Oh, and let’s not imagine that the Republicans wanted to make sure all new Western states were free states. No, their radical proposal was that each new state would decide for itself whether it would be free or slave. Of course it was obvious that the new states would overwhelmingly vote to be free states.
Get enough anti-slavery Senators, and eventually slavery gets more and more circumscribed. So state’s rights be damned.
The slavocracy was overwhelmingly opposed to state’s rights, and the first change they made in the Confederate Constitution was to forbid any state from outlawing slavery.
Its sort of what made the slavery thing an issue. Up until about 1812, states that were admitted into the union were pretty balanced between slave states and free states. After 1812, there were many more territories that wanted to be free states and this led to states being admitted to the union in pairs, one slave state and one free state. After 1850, they started to let the territory decide if it wanted to be a free state or a slave state and the western states generally chose to be slave states and free states were soon going to become a supermajority, like constitutional amendment level supermajority.
So the south saw the writing on the wall and after decades of forcing the rest of the union to admit one slave state for every free state, they decided to leave the union rather than abide by the will of the majority now that they were no longer in the majority.
Its not quite that simple either. There was going to be a war, regardless of who fired the first shot. The shots fired on fort sumter are not as simply explained as you seem to think.
Sure. so if you can show me the agreement whereby south carolina agreed to lease that land to the federal government, then I guess you have some sort of parity. Otherwise, they are not really the same thing.
What’s not so simple? US soldiers at a less secure fort were worried, so they moved to Sumter. Southern states (or, more accurately, the rich white people in charge of them) seceded because they, probably correctly, anticipated that slavery was unsustainable if they stayed in the USA. Days after those soldiers moved to Sumter, a resupply mission was sent, and Southern assholes fired on that supply mission, preventing them from resupplying Fort Sumter.
Perhaps it was inevitable, but if so, it’s because the rich white assholes in charge of Southern states couldn’t conceive of a future without slavery, and they were willing to cause lots of death and destruction to try to avoid it. In every sense, those Southern rich white assholes were responsible for starting the Civil War.
Let’s put aside the issue of Fort Sumter for the moment. Let’s discuss another federal institution that was located in a seceding state: the New Orleans Mint. The mint contained a large quantity of gold and silver that belonged to the United States government. When Louisiana seceded, it confiscated that gold and silver.
Do people feel that was legal? Was the Confederate government entitled to that gold and silver because it was located inside the territory they controlled?
Was it just property that belonged to the United States government that the CSA had a right to take? Or could they confiscate property that belonged to American private citizens? Could the Confederate government confiscate property that belonged to countries other than the United States?
I don’t think this is completely accurate. But in any event, the specific claim I was responding to was that "one of the biggest complaints leading to numerous political deals is that the southern states did not believe that states should be allowed to decide whether they were slave or free in the first place, that it should be dictated by the Federal government."
I was (and am) not aware of that. And as it turned out, the poster making this claim was referring to the Fugitive Slave Act, which does not support his claim.
I don’t know that this is accurate. From Wikipedia
What you’re describing seems to be the Douglas position. But Lincoln, whose election triggered the secession, apparently took a harder line and wanted future states to be free by federal mandate.
I was not referring to the Fugitive Slave Act when I made that claim, I was referring to the history of admitting states to the union and whether they were free or slave in the 1800s, including the Missouri compromise, compromise of 1850, and Kansas-Nebraska act. Southern States were consistently and vehemently opposed to new states determining their slave or free status on their own, which runs directly counter to claims that they valued ‘states rights’.
It appears that my mistake was that I gave you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you had a very basic knowledge of events leading up to the start of the Civil War to back up your claims about how it started.
Governments are only as moral s the people that direct it. In a democracy, the morality of government reflects the morality of the people it governs. The South might have been a bit plutocratic but there was a pervasive flaw in the morality of most southerners that allowed them to not only tolerate slavery but see it as fundamental to their society.
Conscription may or may not be immoral in theory but was usually immoral in practice. The sons of privilege frequently found themselves in safer billets than the sons of ditchdiggers.
You ever hear of a social contract? Conscription might be at the far end of that social contract but when the security of the state requires physical defense, doesn’t the social contract permit the state to conscript people in its defense?
Libertarians frequently think that if things are simply left to their own devices, everything will simply work itself out. Should we have left the segregated lunch counters alone? Should we have left child labor alone? Should we have left monopolies alone?
The south could have languished for many many years as a slave nation if there wasn’t some sort of intervention.
Looking at the politics in the 1960’s, do you really think that there would have been a spontaneous movement for people to simply give up their slaves?
How do the slaves move away? Or are you saying that the poor whites who firmly believed in a social structure that included slavery would have left?
I thought we all agreed that the war wasn’t waged by the north to abolish slavery but to put down a rebellion.
Are you fucking kidding me?
