It doesn’t matter if the South declared their independence and weren’t really fighting to take over the federal government. They were trying to make off with the entire southern portion of the US, something they had no right to do
The Traitors’ War for Slavery is my preferred nomenclature whenever someone tries to rename it.
“Failed war to save slavery” is my preferred term.
I am too lazy to look for it, but the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon had a great lampooning of the whole ‘War between the states’ thing. I’ve never been totally clear on it but the WBTS was started around the Centennial and was almost a way of making the ACW into another war since that war was associated with slavery - and of course the war wasn’t about slavery. This is why all the Centennial stuff was so worthless in a big picture sense.
I guess if the South had succeeded it would been known something like the Confederate War of Independence, so maybe the Confederate Insurrection?
One of the lines in Shogun was something like
“There is no excuse for rebellion.”
“Only if you succeed.”
I’d go with Confederate War of Independence, had they won, and Civil War. I’m not seeing how War Between the States is much different.
Utterly unlike what happened in 1776, of course…!
As noted above, yes, I am quite certain. Painting the Civil War as about states rights, when the only state right that was ever a concern was the right to own slaves is my cite. Johnson Keystone Speech is my cite. Numerous documents from the period easily looked up in any library is my cite.
Individual soldiers may have had varying reasons to put on the grey and take up the rifle, but from a historical perspective, the war was about slavery, period.
Unlike the situation in 1776, the CSA didn’t win. If they had, they’d be in a much better position to spin what their motives were.
I think it is enormously relevant. Was the war of 1775-'83 a British Civil War? Was the Hungarian war of 1848-'49 (among others) really an Austrian Civil War?
That would certainly be superior to “Civil War.” I could go along with that.
FWIW, the WBTS label acknowledges that the sides were aligned on a state-by-state basis, and units were fielded that way.
Losing the Civil War didn’t inhibit attempts to spin secession into something about “state’s rights” rather than what was explicitly spelled out in secession proclamations: the central importance of Southern ownership of slaves. The “War Between The States” nonsense quickly became part of that spin and remains so (among a band of gradually diminishing diehards).
I had always assumed the Clampetts were from West Virginia and this sort of thing was producers’ ignorance (given that WV broke away from Virginia as a rebellion against the rebellion, not wanting to be sucked into a planters’ war over keeping their slaves). But it turns out the producer was from Missouri and most references to the Clampetts’ original home were to the Missouri Ozarks.
Raised & educated in Texas. It’s always been The Civil War.
(But we weren’t an Old Southern Family–some roots in the American Midwest & most in various parts of Ireland.)
Slavery was certainly the key issue of the day, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a states’ rights and Constitutional dispute, or that the structural issues were necessarily bound to slavery.
Some folks wish that the battle over federalism had been joined at another time (perhaps with the threatened New England secession), so that at least the two wouldn’t be so linked in the historical view.
Other “states’ rights” issues paled in importance next to preserving slavery.
*"Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War…Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”*
So before the war “states’ rights” were grand for Southerners - but only if they involved the interests of Southern states. :dubious:
It is called the War of Secession (Guerre de sécession) in French. And I’d agree that the nature of it didn’t really correspond to most civil wars we’ve seen in history. It was a war between two (at least de facto) independent countries controlled by, as you point out, two federal governments. I’ve read on this board the suggestion that the American War of Independence was more of a civil war than the Civil War, since Loyalists were found in most of the country.
This said, in some of the border states it seems to have assumed characteristics of a civil war, when in a same locality you could have had half the population in favour of secession and half opposed to it.
But that depends on there being some hard & fast (or at least passably consistent) rules about terminology in this area, and that’s just not the case. Certainly modern dictionaries support “The American Civil War” as an accurate moniker, and it wouldn’t be the only conflict to spring out of separatist rebellion that was generally referred to as a civil war. More to the point, separate conflicts can be branded as either civil wars or wars for independence (among other choices) despite being apparently similar in the most important areas. The category that sticks seems to depend in part on which side won, and on whether the conflict was over an integral part of a country instead of a vassal, and on the scope and duration of the conflict. It’s just too pat to say that a civil war means fighting over control of a country in its entirety. That is usually the case, yes, but not always.
Anyway, “The Civil War” works just fine as a value-neutral label, and by this point any attempts to promote an alternate label are too bound-up with partisan axe-grinding to serve any purpose besides that (even if said axe-grinding is not, in fact, one’s motive).
I see what you did there.
Granny always refers to Tennessee as her home.
To some extent, as with many of these points of language, I am arguing for what I think are the best usages of the terms involved. Language evolves and all that, but we can still try to shape it deliberately. I am saying that the single most common, ready and useful understanding of “civil war” does not correlate well with wars of secession and independence, in America or elsewhere. So we are better off using other names for them.
This is true. There were some rather brutal incidents among people who were virtually neighbors in Maryland, West Virginia and Missouri that I know of.
Maybe so. And maybe generally true of any particular time the matter of states’ rights versus federal authority has been raised.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a valid free-standing argument in favor of the principle of holding more authority to the state level and consigning to a federal government only a delimited set of powers (though that would be for another thread).
The big distinction here is that during the American Revolution (or the American Rebellion, as I seem to recall hearing somewhere as the name the Brits use for the same conflict), there was no fight over control of any part of the United Kingdom (aside from two raids in Whitehaven and Kirkcudbright Bay, the first time in some long while when hostile troops set foot on British soil, much to the humiliation of the Royal Navy). Instead, several of her colonies were in rebellion, eventually deciding on the way to declare Independence and later on to form a new nation. Compare to the American Civil War, which saw fighting over regions within the borders of the country itself.
Although they weren’t quite so much, or at least they weren’t all aligned that way. The state of Virginia, most notably, was quite literally divided over the matter, to the point where a whole new state was born (West Virginia, which seceded from Virginia and stayed with the Union).
While we’re kicking around alternate names, I vote for “The Slaveholders’ Revolt”
Also, as a Texas boy, I would like to point out that we held out longer than all those wimpy Southern states did (probably because Texas was, how shall we say this… “Way the hell out in the sticks” back then)
The difference between a rebellion and “civil war”: In the American Revolution, the colonies had no say in the government. All the laws and taxation acts were done in Great Britain. On the other hand, the southern states were part of the government and had a vote in all laws. The south did not like what the majority of Americans (the north) wanted, so it seceded. Numerous compromises were made to appease the South, but they didn’t work. The colonies rebelled because they wanted to be able to govern themselves. The South seceded for the same reason, but it was part of the government.
To the extent that the birthers had not up until this week seen Obama’s long form, they had a better argument that Obama might be Kenyan than that the Civil War was not about slavery. The historical record of the various declarations and newspaper articles make this clear. The reason states rights is seized upon as the fig leaf is that slavery was the state right that they were fighting over, and it sounds a bit more moral and principled to later generations than fighting to keep the black people enslaved. Like caring enough to polish that turd.