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There were thirteen colonies when the Revolutionary War was fought, and those thirteen colonies could be divided into North or South, quite easily. Your assertion otherwise is nonsense.
The factions were far greater than you believe. It wasn't simply a North / South divide. Virginia and North Carolina were a different block than Georgia and South Carolina. Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania were all quite different from each other, the first being a quasi-religious oligarchy, the second being controlled by Dutch families, and the third was considered rather too radical and too democratic by the rest of the states.
And that doesn't begin to touch on the large state / small state divides.
Even the South, as late as 1860, was divided three ways, the Deep South, the Upper South, and the Border States.
You say that the U.S. was comprised of two monolithic blocks. I'm telling you that what I've read over the past years indicates quite the opposite.
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Second, tariffs were a bone of contention between the Northern states and the Southern states, and there is ample historical record to prove this.
The 'bone of contention' which you are referring to was worst during the Tariff of Abominations. Interestingly enough, that tariff was authored by Southerners led by John C Calhoun, and designed to inflict more pain on the North East than on the South, while giving extremely favorable treatment to the Midwestern states. Calhoun and company sought a bill that would divide the Northeastern and the Midwestern politicians, to the benefit of the South.
However, Calhoun and the other Southern politicians miscalculated -- the Northeastern politicians held their noses and voted for the bill, along with the Midwestern politicians.
Your "bone of contention" between the North and the South was self-inflicted by the South as a failed power play. And somehow the Northeastern states were able to bear their more heavy burden without complaint.
As for tariffs being contentious in 1860, here's something I posted earlier in the thread regarding the myth that the South paid the bulk of federal taxes:
In 1860, the import tariffs were so low that the federal government nearly had to default on it's debts. The North had been hit with the Panic of 1857. The resultant economic downturn severely suppressed imports, resulting in crashing federal tax revenue. The South, being an agrarian-based economy, barely felt the economic fall-out.
In 1860, federal tax revenue was almost completely collected via import tariffs. The amount collected in 1860 is a matter of public record. It's also a matter of public record that two thirds of all import taxes were collected in the Port of New York City. Additionally, the major ports in the United States were nearly all in the North in 1860, only New Orleans, LA and Charleston, SC could be considered major ports - and they lagged behind Boston and Philadelphia, and far, far behind New York. Notice here, the import taxes, which you claimed "were largely purchased by the citizens of southern states" were actually paid mostly by northern consumers.
If you doubt my veracity, I can provide the numbers from the public records showing the federal tax receipts overall, and public records from the Port of New York showing tariffs paid.
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Third, the South would still have Congressmen and Senators, but if they are outnumbered, then they serve primarily as spectators. If the North could install a President without any input from the South, in the system that was in place in 1860, they obviously had the numbers to control the legislature as well. And maybe you missed it, but the judicial appointments are sourced from the executive branch.
The South's voice was becoming irrelevant. And the election of Lincoln made that clear.
The South's voice was not becoming irrelevant. There were structures in place to ensure that even a minority could have influence, from the stringent super-majorities required to alter the Constitution to the rules of the Senate regarding filibusters and nominations.
What was happening that the South's out-sized influence on the federal government was waning. Like I've been saying in this and other threads, the southern landed elite went with secession because if they couldn't call the tune at the federal dance, they weren't going to stay at the party.
The entire history of the federal government from 1800 to 1859 was one of out-sized Southern dominance. That dominance wasn't going to continue when the Southern population had become only one third of the nation -- and nearly half of that Southern population was considered chattel by Southerners. The Southern elite chose to secede because their one sixth of the population could no longer dominate the federal dialog.
If slavery had never existed, would there have been a Civil War?
Its a double edged sword.
Without slavery the South wouldn't have existed in the capacity it did. So no War.
Without slavery Lincoln would never had been able to rally the North to preserve the Union so if there had been a war even without slavery, then the US wouldn't have survived it intact.
Slavery was central to the Civil War. Slavery tainted every cause commonly cited such as State's Rights.
If slavery had never existed, would there have been a Civil War?
The sole purpose of the Civil War was to forcibly reunite the country after the secession. If it was about freeing slaves, Lincoln wouldn't have waited until the war was almost two years old to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.
