The Confederacy didn’t think that free states should have the right to make slavery illegal in their own state. Thus the south’s objection to Transit Laws and the famously poor reaction to the Lemon v New York case.
“States Rights” like “Lost Cause” is just pandering to people that want to believe racism is honorable and just.
I think it’s great! I’m looking forward to the “Cats should not be declawed” thread and the “Don’t spank your children” thread.
It’s a euphemism. And like all euphemisms, it’s used to package something unpalatable as something agreeable. In fact, this specific euphemism has been used over and over again for the purpose of making something awful (slavery, segregation, gay-bashing, etc.) sound reasonable (“states rights”). And like with many such euphemisms, we do well to not just accept the euphemism; what people advocating for “states rights” want is for the states to continue to have the right to discriminate against whoever they so choose - do not doubt for a second that when granted the opportunity to enshrine that discrimination in federal law despite the objection of states, they will abandon their interest in “states rights” at the drop of a hat.
But yes, well-recognized, the cause of the The War To Preserve And Expand Slavery was slavery. There is no serious dispute about this among historians and anyone claiming otherwise should be seen as deeply suspect, as though they had insisted that there were no mass killings at Auschwitz. This is extremely well-trodden ground.
The Southern states also opposed states’ rights for things like the Fugitive Slave Act, which was giving massive power to the federal government over northern states.
“States’ rights” was bullshit then. It’s still bullshit now, for the most part.
IIRC, just about all of the eleven seceding states issued declarations setting for the reasons for their urgent departure. And they just about all listed preservation of slavery as reason #1.
Also there’s Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech,” where the Confederacy’s new Vice-President said that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
And of course, it is worth recalling that Abraham Lincoln did not propose to end slavery, rather proposing only that no new states be admitted to the Union as slave states. Absent the war, it would have taken a Constitutional amendment to end slavery in the Southern states, and Constitutional amendments need to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.
With 15 slave states in the Union, the end of slavery would have probably been at least two generations away - plenty of time for the Southern aristocracy to adapt to changed circumstances. But the idea of slaves ever becoming free and having human rights was anathema to them.
It was specifically about a state’s right to secede. There is really no getting around that.
Secede? Why would they want to secede?
Yes; Southern appetite for secession was rather low in 1858, and Lincoln himself wasn’t seen as a great “danger.” But there was another man whose actions had a very strong effect on unifying the southern states and tilting them toward succession(*) — that man was John Brown the Martyr.
(* - Several pages near the linked-page 421 help develop that case; I hope Google lets you view several of them.)
Of course. Legally, they’d won. The Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act had effectively made the entire country slave territory.
But the abolitionist movement he was part of (to the extent he could be effective at that point) wasn’t going away.
This “states’ rights” nonsense, ignoring the Supremacy Clause, didn’t go away after the war, either - it became the cover story for Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation, vote suppression, and other things that usually could not be proudly supported directly. It hasn’t gone away yet.
Well duh. That’s kind of the whole point. The whole thing was in a very limited, technical sense about states’ rights, but the rights in question all revolved around slavery and its preservation. It’s not like the southern states rebelled because of Federal overreach in any other sort of state right.
So saying it’s about states’ rights is a disingenuous modern-day attempt to portray the Southern states as somehow more virtuous than they were.
Read any secession declaration - *any *of them - and you’ll see they were all about slavery and a state’s “right” to practice it.
It’s also a way to defend (or avoid confronting) modern-day racism and related practices, as well as other deplorabilities that conveniently correlate with it.
When a state’s right conflicted with protection of slavery, the South chose slavery (as in the “Fugitive Slave Act” which interfered with the right of states to decide how to enforce their laws). When the First Amendment conflicted with slavery, the South chose slavery (as in the laws prohibited anti-slavery literature from being distributed in the South (where there were some abolitionists around, after all)). There was no principle that the South held in higher regard than slavery, no principle they would not abandon if it conflicted with the wish to preserve slavery.
Andy L, you left off a big one - the southern states also opposed letting a state decide if it was a slave state or free state, and supported having Congress declare that certain states were slave states regardless of what the population or government of the state wanted. The Kansas–Nebraska act grew out of their staunch opposition to states rights in regards to being a slave or free state in the first place. This really highlights that the only “State’s Right” that they cared about was the right for a state to be a slave state, even deciding ‘slave vs free’ was a State’s Right they opposed.
Thanks!
What the OP fails to realize is preservation of slavery was seen as a state right. Read the text of the Corwin Amendment.
So it wasn’t about slavery except it was in that the South wanted the right to keep slavery. There were other state-rights issues as well (tariffs and the power of the Feds in a Federalist system being the biggest ones) but slavery was the most tangible and thus become the representation for everyone for “state rights”.
The South very explicitly opposed “states’ rights” on a host of other issues already mentioned. If they were actually for the concept of “states’ rights”, they would have been in favor of them on those issues as well. But they really just cared about slavery.
And then remember that the Southern states explicitly wanted the exact opposite, and demanded to interfere in the domestic institutions of new states as they were added by forcing them to be slave states regardless of what the people and/or government of the state wanted.
So your position is that Confederate Vice President Alexander H Stephens didn’t understand what the South wanted, that in spite of what he said it was all just about some States Rights which happen to include slavery? What documents from before 1865 support your claim? Here’s a quote from his most famous speech on the topic, I think that the VP of the Confederacy is a pretty authoritiative source here:
According to the articles of secession, mostly slavery.
In the antebellum US, Southern pols had one overriding imperative, which was to preserve the even balance between slave states and free states (or, ideally, to make slave states outnumber free). That way, no antislavery bill would ever pass the Senate. There was even a clique called the Knights of the Golden Circle who hoped to annex Caribbean and Central American countries as slave states.
To preserve control of the House of Representatives.
A like the cartoonist Patis definition of the Civil War: “One day, some people took their states and went home. We shot them.”