That’s not accurate. They had also employed it with respect to the tariff. (Resulting in the nullification crisis.)
Your reply is valid and well thought out. I think I’ll quit contributing to the discussion while laying out my primary point and indicating that this is an opinion and one that a definite answer is not possible to come by as far as I know.
Nothing as big as a war is ever about anything as simple as one issue.
I’d also like to add one last thing that hasn’t been mentioned in the discussion that I noticed, certainly not prominently. As the saying goes: “The victors write the history books” since reconstruction the North embraced slavery as the cause of the civil war, yet making slavery illegal and declaring war to enforce it would never have happened. The war was sold in the north as 'For the Union!" and only after the fact when the abolition of slavery was established was the war portrayed as being to free the slaves. A good part of today’s regional prejudice against southerners involves attributing some kind of guilt to us for slavery usually by implying that we would still endorse it. That is why I object to the characterization that the civil war was all about slavery and that all southerners were alike on the subject. Slavery is one of the most abhorrent, evil institutions ever invented by man, and I am very glad that it was abolished. I find that the people who tried to preserve and profit from it were as evil as any S.S. officer. However, I reiterate my original position: Nothing as big as a war is ever about anything as simple as one thing.
Thank you all for your patience and words, I’ll still be reading the thread to see what else you have to say.
AllFree
While denying it in regard to the Hartford Convention and vigorously denying it in the case of the Fugitive Slave Laws, so it seems that they wanted it only when they wanted it.
At any rate, after 1833, it was not a serious, recurrent rallying cry throughout the 27 years leading up to the Civil War, (except to oppose it regarding the Fugitive Slave Laws), until it was resurrected around the time of the 1860 Democrat Convention.
Yes, that’s a fair point. And a non-sequitur. I was responding to your inaccurate claim that a states’ rights argument had only been used in response to the slavery issue. Your statement does nothing to negate my point.
In addition to the nullification crisis, Jefferson and Madison had written the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions setting forth a states’ rights argument in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In other words, it wasn’t a philosophical argument that the Confederates pulled out of thin air. It was something that had been asserted whenever the federal government had been perceived to be overreaching its authority.
But yes, specifically with regard to the Civil War the states’ rights argument was being asserted primarily in defense of slavery.
Speaking of non sequiturs, I did not claim that they invented the argument out of thin air or even that it was an ex post facto argument regarding the Civil War. I noted that it was not a long and ongoing issue with which the South had a persistent investment for one position.
It was an issue that came up from time to time throughout U.S. history between 1789 and 1861, in both the North and the South, that was decided in April, 1865, but it was not a “Southern” issue except when they wanted it to be.
I agree. I also think this attitude shaped racial relations throughout the United States following the Civil War.
Well, that was your fallback position, anyway. :dubious:
:dubious: yourself. That is the postion I have maintained for years on this board in these discussions.
Well, no. You said (and I quote):
(my emphasis)
…which is a false statement.
Before, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and called it “inaccurate.” But if you insist on clinging to a demonstrably false position…
And since the discussion is specific to the origin of the Civil War–meaning the period just prior to 1860 and after, you are simply looking for matters on which to quibble to no point.
And your statement is still false. Slavery was obviously the principal cause of secession, but it was not the only cause cited. So “states rights” was being used not only in support of slavery, but also in opposition to tariffs. Which makes your statement FALSE.
Example of a seceding state citing tariff issues, from the Georgia Declaration of Secession:
Is it really so hard to admit you were wrong, Tom?
In your latest foray, you demonstrate that they argued against the tariff structure, without actually addressing states rights, based on the difference between their slavery based economy and that of the industrial North. Simultaneously, they were arguing against states rights in regard to the Fugitive Slave Acts. So, basically, they simply grabbed whatever was handy for whatever fight they were in, rather than making a principled stand for states rights.
That’s a fair argument, but a different argument from the one you made earlier.
Before, you wrongly asserted that the philosophy of states’ rights was only used to defend slavery. Now you are arguing that the assertion of states’ rights was disingenuous.
Which is a nice fallback, once your initial argument has been shown to be false.
Well…sort of. Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Acts did manifest itself in an assertion of states’ rights, and took the form of personal liberty laws which stopped short of nullification (though the Wisconsin Supreme Court did declare the Act unconstitutional). But I will point out that in the Printz case, the Supreme Court declared the part of the Brady Bill that directed state officials to handle regulatory duties on a federal law to be unconstitutional, so the northern states who refused to help execute the Fugitive Slave Acts arguably had a sound constitutional basis for doing so, even if the US Supreme Court had yet to decide the issue.
In any case, I don’t think southern anger over the refusal of northern states to do the job of the federal government makes them hypocrites on the issue of states’ rights. Different states bring different perspectives to the law. There are people today that believe that states should be able to decriminalize marijuana, yet don’t believe states should be able to restrict the right of abortion. Does that make them hypocrites?
