So? Lincoln didn’t start the Civil War, the South did.
We’ll throw in Kentucky for free! Come on, it’s a great deal!
Okay, fine, we’ll PAY you to take Florida!
All that loyalty during the Civil War, and this what we get for it? Feh!
Oh, think getting sold out to France is a disgrace, do you ?! Feh and feh ! I blow very thin cigarette smoke in your general direction, SIR !
Being sold is one thing, it’s being offered for free that I object to. Kentucky is no throw-in! We have 11 NCAA men’s basketball championships, for Pete’s sake.
And tobacco…hmmm…this could work out, actually…
So if there were no slavery, are people arguing that the US Civil War wouldn’t have happened?
In all likelihood, no, it wouldn’t have.
They weren’t his slaves. They belonged to his father-in-law’s estate. And he only freed them because the will said that he had to free them within 5 years. His own slaves didn’t get freed, for the most part, until the end of the war. He had freed a few earlier at his wife’s urging, but not most of them. (And, of course, most of the slaves had escaped when Union troops seized Arlington and raided the other Custis plantations, leading to Lee’s ironic observation, in an 1863 letter to his son about freeing the Custis slaves, " Those [slaves] that have left with the enemy, may not require their manumission.")
And when Lee was master of Arlington and the estate’s slaves, he was a harsher master than his father in law, whipping slaves, which his father in law didn’t do, and splitting up slave families, which his father in law didn’t do.
What would be the reason otherwise?
Factoid: A fair number of Washington’s slaves escaped to British lines, and several helped found Birchtown, Nova Scotia, then the largest freedmen’s settlement in North America. One, Henry Washington, went on to help found the freedmen’s colony in Sierra Leone, and implemented some of the scientific farming methods he learned at Mount Vernon.
Smithsonian Magazine tells how Jefferson treated his own slaves, once he realized how profitable they were.
No point in asking me.
I was asking people’s opinion because I keep hearing it wasn’t about slavery.
That’s what led me to ask.
Some do say it was about “states’ rights”, yes. Except that was just code for slavery.
Later it became code for Jim Crow, then segregation, now more subtle things, but the Confederate flag still represents them all.
That’s the thing: it was about state’s rights, but the right in question was the right to hold slaves (which wasn’t even particularly threatened at the time, secession was an absurd overreaction). The two positions aren’t mutually exclusive.
They’re not mutually exclusive, but emphasizing the “states rights” angle is deceptive (historically, the deception has been intentional). It was about slavery (almost entirely), and saying “it was about states rights” implies that slavery was a lesser reason.
That’s fair.
Today there isn’t much argument about the United States being a nation committed to entrepreneurial progress but we have to remember that at one time that was a Northern value. The antebellum South found itself outside the American zeitgeist. While it is true that the Republicans only wanted to contain slavery and were not ready to interfere with its existence it is also true that the writing was on the wall. The planter elite could see that their way of life no longer fit in with the rest of the country. They knew full well that the federal government already had the tools to isolate and eventually eliminate slavery (mainly by the interstate commerce clause and patronage). And now the anti-slavery forces had demonstrated that they could control the federal government without any votes from the South.
It was put up or shut up time. Year by year immigration was making the North more powerful than the stagnant South. If they were going to fight to keep their slaves then the sooner the better. Waiting until the federal government was actually limiting the interstate movement of slaves and appointing abolitionist post masters would be too late. The South did not overreact. Unfortunately they decided to spill blood to try to maintain their tyranny. Obviously they failed. But it was their last best hope.
Didn’t overreact? I’d say they overreacted at every possible stage! Tried to force slavery on states that weren’t keen on the idea, made heroes of despicable bullies like Preston Brooks, overreacted to the John Brown raid, tried to justify slavery in a manner that made everyone in a free state flinch, insisted that they run their own candidate - allowing Lincoln to win, having a hissy fit and seceding once Lincoln won, and finally opening fire on Fort Sumter. The only country/region I can think of that made as many errors in judgement was England before the Revolutionary War.
The southern states didn’t view the allowance of slavery as a state’s right. They thought it was a state’s obligation to its citizens. The Confederate constitution explicitly banned states from exercising the right to allow or ban slavery.
By 1861, it was too late. The Union outmatched the CSA in population, wealth, naval power, industrial output, essentially everything needed to wage war. Instead of starting a war they couldn’t win, the Southern states could have fought to keep their slaves through the sourthouse and the ballot box, undoubtedly keeping them past 1865, and perhaps even winning concessions like compensation from the government for slaves freed. Starting the war meant winning no such concessions.
That’s because they were terrible hypocrites.
Precisely - apologists used to say (and some still do): “The war wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights.” As if they were entirely different things.
It was about state’s rights…to slavery. Slavery was the only states’ rights issue that southern states cared about enough to secede over.