EU Portal .net

Was the American Civil War worth it?

The U.S. fought tooth and nail to keep the rebel states a part of the Union in the Civil War… Cotton because a somewhat irrelevant cash crop by the end of the war because the Europeans found other sources of it, the GDP of the south was devestated by the campaigns and didn’t reach 1860-levels until the CCC and other programs electrified and modernized the region in the 30s, and southerners and northerners on the east coast seem to continue to hate each other’s guts to this day… Sooooo what exactly were the benefits of all this fighting?
I’m not writing an essay, I’m just asking a question — please, no “unity” dogma, either…
@ Joshua, the declaration of secession from all CSA states mentioned nothing of states’ rights and lay the justification for war on the issue of “a man’s right to own another man” — CSA VP Alexander Stevens declared the same thing.

What seems to be ever so often overlooked is the fact that after some time of the war had already passed, Lincoln came to realize that what the fighting was truly about was the preservation of democracy as a viable form of government. The American Experiment of democratic self rule was created by the founding fathers after the Revolution, it was the first such government in the history of civilization, and frankly the whole world was watching to see if this could be a success, as it was totally new, never been done before, and many simply did not believe it could survive.

The Confederacy, by its mere existence, attempted to destroy democracy, although it was unintentional. Whether its purpose was to fight for state rights, or to preserve the institution of slavery, be that for racial or economic reasons, what in essence they were saying was that if you are a part of a democracy, and happen not to agree with the majority opinion on a given matter, that then you have the right to secede from that government, and create your own set of laws that might be more suitable to you.

If the Confederacy had succeeded, and that principle of secession is upheld, then theoretically, any state, or city, or even neighborhood has the right to secede, whenever they see fit. What then this results in is not a democracy, but anarchy and chaos, with an unlimited number of multiple independent governments, forever self dividing whenever someone disagrees with a law. Those collection of independent states would have been ripe for take over by any other country, or just simply collapsed themselves out of utter confusion.

Lincoln realized that this United States could not collapse, as that would have been the end of democratic self rule, probably for the rest of all time. Instead he maintained that a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”

It is difficult to argue that a war that cost so many their lives, and so many others their livelihoods, or families, or towns, or so many other countless things, was justified or worthwhile. But the point is that the war had to be won, to keep the union intact, to keep democracy alive for the future of mankind. That is what the lives of the combatants were given for, to have the right to ask your question here, some 150 years later.

EU JeRiCHo :: TS on Reflection :: Halo Reach MLG Gameplay 1

REACH and the long arm of the chemical industry.(The Precautionary Principle): An article from: Multinational Monitor $5.95 This digital document is an article from Multinational Monitor, published by Essential Information, Inc. on September 1, 2004. The length of the article is 4145 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Citation De…