All those tea party libertarians in the south (and they are the dominant species of libertarian in the south) are neither left leaning nor are they are they in favor of reparations. Sure there are some ivory tower types that can make a case for reparations but its not a commonly held belief among libertarians, particularly white libertarians. 94% of Libertarians are white, in other words a Libertarians is more likely to be white than a black person is to vote for a Democrat (even Obama). IOW, Libertarians are more racially homogeneous than blacks are politically homogeneous. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?
Until the labor movement (and today’s social safety nets) the price of labor was pretty much what you needed to eat and feed your family because the alternative was starvation and if you wanted more than what you needed for subsistence then there was another subsistence farmer ready to take your place.
OK, my mistake. you WEREN’T talking about the battle of Fort Sumter like everyone else, you were talking about the previous attack by college students at the South Carolina military college firing on a ship that was attempting to resupply a fort that was pointing its cannons at Charleston.
If I point a gun at you and you shoot me, you might have fired the first shot but it is hard to say that you started it. Federal troops trained cannons at charleston from an island fort in charleston harbor but didn’t have any cannon balls. The supply ship might have been carrying those cannon balls, should they have just let the supply ship through? Is THAT what you are saying?
I don’t think you are using the term reasonable correctly and how do you know they were assholes? How do you know that the guys in the fort weren’t assholes? I mean, isn’t training your cannons on a large civilian population an asshole thing to do?
See above, those supplies might have included cannonballs that could be fired on Charleston.
By college students.
Are you under the impression that the demands to vacate didn’t start until they moved to fort sumter? They were told to vacate before they moved to fort sumter. Its pretty silly to argue that they vacated one fort so the fact that they moved to another fort one island over means they complied with the request.
See above. Is it really your fault if you shoot me when I point a gun at you? Can i really say you started it?
A lot of this seems like opinion based on little more than a one sided emotional argument. South=slavery - slavery=evil therefore its all the fault of the south, there is no “other side of the story” Right?
Oh OK then your statement was meaningless. America didn’t negotiate their share of the British debt when they declared independence either. And like I said earlier the debt (while not negligible) was not a sticking point or an indicator of fuck all.
A lot of that depends on how you see things. The south didn’t see blacks as humans, so why would individual rights apply to them? But it sounds like you are now limiting your criticism to individual rights as opposed to “any moral standpoint”
“Pointing its cannons at Charleston”? Cite? Do you just mean that Fort Sumter had cannons, and some of them incidentally might have been pointing in that direction? That’s not anything close to a justification.
Bullshit on this “point a gun…” analogy. There’s no way to see the situation as the US troops threatening Charleston. There’s no way to see their stationing there as anything but a defensive posture.
Forgive me for injecting some opinion. It’s my opinion that guys who shoot at federal troops because they (or those who manipulated them) can’t see a future together without slavery are assholes. The US troops might have been assholes as well, but nothing you’ve presented gives any evidence of that for me.
So what? It was a US fort, occupied by US troops, under pretty reasonable threat of attack, especially considering that they were just fucking attacked!!!
You’re aware of the age of most soldiers, right? They’re about college aged folks.
“Told to vacate”… by who? Vacate what? How were they “told”? When were they “told”?
It’s a bullshit analogy. The troops at Fort Sumter posed no threat to Charleston whatsoever. Their position was purely defensive and they had no ability to attack.
There are lots of sides to the story. None of them present any reasonable evidence that the war should be blamed on anyone but the rich Southern assholes who demanded secession because they couldn’t see a future without slavery. How could anyone else be at fault?
Can we PLEASE agree that NO ONE in this conversation thinks that slavery was anything but evil. Can we PLEASE do that because otherwise you are just telling me to shut up and stop contradicting people who are invent history as long as they invent that history to make the south look as bad as our imaginations permit.
Who fired the first shot doesn’t matter much more in the civil war that it did during the revolutionary war. Who fired the first shot at concord, no one knows but it doesn’t matter, the war was coming no matter what and firing the first shot gives no moral high ground to either side when shots are exchanged by the military components of either side, unless there was a massacre or slaughter.
No. Governments are immoral. The confederacy was immoral.
Kidnapping and slavery is always immoral.
Yes it an abortion of a theory in some hands and a propaganda tool in yours.
The social contract doesn’t permit anything because it is simply a hodgepodge magic words.
“We” shouldn’t have done anything because “we” don’t act, individuals act. The govt should have stayed out of those issues. By acting on them, the govt hampered prosperity and peaceful society.
Thousands of people could have been murdered and years of wealth destroyed if there had been an intervention. Oh wait…
Spontaneous movements happen all the time, and I know that there were thousands of years of slavery and it has been virtually given up in the span of a few centuries.
As the cost of keeping slaves increased due to runaways, productivity issues, and other economic factors, slavery would have become a poor business model.
Yes but folks insist slavery wouldn’t have ended without the war. It would have. They justify mass slaughter and conscription because of this reason alone.
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Reason-left libertarian, Cato-left libertarian, Rothbardians-reparations. There are no other libertarians really. Not even if Rachel Maddow calls them libertarian.