So Mississippi is celebrating Confederate History Month

[aujeff11 6,243]

The post office banned this, the congress banned that, damn I didn't realize all of these entities were synonymous with southern states.

I must say, you have a very weak argument. That, or your frustrations should be taken out on the federal government. Whatever the case, with the abundant taxes and tariffs passed down to frustrate the south's agricultural economy, I'm pretty sure the southern harmony in the Federal Govt wasn't all there....

"Even if this were the only means, it is laughable to assert a philosophy of states rights, then to use the federal government to override the laws of Northern states."

The south didn't "use the federal government," lol. Many in the union had slaves as well, even Chief Justice Taney.

[TitanTiger 21,068]

The post office banned this, the congress banned that, damn I didn't realize all of these entities were synonymous with southern states.

Ok, so now is the time to connect the dots between Southern states having congressional power levers in their control and the federal government asserting itself into things that under a states' rights philosophy, should be left to the states. You're being deliberately obtuse not being able to see that.

I must say, you have a very weak argument. That, or your frustrations should be taken out on the federal government. Whatever the case, with the abundant taxes and tariffs passed down to frustrate the south's agricultural economy, I'm pretty sure the southern harmony in the Federal Govt wasn't all there....

As the article homer posted showed, the Southern states had managed to gain control of many power positions in the federal government at the time. It's nonsensical to say I should be mad at "the federal government." Do you not understand how these things work? The federal government was and is made up of representatives from various states. The Southern states managed to gain enough power and influence in the federal government such that they could then use those levers of power to further their primary interest: maintaining the institution of slavery and thus their economic engine. And in using coercive federal power to override the rights of Northern states, they showed themselves to be hypocritical on the issue of states' rights. They wanted the federal government to defer to the states when doing so would allow Southern states to preserve slavery. They wanted the federal government to railroad the states when the rights of a certain state (typically Northern) might endanger slavery.

How is this not getting through?

"Even if this were the only means, it is laughable to assert a philosophy of states rights, then to use the federal government to override the laws of Northern states."

The south didn't "use the federal government," lol. Many in the union had slaves as well, even Chief Justice Taney.

Yes, they did. That they had a sympathetic judge in a slave-holding Union state doesn't change this. If the Southern states truly believed in state sovereignty and limited federal government, the Fugitive Slave Laws would never have been implemented at all.

It is just as I have explained it numerous times: They were for states rights when it suited them, and they were for federal power when it suited them. This shows them to not truly be about states rights at all, but merely using the term to soften their true interest: their investment in the institution of slavery.

[homersapien 12,172]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

the south felt their way of commerce was being trampled on by the majority of the other states. Slavery being the institution at the center and the driving force of its commerce. To say states rights wasn't an issue is idiotic. Equally idiotic, thinking the civil war was fought ONLY because of slavery.

No, Titan is correct. Had slavery not existed the States rights issue wouldn't have existed.

[aujeff11 6,243]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

the south felt their way of commerce was being trampled on by the majority of the other states. Slavery being the institution at the center and the driving force of its commerce. To say states rights wasn't an issue is idiotic. Equally idiotic, thinking the civil war was fought ONLY because of slavery.

No, Titan is correct. Had slavery not existed the States rights issue wouldn't have existed.

South Carolina literally almost went to war with the federal government over disproportionate taxes in 1832

So um, yeah...

[aujeff11 6,243]

The post office banned this, the congress banned that, damn I didn't realize all of these entities were synonymous with southern states.

Ok, so now is the time to connect the dots between Southern states having congressional power levers in their control and the federal government asserting itself into things that under a states' rights philosophy, should be left to the states. You're being deliberately obtuse not being able to see that.

I must say, you have a very weak argument. That, or your frustrations should be taken out on the federal government. Whatever the case, with the abundant taxes and tariffs passed down to frustrate the south's agricultural economy, I'm pretty sure the southern harmony in the Federal Govt wasn't all there....

As the article homer posted showed, the Southern states had managed to gain control of many power positions in the federal government at the time. It's nonsensical to say I should be mad at "the federal government." Do you not understand how these things work? The federal government was and is made up of representatives from various states. The Southern states managed to gain enough power and influence in the federal government such that they could then use those levers of power to further their primary interest: maintaining the institution of slavery and thus their economic engine. And in using coercive federal power to override the rights of Northern states, they showed themselves to be hypocritical on the issue of states' rights. They wanted the federal government to defer to the states when doing so would allow Southern states to preserve slavery. They wanted the federal government to railroad the states when the rights of a certain state (typically Northern) might endanger slavery.

How is this not getting through?

"Even if this were the only means, it is laughable to assert a philosophy of states rights, then to use the federal government to override the laws of Northern states."

The south didn't "use the federal government," lol. Many in the union had slaves as well, even Chief Justice Taney.

Yes, they did. That they had a sympathetic judge in a slave-holding Union state doesn't change this. If the Southern states truly believed in state sovereignty and limited federal government, the Fugitive Slave Laws would never have been implemented at all.

It is just as I have explained it numerous times: They were for states rights when it suited them, and they were for federal power when it suited them. This shows them to not truly be about states rights at all, but merely using the term to soften their true interest: their investment in the institution of slavery.

States rights have been used as a political tool since the founding. I said that five pages ago.The south uses it, the north used it, and the federal govt was and is the enemy every time.

So, um,

...

[aujeff11 6,243]

Since none of you undoubtedly read my link... SMH:

Did the South Control the Federal Government Until 1860?

The claim is frequently made that the South controlled the federal government until the 1860 election, and that therefore the South showed a lack of tolerance and fairness when it seceded in response to Lincoln’s victory. However, anyone who is familiar with American history knows that the South did not control the federal government until 1860. Many Northern politicians and writers trumpeted this myth for political and propaganda purposes. A major component of this myth was that the alleged “Slave Power” in the South was behind the South’s supposed domination of the federal government. Some Northern leaders even claimed there was a “Slave Power conspiracy” to impose slavery on the entire country. When the war ended, Radical Republicans issued dire warnings about the need to crush this supposed Slave Power in order to justify their subjugation and looting of the defeated South.

