The American Civil War
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Unless you were there, you won't get an accurate account of history. Just try and fit pieces together from the majority of sources.
Source?Pirate Kitty said:
By the time of the ACW all northern states were free, as in free from slavery. The only states in the Union that had slaves were the 4 border states, but they had smaller combined slave populations than the state of Virginia.
At no time did the north have more slaves than the south. Why? Because they never had a need for slaves unlike the south's agricultural economy.
And here is a couple of census charts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#Distribution_of_slaves
Money. In the end, it was about money and states rights. Slavery was a political move to rally support around Lincoln not an altruistic push (sorry, true) as most states were already moving away from slavery as a viable option. And this is the crux of politics. Don't believe a politician when he says he has your best interests at heart, he's not caring about you, he is trying to save his job and make himself some money and further his agenda. Yes some good comes from these things but just know that they didn't do it for you or your race or people with problems like you have... they did it for selfish greedy reasons. Just like banks and corporations.
Being a History teacher, I'm sure I can help here.amaranth_dru said:
There is a certain amount of truth in there, but you dismiss some other truths. Yes, the war was about money and states rights. It was also about slavery and the preservation of the union. The South was fighting for the rights of their states, but the right they were specifically fighting for was the right to decide if their state would have slaves or not. The South also fought for what they perceived as their economic livelihood, which is the ability to use slaves in the cotton fields. Without slaves, the thought ran, no one would work the fields and the South's economy would crash. There was also a lot of paranoia in the South that this is exactly what the Northern Abolitionists wanted.
The North already had a huge advantage in congress because of their population and many times the two factions had to cut deals to keep a balance in the Senate. With a Northern vice president to break ties and a Northern president to sign the bills into law, the South felt like the North could simply steamroll them out of their slave-driven livelihoods. This had been averted on several occasions by having presidents such as Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan who were both born in the North, but were of "Southern Principles" which was simple code-speak for maintaining the status quo of Slave State/Free State balance. Which, in practice, wasn't true. In 1820, a compromise had been made so that all states brought into the union above a certain latitude (except Missouri) would be free and all states brought in below that line would be slave states. When Nebraska voted in their own pro-slave state constitution and Kansas basically had their election blatantly stolen by Missouri southerners crossing the border just to vote in a pro-slave constitution of their own, it was these presidents who altered the rules to allow this to happen.
Many of the moderates in the North were thrown into a paranoia of their own by this because even if they didn't want to get rid of slavery in the south, they felt slavery had been more or less happily contained. Sure it could expand, but not by much. Just Texas and anywhere else they took from Mexico (which many Northerns didn't support because they thought it was just a big pro-slavery land grab, which it more or less was). The South was riding high but the North felt like all of their deals they'd been making with the South before were systematically being broken. It was this discontent that led to the rise of the new Republican party, the first party in American history to have Abolition as a plank in their party platform. The South started to panic over the sudden Republican popularity and when Abraham Lincoln was elected, even though he had promised to do nothing more than simply return the Status Quo, the Southern States immediately began to break away thinking that he, like all Republicans were "out to end slavery and destroy the South." Understand, the South wasn't reacting to anything Lincoln had done. Several states had already seceded before Lincoln had even been inaugurated, just based on the fear that Lincoln would pass laws to end their rights.
The war itself began a few months later based on the issue of who was supposed to own Federal Army and Navy Forts. The Southern legislatures figured that since the Forts were built in their states, when the state breaks away, it's their Forts. On the flip-side, the Forts had been paid for and built by the Federal Government for Federal troops, so they belonged to the Federal Government of the United States, and the Army and Navy were not going to surrender them. This is why Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, was bombarded, thus turning the Civil War into an actual shooting war rather than a political standoff as it had been until then.
As to why each side was fighting, the majority of Southerners believed that the North had been out to get them for a long time already and that breaking away was the only way to be sure they were safe. The North primarily fought because they felt the South were being treacherous and unreasonable, since they had made many deals in the past and the South had broken most of them, culminating in them not honoring the perfectly legal election of a non-"Southern Gentleman" Northerner. The South broke every deal they ever made as soon as the circumstances no longer favored them, including the moment they no longer held the Presidency and the North felt they had the right to hold the South to their agreements by bringing them back into the Union. For the North, it wasn't about Slavery yet but, in time as the war dragged on, the North, under Lincoln, stopped trying to restore the status quo and finally decided to end the issue once and for all by removing slavery all together. Not because slavery was such a moral affront to them, but rather because they simply did not want to have to do this dance again.
I could go on and speak about the war itself and it's aftermath, but that would be even longer than what I've written so far and my fingers are tired. This should help everyone understand how and why the war started, though. I'll add emphasis to the post if I have time in a little bit.
Wow, you were WAY off.
1. First off, before the war most of the North had abolished slavery, except it was done on a state by state basis, not on a federal level. Most things in the 19th century were like that,
2. The Confederates wanted to be their own country none of them had any intention of submitting to British rule again.
I was taught in school that the South seceded from the North because they thought the North was infringing on their states rights. Namely the rights to own slaves.