From “Texas Textbooks and the Truth about the Confederacy,” by Michael Lind, Salon, 05/31/10:
Lind gets some significant things wrong, there, however. The Central Government wasn’t crippled - in fact, it was if anything too powerful for its own good. While some polticians, such as Zebulon Vance of North Carolina and Brown of Georgia, resisted it successfully, the Confederate government managed to control a lot during the war, and its weakness was due largely to structural issues (lack of time, lack of talent, lack of resources, lack of support) than weak power. The Confederate Constitution didn’t cripple the central government at all, as it was nearly a perfect copy of the old Constitution with a few slavery flourishes (and few significant changes in any case).
I also can’t say they were libertarian in any sense, ever, much less that they “threw their libertarianism overboard.” The South defintiely was not Libertarian, though the planter elite did keep taxes ans services extremely low. Of course, they did this to keep economic activity they didn’t like out.
Let us simply say his version of the final actions of Davis, as well as the role of Lee in it, are overly brief, insipidly written, and communicate no substantial truth. Some, such as Patrick Bleburn, had proposed this long before. Cleburn, much like Lee, wasn’t really a Southern nationalist - but they were both patriots of the South. Not only were both heralded as good men and great commanders, they also both looked somewhat dubiously at the politicians in Richmond, while supporting them in what they felt to be their duty.
Southern minds did not “short-circuit” - when presented with the stark choice, they indeed opted to live another day no matter the cost. This is precisely the choice humans almost always take: keeping fighting in the hopes of a better turn of events. And there were huge differences of opinion between people like Lee, and arch-resisters like Davis, and states-rights slaveholders like Vance or Brown, and the many localities of the South. Note that Vance was nearly pushed out of office by at least a quasi-Unionist, and Brown might have pulled Georgia from the war but got cold feet. There simply never was a united South - but the most of the southern ‘aristorcracy’ could never that.
I’d also doubt the South would have been especially poor had it survived - it had great economic strength in its agricultural program as well as considerable latent energy.
All in all, I find this to be poorly written, overly dramatic, and a poor lesson inhistory, written to ilustrate his personal proclivities and politics rather than a factural. That he manages to wrangle some historical truth out of it is testament more to how densely he packs his interpretations in.
I think you missed his point. The Confederate Constitution laid out a system with less central power, but the central government ended up even more powerful relative to the states than the pre-war U.S. In other words, if states rights was one of their goals, they killed the patient to save it.
He is not referring to the minds of individuals, but rather the concept of a national mind of the South and pointing out that it was not completely rational by the end of the war. Even those that argue for other causes of the civil war must admit that preserving slavery was one of the motivations for succession. So by the end of the war they had restricted states rights to preserve them, resisted excess taxation by raising taxes even higher, and proposed freeing and arming slaves in order to protect the institution of slavery.
Can you name any generally prosperous economies based on raw material export with a rigid class structure and intentional limitation of education, industry, and financial institutions?
So, three simple questions:
Do you think the Confederates States of America would have had more or less freedom than the U.S. as a whole, or even in comparison to the post Reconstruction South?
Do you think the Confederacy would have been economically better off than the post Reconstruction South?
Would you want to live there if you were not one of the plantation owners?
That’s a pretty good line, and I think it describes the situation pretty well.
But that is also incorrect. The Confederate Constitution differed only slightly in layout, and in fact strengthened the national executive with a line-item veto. Further, I do not believe that States’ Rights was a significant force overall, though it did have real power as an ideal among a minority.
The entire concept of a “national mind” is inherently moronic, contrary to all history, and the product of people reading a unified narrative out of the complex weavings of millions of individual lives and viewpoints. Moreover, it is not great feat of perception to note that people make painful choices between things that they want.
The South did have these things - simply not as much as the North. To claim it would never have developed them further had history done something, oh, utterly different like seeing a viable Southern Confederacy on completely unstated terms is a feat of perception far gerater than the author is capable of, and quite worthy of mockery.
First, why are you even asking me this? Should you read other posts I have made, you’ll find me no friend of the Southern power elite who made and executed policy and defined Southern culture. Second, your terms are impossibly vague, because you fail to define what time periods you are talking about. Third, you have demanded I answer completely hypthetical questions based on an alternative history, in which case I can only answer in the probable and short-term.
In short, you have disproven the notion that there are no stupid questions, a particularly vile bit of glurge I have no truck with. There are stupid questions.
Of course treating the Confederacy, or any political entity as having a single brain is not a realistic notion. The point of the whole piece is that subscribing to the idea of the noble Lost Cause is both morally and factually wrong. The point I got out of that passage was that mythologizing the Confederacy as some noble endeavor of freedom loving people or a heroic effort to preserve cultural integrity cannot stand up to the true facts of the Civil War.
Sure they had them, hence the term “limited” in my phrase. The point is that industrializing the South would have been just as big a threat to the power and status of the elites as freeing the slaves.
The reason many people dislike the direction history has been taken by the Texas school board, and many other individuals and groups in the last hundred and fifty years (including Woodrow Wilson), is that it sets up the Confederacy as the romantic and doomed hero and brushes aside all the vileness at the core. People today whose ancestors may have fought against the succession and who themselves would have been little more than peons whose only status was they were above the slaves in the Confederacy actively romanticize and promote it due to not really understanding what happened.