To someone like yourself who is so firmly convinced that Slavery was THE cause of the Civil War despite a mountain of evidence from a multitude of sources to the contrary makes discussion and consideration with you a moot point and a fruitless endeavor.
Sir, given the magnitude of cotton production by 1860, the enormous acreage devoted to it, and the iron grip the wealthy Planter minority had long had on almost all public policy decisions in the South, one cannot "disregard the morality of slavery" for a moment and "focus on the economic forces".
In the Antebellum South, slavery, mostly through cotton production, WAS the economy.
Did your average small-town guy, North and South, like Miles said, happen to join the side most of the people where they lived joined?
Of course.
But that wasn't how the war got started, nor the cause.
Nowhere have I said slavery was the only cause, indeed one only has read the links I previously provided where Southerners carefully described the causes in their own words.
But... my opinion.... absent slavery, that whole war weren't happening....
Birdwatcher
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
