For Decades, Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Northern Aggression

Well said. The meme of "it wasn't at all about states' rights and if you think it was you're a (racist|revisionist|CSA apologist)" is more confusing than persuasive.

And that's my perspective as someone who grew up with "war about slavery" as the default interpretation, only learning about contemporary states' rights arguments in later history classes at my (public Virginia) high school. (And then only learning from HN/reddit that "Northern aggression" / "states' rights" propaganda was even still a thing.)

I expect someone raised on that propaganda would be even more confused, likely enough to conclude that the speaker is lying or misinformed.

It's misleading even then, when you look at the actual complaints of the states (as expressed in their declarations of independence). For example, most of them complained about the free states' pushback to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was also a states' rights issue - but the one where interests of the slaveholders aligned with a stronger federal government strong-arming states; and they didn't have any qualms about that.

Similarly, in the Confederate constitution, there were some provisions added that specifically restricted the ability of the states to handle slavery in their jurisdiction - e.g. the "right of transit and sojourn" (which essentially meant that free states were forced to respect the "property right" of any slave-owning citizen of another state who comes to reside there) - this, of course, was in response to Dred Scott.

Saying it was about slavery is also misleading (although less so than just saying states rights). At the time the civil war started, the North was willing to compromise on the issue of slavery [0]. The North did not fight to abolish slavery. Had the South surrendered earlier (or never seceded at all), they would have been able to keep their slaves [1]. The reason the North fought was to preserve the union (apparently not an answer on the citizenship test).

I actually think that preserving the Union is, in some sense, a more technically correct answer, since the South did not start the war [2]. The South declared its independence. The North started the war to prevent the South from gaining its independence [3].

As an aside. Independent of my actual interperatation of history, I think it would be highly unreasonable to deny citizenship to someone for holding a controversial belief that is shared by a significant portion of the country. Like it or not "states rights" is an American interpretation of the Civil war, even if it is one that is not historically accurate. And we really do not want the government to be in a position of dictating the "correct" history.

[0] You could argue about how trustworthy the North was. I would argue the main cause of the Civil war was that the South lost confidence that the North was (or would continue) to compromise on this issue.

[1] At least for a while. With hindsight, I am sure that slavery would have eventually been abolished in the South as well, and it probably would have been the North that was the primary political force behind it.

[2] Fine, they did open the attack of Fort Sumter when the Union refused to withdraw. You could therefor argue that the South did technically start the war, but I find that to be a bit of a stretch.

[3] As I mentioned above, this was the primary motivation of the North. The North, at the start, did not continue this sentence with "...so that they could abolish slavery".

> But all of those ancillary issues were about defending slavery as an economic and cultural institution.

It's insane how often this is disputed when the Confederate states explicitly asserted this in their various declarations of secession. Mississippi's, for example, begins[1]:

> In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

> 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.

[1] http://www.civil-war.net/pages/mississippi_declaration.asp

Federal law protected these rights, and the rights to retrieve fugitive slaves. The southern states objected to northern states ignoring Dred Scott, which was a federal court ruling.

> It would be more correct to say that there were slave states that didn't succeded from the USA.

Absolutely. Succession (being part of issue of "states' rights") was a huge part of the Civil War.

> The president couldn't free slaves within the USA by executive order

Indeed; I pointed that fact out myself. There's no question that the man Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery but could not himself end it. There's also no question that the man Robert E. Lee opposed Virginia's succession but not himself stop it.

The fact remains that as a whole the Union still had slaves, and that didn't change for the entirety of the Civil War. In fact, assuming you believe the Union's authority was legitimate, slavery was outlaws in the South years before it was in the North.

My point is there's obviously things going on here other than just a war to end slavery, and it's important not to downplay that either.

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FWIW, I'd call Seattle "the West".

Yes, this is main way that States Rights affected the Civil War: northern states ignoring federal law and federal court rulings about returning escaped slaves.

I can see several folks in this very discussion who might be surprised by this bit of history.

Edit: so far two different people think I am mischaracterizing what Southern states said at the time about their state's rights. I wasn't talking about that at all. I was talking about how I (and many modern historians) think about Southern states' reaction to Dred Scott and how Northern states ignored it. Please respond to what I said, instead of something I did not say.

States rights wasn't good enough for them. Before the Civil War, many people in the South wanted to expand slavery to more places including new US territories and Nicaragua [1].

