Was Southern Secession a way to default on its $300 million debt to North?!

Joined
Nov 26, 2009
Location
Miami, FL
Like a lot of the enthusists that participate in this forum, I've always had a strong interest in the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln - perhaps, it could even be an obsession. This was always my favorite part of history and I loved studying it in school and as an adult, taking trips to battlefields and other related Civil War era places, etc. I'd like to think of myself as somewhat of a scholar/historian on all things CW & Lincoln, but yet, I just learned something from a $3 bargain book that I never knew and it is blowing my mind! By the end of 1860, "In commercial dealings, the South owed the North some $300 million, which Southerners believed would be forfeited." - American History - Timeline of the Civil War (p. 23) by John D. Wright (Amber Books, 2007) What?! I had never heard this before!! This one simple sentence provides a whole new take on Southern Secession. Could it be that another of the major factors of the war was a veiled attempt by the Southern rich to avoid paying a huge debt?! WOW!!!

- Brad Watson, Miami, FL
author of 7 Score & 4 Years Later
 
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