Tuesday, February 21, 2017

No, Slavery Didn’t Build America

The issue of slavery in the United States was ultimately decided by the Civil War (1861-1865). It was
a showdown between the free North and the slave South, amongst other things. It was also one of the first “total wars” seen by the West in a very long time.

As Warfare in the Western World: Military Operations from 1600 to 1871, describes it:

“The final year of the Civil War witnessed the full bloom of total war. No western state in centuries had waged a military contest more comprehensively than did the Union and Confederacy. Determined national efforts the world had seen: during the Napoleonic Wars the Spanish and Russian people had fought relentlessly against the French invaders; and in 1813 the Russians had pursued the retreating French for nearly a thousand miles. Yet neither the Spanish nor the Russians had mobilized their populations and economies as systematically as did the North and South.”

If we are to judge who or what “built” America, we must honestly look at the legacy and the strength of each. The reality is that the slave-holding South lost the Civil War. Why? Why, if slavery built America, was it not able to provide the strength needed to the South to be able to crush the North? And what did the North have that made it so great without the aid of slavery?

Read more:
No, slavery didn’t build America. | Intellectual Takeout

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