It is well known that a graduate student is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
But who knew that the American soldier can be a machine for converting coffee into freedom?
But who knew that the American soldier can be a machine for converting coffee into freedom?
This is a variation on a quote often attributed to Paul Erdős, but supposedly it's actually by his colleague Alfréd Rényi: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." [1] [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfr%C3%A9d_R%C3%A9nyi#Quotatio...
[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Misattributed
Or perhaps if you define freedom precisely as that which you fight for in the name of America.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
(emphasis mine)
It's not an either-or situation. The Civil War was about some states having the right to do things that other states found immoral. In that way, if it hadn't been slavery, it'd been something else. States' rights was the principle, but the fuel that the fire burned was slavery.
I'm happy that it ended the way it did, but I see no need to demonize the south or glorify the north. Slavery was unfinished business from the founding that caused hard feelings for decades. Both sides were eager for a fight to finish it, and that's what they got.
Once you move beyond the moral issue, it's pretty obvious that what was going on was that a rural, agrarian, spread-out country was becoming a centralized industrial one. This was the true benefit of the war: taking the nation into the modern age. Slavery is just a red herring. A moral crusade tacked on to a pre-existing war of consolidation.
This is another can of worms. Once the federal government concentrated its power and became more centralized, one of its first acts was subsidizing the railroads, passing the high distribution costs of large, centralized industrial firms on to taxpayers.
This effectively crowded out more decentralized methods of production that could have been more effective, using networks of small rails or canals to more cheaply distribute local goods, for example. The concentration of capital of centralized industries continued to increase under this regime, with the state being used as a blunt force instrument to distribute external costs of large industrial firms to the public.
This relationship between the state and industry continued to mutate into the corporatism we have today, with the corporate form now being massively privileged and protected by the state through subsidizing infrastructure (transportation, communications, etc.), limiting legal liability, tariffs, patents, copyrights, etc. The state acts as a blunt force instrument for concentrating capital in the hands of a few, on behalf of legal fictions called corporations.
This is the modern age, and in many ways it seems like there are more slaves today than there were before, despite the so-called efficiencies of centralized industry.
If you're interested, Kevin Carson puts forth a critical survey of orthodox views on economies of scale in Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, refuting proponents of centralized industry such as Joseph Schumpeter, JK Galbraith, and Alfred Chandler. He provides a strong argument for decentralizing industry as a way to truly lower real distribution costs, by stripping away the many privileges afforded to corporate forms by the state, in preference of freed markets and bringing more wealth into local economies.
The issue was almost entirely economic, and the Southern states couldn't get enough representation in Congress to push through favorable legislation that would have protected them, while Northern states enjoyed considerable industrial protectionism for their economies. Even then, the economics of the situation often made it cheaper to import goods and agricultural products from the better developed European economies than to make and grow things domestically. Without favorable import tariffs, the South had to offset the price differential of European imports. Setting tariffs at the state level would have had no effect since the market competition was in other states.
There's tons of other issues, and a read through of the CSA Constitution can be a really enlightening experience to fully understand the pressures that lead to the civil war.
Among the mistakes the South made, they underestimated the advance of industrialization and the economics of mechanization. If the South had invested in these modernities instead of fighting them, they could have had mechanized agriculture and wouldn't have needed zero-cost labor to do the work.
Another bit of historic timing, the West was opening up and in just a few decades, highly mechanized farming moved profitable agribusiness to there leaving the South without even their own principle economic activity. Being more compliant, the West was also able to better negotiate farming subsidies, a topic still highly controversial today.
Reading that, I was struck by the eerie parallels to many contemporary corporations I see in my consulting work that eschew investing into automation, organizational and other advances and instead focus tremendous managerial efforts and time upon driving labor costs towards zero.
Being a Southerner, I think the view that the civil war was fought over states' rights is the romantic view.
Anyway, the two really aren't mutually exclusive, it was both.
And no, I don't define freedom in such a dumb way, why would I?
P.S. Properly speaking, only individuals have rights. States do not have rights, neither does the federal government. Of course this was not understood fully by the Founding Fathers and it's also not true in a legal sense, only a moral one.