Cotton alone was 60% of US exports in 1860. Northerners quickly discovered that their enormous wealth and power, as well as most of their employment, were dependent on the South, on manufacturing for their captive Southern market and shipping Southern cotton. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not compete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow.
Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its IMMENSE PROFITS. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves.
Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Just the talk of secession caused extreme trepidation to many such as the Daily Chicago Times, which wrote on December 10, 1860, a week before South Carolina's secession convention was to convene: A solution had to be found quickly or a major catastrophe was going to happen in the North and lead to, at worst, anarchy, and, at best, a greatly diminished economic position in the world. The rapidly deteriorating Northern economy created a backdrop of extreme urgency, fear, unrest and anger in the North, and it drove all actions of Lincoln and Northern leaders in the winter and spring of 1861. The primary cause of the War Between the States was the impending economic annihilation of the North when the first seven Southern states seceded. In this brief article, I would like to touch on the main reasons why slavery was not the cause of the War. ii in which the argument is laid out in detail with 218 footnotes and over 200 sources in the bibliography.
I have written a book entitled Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. In other words, it was basically states' rights. The war was really fought about whether the federal government should dominate state government. It was an element in the cause of the war, but it was not what the war was really fought about.
The great historian Shelby Foote was right when he said that slavery "was not the true cause of the war. Slavery as the cause of the American War Between the States is an absurdity of biblical proportions. (Published in Confederate Veteran magazine, The Absurdity of Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States
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