On 1/11/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <wsokol52 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I can certainly sympathize with your viewpoint.
> Slavery was used as mere rallying point in a
> kulturkampf that soon became a real war - pretty much
> the way "hot button" issues (abortion, gay marriage,
> death penalty, guns, sex, crime, etc.) are used today
> - as a mere example to score a point rather than an
> issue in its own right.
this sounds more planned than it actually was. I think that the general perspective of Barrington Moore (SOCIAL ORIGINS OF DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY) makes sense here. The very-different socio-economic systems of the Northeast and the South meant that there as a lack of communication between the two, so that economic conflicts (over protectionism and the like, including slavery) became more and more salient. (BTW, most of the South's trade was with England, not with the North.) The Northern coalition included a lot of different people with different goals and issues, including the abolition of slavery. But it unified around keeping the union intact (Lincoln's program). In the South, as some historians have argued, the issue of slavery was much more important. Just a _hint_ of Northern anti-slavery sentiment was enough to cause the slave-owners to become unhinged.
It's like the case if the US government were to hint at large taxes on profits, which would cause Wall Street to collapse: the hint of anti-slavery attitudes immediately caused fears of capital losses for slave-owners, along with slave revolts and the like.
-- Jim Devine "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin