re: Was the Civil War Fought Because of Slavery? It Depends on Which Side You View

quote:

---

the Emancipation Proclamation) as a wartime measure to weaken the South

---

To weaken the South by making the war a moral question so as to keep England for entering on the side of the South.

quote:

---

The Civil War was about 20 years away from being avoided. The British had just started the industrial revolution. The U.S. would have caught on by the 1880s with mechanized agriculture that was much more efficient and cheaper than slavery.

---

Yea, slavery would've ended on its own.

quote:

---

What was the primary driver of that aggression? Slavery

---

Your previous post was hitting at the complicated nature of the forces and fractures that led to the civil war... and then you follow it up with this?

quote:

---

Your previous post was hitting at the complicated nature of the forces and fractures that led to the civil war... and then you follow it up with this?

---

Just a reminder of my previous post

quote:

---

there wouldn't have been a Civil War with only the "everything other than slavery" bucket.

So when people try to frame is only as "state's rights", for example, they intentionally ignore what issue was leading to that conflict. Without slavery in the mix, it would be similar to the modern, pre-Trump era of DEM-GOP debate on the issue. With slavery? Civil War.

Slavery was the cause that created all of the conflict and fractures in our society/government that led to the Civil War.

---

It was fought for political power/self determination on both sides. The political power war over free and slave states leading up to the war screams that. For the common man it was out of a sense of duty, self defense or being drafted. Nobody on either side fought for slaves either for or against as you don’t take a bullet for someone on the lowest end of American society and in whom you had no relationship with. That goes against human nature if nothing else.

Was slavery an agitation to the war? Of course, but a cause for taking lives and risking your own life when almost none of the soldiers had anything to do with slavery on either side, hardly. People just don’t do that.

A lot of other reasons can be mentioned, but it all boiled down to slavery. Without the slavery issue the war could have been avoided and it was decades in the making.

quote:

---

but it all boiled down to slavery. Without the slavery issue the war could have been avoided and it was decades in the making.

---

Exactly.

quote:

---

He's been dragged through the muck over the years, but Shelby Foote knew what he was talking about.

---

I think of Shelby Foote everything one of these "it was slavery!" debates comes up:

Before the war, it was said ‘the United States are’—grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is,’ as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’

It made us an "is."

Mike da Tigah this is correct.


What I like is you have teachers today teaching that up to 90% of southern families owned slaves. It is less than 6% s the price of a slave was far out of the means of the average framer.

When the war started one side of family lived in Livingston Parish, they owned no slaves and the father went to fight in Virginia
in the 7th Louisiana. He left his wive and family with no real means to plan and grow food. An Indian who lived down the road helped plan and gather the food for the family. You still had Indians in Livingston Parish in 1860s. The father dead in the war in 1862 and is buried in Richmond, Virginia. The family moved to Baton Rouge in the late 1860s.