I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?
I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?
While the Southern states were ultimately fighting for slavery as an institution, the question the war was trying to answer wasn’t whether states can have slavery; it’s whether states can secede. If the North was willing to accept secession (which would’ve been a massive mistake don’t get me wrong) the war wouldn’t have happened. The Southern proposition that made the North go to war was, at least to my shallow understanding, “I’ll make my own Union with blackjack and (slave) hookers”, not “I wanna keep owning slaves”.
It was “I’ll make my own Union with slaves.” Explicitly. It was written into the secession documents of every single Confederate state, clearly and in no uncertain terms, that the reason for secession was specifically to maintain and defend the institution of slavery. Period, end of.
Yeah obviously. I think I made that clear enough. I mean I put “slave” right there.
On this point it makes sense people are eager to explicitly identify slave owning as the primary driver for secession, because it’s the truth and there is still an active attempt to cover it up
The lost cause argument is something racist losers came up with after the war where they try to say it was more about states rights (and oh by the way slavery wasn’t so bad, many slaves like being slaves)
Some schools still teach this, I went to a “Northern” school and still had textbooks making this argument.
Your post seems to echo this by saying the South’s main thing was they wanted to be separate, even though that happened to include slavery, there were other reasons too. That’s not the case. When they seceded the south explicitly identified slavery as THE reason why they were doing it.
If so let me restate/reclarify: The South mainly or exclusively fought because they wanted to defend and further slavery as an institution (not even own states themselves; that’s a charitable way of putting it). However, the North didn’t give a shit about the South owning slaves; they just didn’t want them to secede and why both sides came to blows. To the North the slavery thing was kinda bad but really not the point; what they wanted to do is (to oversimplify) keep the South in the Union. That’s what I was trying to say.
I would just say that the key part to include is that the North knew slavery needed to die on the vine and was uninterested in helping the South preserve it, specifically by opposing the addition of new slave states, or at least abandoning the notion that the two should be intentionally kept in balance.
So nominally, yeah, few with any influence were proposing emancipation, and to be clear almost every white person in the country was super racist by modern standards, but slavery was doomed over the medium- to long-term. The South could see that the writing was on the wall, so they decided it was time to shoot their shot to preserve slavery, in a form particularly at odds with the world around it by the way, for as long as possible, and secession was the only viable path for them. No other issue of the day would have driven any significant region of the country to secede, though ironically if it had, no other issue would have given the opponents the moral high-ground like slavery did.
The American Civil war began with a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. At the same time it was never established that you can opt out of the US, that’s generally not how countries work.
The Confederacy would not have happened if it wasn’t for fears of abolishing slavery.
-Wikipedia
It was “states rights for me but not for thee”.
The constitution doesn’t cover if states can leave the union. Until the civil war this was an unresolved question. We now know definitively that you de facto can’t, at least not without permission of the federal government.
If you believe it’s the force of law that resolved the question: it wasn’t, it was the force of violence. The resolution of that question was through the use of force and it’s the use of force that keeps that resolution in place, not the force of law.