quote:
Originally posted by LazarusLong42:
...But that's not all of it. There was also the matter of commerce. Let's face it, the North may have condemned slavery, but they sure didn't mind the money that flowed their way. They had all the manufacturing, and therefore the money from raw goods--cotton, tobacco, and other plantation materials--that flowed into the South (partially from the North, partially from Europe) eventually made it to the North, where finished goods were made.
All very true. For the first hundred years of our country there was a dirty little aggrement where everybody got paid and everybody stayed happy. I am not by any means saying the North was innocent. But by the 1860's attitudes in the North had shifted away from this and towards abbolishing slavery. This fact is what caused the rift between the two. All the pretty words about liberty and unity were just a way for "educated" men of the time to discuss the issue of the day without having to face the glaring truth.
The argument boiled down to it's core was simply, "Do I have the right to own another human being as property." The majority in South felt YES strongly enough to quit the country. The majority of the North felt strongly NO storngly enough to go to war to stop them.
Of course there are many other reasons why one individual or group or another picked one side or the other. Not everybody in the North cared a whit about the slaves. And not everybody in the South depended on slavery. Many would have been perfectly happy to allow it to be abolished at the time. And I don't doubt you are correct it would have been within a few more decades at any rate.
But my point is if you are looking for a single, defining cause for the American Civil War, it has to be the abolishion of slavery. It is the only one of the numerous issues of the day that if removed from the table, could have prevented the conflict from ever starting. It is the point about which all the other disagreements revolved.
Geoschmo