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”.
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.
Lincoln’s election provoked South Carolina’s legislature to call a state convention to consider secession. South Carolina had done more than any other state to advance the notion that a state had the right to nullify federal laws and even secede. On December 20, 1860, the convention unanimously voted to secede and adopted a secession declaration. It argued for states’ rights for slave owners but complained about states’ rights in the North in the form of resistance to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their obligations to assist in the return of fugitive slaves.
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.
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.