For one thing, wealthy Southern plantation owners, i.e., the men who allegedly comprised the supposed Slave Power, did not dictate Southern politics. Moreover, they were by no means uniform in their political beliefs. In fact, many affluent planters were Whigs (Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, LSU Press Edition, LSU Press, 1982, pp. 141-142; Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945, p. 453; McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 242). And, as mentioned earlier, some of the wealthiest slaveholders opposed secession. In Georgia, for example, many counties with heavy concentrations of Whig slaveholders voted against secession (McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 242). Randall and Donald pointed out that the plantation aristocracy did not control the South’s political destinies:

Nor is it to be inferred that a plantation “aristocracy” somehow controlled the political destinies of the region, for the current of democracy had eroded the powers of the gentry until “whatever influence the planters exercised over the political action of the common people was of a personal and local nature” [quoting Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, p. 139]. (The Civil War and Reconstruction, pp. 40-41)

Even in the very conservative Deep South state of Mississippi, plantation aristocrats did not dictate political affairs. In discussing Mississippi politics and Jefferson Davis’s political campaigns in that state, Cooper notes the following:

White manhood suffrage had existed since 1832, and the sovereign voters required wooing and intermingling from their prospective officeholders. . . .

This was emphatically not a political world in which rich planters controlled candidates and elections while sipping sherry and juleps in elegant drawing rooms. Energetic campaigning antedated Davis’s entry into the arena and did not diminish during his time as a participant. From 1844 until 1860, Davis participated fully and willingly in the demanding ordeal set up by Mississippi voters for those who wanted their allegiance. (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 106)

Historian Francis Butler Simkins called attention to the democratic reforms that the South began to adopt in the early 1800s:

Facts prove that the states of the Old South, through a series of progressive reforms, conformed to the contemporary definition of democracy as “an equal division of political rights, not of property.” They cast aside the Colonial heritage of suffrage restrictions, property qualifications for officeholding, and unequal apportionment of legislative representation. Kentucky, Maryland, and South Carolina established universal white manhood suffrage by 1810. Popular dissatisfaction with aristocratic privilege caused six Southern states in the 1830s to hold constitutional conventions dedicated to democratic reform. Consequently, property qualifications for voting were abolished in all Southern states except Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana, and for officeholding in all except South Carolina and Louisiana. Progress was also made in the reapportionment of legislative representation to give a more accurate proportion of the seats in the interior counties. In the 1850s constitutional reforms in seven states abolished almost all the remaining aristocratic privileges except in South Carolina. Until after the Civil War that state continued to have governors and Presidential electors chosen by the legislature, and to apportion legislative representation through a combination of property and white population.

These restrictions, however, were not more comprehensive than those prevailing in Massachusetts until 1853 and in Rhode Island until 1888. (A History of the South, pp. 108-109)

If the South truly “controlled” the federal government until 1860, one can only wonder why the federal tariff was never as low as the South wanted it to be, why Congress gave the Northern states a legal monopoly in the lucrative shipbuilding business and why this monopoly was never repealed, why it took ten years for Texas to be admitted as a state, why Cuba was never annexed, how the Missouri Compromise became law in 1820, how the Tariff of Abominations passed Congress in 1828, how the Force Bill passed Congress in 1833, how the tariff act of 1842 passed Congress, how the John Calhoun resolutions of 1847-1848 were all defeated, how the Wilmot Proviso passed the House of Representatives twice, how the Compromise of 1850 was enacted, why Kansas wasn’t admitted as a slave state, why the Missouri Compromise line wasn’t extended to the west coast, and how the draconian Morrill Tariff passed the House in 1860. Some critics claim that Southern congressmen supported the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, but in point of fact most Southern congressmen voted against it (see Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States, pp. 61-62).

It’s true that there were periods when the South had more influence on federal policy than did the North, but there were also periods when this was not the case. At no time did the South control the federal government in terms of doing whatever it wanted. Cooper notes that “after mid-1854 no chance remained for a congressional majority on any initiative marked as a southern measure” (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 284). The South was usually able to block or modify unwanted bills in the Senate, but not always, and the South was frequently unable to defeat unwanted bills in the House. As early as 1819 “the North had built up a decisive majority in the House of Representatives” (Divine et al, editors, America Past and Present, p. 281). Historian John Niven notes that the South continued to lose ground in the House from 1830 to 1840:

The House of Representatives, whose membership was based on the census returns for each state, reflected this growing disparity [between the populations of the North and the South]. Even counting three-fifths of the slave population (as the federal Constitution provided), free states increased their majority from twenty-three seats in 1830 to twenty-nine seats in 1840. The disparity expressed in total seats was 149 representatives from the free states to 88 from the slave states. (The Coming of the Civil War, p. 21)

As for the presidency, Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Harrison, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were all Northern politicians. And who were the Southern presidents? They were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and Zachary Taylor. So the South by no means enjoyed exclusive control of the White House prior to the war. Furthermore, the “Southern” presidents didn’t automatically take the South’s side on all issues, just as the “Northern” presidents didn’t automatically take the North’s side on all issues. For example, President Taylor sided with Northern politicians on crucial aspects of the Compromise of 1850 and also supported the Wilmot Proviso, even though he himself was a slaveholder.

When the South did exercise considerable influence on federal policy, it used that influence toward efforts to reduce taxes, to limit the growth of the federal government, to curb or eliminate harmful protectionist trade policies, to impose fiscal responsibility on federal spending, to abolish the corrupt United States Bank, to preserve our free banking system, to prohibit the use of tax dollars for wasteful corporate welfare schemes, to expand the land area of the United States by acquiring new territory, to preserve the sovereignty of the states, and to enforce a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Under Southern leadership, Texas was finally admitted to the Union and the gigantic land area of the Mexican Cession became American territory. And if the efforts of Southern leaders to acquire Cuba had been successful, that beautiful island would have become an American state, there would have been no Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cuban people wouldn’t be suffering under Fidel Castro’s oppressive Marxist regime (which has been in power for over forty years now).

I’m not saying that Southern politicians did no wrong. For example, the Southern-inspired 1836-1844 gag rule in the House of Representatives preventing debate on petitions to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia was unfortunate, though many Northern congressmen supported the rule as well. The largely Southern-backed Lecompton Constitution for Kansas was admittedly unfair, and fortunately the people of Kansas were eventually able to vote it down. But such cases were the exception, not the rule. Most of the time Southern politicians used their influence to pursue good, sound policies that benefited all citizens.

All Americans should be grateful that most Northern politicians did not get their way during crucial times in the decades leading up to the Civil War. If the Northern Federalists, followed by the Northern Whigs, had been in control of the government during certain key periods before the war, America would be a much smaller country today, and probably a poorer and weaker one. How would things have been different if the Northern Whigs had had their way? Texas would not have become a state. The Mexican War would not have been fought (some Northern Whigs viewed the war as another act of the “Slave Power,” and the Massachusetts legislature declared the war was being fought with “the triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power, and of obtaining the control of the free states”). If the Mexican War had not been waged, the massive land area of the Mexican Cession, which now includes Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, would have remained part of Mexico. With regard to domestic policy, if the Northern Whigs had had their way, the tariff would have been even higher than it was, the federal government would have grown significantly, federal spending would have increased markedly, corporate welfare would have exploded, and our system of free banking would have been destroyed much sooner (the Republicans destroyed it during the Civil War).

If the Northern Federalists had been in power in the early 1800s, the Louisiana Purchase would have been blocked. Fortunately, the Federalists failed in their effort to defeat the purchase, and the Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty on October 20, 1803. The lands acquired by the purchase included parts or all of the present-day states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

In addition, if the Federalist-dominated New England states had had their way, the War of 1812 with Britain may have had a different outcome. The New England states refused to help with the war effort and actually aided the British:

New Englanders refused to cooperate with the war effort. . . . New Englanders carried on a lucrative, though illegal, commerce with the enemy. When the U.S. Treasury appealed for loans to finance the war, wealthy northern merchants failed to respond. (Divine et al, editors, America Past and Present, p. 254)

Historian Kenneth Stampp:

New England Federalists throughout the war regarded the . . . politicians in Washington, not the British, as their mortal enemies. And, having regained political control of all the New England states, they were in a position to translate their angry polemics into defiant deeds.

Federalist governors contested federal calls on the state militias. . . . Federalists discouraged voluntary enlistments. . . . Federalists resisted tax measures and boycotted government loans. . . . Meanwhile, New Englanders defiantly continued to trade with Canada and even furnished supplies to the British fleet. (In Blum and Catton et al, editors, The National Experience, pp. 185-186)

[TitanTiger 21,068]

States rights have been used as a political tool since the founding. I said that five pages ago.The south uses it, the north used it, and the federal govt was and is the enemy every time.

So, um,

But we aren't talking about congressional debates in the 1790s or the 1980s or today. I don't really care about whether other groups ever asserted states' rights. We are talking about a specific time period and a couple of specific issues. We are talking about the claim that the South seceded over some real commitment to a philosophy of states' rights and that the evil federal government was threatening that vs the idea that the South really seceded over one particular "right" and that was to maintain the institution of slavery.

I think the historical record shows the South's belief in states' rights to be hypocritical at best and that the specific use of this label for why they seceded as just a way to hide the ugliness of what the real secession issue was: Slavery. Period. End of sentence. "States' rights" was merely a nicer, nobler sounding euphemism for it.

[aujeff11 6,243]

States rights have been used as a political tool since the founding. I said that five pages ago.The south uses it, the north used it, and the federal govt was and is the enemy every time.

So, um,

But we aren't talking about congressional debates in the 1790s or the 1980s or today. I don't really care about whether other groups ever asserted states' rights. We are talking about a specific time period and a couple of specific issues. We are talking about the claim that the South seceded over some real commitment to a philosophy of states' rights and that the evil federal government was threatening that vs the idea that the South really seceded over one particular "right" and that was to maintain the institution of slavery.

I think the historical record shows the South's belief in states' rights to be hypocritical at best and that the specific use of this label for why they seceded as just a way to hide the ugliness of what the real secession issue was: Slavery. Period. End of sentence. "States' rights" was merely a nicer, nobler sounding euphemism for it.

Just. So. Much. Wrong. In. One.Post

[AUDub 11,784]

States rights have been used as a political tool since the founding. I said that five pages ago.The south uses it, the north used it, and the federal govt was and is the enemy every time.

So, um,

But we aren't talking about congressional debates in the 1790s or the 1980s or today. I don't really care about whether other groups ever asserted states' rights. We are talking about a specific time period and a couple of specific issues. We are talking about the claim that the South seceded over some real commitment to a philosophy of states' rights and that the evil federal government was threatening that vs the idea that the South really seceded over one particular "right" and that was to maintain the institution of slavery.

I think the historical record shows the South's belief in states' rights to be hypocritical at best and that the specific use of this label for why they seceded as just a way to hide the ugliness of what the real secession issue was: Slavery. Period. End of sentence. "States' rights" was merely a nicer, nobler sounding euphemism for it.

Just. So. Much. Wrong. In. One.Post

No. He's not. And if you're going to accuse him of being so you should at least explain, Jeff.

Rich a**holes in the south were butthurt because the north wasn't going to let them keep slaves. It really is that simple. Sure there are other theories, but they only seem credible if you ignore the declarations of secession written by the actual confederate states for the purpose of explaining why they wanted to secede.

[homersapien 12,172]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

On the surface states rights and slavery both adequately show the reason, the states right of course being the right to own slaves.

