Originally Posted by
DEVOREFLYER
DS you obviously didn’t read the link or you would have seen that both the North and South were culpable and not guilt free. Politics, Central government, States rights and money paid a great part, a very great part in the Civil War and it didn’t have to happen and Slavery wasn’t the sole reason a great number of other factors were also in play.
The North had as big an interest in slavery as did the South it was called money and power. Let’s start with the value of the slave population. Steven Deyle shows that in 1860, the value of the slaves was “roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in banks,” and it was “equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government that year.”
Slave-produced cotton “brought commercial ascendancy to New York City, was the driving force for territorial expansion in the Old Southwest and fostered trade between Europe and the United States.”
“Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80 per cent of its essential industrial raw material. English textile mills accounted for 40 percent of Britain’s exports. One-fifth of Britain’s twenty-two million people were directly or indirectly involved with cotton textiles.”
New England? “In 1860, for example, New England had 52 percent of the manufacturing establishments and 75 percent of the 5.14 million spindles in operation”. The same goes for looms. In fact, Massachusetts “alone had 30 percent of all spindles, and Rhode Island another 18 percent.” Most impressively of all, “New England mills consumed 283.7 million pounds of cotton, or 67 percent of the 422.6 million pounds of cotton used by U.S. mills in 1860.” In other words, on the eve of the Civil War, New England’s economy, so fundamentally dependent upon the textile industry, was inextricably intertwined, as Bailey puts it, “to the labor of black people working as slaves in the U.S. South.”
History is a generational thing. When I went to school we actually had to study American history, do homework and get tested on what we were taught in class. History was intense and not a watered down cliff’ notes summery style as today. We actually had to learn the Dewey Decimal System and learn how to do research in the library. We didn’t earn gold stars or blue ribbons for only showing up to class we could actually fail and be held back a grade. No feel good participation trophies to lift one’s self esteem you had to earn it whether in academics or athletics.