Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5823284" data-attributes="member: 8835">Hopefully we can keep this about history and not modern politics.This is a fork from the ethics thread as [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] was making a reference to Deadlands and its handling of the Civil WarHere's the baseline of my thoughts.  I'm from Minnesota.  We weren't even a state yet, but sent some troops to fight in the war.  To us, in school we're basically taught that the Civil war was basically about slavery.  That southerners called it "the War of Northern Aggression" and that it was really about States Rights.  I've yet to meet a southerner who called it that.  I now live in Texas, where it seems like they were fools to even get involved in the Civil War, but that's another story.I suspect there were a lot of issues dividing the north and south to cause Seccession.  The crux being "States Rights".  But it always seems to me, that the hidden sub-clause of that reason is "to have slaves."The south's economy was heavily reliant on manual labor (slaves), the north was not.  Society in the north WAS becoming increasingly anti-slavery (they could afford to, their economy not depend on it).  This would be a bad thing to southern economy.Aside from Lincoln dicking around with WHEN he freed the slaves, the actual war was fought because the US Government decided states could not opt out.  That makes sense from an organizational standpoint, when the boss who is elected and represents the whole says "we go left", everybody needs to go left because thats how democracy works.My question, from this point is, if slavery WASN'T the driving theme between the division of North and South, what was?  It wasn't illegal immigration or gay marriage.  Was it taxes?What was the Federal government (and the North) telling the South to do that was so objectionable, they pulled out of the union that was not driven by the slavery issue.Or, if we had an alternate history where Slavery did not exist in America, what was the remaining issue that still would have caused the divide?Remember, other than my jab at 2 current hot topics, let's try not to get political (at least in the modern and offensive sense).</blockquote>

Verification