Oh, lordie, I as hoping I wouldn't have to type this much today ...
I didn't say the war was fought over slavery, I said it was
caused by slavery. It's not the same thing. The Great War was caused by a Yugoslav nationalist assassinating the heir to the throne of Autro-Hungarian Empire but the war wasn't fought over Princip's assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It was fought in part over an interconnected series of treaties of mutual support, and the rest was a family squabble because most of the monarchs of Europe were cousins, descendants of old Queen Vic. In fact back then it often was called "The Cousin's War."
I can't see that there was any other weight issue looming that might have precipitated a shooting war between the two factions. If there had been no slavery, I doubt the tensions between the two factions ever would have risen so high as to come to blows. Therefore it was the war's cause, but not why it was fought.
And I beg to differ about States Rights. The single most important factor driving the prosecution of The Late Unpleasantness ... was Sectionalism.
Because different parts of the country tended to be settled by peoples from the same region in Europe, they tended to be fairly homogeneous in culture and political ideology. They came to America with great dreams and aspirations of what the proper path of their new nation should be, and they resented anyone with differening viewpoints. Sometimes strongly.
Plus their hereditary grievances also made the voyage with them from the old world to the new. The South was settled mostly by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland, and Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon descent from the western counties (Wales & Cornwall). The North was populated mostly with immigrants from Germany, the Netherlands and the eastern counties of England, men of Norman ancestry.
So most (white European) Southerners were from places in the British Isles where the common sentiment was that "their people" had been being persecuted by the Norman (London) English for centuries. And the Norman English thought that the Cornish, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish were all a bunch of slackers, ne'er-do-wells and borned troublemakers who were not deserving of the success they had found in America.
So it can't be overstated that there was a genuine animosity in some circles both in the North and in the South against the other. So strong that many Northerners could not be bothered to object when Mr. Lincoln started
his war against the prodigal South. If the sentiment hadn't been so widespread in the North that the South deserved the comeuppance that Lincoln was delivering, they could have raised such a great hue and cry that Lincoln would have had no choice but cease prosecuting the war. If they hadn't so despised
not the Southerners but their ancestors, it would have never have become the protracted bloodbath that it did.
That animosity was wherein the North found the iron will so slaughter so many fellow Americans. That the Southerners might have believed that they were defending their rights didn't enter into it because it wasn't their rights the North was waging war against.
But that's a complex issue and I don't feel like typing that much so I'll close this post with two thoughts.
It is simplistic (and, to an extent, sophistic) to attribute the cause of any war to a moral issue because somebody always feels they were morally wronged before the war began, wronged by the commencement of the war, wronged by the prosecution of the war, wronged by the cessation of the war, and wronged by the peace that was imposed after the war was ended. But wars rarely -- if ever -- are fought for any reason but one.
Money. Or finances in general, to include land and natural resources.
Lincoln's speeches and writings make it clear he had no particular affection for black folk, and in many cases his attitudes appear to 21st Century eyes to be virulently racist. Whatever interest he might have had in ending slavery was less for the benefit of the slave than for the redemption of the slave-
owner, whatever color they might be, because he thought the practice of owning slaves to be corrupting and morally debasing. His was chiefly opposed to slavery because of what it did to the slave
owners, not because of what it was taking from the slaves.
In fact, Lincoln once remarked that as a child his father hired him out as essentially a bond servant, a "temporary slave." Which he recognized his father had done not out of spite or neglect but as a means of survival. So he knew first hand that some conditions were worse than slavery and that worse conditions sometimes could be alleviated by it (and slavery in fact universally tended to be a more temporary and fungible condition than it became in America after the importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808).
The simple fact is Lincoln knew he could not let the Southern states go without risking the ruination of the Northern economy.
The South hadn't got rich selling its goods to the North, it got rich selling them to the rest of the world, and that could not have happened without Northern complicity because the South had no shipbuilders and few deep water harbors that were not subject to violent seasonal storms. And virtually every major industrialist or capitalist in the North was involved in some aspect of the foreign trade of cotton or tobacco and so was complicit in the practice of slavery.
In 1860, 75% of all American exports (in value) came from the Southern states. The 10 richest men in America all lived in the Natchez district of Mississippi, and all were cotton farmers.
Cotton was more than just a crop, it was the national currency. Men in Boston wore beaver skin stovepipe hats paid for with money made speculating on cotton futures. Ladies in Philadelphia dressed in Belgian lace paid for with proceeds from building ships to carry Southern cotton to European markets. The social elite in New York City adorned their banquet tables with Garrard silverware paid for by returns on investments in cotton plantations in Mississippi and Alabama.
