Submitted by piewacket1861 on Sun, 05/18/2008 - 19:05.
Just some observations, but at the moment I'm tied up with work and can't answer to the fullest of my ability. I will just add that I find it a paradox that slavery both held the North and South together and then tore them apart.
From the beginning, as I have probably noted before, the unpaid labor built this country, both North and South. As the textile industry grew in the North, their need for cotton for their textile plants intensified the need for the South to grow more cotton. Naturally Northerners will argue, "but we would have paid for the labor". The point is, they didn't have to, and the profit for both North and South was greater because of their "turning a blind eye". The complicity of the North, the very dependence of the country's economic engine revolved on this vast supply of unpaid labor - on slavery - and the North did allow this to happen.
A great American writer, Robert Penn Warren, on the 100th anniversary of the Civil War said that the twin national myths had grown from the conflict: The South's, he called "the great Alibi"; the North's "the Treasury of Virtue." (Paraphrased from COMPLICITY, pg. 216.)
Lastly, I would add this quote from Harriet Beech Stowe (the woman of whom Abraham Lincoln once said, "So this is the little lady that wrote the book that started this war.")
Ms. Stowe wrote in"The Education of Freedmen" for The North American Review, 1879,
"The Northern slaveholder traded in men and women whom he never saw, and of whose separations, tears, and miseries he determined never to hear."
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Slavery: Not Just Something for the South
Just some observations, but at the moment I'm tied up with work and can't answer to the fullest of my ability. I will just add that I find it a paradox that slavery both held the North and South together and then tore them apart.
From the beginning, as I have probably noted before, the unpaid labor built this country, both North and South. As the textile industry grew in the North, their need for cotton for their textile plants intensified the need for the South to grow more cotton. Naturally Northerners will argue, "but we would have paid for the labor". The point is, they didn't have to, and the profit for both North and South was greater because of their "turning a blind eye". The complicity of the North, the very dependence of the country's economic engine revolved on this vast supply of unpaid labor - on slavery - and the North did allow this to happen.
A great American writer, Robert Penn Warren, on the 100th anniversary of the Civil War said that the twin national myths had grown from the conflict: The South's, he called "the great Alibi"; the North's "the Treasury of Virtue." (Paraphrased from COMPLICITY, pg. 216.)
Lastly, I would add this quote from Harriet Beech Stowe (the woman of whom Abraham Lincoln once said, "So this is the little lady that wrote the book that started this war.")
Ms. Stowe wrote in"The Education of Freedmen" for The North American Review, 1879,
"The Northern slaveholder traded in men and women whom he never saw, and of whose separations, tears, and miseries he determined never to hear."
PIE