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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

On its way out? Slave states were fighting tooth and nail to keep it.

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.

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Go read all of Lincoln's racist quotes. He is on record saying he would keep the slaves slaves if that meant the country stayed together. He wanted them all exported back to Africa. Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population. The south did not rise up to defend slave owners. They rose up to defend themselves.

Lincoln was in favor of maintaining the status quo in order to keep the country intact. However, the Southern states were planning secession prior to his election. What were the Northern states planning to do to the South? What was the South defending themselves from?

They were defending themselves from protectionism. The states had every right to secede. Lincoln ushered in the era of crony capitalism. All wars are a racket, every single one.

> Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population. The south did not rise up to defend slave owners. They rose up to defend themselves.

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.

> Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population.

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.

in 1861 more than 1/10th of what would later become the army of northern virginia owned slaves— 1 in 12 enlisted men and over half of the officers.

"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.

Yet the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the south. Slavery was not outlawed for the northern states and over 3 million remained slaves in the north until 1865. That is called hypocrisy. It wasn't about the slaves.

this is a hollow charge of hypocrisy, as i am not currently in 1865 arguing against the 13th amendment by saying the emancipation proclamation was enough. neither does the insufficiency of reconstruction absolve the butchers of the confederacy of their crimes.

I mean to order all slaves free in the southern states while keeping slavery legal and active in the north for 5 years is pure hypocrisy that proves it was not about the moral issue of slavery. It was a federal takeover and we are still reeling from the results. As long as everyone believes the south was just a bunch of evil racists we can't talk about the true effects of the war and the path it sent the nation down.

this may seem like a coherent view of history if you view it as a series of decisions made by great men based solely on their personal beliefs, as opposed to protracted contests over resources & power by organized groups, like the radical abolitionists who waged a generational liberation struggle on every front to force concessions from the institutions of the day.

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