New York City (then only Manhattan) dominated the financing and shipping of 
raw cotton to Europe.  Cotton was shipped by the coastal trade to New York 
then put on ocean clippers for transshipment to Europe.  Thus, American 
ships laden with European goods for the American market did not return empty 
to European ports;  a simple economic efficiency.  New York City, as opposed 
to the State, had an uncertain allegiance to the Union until the nascent 
C.S.A. declared New York Harbor an alien port with which the southern states 
could no longer have commercial intercourse.  It was only then that the 
City's commercial elite threw their lot in with the Union.  Pro-southern 
sentiment continued in Manhattan, sparking the July, 1863 riot against the 
draft, blacks, and elite white abolitionist Republicans.

I have made no suggestion that the North "made war" on the South.  This is 
an extremely complex question.  Paul is of course quite right that the South 
made the first armed attack on a Union military facility, Fort Sumter but 
Paul also remembers that as early as 1948, Richard Hofstadter (in The 
American Political Tradition) concludes that Lincoln deliberately gave the 
C.S.A. no good option when he sent the unarmed steamer The Star of the West 
into Charleston harbor.

I didn't propose or even imply the Garrisonian suggestion of northern 
secession from the South.  Rather, I am suggesting, and let me be more 
explicit, is that the 19th century South just like the 21st century South is 
as American as peach cobbler.  While it is fascinating to isolate the South 
and study it in detail, we don't need to fight the Civil War over again, 
which ever flag we may be flying.  America is and was the South and the 
South is and was America.  All of the founding states had slavery.  The 
lower tier of states carved out of the Northwest Territory wanted to have 
slavery but were barred by national law.  There were anti-slavery agitators 
in the upper South and even abolitionists born and raised on a plantation in 
South Carolina (the Grimke sisters.)  Generations of 'dough face' 
politicians, northern Democrats fought to maintain and expand slavery within 
the Union.

In its causes, its contestation, and its consequences, the American Civil 
War is one of the most complicated subjects in the history of the U.S.  I 
consider the Neo-Confederate thesis and its arguments to be trivial.  But I 
do not think we can afford to respond with answers that are dismissive or 
polemical.  We respond, at least I respond not to the Neo-Confeds.  Charles 
B. Dew in his introduction to Apostles of Disunion reminds us that 
Neo-Confed notions are taught to southerners in childhood.  Their thesis is 
a mythology.  There is, however, a larger audience both within and outside 
the American South which desperately wants to know how the modern U.S. was 
formed.  It is to those open-minded, curious people to whom I write.  Yes, 
the Confederates imagined themselves the 19th century successors of the 
'Founding Fathers' and there were some similarities.  But the differences 
are worth emphasizing, because those differences, in character, in the basic 
conditions of the times, in the regional economic transformations of the 
U.S., that insured that unlike the "Founders" the leaders of the C.S.A. 
would founder and fail.  Finally, slavery was deeply entangled within the 
character of the U.S., not just the South.  The destruction of slavery was 
the revolutionary result of a murderous war, where the losses ran so high 
such a war would be inexplicable had not it produced an earthshaking 
transformative result.

Harold S. Forsythe
Acting Chair
Faculty Seminar for the Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Finkelman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: End of the War of Northern Aggression


> don't want to get into an extended discussion of slavery here, since the
> issue is NOT slavery, but whether it was a war of Northern Aggression;
> If Harold is right, that NYC profited almost as much from slavery as the
> South (which I this is an overstatement) then it would have made no
> sense for the states of the North to make war on the South.  In fact,
> NOTHING in the Republican platform or Lincoln's policies suggested
> making war on the South.
>
> Now, Harold may be correct in arguing that the North should have
> seceded from the nation to forma  free northern nation (this is the
> Garrisonian position).  But that is a separate argument.
>
> Paul Finkelman
> President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
>     and Public Policy
> Albany Law School
> 80 New Scotland Avenue
> Albany, New York   12208-3494
>
> 518-445-3386
> [log in to unmask]
>
>>>> [log in to unmask] 4/10/2007 9:46:57 AM >>>
> To Paul and All:
>
>    Surely what Paul says about the early American republic as compared
> to
> the C.S.A. is accurate.  Yet, what remains unsaid in this discussion is
> the
> cancer at the heart of the Republic declared in 1776 and the
> Confederacy
> declared in 1861:  slavery.  The Founders built a republic with a 20%
> slave
> population:  disfranchised and exploited.  The C.S.A.'s slave
> population
> approached 40%.
>    We, north of the Mason-Dixon Line would like very much to lionize
> George
> Washington to the denigration of Jefferson Davis but the fact is that
> they
> were both large scale planters with slaves in the hundreds.  True
> Washington
> put in motion the manumission of his slaves while Davis moved to extend
> the
> life of the exploitative system but by 1860 New York City found slavery
>
> almost as profitable as did South Carolina.
>    American history is really complicated.  Malcolm X, of all persons,
> said
> in one of his last recorded speeches:  "[s]top talking about the
> South!!  As
> long as you are south of the Canadian border, you're in the South."
>
> Harold S. Forsythe
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Paul Finkelman" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 12:11 AM
> Subject: Re: End of the War of Northern Aggression
>
>
>> Ther are three major differences between the 1775 and 1861.
>>
>> 1:  The people who revolted in 1775 were totally disfranchised; they
> had
>> no political power; no representation in the Brit. gov.  They had no
>> rights, no constitutional protections, and no one from the American
>> colonies served in the Brit.  gov.  In the US southerners had
> dominiated
>> the national gov. since 1789.  The Confed. Pres. had been in various
>> cabinets and in the Senate.  No American had served in any British
> gov.
>> Five of 9 Supreme Court Justices were southerners; No Americans
> served
>> on any  English court.  Remember, the slogan of the revolution was
> "no
>> taxation without representation."  The American had no
> representation.
>> Hard to argue that the South was not very well represented in the
>> American Gov.
>>
>> 2:  Jefferson justified revolution on the grounds that people had to
> be
>> represented in the gov. (which southerners were in 1861) and that
>> revolution was only justified after a "long train of abuses."  Tell
> us
>> what were the "long train of abuses" that the South suffered?
>>
>> 3:  The Americans of 1775 had no mechanism to protect their rights
>> because they had no political power; the Southeners had vast
> poltiical
>> power, including a perpetual veto (to this day) of any
> constitutional
>> amendment.  The Southerners chose to reject the political process
> which
>> had served them well. Ironically, had the South not seceded it is
>> unlikely that slavery would have ended until the late 20th century,
> if
>> then.
>>
>>
>> Paul Finkelman
>> President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
>>     and Public Policy
>> Albany Law School
>> 80 New Scotland Avenue
>> Albany, New York   12208-3494
>>
>> 518-445-3386
>> [log in to unmask]
>>>>> [log in to unmask] 04/09/07 11:22 PM >>>
>> As best I can remember, prior to the war of northern aggression, a
> bunch
>> of
>> ragtags turned against their mother country (England) and fought for
>> their
>> freedom.  The southerners did no different.
>>
>>
>>
>> ************************************** See what's free at
>> http://www.aol.com.