Note: This article is a continuation of the "unpopular topic" of the "American Civil War", and information & views are welcome to exchange.
Nowadays, there are still many "ferries" in the whole united states; even if there are all kinds of "bridges" everywhere today, many ferries in the United States are still retained; if the car is put on the ferry, someone will collect money without waiting for the ship; because this money is not in a hurry to collect it~ If anyone on the other side of the shore makes a contradiction because of confiscation of money, 3 yuan and 5 yuan may cause big trouble; although the cost of the ferry is not much, the role in the history of the United States is very large. It can be said that the United States is "independent" because a person may not pay the ferry fee.
In the mid-18th century, Britain defeated France, when the post-war "Empire of the Sun Never Sets" was once larger than the Roman Empire in the heyday of European history. But successive years of war dragged Britain's economy to the brink of bankruptcy, the heavy taxes and miscellaneous taxes could no longer weigh, and in the end there was really no way, only to fight the idea of the North American colonies at that time; I did not expect that the "overseas residents" of the North American colonies had long been free and scattered, and they did not want to raise taxes, and although the governors of various places were appointed by the king of the British Empire, they did not dare to go against the opinions of the voters ~ because although they were appointed by the king, the salaries were approved and paid by the local parliament, and the voters were not happy. When the parliament decided not to pay salaries, the governors' salaries were yellow; after a few years of tossing and turning, only tea was left, almost symbolic, but the people of the North American colonies were still unbalanced in their hearts, so they found trouble for the British every day.
Especially in North America at that time, Boston, as the most important large port, was particularly unstable, and the British government could only send red shirts to sit in town, but the situation was even more chaotic after the army entered the city. It's not that the Red Shirts' military discipline is too bad, they are at best drunk and shouting in the streets on Sundays, but the point is that they have affected the local labor market. The officers of the Red Shirts were basically bought at money, the soldiers were criminals who had to work as coolies in the garrison in order to support their families, and as a result, the price of coolies in Boston plummeted, and the lives of the lower classes were greatly affected; at that time, the "elites" & "working people" in North America felt that there was no way to live, so they were not far from the "revolution".
On March 5, 1770, a captain officer of the Red Shirts was intercepted at the port because he had not paid the ferry fee; the captain threw up his hands and left when he had something important to do, and the ticket collector chased him up, and was stopped by the guards, who did not believe: How can the captain not pay? The boy who collected the ticket replied: Is there a gentleman in the British army? The quarrel began to move, and an American "war of independence" broke out.
In summary, the history of the United States from the beginning and the "ferry" have been indistinctly related, and 89 years later, another "ferry" has jumped on the stage of American history and become another war in the United States, to put it bluntly, it is one of the fuses of the American Civil War, this ferry is called Herper's Ferry.
Compared with other historical monuments, the Hubbers Ferry, which is now located at the junction of the three states, looks like a deep mountain Chiba. If you are going on a tour, you will think that you have come to a natural scenery to go to the autumn tour, but after reading the introduction sign inserted there, you will know that this is a quite famous historical park. The Habers Ferry was located at the confluence of the Shan'andao River into the Potomac River, just at the junction of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and was a good place to "establish a revolutionary base". A century-old town sits on the banks of the West Virginia River, across the bridge to Maryland. In autumn, the mountains are colorful, strolling along the river, wandering around the town, and every time you have the feeling of stealing a day of leisure.
Such natural scenery can be seen everywhere in the United States today, and most of the people who go to Habers Ferry are for sigu; in the history of the United States for more than two hundred years, this place is a place of great ups and downs ~ led the independence of the thirteen north American states in 1776 and established the United States, such as Washington and Thomas Jefferson have left their footprints here. In the early years, when water transport was booming, it was a transit point from Washington, D.C., to the Great Lakes region. Later, the Baltimore Ohio Railway was built, which also passed through here and was an important road for land and water transportation.
Due to its ease of transportation and proximity to the coast, the Federal Government opened an arsenal and arsenal here. After independence, the main enemy of the United States has always been the original suzerainty of Britain, in the so-called Second War of Independence, the Anglo-American War of 1812, britain once occupied the capital Washington, D.C., and burned the White House. From a security point of view, until the Navy was strong enough to defeat the Royal Navy, military-industrial facilities could only be built in a convenient place like Habers Ferry, far from the coast and big cities.
