Read the declarations of secession from the various seceding states. They say why they seceded from the Union. They all talk about one subject: slavery. They seceded over the issue of slavery and then started shooting to kick out the troops from the Union that would not leave.
Rarely is history so clear cut.
James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, said that there was no right to secede in the Constitution.
To be fair, Georgia also mentioned the issue of lighthouses.
How about “The War of Northern Aggression Against the Southern Demons”? That way we can insult both sides at once.
Nonsense; their “new country” existed for the sole purpose of defending slavery. Patriotism for it was support of slavery.
No. The war was primarily about keeping the Union together on the part of the North, and about protecting slavery for the South. That’s all the South was at that point; they’d degenerated into nothing but a vast machine dedicated to protecting slavery. The North was a normal culture with a variety of motives for what it did; the South was a pathological, warped culture that focused on only one thing. Slavery.
Well, there’s your problem: There is a certain minimum muddiness to every historical issue. If it wasn’t muddy back then, there will be people who work like hell to muddy it up now simply to make up for it.
See also: the Moon Landing, the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and Japanese War Crimes.
People in both the north and south really didn’t care what people out west did, but they did care how they voted. If the western territories became free states, they would vote with the northern industrialists and the balance of power in Washington would sway towards that side. If they became slave states then they would vote with the southern agriculturalists, and the balance of power would sway that way. It was considered an important enough issue that it was one of the major cornerstones of the Republican Party platform (along with protecting industrial interests through tariffs, giving away free farmland to help expansion to the west, and making a transcontinental railroad).
Actually Fort Sumter is an artificial island constructed mostly of ballast granite from New England. Almost like blunt symbolism by a bad writer, it was literally a northern island in southern water. It was also built at E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S public expense- so much so that it ruined a couple of politician’s careers that so much federal money was going to defend one city. The Confederacy shelling and capturing it would have been similar to Virginia seizing or destroying the Pentagon in terms of expense and significance.
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They seceded because Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, had been elected. They seceded before he took office, before any sort of anti-slavery agression had started.
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What upset the South the most about Lincoln’s election wasn’t his views on slavery per se. Polemicists and propagandists claimed otherwise but most knew he never had been a zealous abolitionist, certainly not like Seward or some of his other opponents for the nomination. What alarmed them is that he got 3/5 (nice historically significant number) of the electoral vote without carrying a single slave holding state- in fact he wasn’t even on the ballot in most and received at most a few hundred votes in the entirety of the south. (The slave state vote was split between 3 candidates, but even if they had block voted for Breckinridge it would have made no difference.)
One of the almost bitterly funny things about states rights and the Civil War is that the entire 4 years was an exercise in why very strongly independent states can be really bad. Jefferson Davis- not the most inspiring of leaders to begin with admittedly- found that trying to get Georgia and Louisiana and Virginia and the other southern states to work together was less like herding cats than trying to organize a flash mob at a school for deaf autistic delinquents.
Slightly exaggerated of course, but real in inspiration: the states would not cooperate except when it was in their own self interest to do so, they did not see “The Big Picture” of the CSA as a sovereign unity, in order to cooperate they had to have their asses kissed with concessions to their state and the elevation of incredibly petty issues… essentially it was a school full of spoiled brats being asked to share their candy equally. Too much state sovereignty can definitely be as bad as too little, as can too much individualism among your generals (especially the incompetent ones) which was also a major problem.
The whole think was “did first and thunk about later” with a major factors of the calm voice of reason being shouted down by the shrieks of fanatics. (Secession was not- was nowhere near- a unanimous decision by southern policy makers, there were many who saw the handwriting on the wall- but ultimately the fanatics won out.)
I’m just glad we got the “doing things to protect the fortunes and further the egoes of a tiny rich minority without regard to practicalities and complexities” thing out of our system down heah.
And they were pissed off about always being referred to as “peaches”.
I now know everything I need to know about WillFarnaby.
For some it was, actually. As I mentioned above, there were many- millions probably- of northerners (and more than a few southerners) who really did see slavery as evil BUT not worth going to war over (and 1861 was far from the first time they’d come close to war over the issue), so to them anti-expansion was basically seen as a way of keeping the cancer from metastasizing without having to do invasive surgery. (Sorry for the strained analogy- best I can come up with at the moment.)
But to those who weren’t anti-slavery for ethical reasons there were definitely very practical reasons. Quite simply, farmers using free labor (their families and hired laborers) couldn’t compete with slaveowning planters moving in.
Pretty much the entire history of America up until 1861 had been one major theme: opening up more territory for free or cheap land. Both north and south had the same eternal issue: Families tended to be large, and even a big fertile farm that’s very profitable for Ma and Pa and capable of feeding and clothing them and their 10 kids is not going to feed and clothe their 10 kids wives and husbands and then the 50 grandchildren they produce, etc., plus in addition to that even the best of farms could play out after a few harvests (ESPECIALLY with cotton and tobacco, both of which devastate the soil), so each new generation had several kids who had to get their own farms.
