Attitude towards slavery in the South and North
Despite the propaganda of the abolitionists, who at their meetings and rallies, greatly embellished the suffering of blacks in the South, and the established belief that slavery is bad, no one in the North intended to make blacks equal to whites. The Northerners, led by President Lincoln, did not believe in race equality.
Back in 1853, the main "liberator" Abraham Lincoln supported the law of his state, which prohibited blacks from entering Illinois. In 1862, already in the midst of the war, Illinois amended the state constitution to prohibit blacks and mulattos from immigrating or settling in the state. Lincoln did not interfere with this.
Lincoln openly said: “… I do not advocate and have never advocated the introduction of any form of social and political equality of the white and black races … I do not advocate and never advocated giving blacks the right to become voters, judges or officials, the right to marry white people; and, furthermore, I will add that there are physiological differences between the black and white races, which, in my opinion, will never allow them to coexist in conditions of social and political equality. And since such coexistence is impossible, and they, nevertheless, are near, the relationship between the higher and the lower must be maintained, and I, like any other person, advocate that the highest position should belong to the white race. Lincoln condemned slavery in itself, but not as an example of inequality, but for economic inefficiency. In his opinion, the slaves should have received freedom for ransom.
Even the Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 was not intended to free slaves. The text of the Proclamation states that those slaves who are in the states or parts of the state that have rebelled against the United States are declared free. Thus, Lincoln "freed the slaves" only in territories where the United States had no power and could not control the execution of the order. The law was an empty phrase. In fact, it was a sabotage against the Confederation, one of the measures for conducting information and economic warfare. Interestingly, 13 parishes of Louisiana and 48 counties of Virginia (the future state of West Virginia) were specifically excluded from this Proclamation, although these territories were controlled by northerners at that time. Lincoln was not prevented from freeing slaves in the territories occupied by the federal army, but he did not.
The proclamation was a diversion, a method of information war of the North against the South. In the South, no one was going to explain the meaning of the document to the slaves. But rumors of the "word of the Lincoln masses" reached the slaves. As a result, the trickle of slaves running from the South to the North turned into a full-flowing river. It was a blow to the economy of the South. In addition, crime has risen sharply. Most of the healthy men in the South were at the front, in the rear were the sick, women, children, old people, those who for some reason could not fight, so the situation with the mass exodus of blacks did not bring anything good to the South.
When the war began, the Confederates captured Fort Sumter, in response, Lincoln began mobilizing, both sides did not think about slaves. Southerners were angry with the economic policy of the North and wanted to "show the shopkeepers that they are not meddling in their own business." The fact is that the federal government began to introduce import duties convenient for the North on cars, various industrial equipment needed by the South (there was not enough of its own production). This allowed the northern "shopkeepers" to sell their goods to the South at an exorbitant price. In addition, the federal government controlled the export of cotton that went to European countries, forcing it to be sold to light industry enterprises in the North. The government also dabbled in the taxation of individual states. As a result, it turned out that the North almost repeated the policy of the English metropolis when the War of Independence began. Now the South was under economic pressure, and the North was acting as the metropolis. Southerners fought for their independence.
The Yankees went to the South to "pour over the presumptuous planters." To the poor white peasants, the farmers were told that the South is evil, the South wants to seize the North and establish its own order. Nobody explained anything to the mobilized soldiers. War is war, soldiers were cannon fodder in the Great Game. Neither the southerners nor the northerners thought much about the fate of the blacks; it was a matter of secondary, if not tertiary importance.
Thus, the war between the North and the South did not start over the problem of slavery. The truth is that both southerners and northerners were racists who did not see blacks as equals (racial segregation in the United States was lifted only in the mid-1960s). Southerners were satisfied with the current situation. In principle, the southern elite understood that the slavery issue would have to be resolved, but they planned to do this gradually. Even the blacks, if they were not deliberately "rocked" into rebellion and disobedience, would generally be satisfied with their position. After all, the alternative was worse - life without land, shelter, in the eternal search for food, work and shelter. Or become vagabonds and criminals, living in constant fear of falling into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. They were asked to change one chain for another, to lose stability.