If they hadn't been so eager to have their way nationally, it's possible the Civil War could have been avoided.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_(filibuster)

You don't have to be a libertarian (in fact, it rather helps not to be) to recognize that “capitalism” refers to the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th Century, which was largely abandoned because of the widespread misery it caused in favor of the modern mixed economy in the developed world by the mid-20th century.

OTOH, the test is of ability to parrot the mythology of the dominant political groups in the country.

This argument always trots out Mississippi's declaration. Show me evidence from the CSA leadership as a whole, and I'd let the point stand without contention.

Indeed. Tariffs (primarily affecting manufactured goods) was a huge point of contention, rivaled only by the slavery issue.

During the Civil War there was "Cotton diplomacy" [1] where the South tried to pull Britain and France onto its side, under the presumption that their need for cotton would win out. Despite the cotton famine [2] they managed to stay neutral.

Anyway...economics (then and now) are king.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_diplomacy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Cotton_Famine

I've never really bought that story, in that form. It tacitly suggests that the South's economy was stronger with slavery than without. It seems more likely to me, though, that reliance on slavery was part of why the South's economy ended up being so weak in the first place. It allowed money to remain concentrated in the hands of a small, landed elite. That worked out extremely well for them relative to their neighbors, but also would have fueled a sort of falling tide that sinks all boats.

Which isn't to say that it doesn't change the economic equation if you take it away. But it's more tenable to say that the reason people were willing to go to war over it was more about the economics of power than about economics in general.

There's a quote (attributed without evidence to half a dozen prominent historical figures) that probably applies here:

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

" Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought."

Wars were always fought by average people for the benefit of the elites.

I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win.

>> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.)

You have a very idealistic view of human nature if you don't think this banal evil is more common historically than not.

Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. There were likely some familial ties from the average southern white laborer with some who owned slaves or were in the system as overseers. I also don't see how evil is unlikely, the daily brutality of slavery required a large standing militia to suppress the constant threat of active rebellion of the slaves against the owners, and it's likely the average white adult male would have been a part of said militia. It seems to me that living with that one has to make the moral choice to accept it - for the alternative there was only one John Brown and family and maybe one Free State of Jones situation, for almost everyone else, they either did not see it as evil we see it today and commonplace (so not perhaps evil in their own eyes) or not willing to make the ultimate commitment against it. On the other hand, the United States being probably the last country to outlaw slavery does not speak too well of our country. The poor did not start the war, only serve as foot soldiers and there was a draft on both sides - the elite class served as officers, this notion that the war was initiated by the average person seems counterfactual, most of the time it's elites who want to start war and waging a propaganda campaign to get the populace behind starting a war.

Even today there's no popular campaign today to go to war against Iran or North Korea, but it sure is popular in some conservative think tanks and with our current NSA, John Bolton, it's been his obsession for the last 20 years it feels like.

I’m not sure why you find this unlikely. There’s explicit racism by the whites, which could be termed “loss of status”. In-group/out-group has been a long historic motivator.

As far as as why the poor would die for the elites, well that’s also existed from the beginning of time. Pretty much every war is like that.

The War Of The Roses was a family feud that lasted 32 years, and cost lives of somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000, all to decide which inbred guy gets to sit on a chair and boss everyone else around. Almost no one that died in that war, had anything to gain, or lose.

Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]?

People go off an die determine which religious bureaucracy will collect a monetary tax from a group. There’s no benefit or harm to any individual about this.

[0] http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/article592199.html

A lot of people in this thread are trying to flatten a complex situation. This comment is thoughtful: many poor southerners went to war and risked life and limb and stood to gain almost nothing from slavery.

We take for granted our 20/20 view of 1861 and we are biased in our present knowledge of how things turn out. Descendants of slaves, poor white southerners, and northerners all turned out better off, and the U.S. would grow stronger as a whole.

But to look at world and U.S. history from the lens of 1861, that's what the participants of the civil war had to do. Some of it was identity politics. Some of it was loyalty to home turf. Some men DID fight for states rights as much as that is derided as an empty excuse. There has always been concern of the Federal government gaining "too much power" since the Constitutional Convention and Anti-federalism is a well-documented movement of early American politics. For many, the Civil War was viewed as an extension of that cause. (If you want an excellent view on the war by a relatively impartial contemporary, view Lord Acton's account from 1866: https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war)

And sure, rich slave owners had their own motives. And they certainly would leverage the motives driving poor southerners to garner support for the war. That story is as old as time.

