Nation marks 150th anniversary of Civil War

Nation embarks on 4-year national commemoration of nation's bloodiest war

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42548201/ns/us_news-life/
...
Around 4 a.m. Tuesday, a single beam of light was aimed skyward from Fort Sumter. Then about half-hour later — around the time of the first shots of the war — the beam split into two beams, signifying a nation torn in two.
The war resulted in more than 600,000 deaths, although during the bombardment of Sumter only a Confederate officer's horse was killed.
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600,000 dead because the South lacked the brainpower to industrialize and felt it had to survive on the hard labor of others. A frank admission and a UNICEF-style cry for help (think Sally Struthers) for the struggling little Bocephus Beauregard Bodeans of The Least Thirteen might have saved the Union so much grief. Oh, well...

So far, I haven't noticed an abundance of neo-Confederate "it wasn't about slavery!" apologia, but we've got four years of commemoration ahead of us.

you mean "the war between the states"
of course it wasn't about slavery.
it was about maintaining at economic system that relied on slavery.
and maintaining a social system that required that you treat some people as less than humans.

Victory!

This never gets old.

It was about State's rights. Moran.

Exactly. State's rights to treat people as property.

my bad. it was about states rights to perpetuate an economic system that relied on slavery.

Don't you mean The War of Northern Aggression?

Probably the most futile civil war ever fought. Even if they'd won, the Confederacy would have collapsed pretty soon anyway, or just remained dirt poor through their agrarian economy. The South should be celebrating their defeat.

Not the white people.

No, I said what I meant.

Listening to NPR last night, they were talking about a book: 1861 something, something" (yes I forgot the full title), it sounded very interesting, talking about the civil war in St. Louis after their "coup" talked about Indian chiefs having to pick sides to fight on (and how it did not mater what side they picked they all got eventually screwed).

I may have to pick it up.

The war in the "west" (today's midwest, really) is often overlooked, perhaps because it was so ugly. When you consider only those parts of the war involving Lee, Longstreet, McClellan, and the famous battles, then our civil war comes off looking like the "cleanest" civil war ever. There were very few civilian casualties, even when Sherman was waging total war on Georgia.

However, in Missouri especially, there was a lot of tit-for-tat civilian revenge killings and nasty stuff like that. Quantrill's raiders, etc. You don't usually learn about that stuff.

was? still is.

So was the North. Are we talking absolute prosperity or relative prosperity???? If we're talking relative prosperity...Southern whites were in great shape in 1860. If you have evidence that most white people were "dirt poor" please present it.

6% of Southern whites owned slaves in 1860, just before the start of the Civil War. That the other 94% did not own the most profitable use of capital in an otherwise extremely agrarian society with few economic options outside of cotton; and where labor costs were, for obvious reasons, artificially low, should be evidence that a) they didn't have the capital to afford slaves and b) most likely struggled to put food on the table.

Pretty much the whole of Europe was ready to support the South had they kept their momentum into '63.
The UK needed the cheap cotton, and other European nations wanted the strong US to be split, weakening it economically and politically.