1. First off, before the war most of the North had abolished slavery, except it was done on a state by state basis, not on a federal level. Most things in the 19th century were like that,
2. The Confederates wanted to be their own country none of them had any intention of submitting to British rule again.
I was taught in school that the South seceded from the North because they thought the North was infringing on their states rights. Namely the rights to own slaves.
I just wanna clarify:Megalodon said:
The Emancipation Proclimation was a rule that said "The Slaves within the States that Seceded from the Union are hear by freed men". However, 4 states that contained slaves were still a part of the Union, and were allowed to keep their slaves until it became a Constitutional law. These 4 states included: Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.
Other then that, everyone has already stated everything.
The last thing I remember being taught was that the causes of the war were complex.
Other things I remember include:
-The Confederacy would've had a hard time winning the war because of fewer industrial resources (for making ammunition and the like)
-Most of the North had abolished slavery on its own by then
-The South wanted to keep slavery because farming was a lot easier and more lucrative with it
-The South was fully within its constitutional rights to secede from the Union.
-The Union wanted the states to remain together, and attacked the Confederacy
For all I know, every one of these points could be wrong.
Other things I remember include:
-The Confederacy would've had a hard time winning the war because of fewer industrial resources (for making ammunition and the like)
-Most of the North had abolished slavery on its own by then
-The South wanted to keep slavery because farming was a lot easier and more lucrative with it
-The South was fully within its constitutional rights to secede from the Union.
-The Union wanted the states to remain together, and attacked the Confederacy
For all I know, every one of these points could be wrong.
I also want evidence of this. The only slaves the Union had were in the border states; every other black was a free man. And Virginia had more slaves than the 4 border states combined. The North did not need slaves, they needed skilled factory workers.Pirate Kitty said:
The Civil War has roots dating back to the late 1700s / early 1800s, with the Hamilton/Jefferson ideological debate. By the time the Civil War came around, America was already divided into two separate nations: the Yankees and the Dixies. The Dixies just wanted their own state to go with it.
I used a combination of wikipedia and the Prentice-Hall History of the United States textbook.UtopiaV1 said:
Make sure you mention that it's an AMERICAN text book, cause then it adds authenticity!
Your first two points are correct, however the other three are flawed in a few ways.Eumersian said:
-It is a misconception that Southern Economy was better off with slavery than without. It is not, however, a misconception to say that most in the South thought they were better off with slavery than without. There were plenty of poor Southerners who could take over the agricultural jobs vacated by slaves, and it's not like freed slaves would suddenly disappear, as they could take those jobs as well. The difference would have been that without slaves being a cheap alternative for rich plantation owners, those plantation owners would have had to actually compete for labor by offering wages for workers, which would have improved the conditions of the laborers in question, black or white. The fact that most Southerners were convinced that they needed slaves was more about Cultural beliefs than Economic fact.
-There is not, and has never been, a constitutional right for states to leave the rest of the nation. The only exception to this is Texas who included both their right to secede and a right to divide the state into as many as 5 different parts as part of their terms of annexation, and this was only because Texas was its own nation prior to annexation. After the ACW, the right to secede was removed, but Texas still technically has the ability to divide itself into up to this day.
-Also, "The Union wanted the states to remain together, so they attacked" while technically accurate, is worded to basically make it sound like the North was just jealous or vindictive. It could better be explained by saying "The North believed that the South had no right to leave the Union simply because it had lost an election." The mindset wasn't "We want your stuff" but rather "You agreed to be part of this nation and you can't just 'quit the game' because you're no longer 'winning.'" Imagine two teams are playing in the Super-bowl and it has been a good game so far, but one team starts winning. The losing team then suddenly quits in the middle of the game and their manager announces that they're going to start a new league and the winning team can't join. What do you think the crowd would think of this? Even if you didn't really care much for football, a team suddenly forfeiting a game and leaving the league just because they were losing probably wouldn't sit well with you. Both teams, after all, had made a commitment to play the game, and the losing team just taking off suddenly in the middle of the game would seem just flatly unsportsmanlike. Now, this analogy may not represent the way things actually were, but rather, this is how many in the North understood the matter. Even people who didn't care one way or the other about Southern Slavery were upset that the South would just up and leave because they didn't like the results of a single election.
You love history? then i would suggest a book called "Lies my teacher told me". Its written by a historian who does not like some of the tings being done to history books, like ignoring and not metioning ceirtain somewhat embarrising facts.
He does write a bit about the politics during the american civil war.
He does write a bit about the politics during the american civil war.
Which was the entire point of the Union blockade. Cotton was a cash crop that was only worth anything when sold overseas, usually to the British. Without the ability to sell their goods, the South was forced to print money to cover the costs of the war. The resulting inflation eventually wrecked the South's economy from the inside.RAKtheUndead said: