t afraid of Southerners buying land and expanding slavery into the west. Everyone could see that the southern plantation owners were losing their power and were no threat.
Control of the western territories was one of the biggest issues of the 1860 election, and keeping the western territories free was one of the cornerstones of the Republican party’s platform (along with protecting industrialist interests through tariffs, granting free farmland to settlers in the west, and the creation of a trans-continental railroad). One of the reasons the Republicans chose Lincoln for the party nomination was because he very strongly supported keeping the west free of slavery.
Lincoln publicly stated that he was willing to let the South keep their slaves if it would keep them in the Union. He was not so willing to compromise on the western lands. His determination (backed strongly by the Republicans) to keep the west free of slavery was what drove South Carolina to secede, which was what started the war.
Probably Shelby Foote. He certainly expressed those sentiments in the Ken Burns “Civil War” show of 13 hours panning slowly over old photographs.
There was a book on Scots-Irish by Senator Jim Webb “Born Fighting” that has some staggering figures from the 1930s on how little of the industry and other things were owned by outsiders in the 1930s. Something like 90%, depending what was measured.It’s hard to get rich if you don’t own things that produce revenue.
Control of the western territories was definitely a major issue - and one which the south had no chance of winning. My point is that the north didn’t attack the south because it was worried about southern power. It didn’t need to - the south didn’t have the power to threaten the north.
I see slavery as the root cause of the South’s poverty-to keep the slaves under control, the plantation class kept education away. The lack of an educated labor force made industrialization difficult-and the poverty of the Deep South kept people ignorant.
The whole period of 1865-1920 was one long lost era-the south got poorer and poorer, while the Midwest and North prospered.
The interesting thing was, these trends were evident by 1840 or so-but nobody in the southern state legislatures wanted to reform things.
I feel I’ve made all the good faith effort anyone should have to telling you what I wrote. If you’re not going to bother to read what I wrote, I’m not going to bother to respond to you anymore. Anyone who reads what I wrote and what you wrote can see you are mistaken. And you probably aren’t reading this.
Well that’s a pretty foolish thing to think. In the midst of a massive crisis which was dividing the country in half over the issue of slavery, it never occurred to you that some states were similarly divided? That Missouri and Tennessee were divided into a slave half and a free half just like the United States was? That there was a reason why the western half of Virginia split off to form a new state? You knew none of this? You felt that every state was either 100% pro-Confederate or 100% pro-Union?
Actually, at the time the Union was very insistent that the war was not about slavery, but about nationalism (that is, “Union”). It was the Confederates an their sympathizers who insisted the war was about slavery, both in describing their own motives for secession as being for the preservation of slavery, and in accusing the North of fighting for abolition.
Lincoln certainly was. He’d have done anything to keep the Union together. Slavery was certainly one of the major issues in the South feeling to be under represented in Congress, but not the only one.
If only the seceding states had recorded what they thought were the causes for secession.
Oh wait, they did. Four states issued official proclamations of what they thought the issues were. Let’s see what they said.
No mention of tariffs. No mention of nullification. No mention of industrialization. No mention about territorial expansion. No mention about religious differences. No mention about cultural differences.
There was admittedly a mention about states rights. South Carolina said it was against them. They said the federal government was illegally allowed states to abolish slavery. The South Carolina position was that the states had no such right and the federal government should force the states to protect slavery.
Okay, Georgia did say the government was spending too much on lighthouses. But the rest of it was slavery.
So there you have it. The causes of the Civil War. Slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, and slavery (mentioned eighty-two separate times). Servitude (ten times). Abolition (five times). Lighthouses (one time).
