The world's largest Confederate Monument faces renewed calls for removal

Well said FLT-bird

It was about quite a lot more than the cotton trade. The Southern states produced 73% of the US entire trade product at that time, and all the money to pay for it was being funneled into New York because of the Navigation act of 1817.

New York was taking about 60% of all the value of the South's entire production, and if the South became independent, New York would lose about 230 million dollars per year in 1860 dollars. Worse still, European manufactured goods would have flooded the continent through Southern ports at prices deeply undercutting the North Eastern manufacturers, and thereby causing a double financial whammy to the power barons who would have lost significant market share and income.

The existing power structure in New York and Washington DC, then as now wanted all the nation's money funneling through their pockets, and when the South threatened to take control of their own trade and finances, this was more than the existing power structure could tolerate, and so they launched a war to subjugate the South. Lincoln clearly had no intention of freeing the slaves when he began his presidency, and he did in fact urge the passage of an amendment that would have made slavery virtually permanent. (The Corwin Amendment.)

Lincoln and his New York backers knew where all the trade money came from, and they were not going to tolerate it getting out of their control. Their initial efforts was to get control back quickly so that everything could resume as it was before the war. When Southern doggedness kept them from winning quickly, they eventually decided it would be better to break the economic back of the South than to allow it to escape their control, and this is why they moved to abolish slavery.

In point of fact, the Northerners didn't really care about the black people, and they would have kept them in slavery had the North won quickly, but after almost two years, they saw it as a useful tactic to help them win the war, and so they made it one of their goals. The whole affair is a lot more complex than people realize, and this is why people just generally accept the commonly repeated claim that the entire thing was over slavery.

It was really about who would control that money, not about who was creating it.

Also, the Northern powers were mostly English, and the Southern powers was mostly Scottish, and so there was a continuation of the bad blood that existed before back in the old country.

But preserving slavery was the cornerstone of the confederacy. Confederate leaders at the time said it was the issue motivating secession and the war - in secession resolutions across the South, in speeches, in pamphlets and newspapers. At the time this was universally accepted and understood.

Yeah, they were trapped in a box of their own making. They could not conceive of a world without slavery. Plenty of Northerners agreed with the premise of racial superiority. Slavery was the economic cornerstone of the South. They envisioned their children's future as second-class citizens or worse if Northern interests triumphed, with or without war. They were sure the North was determined to humiliate them no matter what. And it happened.

Today's conflict, however, is still about Democrats fearful of losing their constituency and power. They fan the flames whilst raking in campaign donations from the gullible. They can not conceive of the disappearance of racism and slavery. In fact they've made it part of your DNA. And if that isn't enough, there's institutional and systemic racism, which is used to explain why black cops are actually doing the bidding of white racists even when the political hierarchy is black Democrats from top to bottom.

All this discord is really just the work of would-be Marxists, to whom the embrace of Marxism discloses the actual reality in which lying and manipulation is always justified, and to whom everyone is just a pawn.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.