EconAir

    INTRODUCTION This is not a military history of the American Civil War. Instead, it tries to answer three related questions: Was the war inevitable in 1861? Could it have been avoided? What were the alternatives to war?  BACKGROUND America has a peculiar political structure. Major decisions such as abortion, gun laws and legalizing drugs are often made by states, not the national government. The Constitution does not say anything about whether slavery should be abolished or remain legal. So slavery would be legal and protected in the major cotton-producing states. Congress could pass a law outlawing slavery but it couldn’t be enforced in the slave states. In 1861, southern cotton production was important to the northern economy. Cotton textile production was the largest industry in the north. New York City handled most of the distribution of the cotton crop and much of the financing of exports to Europe. Cotton was also by far America’s largest export. (For more on the...

  Colonial Farm Kitchen. Notice clock in the corner. American Colonial History, 1607-1775   Preliminary Comments   Between 1607 and 1775 about 550,000 – 600,000 Europeans migrated to the American colonies. Most American families were immigrants (or refugees) or had recent immigrant pasts. They were risk-takers. They left long-settled communities and societies to get on small, crowded sailing ships to make the dangerous 3,000 voyage to a new land that was mostly wilderness. Many died. They had to adapt to a new, frontier environment. They had to “tame the howling wilderness.” A high percent of the European immigrants in this period were from England, Scotland, and Scots from Northern Ireland. Almost all were Protestants.   Emigrants from England and Scotland came over in four “waves.” They were four distinctly different groups of people from different areas of the English isles.   To understand why these four groups left England and Scotland, at different times, ...