Nick Arnett wrote:
No, and don't call me Shirley. 8^) Seriously, I would disagree wholeheartedly with that statement. If economics was the driver, the South would have rejected slavery long before the Civil War. What I've read suggests that slavery was terribly inefficient because of its coercive nature and the requirement that a slave owner support his slaves from cradle to grave no matter how productive they were.
Slavery wasn't an end unto itself, however. Surely there is little
disagreement that the South's desire to preserve slavery was motivated by
the economics of operating plantations.
Read more about ante-bellum Southern culture. I think you'll find that secession had more to do with "honor" than anything else. The idea that they were fighting for economic reasons probably would have seemed absolutely repulsive to them. Page Smith* writes of the complexity of the Southern culture: "Slaves and slavery were not new to history, but nowhere else, in no other time, had a culture, or subculture taken the form of the South's "peculiar institution," with such contrasting racial types wove into so intricate and intimate unity, one so full of unresolvable tension and tragic paradoxes." It defies any simple description so I can only suggest that you find a good reference and read more about it.So I can't see how slavery could be seen as the root of the issues. Seems to me that money (the love of it, as usual) was at the root, with power (the southern states' right to determine the legality of slavery) running a close second.
It seems also that we agree that religion was not at the root, but used only to rationalize the horrors of American slavery.
No, I have never read that religion was the/a root cause, of the Civil War.
How many of us considered reading about dead people as the most boring subject imaginable? I first became interested when I found the first volume of Smith's history in a book locker onboard ship. I remain fascinated and have really only scratched the surface.When I was younger, that episode of history seemed ancient. As I've grown older, especially as I've looked at my family genealogy, I've been quite struck by how recently this happened. Our *close* relatives were involved; those who imagine that we have really evolved much since then is kidding themselves.
Doug
*Trial by Fire, A Peoples History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (volume five in his History of the United States.)
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