Well slap my face and call me Spanky, did ya’ll know that New Yawk almost became part of the Confederacy? https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/draft-riots
Northeast was teeming with immigrants. Most without work or having menial work only,last thing they wanted was to have the employment market flooded with 2 million newly freed unemployed unskilled workers.
Yeah, there’s that but the thing I was pointing out was because of the economic crash that N. York would be facing due to a discontinuance of product from the south, there was some talk of the state joining the confederacy. The then Mayor of New York, Fernando Wood (dem) attempted to unite the party into joining the Confederacy. Nearly half of New York’s economy depended on southern imports and nearly all of the mills in New York and New England depended on ......cotton from the south. In truth, without the newly formed republican party’s intervention, chances are that the democratic party led by Mayor Wood might have been able to convince the powers that be to cede from the Union just from the standpoint of economics.
Britain sided with the Confederacy because it lost 90% of its cotton trade and thousands in the north west(uk)lost their jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_American_Civil_War
So, in a capitalist kind of way, it makes sense to join in where the best market can be attained. If New York had joined the Confederacy, the deep water harbor would have been made available for trade from the south and the export market. The only other deep water ports were in New Orleans, N. Carolina and I think Virginia. During the war, the Union broke maritime law and blockaded the southern ports with ships coming from the northern deep water ports. If New York had ceded, then that port as well as the southern ports would have been open for business to the UK and wherever else. As a Union asset, New York had several forts built and ready for a southern onslaught and with the state’s conscription policy on immigrants, N. York was a veritable fortress and a valuable asset both economically and militarily. Just think, with everything New York had to offer, if it had ceded and joined the Confederacy, it might have been all the south needed to actually create and maintain the Confederate States of America.
Some people are quick to say the Civil War was fought to "Free the Slaves". This was not the true reason. It was President Lincoln's decision to fight the War to "Preserve the Union". Hal
Yup. He has been quoted as stating that he was agnostic on the issue of slavery, and would have kept the institution if doing so would have held the country together as one nation. Lots of Civil Was buffs here in Virginia. I know some who go metal detecting and unearth some fascinating (in a macabre way) stuff.
Where? How? I've yet to go metal detecting on my land to any degree (I'm a little bit away from a large battlefield), but my metal detector is a low-end consumer model. It won't detect very deep.