Carrol wrote:
The causes of the Slave Drivers' Rebellion are complicated, *but*
it is doubtful that all the other reasons would have led to actual war
were it not for the belief of the Southern Slaveocrats that slavery was
in danger.
There's a whole lit on this that suggests that it wasn't the Northern will
to end slavery as much as the Southern plantation-owners fear of its end
that sparked the conflagration. The owners saw their slaves as assets and
would suffer from severe capital losses even from a mere murmur about
manumission. (It's as if the stock-market goons started hearing about a
proposal to expropriate their shares.) So they over-reacted (in the sense
of starting a war, since it made sense from their own view-points).
BTW, there were a whole lot of civil wars in Latin America even where
slavery was not an issue, over issues of free-trade vs. protection. So that
suggests that "all the other reasons" _could have_ led to actual war. In
any event, it's very hard to separate all of the other reasons from
slavery. Southern slavery was more than mere slavery. It was part of a
"plantation/cotton/slavery" complex that was (for example) necessarily
oriented toward the world market (and thus against protectionism). (More
than cotton was grown, but the other plantation crops were export-oriented,
too.)
BTW, on the topic of "looneyism" (which appears in the subject line). I
think the real "looneyism" is societal. Can anyone think of anything more
looney than the continued accumulation of atomic, biological, and chemical
weapons? (I'm sure you can, but you get the point.) I think the solution to
Doyle's problem is something that most people have done already: drop the
use of the term "looney" (and lunatic) as applied to individual psychology.
I know that even though my son has a neurological problem that leads to
behavioral difficulties and sometimes emotional extremism, he's not a
"lunatic." Nor are those with schizophrenia, clinical depression, etc.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
"From the east side of Chicago/ to the down side of L.A.
There's no place that he gods/ We don't bow down to him and pray.
Yeah we follow him to the slaughter / We go through the fire and ash.
Cause he's the doll inside our dollars / Our Lord and Savior Jesus Cash
(chorus): Ah we blow him up -- inflated / and we let him down -- depressed
We play with him forever -- he's our doll / and we love him best."
-- Terry Allen.
