You talk in the book you explain the uh antagonisms and how they manifested themselves between
north and south in the eighteen forties and the eighteen fifties maybe you could go through
that a little bit since that seems to me to be a period of history that our our uh history
courses seem to ignore rather considerably it's an extremely complex time in American
history I think uh there was slavery in all of the the colonies I think except Massachusetts
and there may have been slavery there in the beginning after The Revolution uh the states
uh many of the northern states began to abolish slavery uh it was not abolished in the south
it was on the way out in the south I think because it was uneconomical uh it but all
of s sudden came along cotton and cotton was extremely labor intensive and essentially
you could've planted cotton without slaves uh it there were no tractors of course and
cotton was so huge it became so huge so quickly and you have to remember that by eighteen
fifty nine eighteen sixty cotton accounted for eighty percent of all the trade revenues
of the United States it was enormous and it wasn't just a few planters who were wealthy
everybody was getting rich on cotton the guy that ran the steam boat the lawyers doctors
the druggists the guy who owned a warehouse uh all of these people the the entire south
was driven by cotton I think many people in the south knew that they essentially were
riding on the back of the tiger with slavery but they didn't know what to do about it and
the abolitionists came along beginning in the eighteen twenties uh from New England
and they essentially preached that slavery was uh an inefficient thing and it should
be abolished it but then after four or five years they began to preach that it was a moral
wrong and uh so there was a lot of name calling and it the name calling was not one sided
it went back and forth I mean people wrote pamphlets in those days and uh you also have
to understand that people back then they didn't go around calling names like they do today
because somebody would challenge you to a duel or something and you had to be rather
careful and people were shocked by this and astonished and it escalated and escalated
the war of the newspapers and the 'course the telegraph came along where you've got
instantaneous news all of a sudden and this by the time of the eve of the civil war everybody
was so angry that it all I mean there was a true almost hatred between the North and
the South as a matter of fact there was a a theory that was rather popular at the time
I think Jefferson Davis ascribed to it uh Admiral Semmes and some of the southerners
that that that what they called the Yankees were an entirely different race of people
from them that the they had been descended from the Roundheads of Cromwell in England
and had disturbed the peace back in England murdering King Charles then they disturbed
the peace Holland when they went there and they came back uh went to New England they
were humorless they were money grubbing and so forth this was the theory as opposed to
the Southerners this theory went who were descendants of uh the glorious uh the Restoration
and they landed in Jamestown in Virginia and there was some truth in that uh my ancestors
landed in the in Jamestown they came then migrated to North Carolina and then from North
Carolina when slavery came in they migrated to to the interior states Alabama and Georgia
and Mississippi uh that'ssort of a brief history of it the the uh rancor between the states
that almost by eighteen sixty could've been solved by nothing else but war you point out
that southern what they call southern yeoman the small farmers they had been trained to
think that the northerners were their enemies and evil so they fought like banshees in the
Confederate army even though they didn't own slave and to a significant extent didn't have
that much at stake although as you point out the entire southern economy was pitched around
the plantations so they had something at stake well they did I mean even the small farmers
they they could brow a bale of cotton and make sveral hundred dollars which was worth
a lot of money in those days uh but yeah they had been raised to to to think of yankees
as their enemy and when the northern armies began to invade they began they thought of
this as an invading army very much like uh you know France would've thought of the Germans
as an invading army uh I think Shelby Foote used to love to tell a story about a Union
colonel who was questioning a Confederate private after having captured him and he asked
him why why are you southerners were fighting why are you fighting us we're your fellow
and he said we're fighting you because you're here This excerpt is brought to you by the
Massachusetts School of Law