In 1860, an editorialist for the London Times opined that without King Cotton, "The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway, and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past. As much as it is linked to the barbaric system of slave labor that raised it, cotton created New York."
"...[C]otton created New York...."
He further posed, “What would New York be without slavery?”
From the turn of the 19th Century until Mr Lincoln started
his war, the majority of all federal revenues came just from the export tariffs applied to cotton. When Lincoln was asked in a cabinet meeting some time after the shelling at Fort Sumter why he just didn't bid the Confederacy a fond farewell, there were three independent testimonies that his reply was, "What shall we do for our revenue?"
And in
his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, "...In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts;..."
In other words, give unto Lincoln the things that are Lincoln's and I will have no reason to make war.
Furthermore the, South collectively took active measures
on three separate occasions indicating that they were willing to give up slavery in return for being rid of Lincoln.
First, in 1861, before President Buchanan left office, both houses of the US Congress passed (and Buchanan signed) the
Corwin Amendment, which proposed a Constitutional Amendment protecting the institution of slavery. President Buchanan signed the bill on 2 March, 1861, at which time all that was necessary for slavery to be constitutionally protected was ratification by 3/4ths of the states.
None of the rebellious states ever considered ratifying the Amendment, despite the fact that it became law a month before hostilities began in earnest. However, there were five non-rebellious states that
did ratify it, plus the "Restored Government of Virginia," which was a group of legislators who in the end would lead the partitioning of West Virginia from the Old Dominion.
Presuming that all 11 Confederate states had voted to ratify, and with the admission of Kansas to the Union in 1861, that would have left the Confederacy nine or 10 states short of ratification. So why would they completely ignore the bill's existence? Why not try to persuade some of the remaining states to codify the protection of slavery, when they knew that the alternative path they were pursuing might well lead to war?
The only rational interpretation of their actions is that they preferred no longer to be joined to the United States over all other considerations.
Second, in his 1862 speech marking the first anniversary of his inauguration, some 11 months after the shelling of Ft Sumter, Lincoln held out an olive branch to the Confederacy. He proposed that they rejoin the Union and keep their slaves (no harm, no foul) but that they then would undertake a gradual emancipation all slaves (and their descendants) to be completed before the end of the 19th Century.
Rejoin the Union and keep your slaves, at least for a while. He got no formal response from anyone in the Confederate government.
And thirdly -- and this is I find incontrovertible proof that Confederates States prioritized being rid of Lincoln over all else -- is
Duncan Keener.
Whom you probably never heard of. Until now.
Keener was a Louisiana State Representative in the Confederate Congress. In 1863 he approached Confederate President Davis with the idea of enlisting support for the Confederate cause -- at the very least, recognition of the nation's legitimacy -- from France and England. But since neither France nor England allowed slavery, he and Davis both recognized that they would have to use slavery as a bargaining chip.
Keener first approached Napoleon III, Emperor of France (emperor one week, president the next, then back to emperor, and so-on). He convinced Napoleon III (nephew of
the Napoleon Bonaparte) to recognize the Confederacy in return for it abolishing slavery
by 1865!!!
Got that? They official stance of the Confederate States was that they would
not agree to rejoin the Union and keep their slaves (at least temporarily) but that they
would emancipate all of their slaves, and
in less that two years time, in return for independence from the United States.
The Emperor of France agreed but his agreement had one proviso, that being that England must also agree.
But the sitting British Prime Minister, John Henry Temple (Lord Palmerston) was not particularly fond of the former colonies so, content to watch the dis-united States stew in its own juices, he refused to receive Keener as an envoy of the CSA.
So yes, BuzzardMarinePumper, I had a passing familiarity with the fact that the war wasn't
fought over slavery, but that doesn't alter the fact that without slavery the war almost certainly never would have happened.
But Sectionalism, a general and deep-seated spite between Old World ethnic groups,
that was the reason that what might have been a short and rather bloodless conflict devolved into the bloodiest war the Western Hemisphere yet has seen. Not States Rights.
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Originally Posted by almostgone
Never give up the right to be free and say NO to the govt and stop looking for govt to take care of you . I am a part of neither party and closer to Librarian , but not even that I am a purist ? A Constitutionalist -- Give me liberty or give me death I will die a free man ! 
