Without passing on whether this is correct or not, the problem is (and the stench of bullshit issues from) the fact that “American Civil War” no more hearkens back to slavery as a casus belli than does “War Between the States.” Now, if “The War About Slavery” were in contention, perhaps you might have a point. But it is not, and so this semiotic analysis is most unconvincing.
Most wars aren’t named (in English) for motives, whether actual or purported, so that’s not relevant.
My point about 1776 was surely obvious. The thirteen colonies that established the United States had absolutely no legal right under the existing law to do what they did. What “right” they did have was as defined political communities seeking to achieve separation by the only method open to them. That is exactly what happened in 1860/61. The motives in either case are not relevant.
What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander!
You are surely not unaware that the victor writes history.
Historians write history. They are not always victorious or even participants. As a counterexample that proves this truism is bullshit I give you Thucydides. Or Machiavelli, or Clauswitz. Or Xenophon.
I don’t totally disagree with this argument… but I don’t totally agree with it, either.
Firstly, you’re entirely incorrect regarding the source of law in the colonies. Almost all legislation directly affecting most inhabitants of the colonies was passed by the colonial legislatures (“navigation” and customs/excise being an admittedly significant exception). And most taxes that were paid were levied by those legislatures, including (I think) all taxation levied within the boundaries of the colonies prior to the infamous Stamp Act.
Secondly, even if the colonies had been represented at Westminster, i.e. they’d had “taxation with representation”, they would then have find themselves in a situation not dissimilar to the one that the Southern states perceived themselves to be in, and not really any different to the situation the colonies actually found themselves to be in c. 1775. Colonies with representation at Westminster would still have found themselves in a minority (albeit a very different sort of minority), even though they were “part of the government”.
Look at Ireland ninety years ago or so. It was formally part of the United Kingdom. It was represented at Westminster; indeed it was over-represented, in terms of population. Yet in 1919-21 it seceded from the United Kingdom, because its inhabitants (and certainly most of its dominant political class) felt that they were a perpetual minority. As with North America in the 1860s, there was division within families and within certain local communities, let alone within the wider “nation”. Yet as with 1776-1783, we don’t speak of a “civil war”. We speak of an Anglo-Irish War, or of the Irish War of Independence, or maybe of the Black and Tans War. The war that ended in 1921 was followed by another war that is referred to as a/the Civil War, where two factions fought over the political control of the country (Ireland) as a whole.
Obviously the underlying reasons for the American War of Independence, the American “Civil War”, the Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War, were all very different. But we have 3x secessions by a self-defined political community vs. 1x conflict within the entirety of a political community. Yet the standard nomenclature conflates the American “Civil War” with the Irish Civil War (as well as with the Russian and English Civil Wars). I don’t think this accurately reflects the nature of the political conflict involved.
Stupid slooooow connection lost my correcting edit to the following! :mad:
Second attempt!
For:
read:
Not perfect, but it’ll do…
I think it would only be fair to 1. Read the whole of the Declaration before we cast our lot in saying, unreservedly, that THE cause for the SC secession was slavery. Our reporter says ‘it was noted’…this, alone, makes me think that it wasn’t the THE it was made out to be. 2. Consult the other states’ declarations, etc… 3. Find out the North’s/Lincoln’s views. 4. Look at all of the facts.
I haven’t seen any good cites here that do too well in saying 'The South" was only fighting to be a bunch of slaveholders. The partial quote from the Post surely doesn’t give us a good idea why there was a succession, it only tells us one of the reasons. Like the sinking of the Lusitania being used to whip the US into war fever.
It’s a bit too much to say that the war was about slavery. It was about other things, too.
One can call it the War of Northern Agression, fairly. The state which had seceded had foreign troops in the Southern state, and had not left (from the CSA’s viewpoint.) It doesn’t matter who fired the first shot, the North (again per the CSA’s view) had an army of hostiles in territory not theirs, and weren’t planning to leave. Casus belli, I believe. (If you want to subscribe to etc…)
Best wishes,
hh
btw, back in my militia sympathizer days, I was forced into an assignment by my Museum Science professor to make an exhibit, with a group of other students. I had to reference the Late Unpleasantness, and on the plaque, I called it ‘The War of Northern Agression.’ I was quite pleased with myself. Got a ‘B’.
Now, of course, I call all wars “The War to Irritate handsomeharry, because every jerk and his brother has an opinion about it, and I don’t, but it doesn’t matter, because they will lecture me on who’s right and who’s wrong all the same, without giving me a chance to give my opinion, or, if they do give me a chance, will interrupt…” or something like that.
We don’t need to rehash the evidence here, there are book length treatments of it. We don’t need to rehash the evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii here either, even though that evidence is not as well developed.
The seceding states started their treason because they thought Lincoln was going to take their slaves away. They said so in their declarations of treason, they said it before during the campaign, and they discussed it throughout the war. It was not the only reason they gave on the face of it, but every reason they did give led directly back to slavery.
Just as the birthers claim it is not about race, but the constitution, the slave supporters claim it was about a constitutional split of powers, but even they concede that the constitutional issue was how to repatriate run away slaves.
Could that not be clearer?
I wonder if Thomas Jefferson eloigned Sally Hemings.
I vote Hollywood trope.
I have lived in the South all my life and have known a lot of very old Southerners, and they all called it the Civil War. No one I’ve ever known gets indignant and insists on “The War Between the States” except with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
My ancient grandmother, whose own father was a disabled (and embittered) Confederate veteran, referred to it as the Civil War, or more commonly just “The War.” As in, “Back before The War, Daddy lived in Early County.”
