![]() ![]() ![]() The answer turns on which Northerners one examines - common soldiers, female teachers and nurses, free black activists, Ohio Valley politicians, officers in high command - and how one evaluates inherently slippery evidence about motivation. In making this comparison, students will decide. This lesson will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the North and South on the eve of the war. Other historians, meanwhile, claim that white Northerners generally sought to extend freedom by creating a new nation without slavery. The North, fueled by an immigration boom, industrialized, whereas Southern reliance on 'King Cotton' kept them agriculturally tied to the land, and dependent on the institution of chattel slavery. ![]() One loosely defined group of historians argues that most white Northerners aimed primarily to restore the Union: to preserve the nation and not to transform it. Yet historians have debated Northern motivations vigorously over the past few decades, because those motivations tell us a good deal about why the Civil War came, what kind of war it was and what its impact would be upon U.S. Confederates attacked the United States, and the United States fought back. Because Confederates launched the first assaults of the Civil War, and because Confederates so eagerly trumpeted their defenses of slavery, Northern motivations can seem irrelevant. ![]()
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