It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict.
Du Bois argues that despite other stated reasons, the underlying issue of Negro slavery was the fundamental cause of the American Civil War.
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To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.