Originally posted by BP:
most historians (and abe himself) dance around the issue by attributing the war to state's rights, political/economical woes, and the deterioration of the union due to the southern states wanting more representation.

How did Lincoln "dance around" the issue, when in speeches and correspondance he blantanly stated that slavery as a moral issue wasn't his concern, but keeping the Union together was? If slavery was such a divided issue to hold a war over, why did it take two centuries for it to come to blows? Why didn't slaves immediately obtain equal rights under law if the North fought for this specific purpose?

Originally posted by BP:
but what was all of this born out of...the southern states feeling their economy would suffer as a result of losing their rights to function as they please.

Since only 10% of the Southern population was known as owning slaves, where was this overwhelming economic burden with the bulk of the citizenry?


Originally posted by BP:
they were afraid that the fed would establish an overarching set of laws that would ultimately regulate how they conduct commerce and in turn affect the southern economy. and what was the lifeblood of the southern economy? slavery.

Exactly. Slavery was a pillar under State's Rights, albeit a large one. Not the other way around. The North and the Federal Goverment was dictating taxation policy, legislative policy, import/export policy and slave policy with little to no input from Southern representatives.

Originally posted by BP:
so in a word slavery may not have been the stated reson for the war, but ALL of the issues can be traced back to it.

I would say it was intermingled with most of the issues that were cropped up to a varying degree. As a moral disagreement, it was NOT the reason behind the conflict. It was a part of a financial and power struggle, and only became a popular moral argument once the fight was under way.

I seem to recall that most people of color (Indians, blacks, etc.) were by in large treated differently and looked upon as inferior by a fair number of the population in the North even after the Civil War.

This is evident in that equal rights under law wasn't achieved until close to a century later under LBJ's administration....

Originally posted by BP:
still you never answered my original question which i will now restate: if the southern economy was not dependant on slave labor would there have been a civil war? i've given you several examples in my previous post of how the fed regulation of commerce was directly related to slavery.

Absolutely. Although there exists a small amount of debate over the causes of the civil war, there is next to NO debate that war was avoidable. There were simply too many fissures that existed between the Northern and Southern states; take slave labor out of the equation and the economic disadvantage that the South would have been placed in would have been even GREATER.

If Southern States were given more control away from Federal mandates, this perhaps could have changed things. One can totally remove slavery from the equation (reckless, I know) but the fact still stands that there exists MANY serious grievances that the Southern states would have had against the Federal government.

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