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?
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.