User:LukeRun82

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Since receiving a degree in foreign languages (Brazilian Portuguese) in 2005, I've also finished a BS in Chemical Engineering from U of I in 2009, which I've used to work as a process engineer in renewable energy and the oil and gas industry in various locations in the United States. I have been an active hobby historian since my youth, especially American political, social, military and economic history and I am meticulous about original sourcing and quantifiable information. Currently I am working as a licensed professional engineer in the State of Texas.

Slavery


Slavery was a major cause of disunion. Although there were opposing views even in the Union States, most northern soldiers were largely indifferent on the subject of slavery , while Confederates fought the war, in large measure, to protect southern society, and slavery was an integral part of it. From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy, due to the large amount of capital invested in slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population.

Slavery was illegal in much the North, having been outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was also fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but it was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the rural South and Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to several factors explaining the geographic divide.