The American Civil War - what others think

[Cybrludite]

Originally posted by DynaMup
I think the war is still present in some form of US consciousness. When I was last in New York, there were some rumblings about some of the southern states wanting to fly the confederate flag instead of the national flag on public buildings, and I can remember there being considerable outrage on TV at the time (this was in 2001).

Actually, the issue was about keeping the Confederate Battle Flag as part of the state flags down here. DUring the fight for intergration, several Southern states added the "Southern Cross" to their flags in protest. The reason there is so much resistance to taking it back off is that many down here are sick of the rest of the country assuming that we're still living (at best) in the 1950's down here. (Some would say we're still stuck in the 1850's...) With very few exceptions, (Like "Steel Magnolias") whenever southerners appear in a movie or a TV show, we're shown either as Beverley Hillbillys or Klansmen. Imagine if every time a catholic showed up on primetime, an issue was made about dual loyalties to Rome, or if every black character who turned up who were either a minstrel act or a thug. (Incedently, I blame John Wilkes Booth responsible for all of this. Had Reconstruction gone the way Lincoln wanted it to, things would have normalized much faster.)

[Cybrludite]

Originally posted by C5
I must confess that what I remembered about the Civil War was mostly something like : "Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery, but the South didn't want to and then started a war".
Then again as I said, I'm no history scholar at all.

Lincoln's main goal was to keep the country intact. His party, the Republicans, were anti-slavery. They varied from just not bringing any more states that allowed slavery into the country, to flat out abolition without compensation. (Or worse. Folks like Henry Ward Beecher and John Brown would be terrorists by today's standards.)

The plantation owners had a great amount of thier capital tied up in slaves. Field hands cost on the order of $1-2000 in 1850's dollars, with dozens to one or two hundred on the larger plantations. As it was, slavery was becoming economically unfeasable. Slaves were more expensive than paid labor over the lifetime of the worker, and were much less motivated than free laborers. You don't need to house, clothe, and feed a McCormick reaper, after all. Protectionist tarriffs supporting northern industry were hurting the south as well. Equipment was more expensive as a result, and we got slapped with similar tarriffs by Europe when the cotton was shipped to them. On this side, it looked like a two pronged attack on our economy. To read the northern editorials, it sounded like they wanted to free the slaves and not compensate the owners, and make it too expensive to buy machines to replace the slaves with. Gee, thanks. This caused hot-heads in the South to start pushing for secession, since the North's advantage in congress was only going to increase over time.

[Eric R.]

Cybrludite I have never read a better and more coherent economic explanation from the southern perspective then what you have given above.


meanwhile on the Northern Side, Farmers looked at the southern plantations as strangling them with the abondence in their eyes of cheap labor undercutting the price of several crops (slaves didn't just harvest cotton folks). Meanhwile Southern filebusting in the congress prevented the passing of the homestead act which would have open up millions of acres of free land in the west. However our good southern freinds could not alow that to happen because the mechanism allowed in the constitution would have seen several free states created very quickly thanks to the force boundry of the 1820 compromise (That stated the southern border of Missouri projected to the pacific would be the permanent boundry between free and slave states.) They had already seen California grow and become a free state in little under three years, though it was a free it had slavery in the southern portion of the state beneath the line. It was a sober example of what was going to happen once the vast territory of the west was open for settlement. The south was facing political extinction not only in the house but in the senate as well.