I should have clarified it. For the easily manipulatable, it would have been about slavery. But for those at the top, it would have been about keeping wages as low as possible for as long as possible, so they can buy up southern assets for a song.
I see a lot of the same movements in this as I do with globalism, where those advocating open borders to keep wage earners earning as little as possible for as long as possible.
It also would lead to more, and richer, consumers to sell to.
It wasn’t just the cheap labor.
(Also there was the issue of the declining contribution of the South to the Fed government while the South maintained effectively equal representation there.)
Very similar to the situation in China 20 years ago.
Of course Western investors were much kinder to China.
You’re making up something that YOU think “makes sense” but you know nothing of historic reality.
“Those at the top” included powerful republican senators who demanded an end to slavery as their biblical duty.
Further, the South started the war by seceding, it was not in the hands of “Northern industrialists”.
You need to learn things, not sit around in a bull session making up what “must have been true”. It wasn’t.
You said, “For the easily manipulatable, it would have been about slavery.“
This is an astonishingly ignorant statement.
As Limbaugh says... follow the money.
There was a moral component against slavery. The largest was still economic and also political. 4 mil freed former slaves could have gone in several unintended directions.
1) a backlash army against whites and the USA.
2) 4 mil new republican voters.
3) they could have elected to go back to Africa and that would be minus 4 mil workers.
Monet is the driver. Since ALL finance went through NYC it was in the interest of the bankers and industrialists to soft land any I insurrection.
The most manipulated to now are those who believe the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and that the democrats weren’t responsible for slavery.
The most manipulated include those who think the party of racism is not the democratic party.