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Comment by UnhelpfulYoda | Hacker News Reader

Meh, this is just the latest fad with 'scholars' ...the whole thing about how The Dark Ages weren't really dark, has been going on for about 20 years now... there are good reasons that this period is called the dark ages.

I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.

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>I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.

The dark ages I seem to have a more-clear picture of: derth of historical record, rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, technological progress, and unfortunate disease, all each contributed, and amalgamated into the public conscious of defining the era as 'dark.'

The civil war thing is really confusing. I grew up on slavery as the reason, then in uni had a prof tell me it was really about states rights. I've talked to others who had the exact opposite experience. Anyways, it's a super political and emotionally sensitive topic to people... But I had the impression the states rights narrative was not a recent thing.

The state's right they were fighting for was the right to keep slaves.

It is super clear, the states say it in their succession documents.

Claiming it is about abstract states rights and not slavery is Lost Cause revisionism.

The Southern States were fighting to keep slavery and they would agree to a ceasefire and to join the union if the north alllowed a constitutional amendment making this clear.

However, people like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson famously said northern aggression towards the south wasn't about slavery.

So the issue seems to be obviously oversimplified in these internet and media debates.

The states' rights narrative isn't recent, but my understanding is that it's a very selective reading of history that ignores many of the stated rationales and events leading up to and throughout the war. Yes, war is complicated and slavery wasn't the only factor, but I understand it to have been the predominant one.

Remember that the back-and-forth over federalism and states' rights has been ongoing since forever, and the same people tend to be on opposite sides of that question depending on the matter in question. Thus it's reasonable to ask: states' rights to do what? In the context of that time, the answer was clear.

It does make for a nice fairy tale, though, for whitewashing the past, and it's one someone might believe because their parents told them, and their grandparents told their parents, etc., all the way back to the vanquished generation rationalizing their conduct post-hoc, much as many Nazis did after World War II.

I'm no historian, so take with 0.017 mol NaCl.

> Yes, war is complicated and slavery wasn't the only factor, but I understand it to have been the predominant one.

From Mississippi's declaration of secession:

> 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.

* https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...

Doing a Ctrl-F and searching for "slavery" gives quite a few complaints (by most of the states) against the Federal government and the North on the subject.

The idea that the civil war wasn't about slavery is mostly the view pushed by the North before the war. Before the war, there was a balance of slave and non-slave states, and any time they were added, that balance was preserved. Lincoln's position was that slavery was OK, but should spread into any new states, and that would have tipped the balance in congress to anti-slavery. After Lincoln was elected, the states began to succeed, and in their succession documents, they quite clearly stated that it was about slavery. The public position of the North was that they fought to prevent the South from succeeding, and they didn't want to end slavery (followed with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge). And its that attitude that allowed the South, after the fact, to promote the idea that it wasn't about slavery, and the North wasn't about to correct them.

>Lincoln's position was that slavery was OK, but should spread into any new states

He may have taken a more moderate stance for his presidential campaign, but for most of his political career Lincoln was a hardcore, outspoken abolitionist. Nobody at the time seriously thought Lincoln was OK with slavery; that's why southern states immediately started seceding.

Lincoln used the military to block Southern ports, which was what I understood to be what prompted secession.

This is a speech Lincoln delivered well before he was president:

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper....

This is the Dunning School:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_School

It is Confederate apologia, not Union. It is the origin of the states' rights theory of the Civil War.

He's not writing confederate propaganda. Can we graduate from this idea of calling everyone you disagree with a nazi or racist? You can see here, what he wrote is consistent with my reading of history: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0032.105/--lincoln...

The ‘Obscure’ Ages

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