What's turned most people off to the use of "States rights" as an answer (you too I'm sure) is the reason most people will say states rights instead of slavery is to either evade the slavery issue altogether or to at least downplay it out of some sense of southern guilt.

It's the same as saying wealth & power caused the Civil War, or more accurately the threat of losing that wealth & power caused secession. but since the wealth and power were both built on slave labor, slavery is still the reason.

Unless someone is doing an academic study based on wealth & power to secession fervor or trying to incite new thought into an old thought process, there isn't much reason to say one instead of the other except to deflect.

Well said.

[homersapien 12,172]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

On the surface states rights and slavery both adequately show the reason, the states right of course being the right to own slaves.

What's turned most people off to the use of "States rights" as an answer (you too I'm sure) is the reason most people will say states rights instead of slavery is to either evade the slavery issue altogether or to at least downplay it out of some sense of southern guilt.

It's the same as saying wealth & power caused the Civil War, or more accurately the threat of losing that wealth & power caused secession. but since the wealth and power were both built on slave labor, slavery is still the reason.

Unless someone is doing an academic study based on wealth & power to secession fervor or trying to incite new thought into an old thought process, there isn't much reason to say one instead of the other except to deflect.

The threat of losing their wealth didn't even cause the secession. Many wealthy slaveowners( and remember the resources were highly consecrated) didn't even want to secede from the union. They felt their wealth was safe only in the union. The threat of adding more free states to the union, allowing an overwhelming majority against the south was the reason the south chose to secede... after they exhausted all legal possibilities possible.

Nobody is trying to evade the issue either. We can have a discussion like grown men and discuss things in a reasonable manner. The slaveowners made morally bankrupt choices but I'm arguing that they believed they had the right to make those choices.

But what's your point? They were rich oligarchs. Secession was never subjected to a popular vote.

[aujeff11 6,243]

States rights have been used as a political tool since the founding. I said that five pages ago.The south uses it, the north used it, and the federal govt was and is the enemy every time.

So, um,

But we aren't talking about congressional debates in the 1790s or the 1980s or today. I don't really care about whether other groups ever asserted states' rights. We are talking about a specific time period and a couple of specific issues. We are talking about the claim that the South seceded over some real commitment to a philosophy of states' rights and that the evil federal government was threatening that vs the idea that the South really seceded over one particular "right" and that was to maintain the institution of slavery.

I think the historical record shows the South's belief in states' rights to be hypocritical at best and that the specific use of this label for why they seceded as just a way to hide the ugliness of what the real secession issue was: Slavery. Period. End of sentence. "States' rights" was merely a nicer, nobler sounding euphemism for it.

Just. So. Much. Wrong. In. One.Post

No. He's not. And if you're going to accuse him of being so you should at least explain, Jeff.

Rich a**holes in the south were butthurt because the north wasn't going to let them keep slaves. It really is that simple. Sure there are other theories, but they only seem credible if you ignore the declarations of secession written by the actual confederate states for the purpose of explaining why they wanted to secede.

I tried explaining why he is wrong. I've done shown as well how there was more at stake in the civil war than slavery. He doesn't want to listen so be it.

[aujeff11 6,243]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

On the surface states rights and slavery both adequately show the reason, the states right of course being the right to own slaves.

What's turned most people off to the use of "States rights" as an answer (you too I'm sure) is the reason most people will say states rights instead of slavery is to either evade the slavery issue altogether or to at least downplay it out of some sense of southern guilt.

It's the same as saying wealth & power caused the Civil War, or more accurately the threat of losing that wealth & power caused secession. but since the wealth and power were both built on slave labor, slavery is still the reason.

Unless someone is doing an academic study based on wealth & power to secession fervor or trying to incite new thought into an old thought process, there isn't much reason to say one instead of the other except to deflect.

The threat of losing their wealth didn't even cause the secession. Many wealthy slaveowners( and remember the resources were highly consecrated) didn't even want to secede from the union. They felt their wealth was safe only in the union. The threat of adding more free states to the union, allowing an overwhelming majority against the south was the reason the south chose to secede... after they exhausted all legal possibilities possible.

Nobody is trying to evade the issue either. We can have a discussion like grown men and discuss things in a reasonable manner. The slaveowners made morally bankrupt choices but I'm arguing that they believed they had the right to make those choices.

But what's your point? They were rich oligarchs. Secession was never subjected to a popular vote.

Rich oligarchs. That's cute

What was proposed for popular vote was whether the new states could determine whether they wanted slavery or not via popular vote. No harm no foul, right?

[homersapien 12,172]

http://michaelgriffi...outhernside.htm

Here is a pretty good LONG read...... (Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and the March to Civil War, Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2004, reprint of original edition, p. 251)

I find it absurd the people continue to "spin" the causes of the civil war when the southern states - or more correctly the rich oligarchy that controlled the southern states were quite explicit in the reasons for seceding. I can only assume it comes from some sort of guilt complex.

If you really want to know why they seceded all you have to due is read their stated reasons at the time in their own words:

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History. by Charles B. Dew.

This slender volume examines the work of secession commissioners sent from the deep South to other slave states in the winter of 1860-1861. The men were charged with defending secession and urging fellow southerners to follow them out of the Union. Charles B. Dew properly notes that historians trying to uncover the emotions and motives behind disunion have rarely examined the words of these commissioners. The men themselves are commonly ignored by historians entirely or dismissed as minor figures. Dew has speeches or letters from forty-one of the fifty-two men who served as commissioners. They were all slaveowning politicians, with varying experience and partisan affiliations; most were natives of the states to which they were appointed. This is not a complete study of the men or all of their work, but it is an important contribution to the literature on secession and a good introduction to the story of these neglected figures.

Dew evidently intends the book for both academics and a more general readership. The text is barely eighty pages, followed by an appendix and only a minimum of notes, which should make it appealing for classroom use. The prose is clear, jargon-free, and includes enough of the narrative of secession that even beginning students will be able to follow the book. But the material is complex enough, and the representative documents well chosen, so that it should also stimulate discussion among advanced readers.

