If you'd like a current global analogy, suppose the wealthiest oil exporters were suddenly taken over by Fire Eater radicals and out of hatred for President Trump's "western values" stopped exporting oil.
Suppose they then declared & waged war on their biggest customers.
It would make no sense, anyone would say "they're crazy and have to be defeated".
That's what happened in 1861.
I’m generally reluctant to employ analogies - especially when dealing with dishonest posters like demojeff - because even the best analogy holds a degree of imprecision, of in-aptness.
The antebellum slavocracy hit upon a fabulous economic strategy - a crop that grew almost by itself; a burgeoning market with seemingly no end; and a production strategy using enforced labor that promised a huge profit margin. They couldn’t lose, and indeed soon enough became richer than God.
They got to the point where they could afford ANYTHING their pea-picking hearts could desire - and then some. It doesn’t matter in percentages how that compared to the industrial north - the comparison isn’t the point. The point is that, like movie stars, they could buy anything they wanted.
What becomes interesting then is not so much what luxuries they did spend their dough on, but what they didn’t spend money on - infrastructure. They didn’t spend money on roads and rail. They didn’t spend money developing their ports or investing in shipbuilding. They didn’t spend money on factories or industry. Or defense. But they sure did build themselves fancy digs.
For all those other things they whined to congress that they were perennially on the short end of the stick and insisted that the federal government spend more in their districts. It wasn’t true of course - the federal government was spending huge amounts, especially defense dollars, in and for the south.
They were simply behaving like democrats.
“If you’d like a current global analogy, suppose the wealthiest oil exporters were suddenly taken over by Fire Eater radicals and out of hatred for President Trump’s “western values” stopped exporting oil.”
That’s close to what actually happened in 1973 (oil embargo). Nixon, not Trump, was president.
I am so thankful President Nixon did not decide to start a war and kill two percent of our nation’s then 212 million residents. That would have been the 1861 equivalent of four million dead.
President Nixon had his faults, but he did not gratuitously start wars.