flown-the-coop said:
Very simple question. If the slaves had been white, would the civil war have been fought.
Very very basic question.
That's kind of like asking what kind of meat is in a hot dog. Even George Washington knows the answer to this. "Nobody knows".
What kind of a world exists where the South has white and only white slaves? You gotta shake up quite a bit to get there. The answer to your question relies on all of the assumptions that you make to invent a world where there are white slaves in the south. Because you can get there pretty much any way you want to, answering that question is just a game of mental masturbation that doesn't really have any meaning.
But, I will generally play your game.
Yes.
If all of the slaves in the south were Irish gingers instead of black people, the civil war would still have been fought, because, as our nation became more educated, and regular people that could read
would read the declaration of independence and would eventually see that the institution of slavery was 100% contrary to the philosophical foundations of the country. Some states would be addicted to free ginger labor, and would revolt when they saw the institution dying. The Northern states would have zero sympathy for the Southern states, as they would feel morally superior to states that enslaved the ginger, and would take advantage of them at every opportunity to make the more philosophically sophisticated North, who still hated gingers but just didn't enslave them, more prosperous at the expense of the ginger enslaving south. This would be acceptable to the North because ginger slavery was so distasteful. This would explode into a powder keg, and civil war would have broken out.