Nah. The Confederates often referred to the other side as “the Federals.” They knew it wasn’t a war between the states, but rather a war between the federal government and some breakaway states.
Y’know, calling it “treason” over and over doesn’t win you any debate points and it does less than zero to keep the discussion, well, civil.
The Confederates were treasonous in exactly the same sense the signers of the Declaration of Independence were treasonous. We are all the heirs to “treason” and descendants of “traitors” one way or another if you want to play that game.
The Confederacy as a whole never produced a “declaration of independence”, and only four of the seceding states produced such declarations individually. (By “declaration of independence”, I don’t mean simply a legal proclamation–those were the “ordinances of secession”, but they mostly just said “We’re secedin’; y’all keep delivering the mail and such until we get it all figured out”–but a political, rhetorical, and philosophical statement of causes and principles.)
South Carolina did mount a considerable defense of the right of states to secede from the union, but the only reasons they cite for actually choosing to exercise that right are all related to slavery.
Mississippi’s is very bluntly all about slavery.
Georgia mentions a few other issues here and there in passing, but it’s clear from the declaration that slavery is the fundamental question. (Georgia’s declaration also says “This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.”)
Texas also mentions a few other issues (Indian raids and Mexican “banditti”) but clearly proclaims Texans’ belief in slavery and white supremacy as fundamental principles.
Lincoln always made it clear he was waging war to defend the Union and that he believed he had no Constitutional power to abolish slavery within the limits of any state simply by executive fiat–the Emancipation Proclamation was presented as a war measure, akin to confiscating or destroying the valuable property of a group of people actively waging war against the United States, (legally speaking) like ordering the bombing of a ball-bearing factory. Total and final abolition was done by Constitutional amendment, not by either Presidential proclamation or even by a law passed by Congress. But Lincoln was also a long-time foe of slavery, who wanted to limit its expansion and ultimately hoped to see it somehow or another ended–it was on that basis that he was elected President. (And I don’t think that he really thought proclaiming millions of slaves to be “forever free” to be morally no different from wrecking a railroad or blowing up a powder mill.) And as he said towards the end of the war “All knew that this interest [slavery] was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
Of course, none of the various names–[American] Civil War; War Between the States; War of the Rebellion–actually say anything much about the causes of the war. I personally don’t see much reason not to call it “the Civil War” (or “American Civil War” to be more precise), since that’s what the vast majority of us have called it for a long time now. (Maybe as a compromise we could start calling it “the War Between the States Over Slavery”.)
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Sir John Harrington
“Treason is a matter of dates.” Talleyrand
There is no attainder of guilt by blood in the good old USofA. It’s not like I’m calling anyone alive a traitor over the late unpleasantness. But I’ll be damned if slavery is something to celebrate as heritage and come up with euphemisms for. It was as ugly a cause as anyone ever fought for.
I’ve lived in Charleston, SC, since 1986, and I’ve usually heard it referred to as the War of Northern Aggression. I once went on a guided tour of Drayton Hall, and the tour guide not only referred to it as WNA, but slammed the federal troops on the way they ended the war and also had no love of Sherman (of course) or of Reconstruction; however, she also made some assertions putting the North in a bad light which were not true. Surprisingly for me as many of the visitors were “Yankees.” I think it will take another century before all the southern hostility finally dissipates.
The Second Stone:
Charleston, SC, made much ado re the sesquicentenial, with many “celebrations” both at White Point Gardens on the Battery and at Ft. Sumter. Most Afro-Americans were not appreciative of all the festivities, but as some of them noted, you can commemorate the sesquicentennial, but you should not celebrate it. Which is true. Many Americans, on both sides, died (the most in any American war), and many in the South fought because they lived in CSA, irrespective of the cause. One cannot just forget about it.
Yeah, I’ve heard this sort of thing from some in recent years. And I suspect what has happened is that way back when, someone made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “War of Northern Aggression” and someone who was a little dense and didn’t get the tongue-in-cheek part picked it up and ran with it, and now uses it in all earnestness.
But the OP’s question (I think) is getting at whether anyone back in the day (that is, the late19th to early 20th centuries) really got indignant if you called it “the Civil War.” Given the long stretches between generations in my family, I have some unusual perspective in that I knew someone (my grandmother) whose father was a Confederate veteran. Now believe me, she was still very bitter about “the yankees,” but she didn’t get caught up in any nonsense about what to call the war. Nor did anyone else of her generation as far as I could tell.
In the 1980’s a friend of mine (elementary school age) and his family moved from Michigan to North Carolina, and he got in trouble in class for correcting the teacher by telling her the North won after she gave a lesson claiming the South did.
I don’t believe you.
I vote these tandem award winners for the most hilariously inane comment in the thread.
The reverberations of the last shots of the war had barely died out before gobs of memoirs and analyses started getting churned out by partipants on both sides. There’s been no shortage of historical tomes over the years written from various scholarly perspectives, with plenty of due consideration for the motives and claims of Northerners and Southerners. Details are still being argued, but there is no real dispute among serious historians about a determination to hold onto slavery being the overwhelming issue that led the South to open hostilities, or that preservation of the Union was the overwhelming issue that drew the North into the war and kept it determined to win despite terrible costs.
Few are fooled by attempts to cloud the issues through deceptive or cutesy names for the conflict.