> After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws.
This happened because Reconstruction was stopped too early. There was a period, from 1865 to 1876, where blacks were in state-level political office across the South, there were no Jim Crow laws, and the Klan was killed off by focused Federal action.
Secondly, slavery was horrible. Slavery involved much of what went on in the Jim Crow era, plus it meant a slave's life to try to escape the South. The Jim Crow South never managed to track down and forcibly return all the blacks who escaped to Detroit or Harlen.
> complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
No. No. No. No. We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone, not just the people lucky enough to be born rich and white. Read the Cornerstone Speech if you still doubt the primary cause of the Civil War was the CSA's insane determination to hold on to slavery.
> It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
If it's the CSA doing the inventing, there would have been another invention that saved slavery. And another. And so on. (After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?)
Just so you know, I imagined you yelling this and slamming your shoe on the table.
> We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone
What about the first civil war? The one between Great Britain and its american colonies? At the time the colonies had slavery and GB eliminated the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. Why were the slave-holding american colonies justified in rebelling in 1775 but a different group of slave-holding americans not justified in rebelling in 1861? Was that self-determination for all?
How did the Second Civil war ensure self-determination for everyone? The fact is that it did not. Many blacks in the south were denied the right to vote for decades through a variety of tactics including literacy/law tests and threats of outright violence.
> After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?
It's way cheaper to employ people for industrial work than it is to enslave them. Slaves are expensive and are a major capital investment, with significant risk of loss if they become injured or killed on the job. With employees you just replace them when they cannot work and you do not have to invest capital in buying them.
If you believe that the US invaded the south to free the slaves, the only reasonable conclusion is that they failed, at an enormous cost of lives, liberty, and property.
This happened because Reconstruction was stopped too early. There was a period, from 1865 to 1876, where blacks were in state-level political office across the South, there were no Jim Crow laws, and the Klan was killed off by focused Federal action.
Secondly, slavery was horrible. Slavery involved much of what went on in the Jim Crow era, plus it meant a slave's life to try to escape the South. The Jim Crow South never managed to track down and forcibly return all the blacks who escaped to Detroit or Harlen.
> complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
No. No. No. No. We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone, not just the people lucky enough to be born rich and white. Read the Cornerstone Speech if you still doubt the primary cause of the Civil War was the CSA's insane determination to hold on to slavery.
> It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
If it's the CSA doing the inventing, there would have been another invention that saved slavery. And another. And so on. (After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?)