Steven Dundas

“But those who study the Civil War from a purely military perspective tend to miss or gloss over slavery. Many people are more comfortable not dealing with it and with white supremacy and “blur the reality that slavery was at the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the brutal fighting, romanticize our own home- grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan that still intrude on our national life.” Thus, for many Americans, it is far easier to ignore the harsh reality that slavery and racism were at the heart of the Civil War.”
― Steven Dundas

“Northern evangelical Protestantism provided authoritative justification for social causes. It influenced labor safety, workplace reforms, and the establishment of women’s rights organizations; alleviated suffering through voluntary medical societies; and protected exploited women who worked as prostitutes. However, there was a dark side to parts of evangelicalism in the North and South: its religious justifications for slavery, the Mexican- American War, the wars against America’s First Nations, and the conviction that manifest destiny “meant removing (or eliminating) those who stood in the way.”
― Steven Dundas

“Southerners’ claims that slavery was ordained by God “represented not just a deeply held conviction, but a sound ideological strategy for an evangelical age, a posture designed to win support both at home and abroad.”20 Proslavery clergymen bestowed “divine sanction on the South’s peculiar institution,” using the Bible and natural law to marry slavery to Christianity. Southern intransigence regarding its slave- based economy encompassed government, economics, and human rights.”
― Steven Dundas

“The plantation system allowed owners to amass “large concentrations of laborers under the control of a single owner produced goods— sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton— for the free market.” The African slave trade was a major part of the world economy, and “slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth.” In the case of the United States, this was paradoxical, as the country was founded and supposedly dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Thus, by the 1820s, slavery became a source of conflict. Northern businesses prospered from slavery, and “New York merchants, working with their representatives in Southern ports and smaller towns purchased and shipped most of the cotton crop.” Economic gain prompted the growth in slavery, and slaves were essential for profit. As such, “[the] first mass consumer goods in international trade were produced by slaves— sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco. The profits from slavery stimulated the rise of British ports such as Liverpool and Bristol, and the growth of banking, shipbuilding, and insurance, and helped to finance the early industrial revolution. The centrality of slavery to the British empire encouraged an ever- closer identification of freedom with whites and slavery with blacks.”
― Steven Dundas