The answer is a bit more complicated than one might imagine, or the popular conceptions would suggest. Arguably, there are a couple different answers for the antebellum period, the initial days of the war, and then later on in the war. Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchical Republic: The Secession of Georgia[0] weighs the internal class conflict that helped precipitate secession. Keri Leigh Merritt's Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South[1] is another fascinating read on the subject that I'd heartily recommend along with Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.[2] Finally, James McPherson's wonderful Battle Cry of Freedom[3] touches on these matters throughout the book, albeit from a more general perspective.

There's no question that poor southern whites and yeomen farmers both saw their wages depressed by slavery and recognized it as the direct cause of their woes. In the antebellum South--particularly during the two decades leading up to the Civil War--there was a significant class conflict that that represented a clear internal conflict to the planter/master class. Not only was the number of slaves increasing, they were also starting to be used in non-agricultural industries. And even when they weren't, slaves were a constant threat to poor white workers' efforts to try and push for wage increases as slave-strikebreakers.[4] Northern abolitionists repeatedly highlighted this conflict and hoped to use it to create division in the South; in 1838, Charles Olcott of Ohio famously observed "[a]ll of the evils of slavery are great evils; but one of the greatest is, that it injures the free as well as the enslaved."

In the years leading up to secession, the master class embarked on a major propaganda campaign to get poor whites to overlook the class conflict and see themselves as beneficiaries of slavery, and later, secession. They argued that abolitionists and "Black Republicans" would force freed slaves to be viewed as the equal of whites, to the latter's everlasting detriment. The common points were that black emancipation would flood the labor market and depress wages for poor whites to starvation levels, the ensuing class conflict/race war would kill thousands of those whites who didn't starve to death first, and of course, there was the constant specter of miscegenation. James Furman, a South Carolina Baptist preacher, predicted that "[a]bolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands...submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!!...Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism" (McPherson).

None of these attitudes were new. Fear of a slave rebellion had been a constant in slave states, and it touched slaveowner and yeoman alike; non-slaveowning whites figured they'd be at risk just the same as slaveowners. Then John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859, and the worry about hypothetical slave revolts turned into an orgy of fear and paranoia; the master class saw an imminent threat, with non-slaveholders in cahoots with Northern abolitionists even as non-slaveholders felt the same fear. John Brown was tried, and as the North started to lionize the man as a martyr and saint, the South went nuts in anger. McPherson likened the Southern panic in 1860 to France's Great Fear in 1789.[5] These arguments clearly had a profound impact on Southern society, and were embedded so thoroughly that they'd be lodged in the collective Southern psyche for the next century. But alone, they weren't enough to push through secession.

For the master class, secession was seen as both a means of protecting the peculiar institution and eliminating the internal threat posed by poor whites. The propaganda and constant fear helped lay the groundwork, but they succeeded mainly by managing to push through before internal opposition could solidify and organize. They were also helped by poor whites being apathetic voters, as they knew they lacked the power of the master class. In the end, secessionists pulled out all the stops to ensure nothing could stop the movement:

> The ultimate choice of disunion, therefore, was a choice made by the master class. By the early 1860s, the Deep South’s slaveholding interests were using every possible method to force people with no ties to slavery to support the institution. Politics became dominated, as Shugg wrote, by “farce and fraud; the knife, the sling-shot, the brass knuckles determining ... who shall occupy and administer the [public] offices.” Poor whites, along with many other non-slave owners, made it completely clear that they opposed disunion. The state conventions, of course, were all dominated by the master class, who deliberately chose to ignore public will. While proving the efficacy of manipulative violence, slave owners simultaneously invoked more concern from Northerners. To Americans residing in free states, it seemed as if a small but powerful band of slaveholders were the only Southerners desiring disunion. Poor whites certainly did not want war. They had no desire to fight and die to protect an institution that had long injured their own prosperity and well-being. Despite all of the weight scholars have afforded white supremacy, it was simply not enough to unite the white South over slavery and disunion (Merritt, 303).

