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I am not very familiar with the American civil war. The way people talk about it seems weird to me though: it is as though the entire southern United States wer

• moussasissoko 6y ago
  James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian says: “Probably 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on the broad questions of what the war was about and what brought it about and what caused it, which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery.”" Look at the secession documents from the states: At the very onset, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” On January 7, 1861, the ordinance signed in Montgomery that “it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the Slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.” On February 2, 1861, Texas declared its decision to be “based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.” On March 9, 1861, Arkansas’s George B. Smoote added a resolution: “Resolved, that the platform on the party known as the Black Republican Party contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race of their country to social and political equality with the whites.” On April 17, 1861 latecomer Virginia, provoked by Lincoln’s raising troops to suppress the already seceded states, declared “Lincoln’s opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” as it cut ties with Washington. Tennessee was the 11th and last, its population divided on secession (eastern Tennesseans generally opposed it), but not on the slave issue.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  If you actually give a fuck then do your own god damn research, Jesus Christ. Entire books have been written about this and you want to be spoonfed a tweet length response that will explain it all to you. Fuck off.
• ralmidani 6y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/confederacy-wasnt-what-you-think/613309 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/confederac...
• matchbok 6y ago
  ...yeah, that's why the war was fought. Don't let confederate apologists change history here. Every confederate state had "slavery" in their constitutions.
• surfpel 6y ago
  Slavery was a huge economic driver as the economy of the south was largely agricultural. > Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? States rights was a factor that was emphasized later. Historical documents indicate that the war was explicitly over slavery.
• monocasa 6y ago
  It was very much over slavery. The entire economic system of the south depended on chattel slavery, and the south didn't really recover economically for a century. And despite the idea of it being over the abstract idea of "states' rights", the confederate constitution mainly reduced a state's right to make choices for itself. It was pretty much a clone of the US constitution, with a clause that states couldn't ban slavery if they wanted to.
  • gentleman11 6y ago
    Why did their economy suffer for a century? You would think the landowning class would lose out badly but that, overall, economic activity would increase. We’re all those farms so badly run that they couldn’t compete once they had to pay wages? Or was money just so concentrated that once slavers lost their slaves, nobody had any money at all?
    • monocasa 6y ago
      They clung to the existing system as much as they could, but the extra steps they had to go through (keeping people as slaves even when it was illegal but hiding it from the relevant officials, the overhead of using prison labor, etc.) wouldn't have made it economically viable even if they didn't have to rebuild a completely destroyed infrastructure on top of that. But it took a long time though for the stored wealth (and associated power structures) to disappear. Around 50 to 75 years. It wasn't until the New Deal investments of the late 1930s (in the entire country, including the south) that the south stared to recover. Before that there were a lot of parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan. A destroyed country with US contractors taking an obscene amount of reconstruction money and not really doing much with it. Locals clinging to their existing way of life including secretly joining brutal militias to enforce the former power structures; some trying to bring "law and order" back to their locality in a distinct power vacuum, some trying to bring back power structures that they had internalized as moralistically correct. That's how the KKK started, with a lot of parallels to ISIS.
      • gentleman11 6y ago
• dsomers 6y ago
  No, it wasn’t a factor that was emphasized later. It’s sometimes a conservative talking point that it was about ‘economics’ or ‘states rights’ but really the economics they were talking about was free labour from slavery, and the states rights they were talking about were the southern states rights to allow slave ownership. Slavery was always the main issue. Anyone saying otherwise is just trying to divert attention from that fact or is totally ignorant or the history.
• theli0nheart 6y ago
  In the 1800s, the North embraced industrialization while the economy of the South continued to depend largely on slave ownership. So, like you guessed, it's not quite race hatred; more like race superiority. Slaveowners didn't hate black people, they liked them a lot, and wanted them to keep working for free. The North was going to take away their free labor, and the folks with money and power in the South didn't quite like that. My guess is that race hatred came later, when the white slaveowners saw their former slaves succeed in business, education, etc., while their former plantations rotted.
• woopwoop 6y ago
  > Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? If anything, the opposite is true. You can read the declarations of secession for the southern states; e.g. see South Carolina's [1]. They seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Surely some people had other reasons to support secession, but this is the primary one. Decades after the war ended, there was a push to deemphasize slavery as a cause for the war for reasons of propaganda and nostalgia. [1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
  • edaemon 6y ago
    There's also the Cornerstone Speech, from the Confederate Vice President Stephens, which is quite plain and explicit regarding slavery and white supremacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
• 1123581321 6y ago
  It was similar in some ways to the unification conflicts happening in Europe in the 19th century. The contentious issues, slavery and tariffs, forced a disagreement about the nature of the Union. There was not a shared sense of identity across the United States, so when Virginia, for example, seceded, Virginians sided with their state. Generally, only the more cosmopolitan upper classes felt conflict between a duty to preserve the union and a state citizenship; the enlisted ranks and home support were more uniformly provincial. In the north, an almost religious belief in the moral and social good of a nationalist Union drove pro-war sentiment (again, similar to other unifications.) It’s an expansive topic; I’d encourage you to pick a few accounts of the era as well as biographies of Lincoln and generals Grant and Lee.