For the book's primary audience -- non academics and beginning students -- the author's intent clearly is to disabuse them of the (incredibly) still popular notion that secession was not about preserving slavery and racial subordination (and the southern culture based on them), but rather to assert some sort of abstract commitment to states' rights. Academic historians, of course, have long-since concluded that states' rights was the means, not a primary motive, for secession and war. Dew's principal target is the somewhat shadowy "Neo-Confederate" movement, including the League of the South and the patrons of "Neo-Confederate web sites, bumper stickers, and T-shirts" (10). He notes correctly that secessionists themselves "talked much more openly about slavery than present-day-neo-Confederates seem willing to do" (10). The book's first chapter makes clear the relevance of his discussion to recent controversies over the Confederate flag in a number of states and Virginia's Confederate history month, among others. The author writes with some obvious passion. A native southerner he recalls "my boyhood dreaming about Confederate glory," and confesses that he is "still hit with a profound sadness when I read over the material on which this study is based" (2).

Not surprisingly, Dew has little difficulty demonstrating his primary thesis. The secession commissioners repeated the same message wherever they went: Lincoln and the Republicans were abolitionists determined to establish racial equality or promote amalgamation; secession and independence offered white men the only alternative to degradation and cultural destruction. The Republican threat, the men argued, was really three-fold: racial equality, race war, and racial amalgamation. The authors of Mississippi's "Declaration of Immediate Causes," for instance, claimed that the North "advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst" (13). Alabama's Leroy Pope Walker summarized that Republican rule would cost southerners first, "our property," "then our liberties," and finally "the sacred purity of our daughters" (79).

Perhaps the most effective evidence Dew offers is the coarse racism that punctuated many of the commissioners' appeals. Thoughtful and open-minded readers will recognize that the preservation of slavery and racial purity -- of the Ku Klux Klan variety -- were founding principles of the Confederacy. As Stephen Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky, wrote: Republican victory was "nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans" (54). Dew touts Hale's letter as the best summary of secessionist arguments about slavery and race -- indeed, he quotes the passage cited above on three separate occasions -- and its full text is presented in the Appendix.

Another of the book's strengths is Dew's effective juxtaposition of comments made by the same men before and after the war. Through the words of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, J. L. M. Curry, John Smith Preston, and others, the author demonstrates that ex-Confederates created the myth of states' rights causation when they wrote Lost Cause memoirs. Before and during the war these men framed arguments for independence and Confederate nationalism in terms of slavery and racism. After the defeat, however, they sang a different tune. Stephens, of course, delivered his famous "cornerstone" speech in March, 1861, and Dew presents a thorough discussion of his remarks. In his 1868 memoirs, however, Stephens insisted that the war "was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other." Slavery "was but _the question_ on which these antagonistic principles" finally collided (16). After the war Preston defended the Confederacy as a noble defense of "true constitutional liberty," a far cry from his antebellum characterization of Republican "canting, fanatics, festering in the licentiousness of abolition and amalgamation" (75).

For specialists, of course, these themes -- if not specifically the material -- will be very familiar. Many historians of the secession movement will object to Dew's contention that "there is no better place to look [for the "secessionist mind"] than in the speeches and letters of the men who served their states as secession commissioners on the eve of the conflict" (18). Furthermore, probably few would agree that to the commissioners fell "the challenge of providing such an explanation [for secession] -- of informing the Southern people of the dark forces threatening their region and driving their states to seek sanctuary outside the Union" (24). Editors, politicians, and a host of other public spokesmen hammered away at the same themes throughout the 1850s and certainly the 1860 presidential campaign; the arguments to explain and justify secession had already received full expression when Lincoln was elected.

Dew also does not engage the historiography; his list of "recent" scholarship includes only two books published since 1988 (one of them a collection of essays). More frustrating for some readers will be the lack of attention to how "slavery" conjured different images for different listeners. Some of the most innovative work on secession -- books by Lacy Ford or Stephanie McCurry, for instance -- has considered the various meanings of slavery within the context of southern political culture and secession. The call to protect slavery from Black Republicanism was tied to the preservation of regional equality and honor, personal manhood, the rights of white male property owners and husbands, and more -- in short, the duties and privileges of white men were at stake as well as the actual future of slavery and racial superiority.

None of these objections takes away from the author's primary thesis or the book's effectiveness. In fact, much of the material in the book may make it even more valuable as a teaching tool for advanced students. A careful reading and discussion should force them to engage the notion that many southerners understood "slavery" as more than just the institution itself and racial superiority. For instance, the words of South Carolina's Leonidas W. Spratt, commissioner to Florida, related the importance of masculinity as well as slavery: "We knew that the men of the South were too instructed, and too brave, to submit to the severities of final subjugation" (44). Religious imagery infused the speeches of Mississippi's Fulton Anderson. Northerners were corrupted, he said, by "an infidel fanaticism" that warped men and women into believing "that we are a race inferior to them in morality and civilization." Republicans were determined to wage "a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution which . . . lies at the very foundation of our social and political fabric" (63). Numerous passages repeated the ubiquitous terms -- always linked by southern spokesmen -- of "degradation and dishonor." In short, Dew's work should prompt readers to consider the many themes related to slavery that informed the secession crisis and affected how southern men understood the imperative dangers that Republicanism brought home. The inclusion of two full texts in the Appendix is especially welcome in this regard.

Apostles of Disunion should, although it won't, end the discussion of whether or not the South's primary goal in 1861 was to defend its slave-based culture. The book offers all of us who struggle with the irrepressible myth of states' rights devotion an effective way to force students to confront the integral place of slavery and racism in the mind of the Old South and the popular movement for secession.

[AUDub 11,784]

I tried explaining why he is wrong. I've done shown as well how there was more at stake in the civil war than slavery. He doesn't want to listen so be it.

