Which of the following best describes the Confederate cause?

In My Humble Opinion
121

If that’s directed at me, I’m not saying that people in the northern states didn’t care about slavery. What I said was that there weren’t any attacks being made against slavery.

There’s a major difference between disliking something and taking actions to eliminate something. I don’t like smoking. But I’m not trying to make smoking illegal.

There’s also a difference between simply letting something exist and supporting the existence of something.

In the years prior to 1860, American political parties had all adopted a policy of supporting slavery in exchange for southern votes. Policies were adopted and laws were enacted which supported the slavery system. The slave states had gotten used to having a friendly national government.

That’s what the Republicans changed. They weren’t going to attack slavery and try to abolish it. But they weren’t going to continue the policy of supporting slavery either. A Republican national government was going to let slavery in the states live or die on its own.

And that wasn’t good enough for the slave states. They wanted a national government that favored slavery. If the United States government wouldn’t favor slavery then they’d form a new national government that would.

122

Interesting Tacitus quote and ironic coming from you considering your seeming defense of American imperialism in this thread.

123

Personally, I think that the United States would have eventually declared war on the Confederacy.

But that’s a moot point. The reality is that the Confederacy declared war on the United States.

So the Confederate desire for war is an objective fact while the American desire for war is a hypothetical possibility.

124

I sort of agree with the first and last but feel it is different. It was personal rights, including the right to be a immoral dick to fellow humans as a God given right. It was that the government had no business in anyone’s business or morality.

125

I realize that this leaves me open to accusations that I’m making a No True Scotsman argument but I think the goal of the abolitionists was to eliminate slavery. That’s how the abolitionists defined themselves. The people who were willing to settle for the containment of slavery while allowing it to continue to exist weren’t abolitionists.

126

Well, they were the leaders of and belonged to abolitionist societies and groups. They had decided to play the long game. First stop the spread. A worthy and achievable goal. I am sure they would next pass laws saying the the children of slaves were born free, that no slave could be sold, and in 40 years wear slavery down to a few old fashioned plantations run by die hard racists.

You cant ban slavery until you have more states on your side, so make sure all new states were Free.

127

I fail to see how the Civil War qualifies. The United States didn’t extend its power or influence through military force, or through diplomacy. Just defeated an insurgency within its own borders.

128

Not directed at you. You’re on point. Directed at apologists who feel like it’s critically important to demonstrate that the US pro-war coalition was not entirely motivated by abolitionist sentiment, therefore the war was something-something complex and not about slavery.

129

Yes, it’s true that most of the Northerners weren’t fighting to abolish slavery, at least at first. What they were fighting for, mostly, was to defeat a group of people who were actively engaged in trying to destroy their nation. That’s kind of the classic justified reason to wage war, right there. What kind of argument is it to say “The North was terrible, because they did something that they had more than one good and just reason to do”?

130

I didn’t mean it that way.

The North wasn’t terrible. They merely lacked sainthood in this war. The way the conflict is often painted (and I’m not accusing you of doing this, btw) is that the northerners were horrified about slavery and saw black people as fully human and wanted to end slavery and pass the amendments granting them full citizenship and change all social attitudes and customs so as to recognize their full personhood; whereas meanwhile the southerners were determined to keep those same folks enslaved.

It really is more complicated than that. Social understandings and mores do change over time. In an era prior to the civil war, slaves were kept in the north as well as the south. We were less enlightened overall. The north ceased to have much use for slaves, for predominantly economic reasons. People became aware that slavery was a moral issue both in the south and in the north as time went on, but the south had the additional factor that they were still using them and were dependent on them economically.

I’ve already written about the various attitudes and vantage points of the northerners.

In the south there were people who thought slavery was an egregious wrong that had to end, but who felt that the nation as a whole, not just the current southern slaveholders, had walked us all down this primrose path, and that slavery needed to either be faded out with federal assistance in restructuring the south’s economy or that people whose families had invested in slaves in good faith needed to be compensated in some fashion because the entire society, the entire culture, had originally been on board with it being a legitimate practice and now they were at risk of being left holding the bag, not because they were more depraved and inhuman but just because the economic trends had resulted in slavery persisting in the south and not in the north.

In the south also were prohibitionists. People who saw slavery as so horrible a practice that they wanted nothing to do with it, people who wanted it abolished. They did not happen to constitute a majority and/or to be in positions of social power sufficient to dictate their states’ policies. Many of them fled to join the Union; others fought locally or tried to communicate with / convince their neighbors. With the exception of what is now West Virginia they did not meet with major success in any identifiable chunk of territory but they were nevertheless southerners doing what they could.

Coercion in any form is horrible, and slavery is the quintessential poster child for the evils of coercion, the awfulness of denying to a person their own self-determination, of forcing them on an everyday and continuing basis to do things they don’t want to do. It required dehumanization, the process of seeing a defined group of people as less than human, as contempt-worthy specimens. There is absolutely zero excuse for doing it, for tolerating it, for fighting for its perpetuation. No shades of grey here.

But slavery versus its end is not the same as north versus south, that’s all I’m saying. The latter (not the former) was a complicated issue that should not be oversimplified.

131

This statement is loaded with presuppositions and would negate the legitimacy of any independence movement. How far do you take it?

132

Are you saying the seceding states hadn’t been part of the United States prior to the secession? Because I’m not seeing any other way you can argue against Babale’s post.

133

To the extent that there were any long term plans to eliminate slavery among Republicans, it was based on the theory that without support from Washington, slavery would be less profitable and would go into decline. Slavery would fade away because it was unprofitable and there wouldn’t be any need to legislate it out of existence.

