America’s New Civil War

Here’s a fun idea: drive your car through the streets of any Southern city or town with a bumpersticker reading “The South lost. Get over it….” If you make it safely from one end of town to another it’ll be a miracle.

To start America’s original Civil War, there were a number of causes: slavery, states’ rights, the economy, the legal system and politics, but the general consensus among honest historians these days is that slavery and its concomitant economic power was the real driving force between the division between North and South.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was the political accommodation between pro- and anti-slavery politicians regarding new territories in the then-young United States. The bankers of Wall Street were becoming extremely wealthy as the result of financing the slave trade, earning as much or more than the Southern farms in the Land of Cotton. New England textile mills were fueled by Southern-grown cotton. By 1860, the value of slavery was $3.5 billion in that year’s dollars, worth more than railroads, banks, factories or ships.

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act called for territorial settlers to decide the future of slavery. Kansas was, at the time, the place where pioneers raced to…