4 ms·

No, the US fought a war over slavery. The "states' rights" framing of the US Civil War skips over which specific right the southerns states were willing to die

by tyre 4y ago

No, the US fought a war over slavery. The "states' rights" framing of the US Civil War skips over which specific right the southerns states were willing to die for. It wasn't abstract, though it was papered over as such. The history of later southern political leaders (e.g. Richard Russell) confirms that the fundamental issue was the enslavement (ideal, for them) or segregation and oppression of blacks in the US. Which isn't to say that the state vs. federal power struggle of constitutional interpretation isn't still happening. These cases rise to the SCOTUS regularly. The US Civil War, however, wasn't that.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> No, the US fought a war over slavery. Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive. I find your argument to be overly concerned with injustice of slavery. No one is defending it. And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive In the abstract, they are not. Its just that the slavery explanation is factually true and the other is false, though it represents part of one sides propaganda (and more strongly that of the retrospective sympathizers of that side than the actual side, which was quite explicit about slavery specifically as the motivation.)
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s mutually exclusive because it wasn’t the internal rights of individual states that set off the civil war, but the question of which way western states would be. In other words southern states wanted to impose rules on the union outside their borders. Florida trying to tell California what to do is by definition not a states rights issue.
- sidlls 4y ago
  The context is important: southern states were fighting specifically for the right to continue to enslave people. Any argument that doesn't focus on slavery in the context of the civil war we had isn't valid, or at least is incomplete, because it elides the reason for the war in the first place.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    So I've been a big fan of studying warfare in all it's dimensions throughout my life, including the causes of various conflicts, one thing I gave come to realize is that we talk about "the reason" for a war or "the cause" but there really isn't a single cause or reason, because for a war to happen you have to have thousands of people willing to march off and die and each of them have their own reasons and their own cause they were fighting for. I mean for Johnny Scott who marched off to war the reason for the war for him was to win a medal so Size Bradshaw will finally love him. Or the Crusades there were probably plenty of people who the war was about going and fighting for absolution of their sins by reclaiming the holy land. At the end of the day there are as many causes for the war as there are people participating, there can be various factors that led to the outbreak of the war, and sometimes we are lucky and they are clear cut, but often there will be several different prominent factors and trying to attribute the war to any one of them is just historical masturbatory navel gazing, or more insidiously trying to rewrite history to fit an agenda. So those who claim the Civil War was only about slavery are just as disingenuous as those who claim the Civil war was only about states rights. Ultimately these were both major contributing factors and trying to attach primacy to one of them is unproductive and pointless. If you want a perfect example go ahead and tell me what caused WW1.
    - sidlls 4y ago
      You're conflating a number of completely unrelated items, at least: individual motivations, catalysts, and the broad-strokes reasons a group fights in a war. The civil war was fought because the southern states wanted to maintain their slave economy. It is as clear, cut and dried as that. Individual southerners may have fought for glory, for Suzy to love them, for money, or for any other reason, but the prosecutors of the war effort for the south did it because their economy was dependent on slaves and they wanted that to continue. It's not disingenuous to state that.
      - kneebonian 4y ago
        Your wrong. The Civil war was fought because the confederate states of America fired on Fort Sumter, the establishment of the confederacy the freeing of the slaves all of those happened as a consequence or prior to the actual war. If you want to get that reductive than I am right. The Civil war happened because the Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter and everything else was ancillary. Just like WW1 happened because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand got assassinated. Youre argument is overly reductive and your ignorant of history
- fineIllregister 4y ago
  > And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states. To add to the sibling comments, the southern states hated states' rights when northern states were liberating escaped slaves within their jurisdiction. The Fugitive Slave Act immediately destroys any argument that the Civil War was about states' rights.
Spooky23 4y ago
Like most complex things, there’s no one magical simple answer. States rights was a huge deal from day one, to the point that the mostly forgotten original government of the United States was a confederation of nominally sovereign states, almost EU style. Under the Articles of Confederation, the US government was very weak. Slavery was essential to southern land barons. It was not essential to northern industrialists, who were better off with immigrant labor. The issue at the end of the day is that Southern wealth was largely defined by chattel slaves - they were the human equivalent of industrial equipment. End of the day, it was about amoral consideration of preserving wealth above all else. (A lesson for any era certainly) The problem was that the writing was on the wall - machines would replace slaves. But the owners of these big slave estates needed the political power to keep it going long enough to pivot to something new — the vision as I understand it was to build the west with slavery and realize imperialist visions with slavery in Latin America. Wrapping this craven nonsense in high minded ideals was key for support and to get soldiers. Johnny Reb wasn’t dying for his slaves, for the most part these guys were victims of slavery in a sense as well as the wages for working class people were suppressed by enslaved people. It’s important to fight lost cause bullshit. But the path to victory is rejecting the notion of slavery attacking the moral failure of slavery and association with it. Bikeshedding over trivia is like arguing with gun nerds over the nuances of firearms.
AlbertCory 4y ago
It ended up being about slavery (with the Emancipation Proclamation), and slavery was the root cause for the hatred between the states. They were also very different societies. Almost no immigrants moved to the South, for instance, and there wasn't nearly as much industry. As another thread points out, if slavery was prohibited in all the new states from the West, it would be game over in Congress, and the slave states knew it. Hence the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That said: "save the Union" was a much bigger motivator for Union soldiers than "abolish slavery." That's what made them volunteer. For the Southern soldiers who mostly did not own any slaves, it was more "defending our homes and our way of life" than "states' rights." In other words, it's more nuanced than you present.
flagsrule 4y ago
The civil war was not fought over slavery. The union chose to free the slaves because it hurt the south economically more than it hurt the north economically.
- ffggffggj 4y ago
  Sorry, this is simply not true. The declarations of secession explicitly spell this out. You are welcome to read them yourself, here is one for example https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp Mississippi’s is even more explicit https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp - “Our position is thoroughly identified with slavery — the greatest material interest of the world” The civil war was fought because slave states wanted to force slavery on other parts of our country, outside their own borders.

