Quite true. Consider, also, the Cornerstone Speech: Cornerstone Speech - Wikipedia
chowder, one thing to consider is that, from the secessionists’ point of view, the U.S. was not one country, and the northerners were not their countrymen. Many of them believed that federal troops were invading their homeland. Robert E. Lee, for example, joined the fight for the Confederacy in order to defend his “country” of Virginia. Even some unionists were prone to thinking this way - there is a story (possibly apocryphal) that General Meade once wired Lincoln after a battle that he had “driven the rebels from our soil” (Lincoln is supposed to have remarked, “When will they learn that it is all our soil?”)
This is why, despite what davekhps said, the term War Between the States is not a neutral term. It is used by apologists for the Confederacy to frame the war as one between the northern states and the southern states, as opposed to a war between a central government representing the whole country and a group of rebels who wanted to break away.
Well then it appears to me that the secessionists didn’t understand exactly what United States meant.
As for Lee fighting for his ‘country’. his country was the USA, his state was Virginia and to my way of looking at it he was totally out of order in considering Virginia to be a country.
Lincoln had it nailed, it was all your soil
To be fair, they may have been looking back at the Declaration of Independence, which said
Note the non-capitalization of that word united there. It’s even more obvious in the original, where “united” is in a much smaller size than the words “States of America”.
Personally, I think that was superseded by the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution, which did write United States, and even specific words like “perpetual union”.
Saying the Civil War was all about slavery is a lot like saying that World War I was about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Slavery is what sparked off the war. It wasn’t the underlying cause. The underlying cause was an “us vs. them” attitude that had been growing in strength for decades. As things started to polarize between the southern agricultural culture and the northern industrial culture, slavery was one of those things that you could easily point to and say see, that’s where they are different than us. As such, a lot of the arguments on both sides built up around slavery. The underlying tension was there long before slavery moved to the forefront of the issues though. A lot of “slavery” issues weren’t really slavery issues. They were control issues. For example, how the new western territories would be managed was portrayed as a slavery issue, but it wasn’t really. The south wanted these territories to be allied with them, as did the north, because whichever way these states went would decide who had more control at the federal level. Battles at the federal level had raged for decades. The north wanted laws and policies that favored their industrial and city based lifestyle. The south wanted laws and policies that favored their agricultural and rural lifestyle. Then, as now, whoever had more control in Washington got to force their policies through. As the balance of power shifted back and forth, whoever was on the losing side of a particular political battle tended to get pissed off, furthering the us vs. them polarization that had started many years earlier.
Lincoln was the straw that broke the camel’s back. When it became clear that he would be elected, the southern states decided to secede. They viewed Lincoln as being a pro-north president. Even if Lincoln hadn’t gotten elected, and even if somehow the whole slavery issue managed to get resolved peacefully (not bloody likely given the circumstances), that still probably wouldn’t have stopped the war from coming. The south may have had to come up with a different excuse to secede, but by that point the U.S. was so polarized that just about anything could have set off the war.
One effect of the war was to change the common ante-bellum construction, “these United States” to “the United States”.
Lee privately disagreed with the decision to secede, but chose to go with his state (Virginia), as did many other people faced with a choice.
Eh, you have some good points about sectionalism, but when one reads what was written and said at the time, it’s clear that slavery and its racialist background issues were the trump cards. Sectionalism may have heated things up but it did not provide the sharpest impetus for the war.
If you take a shallow glance at the war, you’d say it was slavery that caused it. Scratch the surface, and sectional/control issues become apparent. But the bones deep down underneath all that are slavery and racial fear, after all.
Don’t forget Texas’ Articles of Succession!
Not only do they mention that them Yankees wanted to take away their property (slaves), but the same said Yankees wanted to mongrelize the races.
From the very first paragraph:
And the conclusion:
Now tell me again it wasn’t about slavery.
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According to the Language Log, this may not be quite true. See Language Log » When did the Supreme Court make us an 'is'? . In the written opinions of the Supreme Court, the United States didn’t consistently become singular until about the 1910s. While it is true that the formal sort of language usage that an opinion of the Supreme Court would use tends to lag common informal speech and writing, it’s important to note that the changeover from plural to singular did not happen all at once. In fact, according to the Language Log, the Civil War may have slowed the changeover.
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