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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PaulGreystoke" data-source="post: 2228167" data-attributes="member: 10810">A few quibbles... There is some evidence to the contrary.  The Southern slavery-rooted agrarian capitalistic system was by most measures quite competitive, so much so that many Northerners were secretly concerned that free labor couldn't compete with slave labor - despite their vocal public statements to the contrary.  The belief that slavery would have withered away due to an inability to compete with an industrializing economy might be modern wishful thinking.  Certainly slavery seemed to be extremely competitive in the sectors with which it is commonly associated - cotton & tobacco, the premier cash crops of the day.It is also a misconception to think of the North before the Civil War as an industrial economy.  Over 90% of Northerners worked in the agrarian sector.  And very few of those who did work in the growing industrial economy did so in anything we would think of as a modern factory.  Most industrial laborers in the North worked for firms employing less than 50 workers, employing little in the way of equipment, & effectively working as piece workers rather than as part of an assembly line.  Industrial operations of the era were exemplars of the original meaning of "manufacture" - that is to make by hand.  The true industrialization of the American economy was a post-war phenomenon.Of course, freeing the slaves wasn't officially a war aim of the North until the Emancipation Proclamation almost a year & a half after the beginning of the war.  And there is little doubt that the vast majority of Union volunteers at the beginning were solely interested in saving the Union.  They weren't fighting to free the Negro.  But this attitude would change during the course of the conflict, so you are certainly right by the end.As to Southerners fighting to preserve states' rights, this is true only to the degree that "states' rights" was a code word for slavery.  The only right reserved to the states under question was the right of a state to declare that one man could hold another as his chattel - & the right of a state to defend that property right.  It was fear that slavery rights would be under attack by a Republican administration that convinced ardent slave rights advocates to call for secession after the election of Lincoln.While "states' rights" (ie slavery) was the driving consideration of the ardent secessionists in voting secession from the Union, it was only a notional concern to the men who volunteered to fight for the nascent Confederacy.  Just as the Northern soldiers were primarily fighting to preserve the Union, Southern volunteers were fighting to protect their homes & way of life from what they perceived as "foreign" invaders.This is true in some states, but misleading in others.  Many studies of the secession voting by state indicates that paradoxically, it was precisely the richest slaveholders who opposed secession at first blush.  This is less surprising when one realizes that the biggest slaveholders had the most to lose in a war since they were so heavily invested in growing crops for export - an endeavor likely to be disrupted by war.  The biggest slaveholders were also innately conservative, often having been adherents of the Whig party, while the fire-eating secessionists were usually middle class members of the Democratic party.  In some states the richest slaveholders only reluctantly joined the secessionist movement when it became clear that it was going to happen anyway.Both sides relied heavily on conscripts, & the Confederacy did so first.  After the first blush of volunteerism faded, both sides struggled to convince their citizenry to volunteer for the long & bloody conflict.  Agreeing to serve for 3 years (& then eventually for the duration of the conflict) was an immense sacrifice to make, & both sides needed more men than were willing to make the plunge.  Conscription (& the threat of conscription to get states to meet their quotas voluntarily) was a necessary device.But if the Southern states had voluntarily freed the slaves, there would have been no war.  There simply weren't enough other issues that divided the North from the South, as the history of post-war America shows.  Really the major cause of division after the war was the war itself - that & the status of the Negro.  Southerners were bitter about the defeat & were wholeheartedly opposed to what they perceived as a Northern attempt to integrate their societies, whole Northern political agitators worked up anti-southern sentiment by "waving the bloody shirt", constantly reminding the voters about those unrepentent Southern secessionists.  Those few (primarily Northern) idealists who really wished for the freedman to get a fair shake in the South were defeated by crass political realities & the deep-rooted racism of the white American voter, both North & South.  Sadly, this meant that Southern blacks who had labored under slavery, then briefly tasted the fruits of freedom, were soon shuffled into a century of second class citizenship under Jim Crow.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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