JakeStarkey
Diamond Member
- Aug 10, 2009
- 168,037
- 16,520
When you talk about "The North" in regards to a slavery presence, you refer generally to the border states. Where I'm from, "The North" is the Northeastern US. We abolished slavery long before the Civil War, most states in the 18th Century.You are misdefining issues as causes; they are two different things. Preserving the Union was the immediate issue of the war. Slavery was the primary cause of the war.
Ask paper view for copies of all of the documentation she has posted here and in other threads why the southerners of the time believed slavery to be the primary cause of the war. Good reading!
I am not, she is the one using that language. I am asking her to explain why if, as she insists, that slavery is the primary cause of the war, did the North not free slaves in their states. Why did slave owners fight to free slaves? Why did people who opposed slavery fight to keep them?
Any historian will tell you that the issues, or causes, of the Civil War were complex. The North was so powerful politically that they could ignore the concerns of the minority of the south, and enact laws and policies without regard to the opinions of those affected by them. (Does this sound familiar to anyone?) This marginalization of the agrarian south by the industrial north was the actual cause of the civil war, regardless of what people then believed.
I'm from New England. Semantically, I understand why the term is used in reference to the Civil War, but to me, I have a hard time calling Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and West Virginia "the North" - but I understand why. And if you understood the "strategery" (thank you GW) of war, you would understand the necessity of maintaining the buffer of these states. Missouri & Kentucky had a hell of a shit storm as well maintaining their "northern" status.
In regards to your second paragraph, it was only after 60 some odd years of our nation's founding, the South began to lose power. They had it - in Congress, and in the Presidency, for the most part for fully the entire first quadrant of this country.
Hell, they had it so powerfully, they were even able to implement a gag-rule in congress to prohibit even the MENTION of slavery. How about that?
A rule that forbade a country founded on Free Speech, from even discussing a topic in the lawmakers den. Pretty nifty, eh?
It was only when the South lost their grip of powerful Rule, it was then, and only then - they freaked.
The gag rule was the issue that drove John Q. Adams to define the South as anti-American and antithetical to Constitutional ideals, such as free speech and petition. He argued that the nature of a slave culture undermined everyone's freedom.
He was right.