(quoted from post at 09:59:15 02/13/12) Slavery at the start of the war was a non-issue.States rights didnt incude slavery in any way.Its was simply (just as it is today)a right to self determination.IN the case of the civil war it was the right to determine who you were going to trade with.It was fought at its most basic level simply for MONEY.Let me explain,and theres years of history leading up to this point,but the southern white plantation owners didnt invent slavery.the slavery in the us went back long before the white man came here. cherokees kept slaves,as did most southern indian tribes.BUT there was a major difference.first and fore most if you were a slave to the cherokee ,you had full rights as a member of the tribe,you could own land,and you could keep slaves yourself.The way it was setup you more or less sharecropped for your owner.There were literaly thousands of white folks who came to the US that indentured themselves to the cherokee because they had its so much better than the rest of the world where they came from.MY OWN FAMILY WAS ONE OF THEM!.Then a little thing happened that changed this,that was the removal act and the resulting trail of tears.White endentured folks decided they would simply take over the plantations built by the cherokee and they are the ones who made slavery what it was.They simply moved into the plantation houses as the cherokee were forced out.BUT they had one little problem,when the cherokee left so did the work force.So they began importing slaves for forced labor.Big bucks were made,and in fact cotton became so important that it constituted 62% of the ENTIRE wealth and exports of the us at the start of the civil war.BUT right along with that came another problem.The problem of feeding,clothing,etc a massive human workforce.The plantation system simply HAD to have cheap goods to survive.But there was another problem,under the cherokee system it was always expanding. New slaves or indentured folks were given help to clear new ground to raise their crops.Not so after the whites took over.This meant that the ground was simply getting poorer and poorer.Massive amounts of fertilizer had to be imported.And the cotton gin could do more work in one hour than a slave could in one week.all this lead to a system that was failing, slavery had been outlawed in much of the rest of the world,simply because those countries couldnt afford to feed any more people.And machines were doing more and more work.Slavery and the whole plantation system was simply imploding.In the north pretty much the opposite was true.Workers were there by the thousands,living in rampant squaller in slums.And worked in mills and factories.these factories needed raw materials,mainly cotton, at that time.so these folks and mill owners resented the southerners shipping cotton to europe and other places in payment for the cheap goods needed to sustain there ever needy human workforce.The north had to import raw materials which drove the price of their goods even higher ,which meant that often the mills were closed and the northern worker who immigrated on a promise of a better life were less well off than when they started out.They were rioting in the streets demanding the jobs etc that were promised by the industrialized north.All this led to a situation,where the south had the raw material,the north needed it,but their goods were so expensive the south did buisness elsewhere.When the northern mill owners petitioned congress,there were a series of taxes and tariffs placed on imported goods ,designed to force the south to buy comparably priced goods from the north.This of course spelled the doom of the southern way of life,simply because the whole southern economy depended on inexpensive goods to be able to support that style economy.you couldnt simply buy a slave ,work him for three or four days and starve him to death,you had to feed and clothe him to make the system pay.The northerners didnt really need slaves simply because they had so many immigrant workers who would work for pennies,go home and the mill owners didnt have to feed or clothe them.BOTH systems 100% relied on the simple contingent of exploiting your fellow man.There were for all intents and purposes no differences north and south,the main difference was in the south you fed your workforce.When the war started,the first action by the north was to blockade southern ports and to take any cotton seized north.the south responded with what almost imediatly spelled doom for the south.they banned shipping of cotton during the first year of the war.that was absolutly the single one thing that cost the south the war,more than any other thing ,more than any battle fought.What that did in effect was to keep england ,france,and others from supporting the south.davis did that simply to keep seized cotton from going north,but by simply refusing to try to get exports out there was no reason for european countries to get involved.IF davis had been able to prove that cotton being sent to europe was being seized by the north,these countries would have had a reason to enter the conflict to protect their own intrests.Slavery it self was a nonissue at this point.and it only BECAME a issue when immigrants getting off the boats were sent straight into the army ,it didnt take much thinking to realize they were fighting for the intrest of the mill owners.the mill owners needed a moral reason for the war and found it in slavery.The net extent of all this was the demise of the slavery system all right,but it simply meant the south reverted back to the sharecropping system.it was not the same though,,before you were able to eventually work you way up to a position of wealth if you were a sharecropper,under the new system that choice was gone.ex slaves sharecropped simply because you had no choice,that was the only way they had to survive.They were technically worse off,simply because they did the same work,but they now had to support themselves. They were of course free to choose,but what do you do with nothing and no real options of getting something.Some were able to do skilled work simply because they were trained on the plantations to be blacksmiths,cooks,waiters,groomsmen etc. the vast majority were unskilled in anything but chopping and pulling cotton.
