It was about money, pure and simple

[Potomac Pride]

The war was over secession. Secession was over slavery. The Southern Slave States seceded to protect slavery. They then took federal property and fired on federal soldiers to force their secession. In reaction the government went to war to suppress the rebellion.

No slavery, no secession. No secession, no war.

That is a good post. The immediate cause of the war was over the Constitutional principle of secession. The U.S. government refused to recognize the right of the southern states to secede from the Union and the CSA government asserted that right by seizing federal property. However, the issue of slavery was an important contributing factor that eventually led to the war.

 

[wausaubob]

There is not much evidence that northerners wanted to own, occupy or invest in the south. There is an abundant amount of evidence that the northern military men and politicians did not want the Confederacy to have an independent army, navy and foreign policy. The physical destruction visited on Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, and extended late in the war to Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, supports the conclusion that once the threat of independence was removed, there was no interest in owning or restoring the old south.

 

[lurid]

In an economic sense, the answer to that is no, that is not how it worked.

People who bought cotton may have looked around for a different business while there was no cotton around to be bought -- that does not equate to demand for cotton turning into demand for grain. If you were looking for a commodity that replaced cotton, you'd look to see what happened to the demand for flax or another alternative. Demand for American grain was driven by the shortage of traditional British/European grain supplies; the availability and delivered price of American grain supplies made it a natural source to meet British and European demand.

You don't understand what I'm saying. Thanks for posting.

 

[WJC]

Its amazing that people actually believe the war was over slavery. It was about money, pure and simple

Have you considered that to a Southern planter, slaves and money were virtually the same thing? They were faced with the prospect of their investment in humans losing value if they could not take them with them to the west, if the market for selling slaves was limited to the existing slave states, or- worst of all- a government freed the slaves.
It would be like the threat to your savings if the government proposed devaluing the currency or repudiating your bonds.

 

[wausaubob]

There were many separatists impulses that were not directly related to money. South Carolina had never fully consented to federal power. Texas and Louisiana each had a unique relationship to the rest of the US. In Mississippi, Jefferson Davis realized that it was improbable that any southerner would ever be elected President. And Virginia, there was a deep seated nostalgia for the revolutionary era, when Virginia was dominant in national politics. In the other states of what was considered the south, any area not directly connected to cotton agriculture resisted secession.

 

[Saint Jude]

It was about money, pure and simple, and for the central government to control the flow of it instead of the states.

No, it wasn't.