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To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A state’s right to what? And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and no

by pimmen 8y ago

To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A state’s right to what? And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.

mikestew 8y ago
A state’s right to what? The articles of succession of the individual confederate states can answer that question for you. I’ll save you some reading: it’s what you think it is.
- albntomat0 8y ago
  It's in the second sentence of the declaration of secession for Mississippi. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." [0] [0]: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Second paragraph of the Texas declaration: "maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits".
    - justin66 8y ago
      South Carolina's declaration makes it clear what it's all about while kind of torpedoing the idea that they were champions of "states' rights" as it's presented today, a struggle of smaller states against a dominant central power. They wanted very much for the states, the Northern states in particular, to obey the federal power. They just wanted the federal power to reflect their priorities. No bonus points for guessing what type of disobedience they found particularly troublesome. The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States. The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
- Frondo 8y ago
  The Confederate Constitution also explicitly preserved slavery: > Article I Section 9(4) > No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed. And, unsurprisingly, the politicians of the time were much less saccharine about states' rights and other garbage, like the guy who said: "We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel." This is all from this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitutio...
ddebernardy 8y ago
You'll want to check out the "Lost Cause" narrative, which used to be (still is?) deeply entrenched in the South: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
chrismeller 8y ago
You are correct that slavery was the "trigger", but just as it shouldn't be purely about states' rights it also shouldn't be purely about slavery. It's more complex than that and including the discussion on states' rights sets the groundwork to understand a lot of the attitudes still present in the South about limited power and government (not just Federal) overreach in general.
- bhickey 8y ago
  The states' rights narrative has as much historical basis as the stab-in-the-back myth.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  It seems that without the catalyst of slavery, and the vitriol towards blacks and the idea that they might obtain equal rights, was probably the only way these issues of states rights would have come to war.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    I think the history of the world paints a different picture. Worldwide, and since our earliest recordings of history, governments have tried to expand themselves to encompass ever greater regions and ultimately grant themselves ever more expansive power. And invariably there is a backlash, frequently a war, and then a dissolution before another great power emerges and starts combining the disparate pieces into a new whole to repeat the entire process all over again. The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution. The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck
michaelt 8y ago
If you wanted to apply an interpretation that was extremely generous to the confederate states (for the sake of understanding people who say such things) you could make a comparison to the EU. The EU has 'union' right there in its name, but it isn't a single country and there are a bunch of things it doesn't try to homogenise. Every time the EU broadens its control over member countries, there are mutterings about sovereignty until one day, something like Brexit happens. No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" they say "Britain should leave the EU because of its ever-expanding infringement on our sovereignty; an illustrative example of this is the proposed ban on high power kettles" The "states' rights" claim is the same: that it was about the ever-expanding powers of the federal government, and slavery was just an illustrative example of such an expansion. Of course, as albntomat0 points out the Mississippi declaration of secession supports slavery in the second sentence, so what I just said has a big dose of historical revisionism.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  > No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" I mean, that sort of (usually untrue; your example has never even been considered by the EU and would make no sense) trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    As with modern elections and surely the civil war, people tend to over-value publicly visible campaigning (and the subjects thereof) as reasons for outcomes they don't understand. Since justifications can't easily be quantified, assumptions based on the most visible rhetoric tend to get made.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    your example has never even been considered by the EU [...] trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign. My post didn't say I was for or against Brexit; rather, I described a possible mindset of someone who was pro-Brexit, to illuminate my proud-soverignty-of-states-within-larger-unions analogy. I'm glad to hear you found my illustration of a Brexiter's rationale plausible!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
huffmsa 8y ago
A State's right to all Powers not enumerated in the Constitution (10A). That and the Confederate States tried to pull a 1776, since they didn't have a single representative who polled for Lincoln in the EC, the Union states had effective super majorities in Congress, ergo time to form their own system of government, representative of themselves. They just weren't expecting Sherman.
mannykannot 8y ago
The southern states were all in favor of federal power over states in the matter of the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the states' rights story only picked up momentum after it became clear that the federal government was not, in practice, going to enforce those acts on those states that opposed them.
brightball 8y ago
For what it’s worth, I spent a lot of time studying the CW for the past few years as a hobby. The states rights thing came down to equal enforcement of federal policy. Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias. This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while most spending benefited the north. The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that nobody on either side wants to talk about. The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years ago or not, we still feel the effects today.
- russdill 8y ago
  Sure, states always have had causes against the federal government. But their declaration of causes didn't include anything but issues surrounding slavery. https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachingushistory.org/lessons/DecofImCauses.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachi...
  - brightball 8y ago
    The SC declaration was a bit more nuanced. You’re right that the other 3 declarations were almost entirely about slavery though. There’s a breakdown here: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secessio... Also, fwiw, that site used to be civilwar.org. I’m not sure when it was rebranded.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      One might suspect that SC was a bit more savvy in how it presented its case to the world. Britain, a major trading party for the southern states (and having been as guilty as the US in establishing and profiting from slavery in the Americas, and was still profiting indirectly), had by then abolished slavery in its own colonies, and was divided in its attitude to the Confederacy. Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the majority.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You're creating a distinction here that does not exist in any shape or fashion, except for size. The difference between a state government and a federal government is simply over the scope of their decisions. In other words a federal government is no more guaranteed to make good decisions than a state government bad. The exact same sort of powers that enabled the US federal government to abolish slavery are the same sort that enabled governments time immemorial to enforce it. In contemporary times it's the same power that enabled the Nazis to enact their agenda on a national level. Many people try to convince themselves that such wrongs might never happen again on a national level, but is there any logic for this? To me it seems to be simply cognitive dissonance. So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.

