re: On this day 158 years ago, Vicksburg surrendered to Union forces (July 4, 1863)

Spare me the whole South as victim nonsense. The South was an economic backwater going into 1860 and I suspect the powers that ran things saw this even before, but Southern leaders were slow to react to changes in economic reality.

Why did the South not embrace rail and a unified system? Why was overall development in the South so far behind even areas in the mid west that settled at least at the same time as places in the South? It might have been about money, but it was the other way around, the South saw the writing on the wall. The South was stagnant in population growth, it was not easy to get around, there was very limited manufacturing. Additionally southern planters were depleting the soil because of, wait, get this, COTTON. which is why you had such a vicious fight for Kansas and its valuable farmland. The Southern planter class wanted to diversify their crops but they wanted slave labor to do it.

The election of 1860 was an attempt by the Southern planter class to do the same thing that happened in 1824 and send the election into the House of Representative and hope they could broker a deal that would at least get possibly John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party in a brokered set up. Breckenridge would not have been acceptable to Northern Democrats or Republicans.

Sucks to make bad calculations. Start a war against an enemy with 3X the amount of fighting population with a growing manufacturing base that once ramped up could dwarf anything the South could do. If you are going to start a war make sure you don't have to import because if your enemy has a navy and you don't, well, you are toast. In the end it's always about money and yes the North had grown tired of constantly capitulation to Southern demands that the ratio of slave to free states stay constant with the ability of the Southern Planters to send bounty hunters out to essentially recover los "property" with no repercussions in Northern states where slavery was illegal. The Southern planters hated the fact that slavery had become as
a majority unpopular, nationally.