Essay Database

Jefferson Davis stated in the pre-Civil War years to a Northern audience, “You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery... Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country,” (Davis, The Irrepressible Conflict, 447). The Northerners had not freed the slaves for moral issues; the white majority did not have anything but its own economic …

…made, but the whites did not take the time after 1866 to abolish the prejudice that came with slavery, giving testimony to theory that the North engaged in the Civil War for economic, not moral reasons. The application of racism after the Civil War was just as rampant, but much more subtle than before the Civil War, making it much more difficult to confront, and resulting in a century of unequal education, inferior treatment and segregation.