[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

e. Actually, it didn't. The US industrialization process was made by the smuggling of the Bessemer steel refining process and the fact that just because Britain had outlawed exports of industrial processes did not make them unavailable. Research Germany, 1860.

That's the product, not the industrial infrastructure. The vast materiel requirements of the war was responsible for that infrastructure. Without it, large-scale refinement and manufacturing would have been an impossibility.

f. The U.S economic boom was made possible largely by the inventiveness of U.S. inventors and the stagnation of British industry in developing new products/industries in an attempt to maintain the status quo ( The Red Queen, Matt Ridley) This was also a function of war debt from the Napoleonic Wars. This same problem led to the downfall of the British Empire from WW1-WW2.

Regardless of international affairs, the boom would still have been impossible without the industrial complex of the late century. That complex was a product of Civil War industry.

g. Slavery did not require a war to end. Look at the civil rights movement in America in the 50's-70's. There was already a strong anti-slavery movement in the North just as the was a strong civil rights movement in the North during the aforementioned period. Mechanization would have made slavery obsolete anyway. Consider the lot of the sharecropper, who was virtually worthless, compared to a slave who was very expensive. If a slave dies or is sick one must purchase another whereas a sharecropper can be replaced for almost no cost by a multitude of willing laborers.

Research Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin for mechanization's effect on slavery.

Slavery was merely an excuse to get the citizenry to pursue a cause that their leaders felt they would not understand. Just as communism taking over the world was the motivation for Korea and Vietnam, just as the Germans taking over the world and murdering babies and all that garbage was an excuse to get people to fight the world wars.

Correct. No one claimed that Lincoln's motives for emancipation were pure. Still, immediate emancipation was the result of the Civil War.

I agree that Gettysburg was a great battle and the men who served on both sides deserve their place in history as did all who fought. Like many wars however, it is a tragedy that they fought and died for something much different than what they believed they fought for.

That's true for every war.