In July 2021, a poll in the United States showed that 13 states in the southern united states had a very clear tendency to independence, and republican supporters in these southern states believed that they should secede from the U.S. federal government, a proposal that was widely endorsed in the southern states.
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The issue of the division of the North and the South, or the civil war, has been a relatively sensitive topic in the United States for more than a hundred years.
In 1852, the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (Mrs. Stowe) published the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which stirred up the sensitive nerve in the cause of the split- slavery.
To some extent, Uncle Tom's Cabin influenced the course of American history, and a novel set the agenda for a country for the first time in human history. For the first time in history, women have stepped onto the stage of American society and history and become the protagonists of agenda setting.
After the outbreak of the Civil War, President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe and said of her: "You are the little woman who caused a great war. ”
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" represents most of the public opinion tendencies in the North, believing that slavery in the southern plantations should be abolished in the dark, cruel, and dehumanizing way.
Southern plantation slave owners believed that the situation of the slaves on the plantations was far less miserable than the Yankees said, at least a little better and more secure than the wage workers in the northern factories.
Speaking of darkness and cruelty, the wage workers in the factories of the North, especially the newcomers, were worse off than the black slaves.
The confrontation between the North and the South, the abolition of the disputed slavery, became a national contradiction.
On the surface, it is a question of the abolition of slavery, but in essence it is a conflict and confrontation between two United States, two development paths, and two development models: the two development paths of the South and the North, are the development of industry and commerce, or the development of land for plantations? Is it a country of industry and commerce, or an agricultural country?
The struggle between the two lines was the root cause of the outbreak of the American Civil War.
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Beginning with Washington, the founding father of the United States, although he was a slave owner himself, he advocated the abolition of inhumane slavery.
The United States is a country with a strong religious atmosphere, with a large number of Protestants, and in a country that belongs to the social elite, slavery itself contradicts their religious beliefs and moral codes.
But slaves were the private property of slave owners. The U.S. Constitution stipulates that personal property is sacrosanct and therefore it is impossible to confiscate or deprive slave owners of their private property. The abolition of slavery is in natural conflict with the U.S. Constitution.
In the mid-19th century, the worldwide industrial revolution began with the textile industry.
When cotton met Jenny's loom and Watt's invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution advanced by leaps and bounds, changing Europe, the United States, and then changing the way of production and lifestyle around the world. It is precisely because of this that cotton has become the focus of the entanglement of interests between the North and the South.
Originally, the southern plantations grew sugar cane and tobacco, relying only on the labor of black slaves, and had no competitiveness, and there was no possibility of sustainable economic development. Moreover, the consumption of sugarcane and tobacco on the land is very large, and the land can no longer be planted after two seasons of planting, and the economy of the south can no longer develop.
The emergence of cotton made the use of black slaves to develop the economy an extremely profitable thing, especially with the westward expansion movement accompanied by the industrial revolution, the large-scale application of machines in industrial and agricultural production, the use of cotton tying machines, cotton baling machines, and various planting supporting machines, so that the southern plantation economy suddenly came back to life.
Black slaves planted cotton and then roughed it with machines, providing raw materials for the rapidly developing cotton spinning industry at that time.
As a result, the southern planters were fertilized and insisted on slavery to engage in the plantation economy.
Before the outbreak of the Civil War, the cotton production in the South accounted for seven-eighths of the world's total cotton production, and such a large market share naturally had bargaining power and pricing power. At the time, cotton was known as white gold.
The reason why the North insisted on abolishing slavery was also simple, because the American North was dominated by industry and commerce, unlike the Southern planters who only sold raw materials, and the North also sold industrial products.
The sale of industrial products is faced with a corresponding supporting tariff system and a socio-economic system. Industry and commerce need smooth circulation channels and a broad market, as well as an abundant supply of labor.
Slavery, on the other hand, affected the abundant supply of labor. Because they were enslaved from generation to generation, the labor force was fixed on the land and could not be moved. The South needed both cotton and machinery and consumer goods. The South advocates low tariffs, no tariff protection, preferably zero tariffs, and free trade. In this way, exports can be competitive, and imports can also buy high-quality and inexpensive products.
