150 years on - was the civil war

[freepcrusher]

America's own northern Ireland type conflict? My view is that slavery was an issue but was really a proxy for the NE to vent their dislike of the south. The south in many ways was the most unassimilated part of the United States and there was certainly an ethnic angle to it - with the heterogenous, Unitarian/Transcendentalist leaning population of the NE vs the relatively homogenous and traditionalist southern population.

[TNF]

oh f**k off

[Antonio the Sixth]

America's own northern Ireland type conflict? My view is that slavery was an issue but was really a proxy for the NE to vent their dislike of the south. The south in many ways was the most unassimilated part of the United States and there was certainly an ethnic angle to it - with the heterogenous, Unitarian/Transcendentalist leaning population of the NE vs the relatively homogenous and traditionalist southern population.

lol

[sparkey]

There's some pretty good literature suggesting some amount of continuity between the English Civil War and the American Civil War, including Fischer's "Albion's Seed" and Phillips' "The Cousin's Wars." Descendants of Cavaliers were more likely to take the Southern side, and descendants of Roundheads were more likely to take the Northern side. So surprisingly old cultural differences absolutely played a part. Of course, there's much more to it than that, and there's honestly quite little similarity between the American Civil War and the conflict in Northern Ireland, which was more religious, and fought between native and settler descendants rather than 2 groups of settler descendants.

[Stranger in a strange land]

No. No it wasn't. It was mainly - not entirely, but mainly - about slavery.

[The Mikado]

A few points:

A. The South seceded in response to Lincoln's election. This is crucial. The South seceded and the South fired on U.S. military property because the South rejected the results of the American political system at the point that that system (which had already been rigged in their favor) stopped producing results it approved of. The Civil War was not, in any real sense, "started" by the North except to the extent that electing Lincoln in the first place was an "insult."

B. This argument (that the Civil War was a "Second American Revolution" as the crushing of an alien Southern agrarian/slaveholding economic system and its incorporation into the Northern one) is one that was quite popular 50 years ago and has a bit of merit as a way of viewing the results of the war, but it was certainly not anyone's objective in the North upon the start of the war. The destruction of the South, the freeing of the slaves, the transformation of the plantation system to the debt system, the attempts at freedmen's rights...none of this was foreseen or planned for in 1861 by anyone in the North.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

No. No it wasn't. It was mainly - not entirely, but mainly - about slavery.

Pretty much this.