In the end, it was all about the money

Twenty years ago a friend stopped along a country highway and saw the roadside ditch was full of what looked like real old documents. He gathered them up and brought me the whole pile to look through and see what it they were. It turned out to be some estate papers dating from 1859 having to do with dividing up the assets of a deceased person for the heirs.

I thought the papers were interesting, and put them away. From time to time I would come across them and spend a few minutes studying them. Then one day I gained major insight into the causes of the Civil War.

Consider, the South was rural and agricultural. Just like the early settlers in the North and Mid-Atlantic states, well-to-do landowners in the South depended on slaves for labor - much more than in the Northern states.

What you can see here - the small images with the colored borders - are details that show the relative worth of this family's holdings.

The account reckoning would look something like this:

You can see that most of the family's wealth was in slaves, and no matter what you might think about slavery, for the Federal Government to set your wealth free was too much to take without struggle.

Certainly it had been building for years, and the issue of State's Rights was the pivot - but should a state be able to decide the issue of slavery?

Slavery is wrong, but exists nonetheless, and probably always has, and the purpose of this observation is not to justify slavery as an institution, but to gain some understanding of why the folks in the 'big house' worked so hard to rally the rabble to the cause of Dixie.

Click on the smaller images to see document details.

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