Lord have mercy. If their motives still evade you after reading the individual declarations of secession of the slaveholding states', there really isn't much we can do for you:

It is one of the oldest, hoariest, and most reliable tropes wielded by defenders of the Confederacy: the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about "states rights." That's what they actually used to teach us in high school as part of our standard education.

It is a lie. All anyone has to do is go back and survey the original declarations of secession by the various Southern states -- as well as the many speeches on behalf of secession by various Confederacy advocates -- to get a clear understanding of what motivated them.

It was slavery. And white supremacy. And very little else.

The only mention, or discussion, of "states rights" in all of this is actually pointed the other direction: The Confederates were in fact agitated extremely by Northern states who were asserting their states rights by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all non-slave-holding states to return any and all former (usually escaped) slaves who were living within their borders. The fact that the federal government did so little to enforce the act was, in the view of the Confederates, proof positive that the entire federal compact was irrevocably broken.

Here. You'll get a better idea of all this if you scroll through the complete collection of the various Declarations of Secession by the Confederate states.

Mississippi:

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.

That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. ....

... It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. ...

Georgia:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. ...

While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united, could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion of that time.

Therefore such an organization must have resulted either in utter failure or in the total overthrow of the Government. The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. ...

... Why? Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants; because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides....

A depiction of South Carolina's secession convention

South Carolina:

...

The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

A banner from South Carolina secessionists.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. ...

Texas:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original];

that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.

Virginia:

The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers,

not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States

.

Alabama:

Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republi­can party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi­ples, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for

the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.

You can also get a clear picture by reading the Southern press's editorials of the time, such as this one from the Richmond newspaper:

‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.

Or you can read the speeches, such as this one by Alexander Stephens of Virginia, at the various secession sessions:

The great truth, I repeat, upon which our system rests, is the inferiority of the African. The enemies of our institutions ignore this truth. They set out with the assumption that the races are equal; that the negro is equal to the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be legitimate. But their premises being false, their conclusions are false also.

Most of that fanatical spirit at the North on this subject, which in its zeal without knowledge, would upturn our society and lay waste our fair country, springs from this false reasoning. Hence so much misapplied sympathy for fancied wrongs and sufferings. These wrongs and sufferings exist only in their heated imaginations. There can be no wrong where there is no violation of nature’s laws. We have heard much of the higher law. I believe myself in the higher law. We stand upon that higher law. I would defend and support no constitution that is against the higher law. I mean by that the law of nature and of God. Human con­stitutions and human laws that are made against the law of nature or of God, ought to be overturned; and if Seward was right the Constitution which he was sworn to support, and is now requiring others to swear to support, ought to have been overthrown long ago. It ought never to have been made. But in point of fact it is he and his associates in this crusade against us, who are warring against the higher law—we stand upon the laws of the Creator, upon the highest of all laws. It is the fanatics of the North, who are warring against the decrees of God Almighty, in their attempts to make things equal which he made unequal. My assurance of ultimate success in this controversy is strong from the conviction, that we stand upon the right.

The only "states right" the South was interested in defending was the right to hold slaves. So please: The next time someone whips out that hoary old lie, just remember that it belongs with all the other false history woven into "Lost Cause" nonsense.

[homersapien 12,172]

And more from McPherson:

"This Mighty Scourge - Perspectives on the Civil War" by James M. McPherson

pp.3-12 (excerpts)

Jefferson Davis, a large slaveholder, justified secession in 1861 as an act of self-defence against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose announced policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make "property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless...thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars".

The new vice president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander H. Stephens, said in a speech at Savannah on March 21 1861, that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" of Southern independence. The old confederation known as the United States, said Stephens, had been founded on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, "is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

After the war, however, Davis and Stephens changed their tune. By the time they wrote their histories of the Confederacy, slavery was gone with the wind - a dead and discredited institution. To concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause.

Over the years since the war, many Southern whites have preferred to cite Davis's and Stephens's post-1865 writings rather than their claims of 1861. When Ken and Ric Burns's popular PBS documentary on the Civil War was first broadcast in 1990, it provoked a hostile response from Southerners who did not like the portrayal of their Confederate ancestors as having fought for slavery. 'The cause of the war was secession" declared a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "and the cause of secession could have been any number of things. This overemphasis on the slavery issue really rankles us." Among the "any number of things" that caused secession, according to the descendant of a soldier who served in the 27th South Carolina infantry, were "states rights, agrarianism...., aristocracy, and habits of mind including individualism, personalism toward God and man, provincialism and romanticism" - anything but slavery.

During the first half of the twentieth century the argument that slavery had little to do with the growing polarization between the North and South that led to secession found a great deal of support among professional historians. The "Progressive school" dominated American historiography from the 1910s to the 1940s. "Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography," wrote Charles A. Beard, doyen of the Progressive school, "was it a sectional struggle" - the accidental fact that plantation agriculture was located in the South and industry mainly in the North. Nor was it a contest between slavery and freedom. Slavery just happened to be the labor system of plantation agriculture, as wage labor was the system of Northern industry. The *real* issues between the North and the South in antebellum politics were the tariff, government subsidies to transportation and manufacturing, public land sales, financial policies, and other types of economic questions on which industrial and planting interests had clashing viewpoints.

This interpretive analysis, so powerful during the second quarter of the twentieth century, proved a godsend to a generation of mostly Southern-born historians who seized upon is as proof that slavery had little to do with the origins of the Confederacy. The Nashville Fugitives, an influential group of historians, novelists, and poets who gathered at Vanderbilt University and published the famous manifesto "I'll Take My Stand" in 1930, set the tone for the new Southern interpretation of the Civil War's causes. It was a blend of the old Confederate apologia voiced by Jefferson Davis and the new Progressive synthesis created by Charles Beard.

An offshoot of this interpretation of the Civil War's causes dominated the work of academic historians during the 1940s. This offshoot came to be known as revisionism. Revisionism tended to portray Southern whites, even the fire-eaters, as victims reacting to Northern attacks; it truly was a "war of Northern aggression".