There were several reasons for the secession, states' rights to determine the legality of slavery being one of them. But many southern leaders, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, didn't believe that slavery was economically sustainable in the long term largely due to advances in technology. So I find it hard to believe that the South would have chosen to secede primarily to preserve an institution that was bound to falter due to obsolescence within a few years.
So I think chances are very good that the South would have tried to secede even if slavery hadn't been an issue, and I think chances are also good that the Federal Government would have still used military force to reunite the country. Therefore I have to believe that the Civil War would have taken place even without the issue of slavery.
It was about secession. Preserving the Union at all costs. Slavery was the point of contention.
Southern states to Lincoln: "We want to secede from the union because"
That's all they get out before Lincoln interrupts with, "You can't".
How did the Confederate States of America intend to be different from the United States of America?
When the Constitutions of each are compared, they are nearly identical, the issue of secession in the Constitution of the CSA remained unchanged.
The following link contains a line-by-line (& conveniently situated as side-by-side) comparison of each, this from the summary:
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...As previously noted, the CSA constitution does not modify many of the most controversial (from a states' rights perspective) clauses of the American constitution, including the "Supremacy" clause (Art. VI, Sec. 1[3]), the "Commerce" clause (Art. I, Sec. 8[3]) and the "Necessary and Proper" clause (Art. I, Sec. 8[18]). Nor does the CSA take away the federal government's right to suspend habeus corpus or "suppress insurrections."
As far as slave-owning rights go, however, the document is much more effective. Four different clauses entrench the legality of slavery in a number of different ways, and together they virtually guarantee that any sort of anti-slave law or policy would be unconstitutional. People can claim the Civil War was "not about slavery" as much as they want, but the fact remains that anyone who fought for the Confederacy was fighting for a country in which a universal right to own slaves was one of the most entrenched laws of the land. ...
Well, it was about slavery because the Confederate leaders of the day explicitly said that it was about slavery.
More significantly, in their statements it wasn't the physical need for slaver labor that they brought to their defense.
It was the cultural desire to maintain a caste system deliberately reminiscent of that of ancient Greece (which is why you find so many old mansions in Grecian style) that they used as their defense of slavery. Even if slaves had not been required for mass labor, the south would have insisted on maintaining a slave-based culture.
Unfortunately, the OP on this thread asks whether or not a Civil War would have happened if slavery had not existed. And while you've been adamant about the cause for the Civil War being slavery, you've ignored the question, and you haven't rebutted a single argument of those who've said that yes, a Civil War probably would have happened if slavery hadn't existed.
That would be speculation. A civil war DID happen and it was about slavery.
That would be speculation. A civil war DID happen and it was about slavery.
Additionally, if one considers the Legislative history & record of the 36th Congress, it seems as if they attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to resolve the differences between the Slaver States & the Free States through negotiation & compromises:
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...In the Congressional session that began in December 1860, more than 200 resolutions with respect to slavery,[7] including 57 resolutions proposing constitutional amendments,[8] were introduced in Congress. Most represented compromises designed to avert military conflict. Mississippi Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis proposed one that explicitly protected property rights in slaves.[8] A group of House members proposed a national convention to accomplish secession as a "dignified, peaceful, and fair separation" that could settle questions like the equitable distribution of the federal government's assets and rights to navigate the Mississippi River.[9]. ...
8. Ewen Cameron Mac Veagh, "The Other Rejected Amendments", The North American Review, vol. 222, no. 829, December 1925, 281-2
Slavery, as it was during the US Constitutional Congress nearly a century earlier, remained a hotly debated issue & one that proved to be an 'irreconcilable difference' evidenced by the American Civil War.
Most posters in C-D threads can't answer a basic question important to this topic -- how did the Kansas Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision lead to the creation of the Republican Party and, in amazingly short order, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President and the consequential creation of the Confederacy?
After the War, the North created anther problem. Now the south had a whole new class of of untrained ,uneducated new freed slaves. Part of the issues we have today is there was no action to get Black American Citizens educated and or trained to take on these new freedoms.
Many were lost and return to a form of slavery, share cropping!
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Crash course on the cause of the Civil War
