JJMt said:

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Sapper, it's my impression that slavery was fairly common in ancient (pre-Roman) Europe. But as Christianity spread in Europe during the Roman era and following, the Christianized areas eventually abandoned slavery. It wasn't until the much later colonial era and the need for cheap labor in the brutal conditions of the sugar plantations that slavery reared its ugly head among Europeans again.

Is that broadly correct?

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It depends on the region and how you define slavery. Slavery was common for criminals and common in the early Middle Ages. The big change was a push by Christian leaders to make slavery immoral when the slave was another Christian. Slavery existed in Byzantium, the Crusader states, and Medieval Spain, where the slaves were non-Christians.

Feudalism, particularly in places like France with the manorial system, had aspects of slavery, though the serfs were not outright chattel property.

This issue of Christianity and slavery loomed large in the early 17th Century as the European states started using African and Indian slaves. Colonies very quickly passed laws declaring that even if Indians or Africans converted to Christianity, that would not change the legal condition of their person.

Dr. Watson said:

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VanZandt92 said:

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Never takes long for Civil War discussions to go these directions. If only Southerners could free real estate in their heads for other history. But instead we're back to slave holding and it's many forms....

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It's rather hard for a discussion about the Civil War to not eventually return to the cause for the war.

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The cause for the war?

I wonder whether, had it been pitched solely on the principle of slavery, whether the average Southerner -- especially those who would be called on to fight the battles -- would have quite so enthusiastically rallied to the cry for secession?.

jickyjack1 said:

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Dr. Watson said:

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VanZandt92 said:

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Never takes long for Civil War discussions to go these directions. If only Southerners could free real estate in their heads for other history. But instead we're back to slave holding and it's many forms....

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It's rather hard for a discussion about the Civil War to not eventually return to the cause for the war.

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The cause for the war?

I wonder whether, had it been pitched solely on the principle of slavery, whether the average Southerner -- especially those who would be called on to fight the battles -- would have quite so enthusiastically rallied to the cry for secession?.

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Yes, the cause for the war. There are any number of considerations that flow from any root cause that wil influence how people think. That doesn't change the root cause. Many of the Confederate states made their rationale for secession quite well known, and race and slavery were front and center in those documents.

Dr. Watson said:

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jickyjack1 said:

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Dr. Watson said:

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VanZandt92 said:

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Never takes long for Civil War discussions to go these directions. If only Southerners could free real estate in their heads for other history. But instead we're back to slave holding and it's many forms....

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It's rather hard for a discussion about the Civil War to not eventually return to the cause for the war.

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The cause for the war?

I wonder whether, had it been pitched solely on the principle of slavery, whether the average Southerner -- especially those who would be called on to fight the battles -- would have quite so enthusiastically rallied to the cry for secession?.

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Yes, the cause for the war. There are any number of considerations that flow from any root cause that wil influence how people think. That doesn't change the root cause. Many of the Confederate states made their rationale for secession quite well known, and race and slavery were front and center in those documents.

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I yield on breadth of historical knowledge (though not always to the conclusions you draw), but not on semantics.

Your argument seems to be that the issue of slavery was the "root cause" of the Civil War, and that all other "considerations" flowed from that. This implies that slavery was the original, and thus at the beginning only, propellant of secession. All other factors were, as I read your argument, spawned one way or another by the existence of slavery.

My conception is a little different. I would suggest that rather than having "flowed" from race and slavery, other -- which you could, as a professional, enumerate better than I (and I think you honest enough to do this) -- considerations important to the several decisions to secede were born and existed independently of and concurrently with the slavery issue.

If the above was the case, as I believe it to have been, slavery would not have been the the cause of the war. If one instead contends it was the major cause of the war ... there we have another, and IMO more reasonable, contention. To seriously argue still against slavery as the major cause, at your level, is outside my competence and would require extensive knowledge expertly presented; indeed, I don't know how many, if any, professional historians undertake to do so in the current political climate, or if to do so is even possible -- political climate aside.

I think it would be accurate to say that the South was not in a hurry to free the slaves without compensation to the slave owners, but by the time of the Civil War, roughly half the slaves had already been freed in border states like Maryland and Kentucky. Without the Civil War, it would probably have taken another 20 years to go from slavery to share cropping (the last new world country to outlaw slavery was Brazil in about 1892 though I've seen conflicting dates).
During the war, emancipation only applied to areas no longer controlled by the South, and was done both to weaken the Southern economy and to make drafting black men legal.
In Texas, much of the Federal army stationed at Brownsville to cut off the cotton trade with Mexico,
was made up of black men.
The last battle of the war was probably launched by RIP Ford on black troops marching out of Brownsville, because he didn't like them and as with many Southerners, considered blacks fighting for the North to be traitors.

THE cause