While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state's rights for what purpose? States rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle. In the antebellum South, the purpose of asserting state sovereignty was to protect slavery from the potential hostility of a national majority against Southern interests - mainly slavery.

[aujeff11 6,243]

"I find it absurd the people continue to "spin" the causes of the civil war when the southern states - or more correctly the rich oligarchy that controlled the southern states were quite explicit in the reasons for seceding. I can only assume it comes from some sort of guilt complex."

What am I to feel guilty about? I hate southern politics more than you do. If I am to feel guilty, maybe you should feel guilty about Andersonville prison, the Americans killing off the Indians, the Japanese bombings, etc. So again, what am I to feel guilty about?

Nice article (sarcasm)

[aujeff11 6,243]

And more from McPherson:

"This Mighty Scourge - Perspectives on the Civil War" by James M. McPherson

pp.3-12 (excerpts)

Jefferson Davis, a large slaveholder, justified secession in 1861 as an act of self-defence against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose announced policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make "property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless...thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars".

The new vice president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander H. Stephens, said in a speech at Savannah on March 21 1861, that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" of Southern independence. The old confederation known as the United States, said Stephens, had been founded on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, "is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

After the war, however, Davis and Stephens changed their tune. By the time they wrote their histories of the Confederacy, slavery was gone with the wind - a dead and discredited institution. To concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause.

Over the years since the war, many Southern whites have preferred to cite Davis's and Stephens's post-1865 writings rather than their claims of 1861. When Ken and Ric Burns's popular PBS documentary on the Civil War was first broadcast in 1990, it provoked a hostile response from Southerners who did not like the portrayal of their Confederate ancestors as having fought for slavery. 'The cause of the war was secession" declared a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "and the cause of secession could have been any number of things. This overemphasis on the slavery issue really rankles us." Among the "any number of things" that caused secession, according to the descendant of a soldier who served in the 27th South Carolina infantry, were "states rights, agrarianism...., aristocracy, and habits of mind including individualism, personalism toward God and man, provincialism and romanticism" - anything but slavery.

During the first half of the twentieth century the argument that slavery had little to do with the growing polarization between the North and South that led to secession found a great deal of support among professional historians. The "Progressive school" dominated American historiography from the 1910s to the 1940s. "Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography," wrote Charles A. Beard, doyen of the Progressive school, "was it a sectional struggle" - the accidental fact that plantation agriculture was located in the South and industry mainly in the North. Nor was it a contest between slavery and freedom. Slavery just happened to be the labor system of plantation agriculture, as wage labor was the system of Northern industry. The *real* issues between the North and the South in antebellum politics were the tariff, government subsidies to transportation and manufacturing, public land sales, financial policies, and other types of economic questions on which industrial and planting interests had clashing viewpoints.

This interpretive analysis, so powerful during the second quarter of the twentieth century, proved a godsend to a generation of mostly Southern-born historians who seized upon is as proof that slavery had little to do with the origins of the Confederacy. The Nashville Fugitives, an influential group of historians, novelists, and poets who gathered at Vanderbilt University and published the famous manifesto "I'll Take My Stand" in 1930, set the tone for the new Southern interpretation of the Civil War's causes. It was a blend of the old Confederate apologia voiced by Jefferson Davis and the new Progressive synthesis created by Charles Beard.

An offshoot of this interpretation of the Civil War's causes dominated the work of academic historians during the 1940s. This offshoot came to be known as revisionism. Revisionism tended to portray Southern whites, even the fire-eaters, as victims reacting to Northern attacks; it truly was a "war of Northern aggression".

While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state's rights for what purpose? States rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle. In the antebellum South, the purpose of asserting state sovereignty was to protect slavery from the potential hostility of a national majority against Southern interests - mainly slavery.

My God. You think McPherson is the gospel don't you?

Post the links if you have em boys

http://thomaslegion.net/whatcausedthecivilwarcauses.html

[homersapien 12,172]

Yep, "states rights" my ass. They cared about one "states' right" - the right to own other people as slaves to enrich themselves.

On the surface states rights and slavery both adequately show the reason, the states right of course being the right to own slaves.

What's turned most people off to the use of "States rights" as an answer (you too I'm sure) is the reason most people will say states rights instead of slavery is to either evade the slavery issue altogether or to at least downplay it out of some sense of southern guilt.

It's the same as saying wealth & power caused the Civil War, or more accurately the threat of losing that wealth & power caused secession. but since the wealth and power were both built on slave labor, slavery is still the reason.

Unless someone is doing an academic study based on wealth & power to secession fervor or trying to incite new thought into an old thought process, there isn't much reason to say one instead of the other except to deflect.

The threat of losing their wealth didn't even cause the secession. Many wealthy slaveowners( and remember the resources were highly consecrated) didn't even want to secede from the union. They felt their wealth was safe only in the union. The threat of adding more free states to the union, allowing an overwhelming majority against the south was the reason the south chose to secede... after they exhausted all legal possibilities possible.

Nobody is trying to evade the issue either. We can have a discussion like grown men and discuss things in a reasonable manner. The slaveowners made morally bankrupt choices but I'm arguing that they believed they had the right to make those choices.

But what's your point? They were rich oligarchs. Secession was never subjected to a popular vote.

Rich oligarchs. That's cute

What was proposed for popular vote was whether the new states could determine whether they wanted slavery or not via popular vote. No harm no foul, right?

There was never a general election for the southern people to vote on secession.

Here's what an Auburn man had to say about the southern political structure at the time:

"Bitterly Divided - The South's Inner Civil War" by David Williams (obtained his PhD degree in history at Auburn University)

Williams shows in this extensively documented work that from the Confederacy's very beginning, white Southerners were as likely to oppose secession as support it. He makes a compelling case that this was basically a rich man's war that was undertaken against the will of the majority of Southern residents, 3/4's of whom owned no slaves. In fact, he makes the case that a major driving force for the secession movement by slave holders was a fear that poor whites would come to realize that slavery kept them poor and an abolitionist movement would arise in the South.