Once everyone accepted that war was inevitable, both sides tried to downplay slavery as the immediate cause. For the North, it was to avoid antagonizing the border states. For the south, it was because they needed a more palatable rationale for non-slaveholders to accept. The Confederacy also expected King Cotton to persuade European governments to quickly support them, but they figured avoiding mentioning slavery would give foreign governments a useful figleaf to hide behind on slavery. It was a complete fiction, but a useful one for each side. And in 1861, everyone believed it would be a short war. Southerners believed that their martial superiority would carry the day, and one Southern soldier could whip a dozen or two Yankees.

Some fought because of cultural beliefs about courage and the glories of war or the fear of the shame of cowardice (or the physical threat of hanging deserters). Others because the immediate enemy--Northerners--was a more tangible threat than the political power of the planter class. But at first, that wasn't a huge issue. In 1861, "almost half of all the South’s enlistees 'either lived with slaveholders or were slave owners themselves'" (307). That changed later on with conscription, the "Twenty Negro Law" (in part, tied to the fear of slave rebellion), and the hiring of substitutes who were mostly poor. And throughout the war, desertion was a constant challenge for southern armies. Eventually, the Confederacy would try to limit some of the class tensions that were hampering the war effort, but even after, they were always a factor. Finally:

> The master class’s fear mongering surely helped convince a number of them that maintaining slavery would keep their families safe and their wages stable. By playing to their basest, most irrational anxieties, masters suc- cessfully used racism to push reluctant poor whites into an unsustainable war. Moreover, many of these men, who oftentimes lived hand to mouth during slavery, actually looked forward to the prospect of making a steady wage in the Confederate military [...] Other poor whites were seemingly coerced into enlisting due to the fact that they depended upon certain slaveholders for employment, land rental, or loans. Some simply concluded that allying with the powerful master class was in their best interest. Yet another often-overlooked incentive for antebellum era men to join the armed forces was the historic precedent of the government granting land to veterans [...] Finally, cravings for honor and respect undoubtedly led some poor white men to try to prove their own self-worth and masculinity through combat. And once the war actually began, slaveholders could shift their campaign of racial hysteria into a campaign about honor and patriotism. Once the fighting commenced, the region’s politicians could stop talking about miscegenation and race wars and begin talking about heroism and virility. And poor white men, who had spent most of their lives without a sense of honor, finally found a way to feel valued by their society. By protecting their homes, families, and communities, poor whites were able to elevate their social status. Furthermore, as David Potter found, most Southerners had more loyalty to the war and the troops than to the Confederacy itself, largely due to their emotional attachments to “home" (318-320).

Apologies for the length, my reply got away from me.

0. https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Southern-Populism-Transformatio...

1. https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-A...

2. https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807848845/the-counterrevol...

3. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ

4. https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-s...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear

Southern whites who weren't slaveholders tended to be economically dependent on slaveholders for their livelihoods, in a much more direct way than northern whites were dependent upon capitalists. The Southern economy was pre-capitalist in nature, dominated by a de facto hereditary, landed aristocracy, many of whom were descended from actual aristocracy who migrated to colonial America.

Also, there's a natural human reaction to seeing invading armies occupying your home town, regardless of the rationale behind that action or one's previous or preexisting attitude towards their present ruling class. I mean, there's a spectrum of reactions, but a large chunk of that spectrum includes hostility.

> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.)

This gets down to Arendt's idea of the banality of evil: people who do bad things (usually) aren't mustache-twirling masterminds, they're otherwise "normal" people for whom the morally wrong course of action is either easier or more compelling (including for reasons of racial superiority). My opinion: we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness.

When you consider that the average white sharecropper in the antebellum South inherited both social and political structures that granted him legitimacy in contrast to black slaves, it makes sense that such a status suffices for supporting war -- it's a matter of identity.

The United States as we know it now didn't really exist. Every State in 1860 was basically a country with its own culture and history. The Civil War was instrumental in making the US into one country with one government. Before 1860 it was more a loosely held together alliance.

> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely

What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status.

The South was run like a feudal society:

“Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed.

Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key

More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced.

In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“

https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-...

Well, for what it's worth, I think the west needs more Muslims. I mean, why do we have weekends? It's basically Saturday because of the Jews, and Sunday because of the Christians. Well, the Muslims' holy day is Friday. Three day weekend every week? Yeah, sign me up.

This is not an endorsement of Islam as a theology. But culturally, I'm down.

lost cause ?

Considering the trillions of dollars in land stolen from them I wouldnt call this any sort of compensation