In order to protect national industries, the northern part of the United States needs high tariff protection and trade barriers to industrial and commercial development. At that time, compared with Europe, the industrial products of the United States still belonged to the stage of copycat goods, counterfeiting and shoddy were prevalent, and without tariff protection and trade barriers, the industry could not develop.
The struggle between the North and the South, which takes the survival and abolition of slavery as its appearance, is actually a struggle of interests in life and death. Industry and commerce, or agriculture?
At the beginning of this controversy, it was a war of words, and both sides tried to make the other stink in public opinion and occupy the commanding heights morally.
However, this cannot fundamentally solve the problem, and the real solution to the problem must be adjusted from the policy, law, and social system. No one can tolerate the other side moving their own cheese, the outbreak of bloody wars and institutional reforms, which are inevitable.
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In 1856, a new political party appeared in the United States, the Republican Party, which was split from the Whig Party. The two-party politics in the United States began with a dispute between the North and the South.
The struggle between the North and the South is reflected in politics, the showdown between two political parties. For many years, there was only one democratic Republican Party in the United States, one-party rule, and no one played with him.
Two parties, two destinies, two futures, two paths of development. The focus of the dispute between the two parties is that it cannot be resolved peacefully, nor can it be resolved by seeking a lawsuit with the Supreme Court.
In the end, there is another way to a peaceful settlement - elections, counting heads, and whoever supports them more will choose whomever they want. Unexpectedly, the election instead provoked contradictions and sparked war.
In 1860, the U.S. presidential election was conducted in a number of heads. At that time, the Republican Party represented the interests of northern industry and commerce, and the way of counting heads certainly won.
Especially at this time, the nascent Republican Party in the North had a genius leader, Abraham Lincoln.
In the 1860 U.S. presidential election, Lincoln was elected president of the United States. But it was Lincoln's election that left the North and South disputed the issue with no room for manoeuvre.
In 1858, Lincoln's famous speech "The House of DividedNess Cannot Endure" when he participated in the Senate election had already made it very clear. He did not advocate the immediate abolition of slavery, which was contrary to the sanctity and inviolability of private property advocated in the Constitution.
However, he also decided that slavery was morally inappropriate because it would lead to the division of the state.
How to solve the problem? It was the gradual and peaceful abolition of slavery, so Lincoln became the representative of the abolition of slavery.
No problem has been solved through the three systems of legislation, judiciary, and administration, and outside the system of public opinion, and in the case of the exhaustion of peaceful means, we can only rely on our fists.
In 1861, after Lincoln was elected president, civil war broke out. The outbreak of civil war can be said to be the fate of the United States. Several events that occurred before Lincoln's election foreshadowed the inevitability of civil war.
In 1857, Scott v. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857) case occurred. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not U.S. citizens and annulled the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which was designed to limit the expansion of slavery, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
This judgment not only upheld slavery from the constitutional level, but also intensified the already sharply antagonistic dispute between the North and the South, blocked the way to solve the problem of slavery in the South by compromise means, and played a bad role in fueling the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Scott case was not only listed by American scholars as the worst jurisprudence in american constitutional history, but was also considered to be an important cause of the Civil War.
The second was that a fanatical abolitionist white man named John Brown launched an armed abolitionist uprising in Virginia in 1859, which failed and he was brought to court.
On November 2, 1859, he was sentenced to death and hanged a month later.
But his final statement in court was published in the New York Herald on November 3 of that year and became a moving word for a nation. When this man was executed on December 3, 1859, the whole north regarded him as a hero.
The third incident, the Kansas Massacre of 1856, also because of the existence of slavery, led to a series of vendettas, more than two hundred deaths. This is also a small-scale rehearsal of the civil war, and when there is no way to convince, it can only be subdued and subdued.
These events indicate that the confrontation between the North and the South in the United States can no longer be concealed, nor can it be resolved through compromise, and civil war is inevitable.