Since then as now most people weren’t rich and often couldn’t afford farms where they grew up (plus there was only a limited amount of farm land available), the only way to accomplish this was for a significant part of the population constantly moving west, taking land from the Indians and settling it themselves. Worked okay (divorcing the ethics of what was done to the Indians of course) well into the 19th century, but even by the 1850s they were starting to run out of places to go.
Now, in the south the same pattern was repeated constantly: in Kentucky in the 1810s, Mississippi/Alabama in the 1820s, Florida in the 1830s, northern Louisiana in the 1850s, same thing: the land is cheap enough, but no matter how many small farmers settled it within a few years the slave owning class would end up with the lion’s share of the holdings. They could afford to drive the yeoman farmers into the poor house and take over a place economically. This in fact is a major reason that Lincoln’s family left Kentucky when he was a boy- the speculation that the planter class had the cash and the slaves and the political muscle to drive poor whites like Thomas Lincoln off their land or else make them into their vassal.
They didn’t want this to happen in Kansas and Nebraska, and if they’d been allowed to move there with their slaves then in another few years, once another generation of southerners had to go on the move again to find their farms, it would have begun repeating.
Hijack:
While I agree that slavery was the fundamental, primary cause of the Civil War, the statement of yours is just claptrap.
If anything, the South was written out of American popular history in the decades after the Civil War, as the nation’s history came to be told from a suspiciously New England perspective. American colonial history seemed to begin with the Mayflower, rather than with Jamestown. The American Revolution seemed to take place almost entirely within the vicinity of Boston and the Northeast, and more or less ended with Saratoga (with just a little mop-up operation in some place called Yorktown, no state specified). (King’s Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse were largely ignored in grade school histories.) And the Virginians who couldn’t be written out of the story, like Washington and Jefferson and Madison, seemed at least to lose their Southern accents.
So please, a cite for this proposition that the profession of history was dominated by Southerners.
/Hijack
So, you are saying that the Southerners were merely hypocrites?
When Virginia and its Southern allies imposed the War against Britain on the North in 1812, using as an excuse the impressment of seamen into the Royal Navy, (an issue that irritated New Englanders, but over which they did not want to fight a commerce disrupting war), the Northerners began discussing the possibility of withdrawing from the union in order to put a halt to the ruinous taxes and trade disruption it imposed on them. These discussions took place over several months in letters and newspaper editorials, culminating in the Hartford Convention at which the matter was given serious consideration, although a resolution was postponed at that time.
The universal, (nearly unanimous), reaction throughout the South was that New England had no right to secede and that the Southern states would be justified to divert military forces from the war against Britain to the North to compel those states to remain in the union. Now, you are saying that those same Southern states suddenly perceived a right that they had already condemned. That was awfully convenient.
That’s not entirely true. They also talked about tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, which was a legitimate non-slavery regional issue. (The Tariff, the South argued, was being used not as a neutral revenue-raising measure, but as a way to enrich Northern manufacturers by forcing Southerners to buy from them when they could have otherwise purchased less expensive English goods.)
But slavery was first and foremost the issue of the day, and you really get the feeling that the Tariff issue was hauled out as an afterthought, in an effort to bring along the non-slave-holding yeoman farmers.
You only get to say you formed a new country if you win.
Both were rebellions.
Well yes. But slavery was the single most important issue. Without the slavery question, the Southern states would not have seceeded. You can’t say that about anything else.
Mid-Nineteenth Century industrialists cared about the same thing that industrialists today care about: making money. They didn’t want Southern states to build their own factories in the name of Progress. Those factories would compete with them.
The federal government is just not set up to let the majority do whatever they want. Compromise is essential to getting things done. The history of the slave question was one of compromises. Every time new states were added there was a compromise. Going all the way back to the admissions of Kentucky and Vermont in 1791.
This misses the bigger picture. To oppose the expansion of slavery was to oppose slavery itself because at the time it was believed that slavery had to expand to survive. Not for any obscure philosophical reason but because intensive cash crop farming quickly ruined the land. So planters always needed new lands. It wasn’t just the balance of power. The fight to expand or limit slave territory was seen as crucial to the survival of slavery even if those moving west were never given any political power.
And, of course, many nonelite white Northerners wanted to move West, or knew people who were planning on doing so, and didn’t want to have to compete with blacks and their evil overlords. The West represented freedom and opportunity. But not if slavers took over those lands. Very few people emigrated from free states to slave states. (Or from free foreign countries to slave states for that matter.)
It was about money. The slaves made lots of money for the southern land owners. If farm machinery came around a little sooner, there may not have been a civil war. They may have let the slaves walk in peace.
Yes I’m saying precisely that. So were the New England states.
A short-lived country is still a country. It’s citizens we’re represented by the Confeserate government, not the U.S. government.
Of course there is no right for the states to secede in the Constitution, the document was created to outline powers of he FEDERAL government.
The tenth amendment reserves all other powers to the states.
Virginia, New York, Rhode Island all included a clause in their ratifications of the Constitution that allowed them to withdraw from the union. Virginia mentioned this clause when it seceded. Since all states must adopt the Constitution on equal terms and with equal rights, the right of secession applies to all states.
"Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable , a most sacred right- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they inhabit. " - Abraham Lincoln, 1948. Speaking about people dwelling in the disputed area between Texas and Mexico.