134

Like the Supreme Court, I won’t tell you exactly how far I would take it, because that is a more complex question than I want to address in this thread. For example, is Britain defending its territory when Washington tries to revolt imperialistic? On the one hand it’s an overseas colony. On the other hand it’s an overseas colony that was built basically from scratch by the British (the territory was taken from the natives, but it’s not like the British occupied Native American cities) and the colonies were under continuous British control, so the British have a pretty good claim that the Thirteen Colonies should be considered a core part of Britain and not allowed to rebel.

For a counter example, if Britain is fighting a war to prevent its Indian colonies from breaking free, that’s much more clearly “imperialistic” - India was a sovereign nation that they invaded and subjugated. (Note: In the Americas, they displaced the natives. That’s quite arguably worse than subjugation, although it wasn’t necessarily something the British did on purpose – most of that happened due to disease).

But like the India example, this one is very clear cut. The Southern states were part of the United States of America (at least as a territory) for basically their entire existence (aside from Texas). That’s not like Britain fighting to control India or the 13 Colonies, that’s like Britain fighting to control London. (No, not Scotland or Ireland or Wales. Both of those were originally independent nations with long cultural histories of their own. Very unlike the Southern states).

135

To say that one does not have the right to secede from a nation would mean that the United States couldn’t exist, as we seceded from the United Kingdom. Obviously it can be done. The issue with the Confederacy was entirely the cause, which was slavery.

The South didn’t have legitimate grievances, since their grievance was slavery, period. While both sides are of course flawed, the issue isn’t that complex. I guess you can argue “open rebellion” since they called it such, but I they weren’t trying to overthrow the government exactly. It would still continue for those who did not secede. I don’t consider the Revolutionary War to be treason, either, so I can’t for the Civil War. Still, they did secede for one of the worst causes imaginable.

As for the US imperialism: that has more to do with expansion westward. Sure, some of the South could be argued to have originally been US colonies. You have to exclude the Louisiana Purchase and Texas, but the rest work. But it was not what the war was about, and the Confederacy had no intention of stopping expansion, AFAIK.

IN other words, all of the Confederate states willingly joined the Union. So secession is not about imperialism.

136

Nobody is disputing that if the southern states had been successful in their secession then their secession would have been successful. That’s just a tautology.

The question some people argue is whether their secession was legal under American law. And it wasn’t.

To use your example, nobody pretends that the Americans had a legal right to declare independence under British law. What they were doing was illegal. But by successfully rebelling and forming a new country, they removed themselves from out of the jurisdiction of British law. They formed a new body of law and their existence as a nation was legal under that new body of American law.

The same was true in regards to the Confederates. When they declared their independence they were breaking American law. But they would have gotten away with it if they had succeeded in establishing themselves as a separate nation. The new Confederate body of law would have been based on them being a separate nation.

137

Not just the cause. The Colonies were made by GB. The Southern states voluntarily joined the Union- they signed the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation and they Ratified the Constitution. All willingly. They could have stayed out. Rhode island nearly did. The deal was made and you can’t back out unilaterally.

The Colonies were just that- Colonies of Great Britain. They most assuredly were not part of it. That was one reason why they rebelled.

So, there’s little similarity. The Colonies rebelled against a repressive Imperial government , in which they had not voice. The CSA rebelled vs a Union they had agreed to, and in which they had more than equal voice in.

138

It wasn’t only about slavery, Lincoln wasn’t worried about slavery, it was also about taxes.

At the time most, federal tax revenue as generated by tariffs. There was no personal or corporate income tax.

In 1828 congress had passed a tariff of 62% on almost all imported good. Given the south lacked manufacturing capacity, it relied on imported goods. Now South Carolina declared that tariff and the 1832 tariffs unconstitutional, Jackson didn’t accept that but there was a compromised tariff in 1833. There were more tariffs in 1842 and 1857, which fell more heavily on the south then the north, the north took exception to the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) with some states refusing to enforce that law. In 1861 you had the Morrill Tariff, which once again raised the tariffs.

Now between the tariffs and Fugitive Slave Act, you had a lot of friction between the north and south. Taxes which the south saw as unjust, some states in the north saw slavery as unjust. And Lincoln wanted the union to remain intact, he didn’t really care about slavery.

That lead to the next point secession, can a state secede? Lincoln at one time was in favor of secession

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right — a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-war-with-mexico-speech-in-the-united-states-house-of-representatives/

Now add in the Tenth Amendment “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” To put it simply, if the Constitution doesn’t say the federal government can do something it can’t.

So it’s clear how a state is admitted or formed, but it doesn’t say how it can leave, and given the federal government wasn’t granted to power to say no to secession, it can be argued that the states had (notice had as the supreme court ruled later that they don’t) the right to secede. In fact, it was probably one of the reasons the north didn’t try the southern leaders. Because if the court decided the south had the right to secession, the south could have demanded the north pay damages.

So to say it was about slavery isn’t the whole truth, it is part of the truth, there were many issues, taxes were a problem, the way of life in the north vs the south. Urban vs rural. It wasn’t a cut and dry issues about slavery as Lincoln only wanted the union to remain together, with or without slavery. And notice when Lincoln “freed” the slave he didn’t free them all, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, it was still legal to have slaves.

139

No, they would’ve been secessful.

140

An independence movement does not require armed insurrection. The South could have attempted a negotiated exit from the Union, much like the UK is currently doing with the EU, or like Scotland attempted to do from the UK. Instead, the turned to theft and murder to get what they wanted. Fort Sumter was federal property, paid for with federal funds. The money to build it came out of the pockets of people in Illinois and Connecticut. The stone to build it was literally quarried in Maine. When South Carolina decided they didn’t want to be part of the Union any more, they could have attempted to work out a deal with the Northern states that involved paying back the costs of the newly constructed fort. Instead, they took it - along with a wealth of other property belonging to the Federal government and Northern interests.