To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A state’s right to what?
And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.
And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!