The elite of the North wanted to subjugate the South, expand their zone of control, and get a new workforce. The problem of slavery was just a pretext. The overwhelming majority of northerners, both gentlemen and poor, were ordinary everyday racists. Moreover, in the North, the degree of racism was higher than in the South. In the South, they got used to the masses of blacks, they were already an organic part of life there. In the North, no one smiled to have a black person as their neighbor. And the poor white people understood that the masses of liberated blacks would become their competitors in the struggle for a meager piece of bread.
Only a few facts speak eloquently that the South should not be considered the "abode of evil" that kept blacks in slavery, and that the North had heroically stood up for the freedom of blacks. The Yankees from New England were the first to legalize slavery in North America. They started the slave trade in the middle of the 18th century. This area was famous for its religiosity and pronounced piety (in fact, hypocritical Puritanism). And the Protestants, who divided the world into “chosen by God” and “others,” had no moral problems with enslaving other people, first of all, Indians and Negroes. A person's success in business becomes an outward sign of being “chosen”. That is, the God of Protestants loves the one who has money, and it does not matter how the person earned it. The slave trade, which brought huge profits, was a godly business, according to the logic of the Protestant Puritans. Therefore, the first English colony to pass the law on the legalization of slavery in North America was the northern colony of Massachusetts. And, despite the 1808 ban, the slave trade continued illegally until the outbreak of the war in 1861, as it brought even greater profits. The ban on the import of new slaves led to the fact that their prices skyrocketed. Nobody wanted to give up such profits. Actually, it was the super-profits from the slave trade that made it possible to create the initial capital necessary for the creation of the banking system and industry of the North.
Interestingly, the first to try to ban the import of slaves was the southern state of Virginia under Governor Patrick Henry. Even before the ban on the import of new slaves in the early 19th century, on October 5, 1778, the Prevention of Further Importation of Slaves Act was passed, which not only prohibited the import of slaves, but also gave freedom to slaves who appeared in the state in contravention of the law.
It is also worth remembering that in the North, slavery gradually collapsed not because of the special moral qualities of the northerners. In reality, no state was in a hurry to prohibit slavery or stop the import of blacks. The bottom line was that the plantation slavery system in the North was economically disadvantageous. Profits were low and costs were high. As at the present time, agriculture is a costly industry that does not generate windfall profits. It is not for nothing that in the modern States and the European Union, which are set as an example of highly efficient agriculture, farmers are actively supported by central and local authorities.
They began to refuse the use of slaves in agriculture in the North not because of "high principles" (they were unknown to the Yankees; it is enough to recall the total genocide against Indian tribes, when prosperous societies of many thousands were quickly reduced to miserable heaps of drunken marginals), but because of small profits. This is what led to the fact that slavery began to disappear in the North. In addition, there were initially fewer slaves, since the bulk of Africans were transported to the South, where the main agricultural areas were. It is also worth noting that before the war, not a single law that granted freedom to a person who was in slavery was adopted in the North. Property rights in the North were not violated. The northerners gradually sold slaves to the South, since after the introduction of a ban on the import of new slaves at the beginning of the 19th century, slaves began to be traded only within the States, and their prices skyrocketed.
Results of the war. What gave blacks "freedom"
The beginning of the war was a disaster for the North. First, most of the regular army, with cavalry, went over to the side of the Confederacy. Secondly, the South had the best military leaders who, for 5 years, held back the onslaught of a more powerful adversary with superiority in human, financial and economic resources. Before the war, Southerners preferred to pursue a military career. They were military men, not shopkeepers. The Yankees, on the other hand, preferred to "make money." While the northerners learned how to fight, the southerners smashed the enemy who had two and three times the advantage. Thirdly, it is worth remembering that if the North needed a complete victory, for which it was necessary to break the resistance of a strong enemy and occupy its territory, then the southerners were quite satisfied with a draw and maintaining the status quo at the start of the war.
