Hi Mike. Thanks for sharing your passion and interest in history, particularly the Civil War. Regarding your episode in November 2022 on the causes of the Civil War, I would just like to share my thoughts. Yes, slavery certainly contributed to the outbreak of war. But you really can’t talk about slavery in the South without talking about industrialization in the North-factories and textile mills, especially concentrated in the New England states of MA, NH, RI. (Please see Jefferson Davis’s Inaugural Address to the Confederate Congress whereby he directly references the Northeastern states). US historians have debated endlessly-and sometimes senselessly-on the causes yet it was an English historian that captured it best, Eric Hobsbawm. In his, The Age of Capital, he notes that the US Civil War was a struggle between southern capital, in the form of chattel slavery, and northern capital, in the form of the industrialization. In essence, you cannot talk about the war without discussing capitalism, whether it’s agricultural capitalism in the South or industrial capitalism in the North. In addition, the other cause of the war was expansionism. Note that the Republican Party ran on a platform to prevent the spread of slavery in the new territories of the U.S.-which were forcibly taken from the Native Americans. The restriction of slavery in the new territories was what really galvanized the Southern planters (the elite) to demand secession from the Northern elite, the Federal Union. (Historian James McPherson tries to argue in his book, Battle Cry of Freedom, that the war wasn’t really a rich man’s war. Perhaps that’s another podcast episode.) The war would then essentially determine who would be the predominant economic power on the North American continent. On this point, see Lincoln’s first annual message to Congress in which he states, “that one strong nation promises more durable peace and a more extensive, valuable, and reliable commerce than can the same nation broken into hostile fragments.”
Those are my thoughts, look forward to more episodes.