Military production made The Habers Ferry once very prosperous, with more and more workers and their families, making it a large town. The military is only responsible for paying wages, and workers and their families eat on the spot. The surrounding farmers rely on the mountains to eat and drink water, and every day they go to the farmers market at Habers Ferry to sell their produce. Due to the large population of the factory and the lack of other places for workers and their families to choose from, the price of the farmers' market is becoming more and more expensive, so that many workers' families cannot make ends meet, which has become a major problem affecting normal military production, and this problem falls on the factory director and the commander of the local garrison.
The natural way to solve this problem is to limit the price, cucumber a few cents a pound of beef a few pieces of pound, strict implementation of the limit is. But the commander was a loyal believer in the American version of the "market economy", which he refused to do, and he knew that the workers could not eat three meals a day from this farmer's market, and if the peasants did not come after the price limit, they would starve. Another option is to subsidize workers. The U.S. military service has been doing very well, and the prices of the things in it are much cheaper than the market price. But the military factory is not a military barracks, the military has already given higher than the market wage, it is impossible to issue food subsidies. The workers whose prices rose every day could not survive, so the commander came up with a brilliant plan; the entrance to the old site of the farmer's market still contains the commander's order: at that time, each family could only consume 25 yuan per week in the market, and if it exceeded this standard, it would be arrested according to law.
The commander was an economic genius who solved the problem of inflation from the perspective of seeking. History does not record in detail how he tracked the amount of shopping consumption of each family, it is said that after the implementation of this order, the workers can only buy things cheap to buy, otherwise there is not enough to eat, the peasants have to sell small profits, otherwise the agricultural and sideline products are rotten, the contradiction in the supply of food in the factory is thus solved from another angle; in addition to the peasants, There are other people in the military industrial stronghold of Habers Ferry, and october 16, 1859 is Sunday, at 11 o'clock in the evening, a group of armed elements suddenly appeared. The habers ferry was easily taken, pushing the United States to the brink of civil war.
With regard to the outbreak of the American Civil War, it begins with the slavery imposed by the United States. At that time, most of the southern states and a few northern states allowed the existence of black slaves, that is, livestock slave states. The existence of this barbaric and backward system of slavery in the United States, an emerging country that advocates democracy and freedom, is itself a mockery of the idea of American nation-building. After the founding of the United States, there have always been people who have taken the abolition of slavery as their mission, and abolishing slavery or animal slavery has often become the difference between the North and the South, so that posterity believes that it is the cause of the Civil War.
In fact, the existence of slavery has its historical reasons, it is a fuse of civil war, but it is not the only one, the difference between the North and the South from the north to the sword and the face of each other is not as simple as slavery. Slavery in the Americas did not appear after the arrival of Europeans, and when Columbus discovered the New World, slavery was widespread on the American continent, especially the Inca Empire in South America, which can be called the most complete slave country in human history. Of course, the Europeans did not pursue slavery until after they reached the Americas, and when they occupied The Islands of Gadna, Azores and Madeira, they began to convert the indigenous population into slavery. It has to do with their religious beliefs.
Many Christians in Europe believed that barbarians were soulless and therefore unworthy of God's salvation, and it was only natural that they should be treated as slaves. Columbus held this attitude, and most of his greedy explorers after him also recognized this belief, and when they came to the New World, they enslaved indians with impunity. But there are still many Europeans who believe that Indians are also human beings, that their souls are worth saving, and most importantly, that they have the dignity and right to be human beings. During the conquest of the New World, many Spaniards who held this belief recorded their own sights with a pen, and only later generations learned about the tragic experiences of indians in the conquest.
To be sure, the former Spanish royal family had a much more civilized attitude on this matter than the means of the so-called "westward migration movement" in the United States later. On his first voyage back, Columbus brought back some Indians as gifts to his friends. This move was rebuked by Queen Isabella, who even ordered all the explorers to return to Spain immediately at their own expense. Nearly half a century later, King Charles, the grandson of Queen Isabella, was so disturbed by his reading Casas's notes on the New World that in 1542 a new law was enacted against the New World: any Spaniard who owned Indian slaves could continue to own them, but once they died, the slaves would be freed. If they mistreated slaves, the slaves were immediately freed. Any Indian who is now free cannot be taken into slavery, and the wages must be reasonable.
Unfortunately, this great law led to a Spanish immigrant revolt in Peru, which was suppressed by the viceroy sent by the king, but as a compromise, the law was abolished, and slavery in the Americas, far from being finalized, became an institution. Oppressed by disease and slavery, the Indians' population suddenly declined, and their civilization soon declined.
