I'm getting in late on this topic. Haven't read all the posts but would like to offer a few comments on some of the statements made in those I have read.
1. The Civil War had multiple causes. When Toad states that slavery was not the major issue impelling the Southern states to the separation he is correct. Slavery did not become the cause celebre of the Northern government until Great Britain began rattling it's sabre in 1862. How many of you realize that the British had begun massing an army in Canada for a possible invasion of the North? Lincoln used McClellan's victory at Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation to place the North's war effort on a "higher moral footing" in the hopes that this would derail attempts by members of the British Parliament to intervene in the conflict. All references to the war, prior to Antietam, by Lincoln or the press, speak of the war as a struggle to preserve the Union. One wrap on the knuckles Grun, for sleeping during history class.
2. The war WAS fought largely by members of the Southern yeoman class. While some of them were slave owners, most owned only two or three, and worked beside them in the fields. The impression held by many modern Americans that southern agricultural society was made up mainly of large plantations is erroneous. The impression left by "Gone With the Wind" is a crock. Two thirds of all southern farmers did NOT own slaves. When they fought, they fought to expel invading armies from their home states and to protect their farms against the depredations of those armies.
3. MT, you are mistaken to believe that technology would not have eliminated slavery. It would not have happened quickly, but it would definitely have happened. The use of manual labor to hoe and pick cotton persisted until my lifetime. The cotton picker eliminated that need completely about 30 years ago, which was about the last time I remember seeing "pore fokes" picking cotton by hand in the fields. However, slavery would not have persisted that long. Competition for foreign markets, principally by Egypt and India, drove a stake through the heart of the Southern cotton economy during the late 1800s. Slavery would "probably" have died a natural death by the year 1900.
4. Grunherz, the state of South Carolina seriously considered seceding from Union because of the tariff as early as 1828. The central argument then, as it was in 1860, was the issue of "state's rights." While slavery, and its spread into the western territories purchased from France and seized from Mexico, remained a volatile issue, it was the heavy taxation of imports by the tariff that the Southern states felt were the greatest threat to their economic way of life. Another rap on the knuckles for sleeping during history class.
5. MT, if stating that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War is "revisionist history" then what are we to say about the claim that "the tariff was not a major contributing factor to the war." One rap on the knuckles for falling hook, line, and sinker for the myth of the "Great Crusade."
Regards, Shuckins
