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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (38679)	5/31/1999 4:08:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Much of the South's wealth was tied up in an uneconomic plantation system. Slaves accounted for a significant portion of that wealth, but could not be freely traded. Thus, the South was compelled to fight against the tariffs that the industrial North wanted in order to protect its fledgling industries. The South wished to trade its cash crop -- cotton for finished goods from England, while the North wished to use that crop to manufacture textiles. This is where we reach the core issues of the Civil War. The south realized that it could get a better trade deal from the Europeans than it could from the north. The north passed tariffs that would have rendered this trade uneconomical, and forced the south to sell to, and buy from, their northern countrymen. The south responded by ignoring the tariffs and smuggling their crops out and the finished goods in. The issue, then, was simply whether the north, with a majority of the votes, could force the south to stop doing something that the southerners believed to be in their own interest. The economically prominent northerners doubtless saw the refusal to obey tariff legislation as a greater threat than slavery, but it was a difficult issue over which to declare war, since much of the northern population was agricultural - especially the poor rural northerners who would actually be doing the fighting - and were actually negatively impacted by the tariff. There was, of course, substantial moral opposition to slavery - as Christine points out, the underground railroad was a real thing - and this made it an obvious choice as an issue to rally around. Most people, on a purely emotional level, would rather go to war to end evil than to achieve economic benefit. Really, it doesn't matter much whether the cause was the refusal of the southerners to free their slaves or their refusal to collect the tariff. The core issue was still the right of a majority bloc of states to impose its will on the minority. It is interesting to note that at the end of the war the south became, for all economic purposes, a colony of the north, which was in many ways what the southern gentry were fighting to avoid. The Civil War could thus be seen as the start of mercantilism in America.