The black slaves came to the Americas with the Spaniards, and initially worked as stewards and foremen of the colonists, responsible for managing the Indians. Later, due to the sharp decline in the population of the Indians, there was a severe labor shortage, which forced the colonists to sell people from Africa to the Americas as slaves.
The situation in North America is different from that in Central and South America, where the Spaniards, after exploring California and Florida, found no gold and no indigenous countries worth conquering, and the climate of North America was too cold for the Spaniards, so they did not establish colonies here, and this vacuum zone was occupied by the British a hundred years later. When the British and the Dutch came to North America one after another, the harsh natural conditions made them first face the problem of how to survive, the labor was not lack but excess, they could not feed themselves, where could they afford to raise slaves? The total population of the Native American Indians, which originally belonged to the north American people, was only a few million, but scattered across the North American continent, not as densely populated as In central and South America. It wasn't until tobacco and cotton were grown on a large scale in North America that labor problems really arose, especially in the American South, where large-scale agriculture required a lot of labor. By this time, the Population of the Indians had long since been severely reduced, and they had been driven to barren lands, and they were at odds with the white colonists, and it was unrealistic to use the Indians to solve the labor shortage. In this case, americans, especially the large estates of the South, had to rely on the highly costly method of the slave trade.
The Europeans took advantage of the feud between the tribes of Africa, bought captives from tribal chiefs, and transported them to North America for sale. But the slave trade road is a long way, the mortality rate is very high, so the price of the slave market is not low, and ordinary people cannot afford to buy slaves. Those who bought slaves also hoped that their investment would preserve their value, one was to let the slaves have children, so that the property would increase in value; the other was to strictly prevent the slaves from escaping, while improving the quality of life of the slaves, so that they could live as long as possible. Since the founding of the United States, black slavery has not been a citizen of the United States, but one of the private property; this is related to the plot and record in the film "The Patriot" starring Mel Gibson.
By the middle of the 19th century, there was a huge contrast between the South and the North, forming two completely different worlds ~ the South, because it was the main producer of cotton raw materials in the world at that time, required a lot of cheap labor to engage in cotton planting, which was a very highly manual crop production, and black slaves became the pillar of the Southern economy; the North, because of the continuous improvement of mechanization after the so-called Industrial Revolution, gradually got rid of the dependence on labor, and the cost of raising black slaves for production was getting higher and higher, more and more impractical And a large number of immigrants came to the United States, 90% of them settled in the north, solving the problem of labor. With the exception of New Jersey, northern states granted freedom to black slaves. Even in the South, there were only a few people who owned slaves, and there were more than 200,000 free blacks in the American South at that time, some of whom owned slaves; in 1860, of the 5.5 million Southerners, only 46,000 had more than 20 slaves, and less than 3,000 had 100 slaves, and only 12 had more than 500 slaves ~ So the question arises, that is, why were the southern states of the United States so supported slavery at that time?
One of the reasons was, first, that the power of the American South was concentrated in the hands of a small number of big slave owners, who represented the "upper social class" of the American South, so they desperately defended slavery; second, the ownership of slaves in the South was a successful expression, and the peasants had spare money to buy slaves, and then they could earn more money, and if they were lucky, they could "start from scratch" like the later "Confederate President" Davis and his father, and finally became the richest and most powerful person in Mississippi at that time. The number of slaves owned was a symbol of the prosperity and success of American Southerners at that time.
Therefore, the dispute over slavery, at that time in the United States gradually rose from the economic point of view to the evolution of the moral point of view, and further rose to the political point of view, a small number of people in the North firmly believe that the existence of slavery is a violation of the american spirit of freedom, must be completely abolished ~ written here, interested and have the opportunity to see here friends, you can try to find an old American drama "North and South Chaos", which has a detailed record of this. If the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson in the thirteen States of North America at the time of the original American Revolutionary War, wrote that "everyone is equal," why did slaves not have human rights? They hated not only the system, but also the slave-owning peasants, and behind these staunch abolitionists were some "wealthy" Canadians; after the American Revolutionary War, these loyalists loyal to King George basically gathered in Canada, especially in the "Anglo-American War" of 1812, which preserved the territory of British Canada; these people were very happy to finance everything that might harm the United States.
When the time came to October 16, 1859, john Brown, who led the team to capture Habers Ferry, who was regarded as a god by future Generations of Americans but was a deviant at the time, had in his pocket a "check" funded from Canada for about $100; more than 150 years ago, the $100 was enough to organize an unprecedented "terrorist campaign".