From: John Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:55:30AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > Not really. Slavery was already on the way out, and would have been
> > almost completely gone within another generation anyway.
>
> How do you know? It was alive and well for centuries before Civil
> War. Why are you so sure it was going to automagically disappear
> within another generation?
The Industrial Revolution. Slaves were expensive and problematic... you
have to pay for all of their upkeep, keep them from running away, etc.
Machines came about twenty years later that quickly killed manual cotton
picking.
ANd its a lot cheaper to run machines with slave labor- as modern factories
have discovered in Asia. Manual picking slaves may have died, but not
slavery. Their uses would just have shifted.
> > The Civil War was
> > all about consolidation of power in Washington DC instead of the
states.
> > The mess we're in today is a direct result of that.
>
> And having 2 countries....USA and Confederacy would have made things
> so much better because?
Actually, it would have been better for the North to have not forced the
issue. The Federal government was always supposed to be extremely
limited, and the states handled everything else.
I never understood this argument- how is state power better than federal
power? If either government has a power, its potential for abuse. I can
understand saying no government should have power X, but saying its better
at the state level than the federal because states are magically better is
sheer sophistry.
Gabe
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