He also describes the acute class divisions in the South. Anyone owning 20 or more slaves were exempted from the draft. Men of wealth could also avoid military service by paying an exemption fee. Meanwhile poor men were subject to conscription, often having to leave their wives and children to fend for themselves on subsistence level farms. And because growing cotton and tobacco were much more profitable the rich planters favored those crops instead of growing food crops. This resulted in outright famine for poor throughout the South.

As a consequence the desertion rate from the Confederate army was tremendous. In 1864 Jefferson Davis admitted that 2/3 if Confederate soldiers were absent, most of them without leave. Many of these deserters went on to serve in the Union army. Southerners, including ex- slaves, who served in the Union military totaled nearly half a million, or about a quarter of federal armed forces.

Large geographical areas of the South resisted secession and supported the Union. Many of these areas were in the mountainous regions of northern Alabama and Georgia and eastern Tennessee and North Carolina.

While I have always known that there was considerable resistence to the Confederacy in the South, I certainly did not realize that this was a war that was brought on by a relatively small minority of rich planters. For someone raised in the South and has had a long term interest in the Civil war, this book was a paradigm shifter. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the Civil War.

It also puts any theories of how the South may have won (militarily) the Civil war into perspective. The Confederacy was destined to be defeated, if not by the North then by Southerners themselves.

[AUDub 11,784]

What am I to feel guilty about? I hate southern politics more than you do, prick. If I am to feel guilty, maybe you should feel guilty about Andersonville prison, the Americans killing off the Indians, the Japanese bombings, etc. So again, what am I to feel guilty about?

Nice article (sarcasm)

The tone of your response is evidence of the value of your argument. You're peddling a typical southern apologia. You're not this stupid. You do yourself a disservice to peddle this horsesh*t.

The casus belli of the South could not be more obvious. That you choose to align yourself with the peddlers of the various feeble apologias for the South just further demonstrates how little you've thought about the subject.

[homersapien 12,172]

The post office banned this, the congress banned that, damn I didn't realize all of these entities were synonymous with southern states.

Ok, so now is the time to connect the dots between Southern states having congressional power levers in their control and the federal government asserting itself into things that under a states' rights philosophy, should be left to the states. You're being deliberately obtuse not being able to see that.

I must say, you have a very weak argument. That, or your frustrations should be taken out on the federal government. Whatever the case, with the abundant taxes and tariffs passed down to frustrate the south's agricultural economy, I'm pretty sure the southern harmony in the Federal Govt wasn't all there....

As the article homer posted showed, the Southern states had managed to gain control of many power positions in the federal government at the time. It's nonsensical to say I should be mad at "the federal government." Do you not understand how these things work? The federal government was and is made up of representatives from various states. The Southern states managed to gain enough power and influence in the federal government such that they could then use those levers of power to further their primary interest: maintaining the institution of slavery and thus their economic engine. And in using coercive federal power to override the rights of Northern states, they showed themselves to be hypocritical on the issue of states' rights. They wanted the federal government to defer to the states when doing so would allow Southern states to preserve slavery. They wanted the federal government to railroad the states when the rights of a certain state (typically Northern) might endanger slavery.

How is this not getting through?

"Even if this were the only means, it is laughable to assert a philosophy of states rights, then to use the federal government to override the laws of Northern states."

The south didn't "use the federal government," lol. Many in the union had slaves as well, even Chief Justice Taney.

Yes, they did. That they had a sympathetic judge in a slave-holding Union state doesn't change this. If the Southern states truly believed in state sovereignty and limited federal government, the Fugitive Slave Laws would never have been implemented at all.

It is just as I have explained it numerous times: They were for states rights when it suited them, and they were for federal power when it suited them. This shows them to not truly be about states rights at all, but merely using the term to soften their true interest: their investment in the institution of slavery.

It sure ain't from a lack of effort on your part.

Some people just can't handle the truth.

[telling tiger 156]

For someone who said and I quote, "we can discuss this like adults'', you just called a man a prick who had the audacity to have a different opinion than you. How's that adult working out for you?

You're getting your ass handed to you in this debate and will defend your right to be wrong to the death.

How very Civil War southern of you.

[aujeff11 6,243]

What am I to feel guilty about? I hate southern politics more than you do, prick. If I am to feel guilty, maybe you should feel guilty about Andersonville prison, the Americans killing off the Indians, the Japanese bombings, etc. So again, what am I to feel guilty about?

Nice article (sarcasm)

The tone of your response is evidence of the value of your argument. You're peddling a typical southern apologia. You're not this stupid. You do yourself a disservice to peddle this horsesh*t.

The casus belli of the South could not be more obvious. That you choose to align yourself with the peddlers of the various feeble apologias for the South just further demonstrates how little you've thought about the subject.

The Guy tried to say I was speaking with a guilty complex. I'm not. You obviously know everything as well, including the reasons for my posts I see.

...

[aujeff11 6,243]

For someone who said and I quote, "we can discuss this like adults'', you just called a man a prick who had the audacity to have a different opinion than you. How's that adult working out for you?

You're getting your ass handed to you in this debate and will defend your right to be wrong to the death.

How very Civil War southern of you.

How revisionist of you. Step in line with the sheep. Ha

[homersapien 12,172]

"I find it absurd the people continue to "spin" the causes of the civil war when the southern states - or more correctly the rich oligarchy that controlled the southern states were quite explicit in the reasons for seceding. I can only assume it comes from some sort of guilt complex."

What am I to feel guilty about? I hate southern politics more than you do, prick. If I am to feel guilty, maybe you should feel guilty about Andersonville prison, the Americans killing off the Indians, the Japanese bombings, etc. So again, what am I to feel guilty about?

Nice article (sarcasm)

OK, if not Southern guilt, what is it exactly? Why do you feel compelled to reject the simple truth?

And - as if it mattered - I have no problem with accepting the truth of shameful events in American history. I see no value in self-delusion.