Wells Hall Off Topic Board

Can anyone disprove Nugent's statement? How do you know if America would have been better off or worse off if the South won? We will never know, really. Not that outrageous of a statement.

Nuge is a rock legend in the same way that you are an accomplished scholar.

Dbl post

Yes we can disprove it, because as previously stated in this thread, if the South had one, there wouldn't have been an America as we know it, there would have been (at least) 2 separate countries.

This. You can't assume anything really as we know of it today. World history would have been altered if the South won. We can get in pretty solid guesses to what the conditions of the treaty would have been and whatnot, but we can't be for certain.

The ignorant person appears to be you. Preserving slavery was the reason stated in all the secession documents written by the southern states. At one point, yes slavery did seem to be fading in the 1840's, but the invention of the cotton gin made cotton production much easier and the demand for cotton grew so much that slavery was increased to meet the demand. Cotton was still being hand picked and the expansion of the cotton fields demanded more hands. If a machine had been around at the time that could pick the cotton as well as process it, then slavery would have eventually died out on it's own. But that was not the case.

Whether or not slavery would have declined or continued if there was no war is debatable. Yes the cotton gin increased demand for slaves, but the South was running out of land and had to continue to move westward to more fertile soil. The southeastern soil for short staple cotton was rapidly being used up.

I personally think the north should have let the south secede from the Union.