Texas students will soon learn slavery played a central role in the Civil War
npr.org
npr.org
Slavery was the first order cause, so it would be correct to present slavery as having a central role.
source: Texas Declaration of Secession: http://www.civil-war.net/pages/texas_declaration.asp
"maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits"
As opposed to most wars, where history was written by the victors, in the US Civil War was mostly written about by the losers. They immediately went about reinventing the war in order to ease their conscience. I mean, the South deliberate started the war to defend an absolutely evil act (slavery), and in the ensuing conflict brought utter ruin on their society. The North was complicit in this rewriting because their main interest was in reintegration and reunification of the country.
Unfortunately, fast forward 100+ years, and now we have people talking about state's rights, and not about slavery. Counterrevisionism, in this case, is more than justified.
As far as Southern states were concerned, slavery was perfectly legal, culturally acceptable and morally correct, so they wouldn't see a need to mince words. It's only in the modern context of historical revisionism that such whitewashing is necessary.
"The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order."
I have emphasized the part that shows how, while that position avoids being formally completely wrong, it fundamentally misrepresents the situation. The reality is that the only significant issues (significant enough to lead to secession), with regard to the first two causes stated here, were over slavery. We don't have to guess about motives here, because the leaders were not shy about stating clearly, on the record, what their issues were.
"How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us" https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/21/how-texas-inflic...
Would you prefer the history curriculum be overseen by an unelected group of party cadres?
Voting is a lot better than many systems currently in use. If there's an issue, at least you have the chance to influence things for the better.
> These efforts at controlling production, intended to protect both the independent operators and the major producers, were largely unsuccessful at first and led to widespread oil smuggling.
The largest producers demanded the governor to shutdown competition. They did this with the help of the Texan National Guard to protect their cartel and thus the Railroad Commission was born. Upton Sinclair or Howard Zinn are much more accurate than Wikipedia.
The other prominent high-profile Texan criminals are either still alive or just died, so their rosy view of history is still censored in their favor.
On the other hand the Coal Wars Wikipedia article is pretty accurate, but this didn't happen in Texas.
And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.
The articles of succession of the individual confederate states can answer that question for you. I’ll save you some reading: it’s what you think it is.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." [0]
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
> Article I Section 9(4)
> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
And, unsurprisingly, the politicians of the time were much less saccharine about states' rights and other garbage, like the guy who said:
"We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel."
This is all from this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitutio...
The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution.
The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others.
Eliminating the states' rights aspect entirely leaves you without valuable context when you're looking at modern day political debates and makes it easier to view the entire thing from an absolutist standpoint that simply demonizes the south - everyone in the south was evil because they did this thing that was wrong, but that would clearly never happen to _us_.
Except claims about states' rights are without any historical basis. They were concocted fifty plus years after the fact to cast the Confederates in a noble light. As others here have pointed out, articles of secession specifically call out preservation of the institution of slavery without any assertion of states' rights.
The EU has 'union' right there in its name, but it isn't a single country and there are a bunch of things it doesn't try to homogenise. Every time the EU broadens its control over member countries, there are mutterings about sovereignty until one day, something like Brexit happens.
No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" they say "Britain should leave the EU because of its ever-expanding infringement on our sovereignty; an illustrative example of this is the proposed ban on high power kettles"
The "states' rights" claim is the same: that it was about the ever-expanding powers of the federal government, and slavery was just an illustrative example of such an expansion.
Of course, as albntomat0 points out the Mississippi declaration of secession supports slavery in the second sentence, so what I just said has a big dose of historical revisionism.
I mean, that sort of (usually untrue; your example has never even been considered by the EU and would make no sense) trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign.
your example has never even been considered
by the EU [...] trivia was a HUGE part of
the leave campaign.
I'm glad to hear you found my illustration of a Brexiter's rationale plausible!
That and the Confederate States tried to pull a 1776, since they didn't have a single representative who polled for Lincoln in the EC, the Union states had effective super majorities in Congress, ergo time to form their own system of government, representative of themselves.
They just weren't expecting Sherman.
Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias. This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while most spending benefited the north.
The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that nobody on either side wants to talk about.
The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years ago or not, we still feel the effects today.
That's super interesting was it mostly from cash crops? What benefits were paid to the north exclusively from that?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachi...
There’s a breakdown here:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secessio...
Also, fwiw, that site used to be civilwar.org. I’m not sure when it was rebranded.
Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the majority.
4 of them seceded specifically in response to being requisitioned for troops without congressional approval. Virginia’s articles even went so far as to say they would rejoin.
So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.
It is incredibly important that the idea of slavery is pushed as the cause for the civil war. Without that it becomes obvious the path we took was not for the better of the country. Without the civil war slavery would still have been abolished yet states would still have strong rights. Our country was lost.
An institution doesn't have to create wealth for an entire country, in order to persist. It only has to create wealth for the rich and powerful.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The South sure thought it was. The amount of ink it spilled on the subject of protecting that one particular right of a state was staggering. It was the one thing that apparently, they could compromise on. It's almost as if preserving the right to keep human beings like cattle was the whole bloody point of their secession.
This is a really important point and you have been severely misinformed. The states that succeeded were not shy about why. My own home state, South Carolina, after an extensive legal argument that they're allowed to succeed, revealed the great violation of their rights was the refusal to return fugitive slaves.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Someone else already linked to Mississippi. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18474740
Slavery, to slave holders, was a state's right. That's the right they fought for.
This is an especially pernicious lie. A very small percentage owned vast plantations with hundreds of slaves, but the deeper into the south you went the higher the percentage of slave owners. 32% of all households in the south owned slaves. 49% of all Mississippi households and 46% of all in South Carolina households owned slaves. A slave was an aspirational purchase in the south; for those households that did not own a slave it was more likely to be due to poverty than principles.
"only" 1 in 20 white southerners in the confederacy personally owned slaves on paper, but this is like making an org chart of the institution of slavery & only counting senior management.
if you look at the 1860 us census & expand the analysis to slave owning households of the confederacy, the rate was closer to 1 in 3.
Having gotten a close-up sample of California's approach to teaching history, any coverage that Texas may have been giving to Clinton and Keller would probably have amounted to one bullet point at best in practice. This is just political posturing.
This is often the case as I see it due to the differences between the perceived methods of teaching/learning history and the actual methods (coupled with the differences in value too). Once reasonable comprehension can occur in youth, knowledge is obtained these days from a multitude of sources. Also history teachers, more than others, tend to deviate based on personal preferences making centralized bullet points only as valuable as their disseminators. While this may sound scary, good teachers like historical orators of the past can do wonders with narratives. Regardless, children obtain so much from the internet, documentaries, and other avenues of self learning that specific textbook statements are often overvalued simply out of fear of misrepresentation.