Someone sat a political function last night (in NH of all places) and asked Nicki Halley....what was the cause/trigger of the Civil War...wanting her to just say something to the concept of slaves/slavery. Halley paused for a minute.....avoided the phrase of slavery....saying something to the effect 'basically how the government was going to run'.
She knows in states like NC, SC, and Georgia....one stupid phrase would cease her chances of an election.
I paused over this. I've spent probably 400 man-hours over the past decade reading through the period of 1800 to 1860....with 50-odd books. A good bit of this had to do with western trails to Oregon, life in the prairie region, and the spiral going on with relations between the south and north.
It is curious.....158 years have passed and the Civil War conflict has now emerged as a leading topic of the 2024 election. Republican candidates (other than Trump) are stuck....they are a member of the party that devoted their entire existence in 1860 on ending slavery, but cannot feel a passion for the effort done....158 years later.
The problem in dragging this topic up? Well....if you were a Democratic Party guy, you surely wouldn't want the public to figure out that you were the party in 1860 to proudly push continuation of slavery in America.
If you asked Biden or Harris over this....both would give you a deer-in-the-headlights look...like what the hell are you asking me over this for?
If you asked college students who participated in the war, or won the war, or was President during the war? I would guess two-thirds of these college youth would not be able to answer.
Should the Civil War ending be a 2024 discussion topic? If so....will we eventually go back to discuss the Revolutionary War and how it was wrong to leave the English kingdom business? Will we go and discuss how winning WW I....simply led to creation of Hitler and WW II? Will we go and admit that the steroid era of baseball destroyed the sport? Will we go and admit that 1920 prohibition era was a total joke? Will we finally sit down and admit that inches/feet should be shredded, and we should go metric?
Yeah, these are all crap-topics and worthless to engage in....but we've made ourselves so stupid....we can't seem to leave some paranoid schizophrenic stage of life.
As for understanding how things existed in 1850? You'd have to understand basic economics, the consequences of adding non-slave states to the union, the continual collapse of banks for the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, and downward spiral of agricultural enterprise in the south for the decades prior to the war. I should also state....behavioral collapse and alcoholism in the capital was daily feature of life in DC.