In the war of attrition, the preponderance of forces was in the North: only 9 million people lived in the South, of which 3 million were slaves who could not fight effectively, against about 22 million white people in the northern states. Most of the industry was also in the North. Hopes for active support from the European powers did not come true. The southerners beat the superior forces of the enemy for three years, but then their forces were depleted. In a war of attrition, they had no chance. The North could continue to send "cannon fodder", literally filling the South with corpses. The South, on the other hand, did not have such human resources. The losses for the southerners became irreparable. In the Confederation, general mobilization was announced at the very beginning of the war, everyone was called up on a voluntary-compulsory basis, and there was nowhere to take new soldiers.
The US Army was initially recruited with volunteers from poor white poverty and patriots for money. In addition, propaganda did its job and the USA and Europe poured masses of people who believed in the fight against the "abode of evil", or simply wanted fame and money (the northerners, along with the war, plundered the South, which caused an additional wave of resistance). However, soon there were few volunteers. As a result, universal conscription was introduced, all combat-ready men who could not pay a ransom of $ 300 (a lot of money at that time) were seized. In fact, the elite of the North in this war solved another problem - "utilized" the mass of poor white people. For the same purpose, a huge stream of Irish migrants was driven into the army (in Ireland at this time there was another famine). The Irish were given citizenship and immediately shaved into the army. Thus, almost without exception, all the white poor of the North were thrown under bayonets, bullets and buckshot of the southerners. Through total recruitment, the army of the North was brought to more than three million people (the southerners were about 1 million people, with scarce sources of replenishment). In addition, the North used a number of novelties, such as the practice of detachments, which drove their soldiers into attacks. Also, both sides actively set up concentration camps.
The northerners won the war of attrition. The South was literally drowned in blood and ravaged. The losses of the Americans were comparable to those of the two world wars combined. Shortly before the end of the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, freeing slaves in all states. Blacks got "freedom" - without land, place of residence and property! From such freedom you can only die of hunger or go to robbers. The luckiest blacks have joined their former masters as hired servants. Others became vagabonds. In addition, the federal government passed a law outlawing vagrancy. Hundreds of thousands of blacks could not return to their former lands, since they were someone else's property and at the same time lost the right to move around the country. However, they were still second-class people. It was extremely difficult for them to start their own business, get an education, get a good job.
As a result, thousands of blacks were doomed to become criminals. The country, especially the devastated and depopulated southern states, was swept by a wave of "black crime". Due to the increased testosterone among blacks (a biological fact) and the low level of cultural tradition, which reduces the degree of control, women were subjected to wild violence. The population was in fear and horror. In response, the whites began to create popular squads, and then the famous Ku Klux Klan arose. Mutual hatred of northerners and southerners, whites and blacks, incessant massacres, partisans allowed the elite of the North to carry out the Reconstruction of the South in the direction they needed. Power in the South was redistributed in favor of wealthy northerners. All this took place under the pressure of the army, thousands of southerners were repressed. At the same time, a lot of money was invested in the South in the construction of railways and the restoration of infrastructure. For this, taxes were sharply increased in the South. In this case, many swindlers and the North have warmed their hands by plundering millions of dollars. Railroad owners and managers were also predominantly northerners.
In general, the War of the North and the South allowed the elite of the North to solve several main problems: 1) to crush the South, having the opportunity for further expansion of the "American Empire". Already at the end of the century, the United States, having overtaken England, France, Germany and Russia, broke into first place in industry; 2) to seriously reduce the number of white poor, reducing social tension in the country; 3) the war brought the elite of the North incalculable profits both in the field of military contracts and the impulse for the development of industry in the form of hundreds of thousands of black "two-legged weapons", and in the redistribution of power (and therefore sources of income) and property in the South in their favor.
