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Comment by dontlaugh | Hacker News Reader

The US civil war was primarily over different modes of production, not slavery directly.

The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.

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Why are you trying to white wash the civil war? It was fought over slavery. That is what the declarations of independence signed by the confederate states actually say. They spell it out.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...

Whitewashing the Civil War as grandparent post did was in error, but don’t let the evils of slavery blind you to the leadership’s more immediate, stated war goal: to preserve the Union. Freeing slaves was an ancillary matter at best.

If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.

You misunderstand me. The ruling class in the north didn’t care about slavery, just their own profits. It just so happened that they were in competition with the ruling class in the south, whose wealth depended on slavery.

Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.

> That was in no way just or good or useful

I think the people who stopped being slaves, along with their descendants, would disagree.

It was not good that the slavers were paid, instead of paying reparations to the former slaves.

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