On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 04:19:57 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

The North and South disagreed on various things, but slavery was invariably either the root
cause of the clash, or the reason why it couldn't be resolved quietly.

....More of the latter than the former, although if you replaced "root
cause" with "convenient excuse", you'd be closer to what was really
going on back then. The true "root cause"(*) still resides more in the
conflict between the industrial-based Yankees and the
agricultural-based South over economic power.

(*) One other thing that many people tend to forget is that most of
the Southern states that were part of the original 13 colonies were,
unlike their Northern counterparts, founded as penal colonies. By the
time of the Revolution, many protoYankees looked down on the Southern
colonies due to the fact that their inhabitants either were criminals
and/or debt exiles, and/or descendents of said, and thereby were
"lower-class". The converse was also true, as the Southerners viewed
the Northerners as the same sort of sods that sent them over to the
Colonies in the first place, as they behaved just like the aristos
they'd been ostracized from in Englandland. This same sort of
discrimination still prevails today,
OM
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