by pimmen 8y ago

To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A state’s right to what? And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.

mikestew 8y ago

A state’s right to what? The articles of succession of the individual confederate states can answer that question for you. I’ll save you some reading: it’s what you think it is.

albntomat0 8y ago
It's in the second sentence of the declaration of secession for Mississippi. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." [0] [0]: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Second paragraph of the Texas declaration: "maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits".
  - justin66 8y ago
    South Carolina's declaration makes it clear what it's all about while kind of torpedoing the idea that they were champions of "states' rights" as it's presented today, a struggle of smaller states against a dominant central power. They wanted very much for the states, the Northern states in particular, to obey the federal power. They just wanted the federal power to reflect their priorities. No bonus points for guessing what type of disobedience they found particularly troublesome. The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States. The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
Frondo 8y ago
The Confederate Constitution also explicitly preserved slavery: > Article I Section 9(4) > No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed. And, unsurprisingly, the politicians of the time were much less saccharine about states' rights and other garbage, like the guy who said: "We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel." This is all from this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitutio...

ddebernardy 8y ago

You'll want to check out the "Lost Cause" narrative, which used to be (still is?) deeply entrenched in the South: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

chrismeller 8y ago

You are correct that slavery was the "trigger", but just as it shouldn't be purely about states' rights it also shouldn't be purely about slavery. It's more complex than that and including the discussion on states' rights sets the groundwork to understand a lot of the attitudes still present in the South about limited power and government (not just Federal) overreach in general.

bhickey 8y ago
The states' rights narrative has as much historical basis as the stab-in-the-back myth.
jjeaff 8y ago
It seems that without the catalyst of slavery, and the vitriol towards blacks and the idea that they might obtain equal rights, was probably the only way these issues of states rights would have come to war.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I think the history of the world paints a different picture. Worldwide, and since our earliest recordings of history, governments have tried to expand themselves to encompass ever greater regions and ultimately grant themselves ever more expansive power. And invariably there is a backlash, frequently a war, and then a dissolution before another great power emerges and starts combining the disparate pieces into a new whole to repeat the entire process all over again. The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution. The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck

michaelt 8y ago

If you wanted to apply an interpretation that was extremely generous to the confederate states (for the sake of understanding people who say such things) you could make a comparison to the EU. The EU has 'union' right there in its name, but it isn't a single country and there are a bunch of things it doesn't try to homogenise. Every time the EU broadens its control over member countries, there are mutterings about sovereignty until one day, something like Brexit happens. No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" they say "Britain should leave the EU because of its ever-expanding infringement on our sovereignty; an illustrative example of this is the proposed ban on high power kettles" The "states' rights" claim is the same: that it was about the ever-expanding powers of the federal government, and slavery was just an illustrative example of such an expansion. Of course, as albntomat0 points out the Mississippi declaration of secession supports slavery in the second sentence, so what I just said has a big dose of historical revisionism.

rsynnott 8y ago
> No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" I mean, that sort of (usually untrue; your example has never even been considered by the EU and would make no sense) trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign.
- kodablah 8y ago
  As with modern elections and surely the civil war, people tend to over-value publicly visible campaigning (and the subjects thereof) as reasons for outcomes they don't understand. Since justifications can't easily be quantified, assumptions based on the most visible rhetoric tend to get made.
- michaelt 8y ago
  your example has never even been considered by the EU [...] trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign. My post didn't say I was for or against Brexit; rather, I described a possible mindset of someone who was pro-Brexit, to illuminate my proud-soverignty-of-states-within-larger-unions analogy. I'm glad to hear you found my illustration of a Brexiter's rationale plausible!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

huffmsa 8y ago

A State's right to all Powers not enumerated in the Constitution (10A). That and the Confederate States tried to pull a 1776, since they didn't have a single representative who polled for Lincoln in the EC, the Union states had effective super majorities in Congress, ergo time to form their own system of government, representative of themselves. They just weren't expecting Sherman.

mannykannot 8y ago

The southern states were all in favor of federal power over states in the matter of the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the states' rights story only picked up momentum after it became clear that the federal government was not, in practice, going to enforce those acts on those states that opposed them.

brightball 8y ago

For what it’s worth, I spent a lot of time studying the CW for the past few years as a hobby. The states rights thing came down to equal enforcement of federal policy. Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias. This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while most spending benefited the north. The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that nobody on either side wants to talk about. The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years ago or not, we still feel the effects today.

russdill 8y ago
Sure, states always have had causes against the federal government. But their declaration of causes didn't include anything but issues surrounding slavery. https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachingushistory.org/lessons/DecofImCauses.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachi...
- brightball 8y ago
  The SC declaration was a bit more nuanced. You’re right that the other 3 declarations were almost entirely about slavery though. There’s a breakdown here: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secessio... Also, fwiw, that site used to be civilwar.org. I’m not sure when it was rebranded.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    One might suspect that SC was a bit more savvy in how it presented its case to the world. Britain, a major trading party for the southern states (and having been as guilty as the US in establishing and profiting from slavery in the Americas, and was still profiting indirectly), had by then abolished slavery in its own colonies, and was divided in its attitude to the Confederacy. Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the majority.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

You're creating a distinction here that does not exist in any shape or fashion, except for size. The difference between a state government and a federal government is simply over the scope of their decisions. In other words a federal government is no more guaranteed to make good decisions than a state government bad. The exact same sort of powers that enabled the US federal government to abolish slavery are the same sort that enabled governments time immemorial to enforce it. In contemporary times it's the same power that enabled the Nazis to enact their agenda on a national level. Many people try to convince themselves that such wrongs might never happen again on a national level, but is there any logic for this? To me it seems to be simply cognitive dissonance. So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.