pranavb99
pranavb99
Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read

I learned some junk US history growing up in Canada, but spending a lot of time considering the arguments while living in the US, it is clear that there were two main reasons for the war.

For the South, the war was about retaining slaves, which they stated very clearly in their reasons when they declared war. For the North, the war was for dominion over the South — not quite the same as retaining slaves, but not a good motive either. The Civil War killed about one in six Americans for every slave freed. Lincoln’s choice was the wrong one.

Slavery was ending very quickly almost simultaneously in the Western hemisphere. Not only had some US states banned it, but the Constitution ended the slave trade in the 1800s.

It would have persisted in the South for a while before ending (breeding people for slavery got around the trade issue, demonstrating only one example of how regulation almost always fails), but the South was already threatened by slaves escaping to the North (which is an explicit reason why they sought the war), and by an economy falling far behind the North’s due to lack of industrialization. There’s no easy answer, but war is usually a really bad one.

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