  • gentleman11 6y ago
    Any particular account you would recommend?
    • 1123581321 6y ago
      McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is a great introduction. Grant published his memoirs and they are highly readable.
• ACodeMonkey 6y ago
  The rationale for succession had slavery as a primary factor, but the war was fought for the right of States to leave the union if they wished. Federalism and states rights sentiments are tied up with the symbol of the flag, though it might be more accurately framed as anti-federal government than pro-state government. Importantly though I'm not denying that there are also those who use the flag as a symbol of racial animosity, nor are the two groups completely separate.
• TMWNN 6y ago
  Southern states by and large seceded over fear that the northern states, which outnumbered the south, would outlaw slavery throughout the country. That's clear from most of the declarations that southern states passed to formally state their reasons for leaving the Union. So it's not true, as sometimes claimed, that the primary reason for the war was "states's rights" (well, yes, but the right of a US state to maintain slavery), or "northern capitalists keeping the agrarian south under their heel". But that doesn't explain why the average southern soldier—who didn't own any slaves (that was for the rich planter elite minority), who probably personally knew and possibly were friends with slaves, fought and died for the Confederacy. Claiming that "the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred" is as ridiculous (not saying that you are claiming that; you recognize that such a statement is silly) as stating that "every German soldier in WW2 was a Nazi", which was incorrect on both a literal sense (in terms of being a Nazi Party member) and a figurative sense. Ultimately the average southern soldier fought and died for the same reason the average German soldier did: For his home (and homeland), his family, his friends and comrades, his way of life. Nothing more or less grand than that.
• matwood 6y ago
  There was hatred for sure, but also the fact that the entire southern economy ran on slavery. So there were also economic reasons, but they were based around the free labor provided by slavery.
• tinix 6y ago
  It was mostly about states' rights, and trying to keep the economies propped up, which were supported by cotton and textiles... which were supported by slavery. As soon as Lincoln was elected, without being on any ballots in the south, they knew what was coming (abolition of slavery), and the southern states attempted to secede. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis
• jfengel 6y ago
  The declarations of secession are very explicit that it was about racism and slavery. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati... The racism wasn't a sudden thing. What was new was the movement to ban slavery, especially in new states, which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.) The election of an anti-slavery President was the impetus that turned it into war before he even took office. It's not just about owning slaves, but also the belief that some people are fundamentally an underclass. Poor people didn't own slaves but feared that they would be put in the slaves' position if the slaves were gone. So yes, it's a basic racism that goes back to the beginning. It only seems sudden because the election indicated that the tide of history was against them.
  • williamgrant 6y ago
    Thanks for posting this, I had not previously read the declarations.
  • neonate 6y ago
    I hadn't read these before and, wow. From Mississippi's: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization
  • pseudalopex 6y ago
    > The Constitution still gives extra power to those states. The Three Fifths Compromise gave slave states extra power. The 14th Amendment nullified it. The Senate and Electoral College still give less populous states extra power. Most of those were in the north.
  • rayiner 6y ago
• egypturnash 6y ago
  I grew up in the South and there is a certain amount of propaganda about how it was the evil oppressors of the North who wanted to ruin our beautiful lifestyle, but when you get right down to it this beautiful Southern world was built on the backs of a whole lot of dirt-cheap labor in the form of slaves. All the human traffickers sipping mimosas on the verandah of their gorgeous, tree-lined work camps watching the people they thought of as sub-human animals laboring away wanted to be able to keep doing this, so they sent their kids and the poor people of the South off to die for this. White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans. Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.
  • haram_masala 6y ago
    Indeed, slavery never ended, we just exported it to China.
• deleted 6y ago
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• GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  What's really funny is that the south had more than enough money to reinvest and industrialize. This lack of industrialization is what lost the civil war as they relied on northern factories to produce equipment / weapons. Train supply chains allowed the north to move troops and supplies an order of magnitude faster than the south.
• zeveb 6y ago
  > I couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock. Yeah, it is stomach-churning to us folks with a modern colour-blind sensitivity. It is hard to believe that folks believed that sort of thing. > Economic incentives are perverse Not just that, cultural and partisan factors. We see an echo of that sort of thing with the current lunatic rage against facemasks: it makes absolutely no sense to argue against them, yet … people do. The crazier they are the louder they are. Prior to secession, pro- and anti-slavery advocates eventually lost all respect for one another and lost the ability to compromise. Slaveholders thought that abolitionists literally wanted to see them murdered in their beds (cf. the Haitian Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Pottawatomie massacre, Harper's Ferry), and abolitionists had an equally low opinion. Opinions polarised and ossified. The extremists got more and more vocal, and eventually there was no middle ground. And then everything dissolved into a cataclysm of violence.