Posted by
Gerald R Evans on Friday, October 24, 2008 11:31:02 PM
I was born and raised in the south, and I was taught to embrace my Southern Heritage. Let's be honest, talk of the old Confederacy will usually get one branded a racist. But, there are also a few relative factors that must be considered when discussing pre-Civil War America.
!) Both the North and the South had slaves.
2) Most of the industry in the nation at that time was located in the North, most agriculture in the South.
3) The north pretty much "ran" the country; it had more control of the Congress and Senate.
Now, let's take a look at the causes of the Civil War.
Most people think that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. That is untrue, slavery was the emotional issue that drove the war for both North and South. The real causes were: the inequities between Northern and Southern industry; trade restrictions and tax burdens forced on the South to "punish" them for the use of slave labor; and the basic disagreement between North and South over slavery, more the point of which type of slavery (the effect of this has always been exaggerated on to try and present the Northern case in a more favorable light). When it comes right down to it the same reasons that caused the American Revolutionary War caused the Civil War (taxation without representation.)
Many people believe that Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents of all time. I, on the hand, have always thought that he was one of the worst presidents ever and certainly the most unconstitutional. The reason I say this is because of an often over looked fact; any state may at any time secede from the union ("Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present.." and therefore any state can withdraw its consent to be governed by the Constitution and therefore by the US Government) So, Lincoln had no right to force the Confederate Sates to repatriate. Some argue that the Confederate States crossed the line when they began the bombing of Fort Sumter, but as an independent nation (which was recognized by the British) the CSA had a right to demand that the USA withdraw it's solders from Fort Sumter and therefore, in my honest opinion, had every right to begin bombardment of that facility when their demand was not met.
And so, now we begin the socnd part of the argument over why it was a good thing the USA won the Civil War: that at least it got rid of slavery. Slavery was begining to die out of its own accord. The invention of the Cotton Gin has always been heralded as the event which escalated the use of slave labor in the cotton industry. What it actually heralded was the eventual collapse of the slave labor system. The Cotton Gin was the first of many mechanical farm implements that would have eventually made slavery a non-cost effecient system of agriculture. Things such as mechanicale combines and harvesters would have eventually led to more and more plantation owners completely doing away with slave labor. A piece of equipment is much more cost effecient over a long period of time when compared with the amount of physical labor costs it replaces. Example: if it took twenty slaves to harvest a days worth of cotton and a machine could match that smae quota in the same amount of time the machine is more cost effecient: you do not have to feed, cloth and hosue a machine. Eventually every slave would have been freed in the south. Furthermore, most of them would have become a skilled labor class, having been the ones most likely to operate and maintain early farm implements.
Imagine how much idfferently things would have progresed in the South had the issue of slavery been handled in a timely matter. I dont think we would have had the ammount of racial tension that existed during the Civil Rights Movement and that blacks in the south would probably have been quicker to gain rights had the CSA still been a soverign nation....