See the discussion under "Funny thing" for more on this topic.
so if the war was not about slavery,why was it ok to have slaves!
The war was a general culture war. Rural South vs. Urban North, Agricultural South vs. Industrial North, Aristocratic South vs. Meritocratic North... you get the idea. Slavery was part of the Southern culture. It was "OK" to have slaves in the South in 1861 because it was a part of the culture. It was legal under the constitution. However, it was certainly morally questionable by 1861, and it wasn't part of the Northern culture, which was ascendant at the time.
and why were they there! were all mankind created equal or not?
They were there because the agricultural system in place in the South, that of cash-crop farming, depended on manual labor, and since there was no wage labor pool available, as there was for the industrial North, the South maintained chattel slavery. Certainly, all mankind is created equal. From our perspective, we can see and say that no man or woman should ever be another's property. Not everyone saw it that way back then. There was more of the biblical sense of human dignity in the presence of slavery. (Slavery was a simple fact of life in biblical times.) We can't understand it that way today. I sure don't. Perhaps in the future, our acceptance of wage labor will be seen in a similar light. (The Jeffersonian ideal is that no person ever works for another, either as a slave or as a wage earner. Everyone is a free and independent contractor. That didn't stop Jefferson from owning slaves or hiring laborers, though. Ayn Rand would follow this ideal through to its natural conclusion with the philosophy of Objectivism.)
and do you think blacks are less then whites?do you like blacks!
I can't answer for the person this refers to. I can say, for myself, in the words of the
Monty Python's Flying Circus "Parrot sketch," "The plumage don't enter into it." Each individual person is a person, all other considerations aside.
And bigbore wrote:
The institution known as slavery would have died out in another 20 years or less as machinery was replacing the slave labor.
I'd guess 20 - 30 years. Farm machinery became more productive than manual labor about 1890 or so. With the additional social pressure that would have come if the South had maintained slavery, the machinery might have been developed a little more quickly, but not much.
Another dimension to add is that although slavery was a tough existance, was it that much better for immigrants just off the boat in some big eastern cities?Some authors state they were all in the same boat.
In some cases, Southern slaves were better treated; healthier, better fed, housed and clothed, and better educated, than were some Northern immigrant wage laborers. And in some cases, the hatred and bigotry faced by the Northern immigrant wage laborer equalled that faced by the Southern slave. I saw a newspaper article from a local paper from the late 19th Century, giving the casualty report from a construction accident on one of the local railroads. The dead were listed, with the local residents listed by name, age, and town of residence, then the out-of-town workers, also by name, age and town of residence, including one with the parenthetical note "Negro," then, "Four mules and six Italians."
It's unlikely that anyone back then would have considered this outrageous, yet I can't think of any sensible person today who
wouldn't consider it so. Kinda like slavery. It makes you wonder: What are we doing today that'll seem equally outrageous to our descendents five or six generations from now?
