# Is the Civil War only about Slavery?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-civil-war-only-about-slavery/186799>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 7, 2003, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-civil-war-only-about-slavery/186799 "2003-07-07T16:38:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2003, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-civil-war-only-about-slavery/186799/41 "2003-07-08T21:36:30Z")

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I particularly enjoyed Gov. Brown’s inversion of Martin Luther Kings’s speach:

> [@](#):
>
> Abolish slavery, and you make the negroes their equals, legally and socially (not naturally, for no human law can change God’s law) and you very soon make them all tenants, and reduce their wages for daily labor to the smallest pittance that will sustain life. Then the negro and the white man, and their families, must labor in the field together as equals. Their children must go to the same poor school together, if they are educated at all. They must go to church as equals; enter the Courts of justice as equals, sue and be sued as equals, sit on juries together as equals, have the right to give evidence in Court as equals, stand side by side in our military corps as equals, enter each others’ houses in social intercourse as equals; and very soon their children must marry together as equals. May our kind Heavenly Father avert the evil, and deliver the poor from such a fate.

I guess we are living in that man’s nightmare scenario right now.

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**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2003, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-civil-war-only-about-slavery/186799/42 "2003-07-08T22:49:46Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Bill H. \*  
> \*\*a) if it wasn’t profitable, why was it done? Natural selection among plantations would’ve killed off the less profitable ones.  
> b) If it was even borderline, why were so many adament about keeping it in place? To the extent that hundreds of thousands died to keep it in place? \*\*

First, before I answer your questions, I want to recommendm as probably one of the best contemporary economic critiques of slavery, Hilton Helper’s “The Impending Crisis of the South and How to Meet It”. Helper, a North Carolina journalist, who had become popular for a book on the California Gold Rush, (which I think contains one of the best lines about California ever written) in 1858, wrote an economic analysis of Southern slavery, and he came to the conclusion that slavery was destroying the southern economy. Here it is, if you’d like to read it:

[http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html](http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html)

Now, if slavery wasn’t profitable, why was it done? The answer is, that, in the early years, slavery was profitable. When the colonies were first founded and goods like tobacco were in such high demand, someone who could set up a monoculture plantation could get rich. And, since labor was in such demand, and products like tobacco and cotton are so labor intensive, slavery became neccesary for a plantation economy. So, plantation owners, first growing tobacco and then cotton, got rich, and established themselves as the ruling classes of the southern colonies. Unfortunately, prices can’t stay high forever, and further, cotton cultivation, which became the South’s main crop, is extremely demanding of soil, so soil quality declined, and crop yields and quality declined with it. In fact, there was even a growing abolitionist sentiment in the South at the end of the 18th century, because it became extremely unprofitable, until the invention of the cotton gin was able to push cotton production back into profitibility.

So now, you have a situation that’s marginally profitable at best. Most of these plantations are cash poor…their value lies in land and slaves, so it’s to the interest of the plantation owners to make sure land value doesn’t go down, and especially that the value of slaves doesn’t go down, because that would be ruinous. Remember, even though the slave/plantation system is borderline in terms of profitibilty, getting rid of it would be catastrophic to the economy. So, that’s why, by the time of the Civil War, the plantation owners were adament about keeping it in place. They would be ruined if it disappeared.

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