Gautam Mukunda wrote:
> Ironically enough, that position has now
> been adopted by the far left of American historians, who similarly are (in
> my opinion) ideologically motivated to deny that the Civil War was, in the
> end, fought entirely about slavery.
What is their rational?
>From Page Smith's Trial By Fire:
"Since the Civil War some historians have been disposed to argue that there
were other, more essential of more central causes for the secession of the
Southern states and, correspondingly, for the war; most commonly economic
causes. The North, by by this reading, was a great commercial and industrial
region with economic interests very different from those of the South.
Through such measures as high protective tariffs, the North exploited the
South economically and eventually pushed it into seceding to protect its
legitimate economic interests. Needless to say, that is not the perspective
of this work, which is based unqualifiedly on the assumption that the
institution of slavery and, more specifically, the determination of the North
to limit it and the South to extend it were the exact and specific cause of
the war."
Doug
