Originally posted by kbeverina
As you said before, it's all well-documented. Read the articles of secession from the various states. They state outright that they are seceding because of slavery. True, there were many other issues going on, issues that had been boiling for decades. It's certainly not as simplistic as saying the war was all about slavery. Been there, done that with this debate.
But the states were explicit in their secession documents that they were seceding because Lincoln had been elected and they feared he would abolish slavery. Words of the people who did it at the time--not some history professor years later writing a book or thesis or defending his southern pride.
Yes, the war was about states' rights--states' rights to own slaves.
I have to go to sleep (gee, this is addicting)--after all it is late here in the Confederacy--but I want to address this quickly.
Your assertion that the secession movement was solely about protecting the rights to hold slaves is partially correct. For the people who fought the war, and died, it was not at all about slavery, but rather about repelling invasion and determining their own lives.
You must remember--as repellant as we find it today-- until the Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862, slavery was a Constitutionally protected institution. You may want to make a moral argument against slavery--and I would agree with you. But the plantation owners of the South (a very small minority of the southern population), had the law upon their side.
To state that the war was only about a state's right to continue the slave institution is false. States' rights, as a political movement, is about the supremacy of State Government over the Federal Government. This is probably the fundamental cause of the Civil War in addition to the cultural differences that existed between south and north.
Slavery was an institution that supported southern culture--it was not southern culture
itself. Characterizing the Confederacy as merely a bunch of slave holders who want to secure a continued source of free labor is completely inaccurate.
If you read the Confederate Nation as well as many other books on Confederate culture before and during the Civil War, you will see that the south had developed a culture completely different from that of the north. Their desire to govern themselves and determine their own fate was completely in the tradition of the founding fathers of the American Revolution. Every state that seceded did so as a direct result of a popular vote of the citizens of that state. This was a perfect illlustration of representative democracy in action. Subsequent military events notwithstanding, the secession of the southern states was completely legal from a Constitutional democratic perspective. Many legal scholars have shown this to be true--Jefferson Davis, particularly, proved this point in
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
Had the Constitution been worded slightly differently, and had the idea of the Union been not so religious and evangelical in nature, the 600,000 dead would not have died. Lincoln saw his duty fundamentally to be the preservation of the Union. The Confederates understood the Union to be a collective of sovereign states which inherently justifies their right to leave the Union.
Your characterization of this cataclysmic event as mainly being about slavery is an oversimplification of a very complicated historical event.
I do appreciate your engaging me on this discussion on the Civil War. This is particularly of interest to me. My defense of Confederate symbols is meant only as an illustration of what those were meant to be and not what those who stole it want to make it.
