Though slavery became the symbol over which
the Civil War was fought after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, prior to that, the grounds
for war were not so much slavery as that the North fought to preserve the Union of the entire
country while the South fought to preserve a way of life.
The South was very
much an agricultural entity. The culture revolved around agrarian lifestyle or the maintaining
of cultivated land. Huge plantation owners had acres of land to cultivate and maintain without
enough laborers to maintain it. While the North had a much higher population twice the size of
the south, its culture revolved around a more mechanized lifestyle. Over 90% of all industries
of all types in the entire country existed in the North as did most of the railroad system. The
only way the South could maintain the large plantations and exist as a mainly agriculturally
sustained economy was to maintain slave use. To do that, they must win the Civil War.
In short, the South wanted to win the Civil War to maintain their way of life. The only
way they knew to maintain the huge plantations without having the population and mechanization
that the North had, was to utilize slave labor.
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