by tyre 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

> No, the US fought a war over slavery. Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive. I find your argument to be overly concerned with injustice of slavery. No one is defending it. And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive In the abstract, they are not. Its just that the slavery explanation is factually true and the other is false, though it represents part of one sides propaganda (and more strongly that of the retrospective sympathizers of that side than the actual side, which was quite explicit about slavery specifically as the motivation.)
Retric 4y ago
It’s mutually exclusive because it wasn’t the internal rights of individual states that set off the civil war, but the question of which way western states would be. In other words southern states wanted to impose rules on the union outside their borders. Florida trying to tell California what to do is by definition not a states rights issue.
sidlls 4y ago
The context is important: southern states were fighting specifically for the right to continue to enslave people. Any argument that doesn't focus on slavery in the context of the civil war we had isn't valid, or at least is incomplete, because it elides the reason for the war in the first place.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  So I've been a big fan of studying warfare in all it's dimensions throughout my life, including the causes of various conflicts, one thing I gave come to realize is that we talk about "the reason" for a war or "the cause" but there really isn't a single cause or reason, because for a war to happen you have to have thousands of people willing to march off and die and each of them have their own reasons and their own cause they were fighting for. I mean for Johnny Scott who marched off to war the reason for the war for him was to win a medal so Size Bradshaw will finally love him. Or the Crusades there were probably plenty of people who the war was about going and fighting for absolution of their sins by reclaiming the holy land. At the end of the day there are as many causes for the war as there are people participating, there can be various factors that led to the outbreak of the war, and sometimes we are lucky and they are clear cut, but often there will be several different prominent factors and trying to attribute the war to any one of them is just historical masturbatory navel gazing, or more insidiously trying to rewrite history to fit an agenda. So those who claim the Civil War was only about slavery are just as disingenuous as those who claim the Civil war was only about states rights. Ultimately these were both major contributing factors and trying to attach primacy to one of them is unproductive and pointless. If you want a perfect example go ahead and tell me what caused WW1.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    You're conflating a number of completely unrelated items, at least: individual motivations, catalysts, and the broad-strokes reasons a group fights in a war. The civil war was fought because the southern states wanted to maintain their slave economy. It is as clear, cut and dried as that. Individual southerners may have fought for glory, for Suzy to love them, for money, or for any other reason, but the prosecutors of the war effort for the south did it because their economy was dependent on slaves and they wanted that to continue. It's not disingenuous to state that.
    - kneebonian 4y ago
      Your wrong. The Civil war was fought because the confederate states of America fired on Fort Sumter, the establishment of the confederacy the freeing of the slaves all of those happened as a consequence or prior to the actual war. If you want to get that reductive than I am right. The Civil war happened because the Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter and everything else was ancillary. Just like WW1 happened because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand got assassinated. Youre argument is overly reductive and your ignorant of history
fineIllregister 4y ago
> And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states. To add to the sibling comments, the southern states hated states' rights when northern states were liberating escaped slaves within their jurisdiction. The Fugitive Slave Act immediately destroys any argument that the Civil War was about states' rights.

Spooky23 4y ago

Like most complex things, there’s no one magical simple answer. States rights was a huge deal from day one, to the point that the mostly forgotten original government of the United States was a confederation of nominally sovereign states, almost EU style. Under the Articles of Confederation, the US government was very weak. Slavery was essential to southern land barons. It was not essential to northern industrialists, who were better off with immigrant labor. The issue at the end of the day is that Southern wealth was largely defined by chattel slaves - they were the human equivalent of industrial equipment. End of the day, it was about amoral consideration of preserving wealth above all else. (A lesson for any era certainly) The problem was that the writing was on the wall - machines would replace slaves. But the owners of these big slave estates needed the political power to keep it going long enough to pivot to something new — the vision as I understand it was to build the west with slavery and realize imperialist visions with slavery in Latin America. Wrapping this craven nonsense in high minded ideals was key for support and to get soldiers. Johnny Reb wasn’t dying for his slaves, for the most part these guys were victims of slavery in a sense as well as the wages for working class people were suppressed by enslaved people. It’s important to fight lost cause bullshit. But the path to victory is rejecting the notion of slavery attacking the moral failure of slavery and association with it. Bikeshedding over trivia is like arguing with gun nerds over the nuances of firearms.

AlbertCory 4y ago

It ended up being about slavery (with the Emancipation Proclamation), and slavery was the root cause for the hatred between the states. They were also very different societies. Almost no immigrants moved to the South, for instance, and there wasn't nearly as much industry. As another thread points out, if slavery was prohibited in all the new states from the West, it would be game over in Congress, and the slave states knew it. Hence the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That said: "save the Union" was a much bigger motivator for Union soldiers than "abolish slavery." That's what made them volunteer. For the Southern soldiers who mostly did not own any slaves, it was more "defending our homes and our way of life" than "states' rights." In other words, it's more nuanced than you present.

flagsrule 4y ago

The civil war was not fought over slavery. The union chose to free the slaves because it hurt the south economically more than it hurt the north economically.

ffggffggj 4y ago
Sorry, this is simply not true. The declarations of secession explicitly spell this out. You are welcome to read them yourself, here is one for example https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp Mississippi’s is even more explicit https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp - “Our position is thoroughly identified with slavery — the greatest material interest of the world” The civil war was fought because slave states wanted to force slavery on other parts of our country, outside their own borders.