The star of the west did carry weapons and reinforcemnets, I believe.
It kind of boggles the mind that they couldn’t have waited till noon for a surrender.
Great primary cite. It’s interesting that NC and VA, don’t say that they are seceding directly for slavery, but rather because the feferal government is telling slaveholding states that they can’t have slaves, and that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to make that call. (My paraphrase feel free to take issue with it.)
It’s an interesting argument. It’s like if you tell me that I am not allowed to beat my wife, and I fight you not because I want to beat my wife but because I take issue with you telling me what to do. Maybe I beat my wife specifically to prove that you can’t tell me what to do. Maybe I fight you because you I’m afraid that I accept that if I can’t beat my wife because you told me not to than that means you might tell me not to mow my lawn or sit in my couch, and now I have to fight you or beat my wife to avoid giving you a precedent.
I think this is the crux of the “states rights” argument, which could be distilled into “We are not fighting for slavery but because you don’t get to tell us what to do.”
Other iterations of the “It’s none of the Federal Government’s business,” argument are why we have federal tax free municipal bonds issued by states, have had various drinking ages in different states, rules on gay and a whole host of other issues. So clearly, there is some legal credence about what the federal Government can and can’t tell states to do.
So, if you are VA or NC I guess you can claim that you didn’t fight for slavery, but for your rights. (Of course the right you are fighting for is the right to have slaves, but never mind that.)
Let’s put this another way, just for fun.
You see me beating my wife. You tell me to stop. I attack you. Later in court I claim that I was defending myself against you, because you were taking away my rights by telling me what to do, which you are not allowed to do. The fact that the issue just happened to specifically be about wife beating is immaterial. I would have been forced to defend myself in the same manner if you told me not to wear red sneakers.
In this scenario does my claim make any sense?
It seems to me pretty obvious that this is specious reasoning, and pretty obviously flawed but yet, 150 years later we keep having the same argument. Why?
I would be guess that it is true that you are not allowed to tell me not to wear red sneakers, and that for rhetorical purposes we have not established or allowed any distinction between the wearing of red sneakers and the beating of wives, and if indeed these things are equivalent than than this argument makes sense.
But they are not equivalent, any more than taxation of municipal bonds is equivalent to slavery.
Anyway, I am going through all this to try and see by what way the argument that the civil war was about state’s rights and not slavery mos any kind of sense. I guess my conclusion is that that argument is 100% wrong unless we are talking about VA and NC in which case it is only 99% wrong.
Scylla there’s two major problems with your analogy. The first is that there was talk and action around secession for reasons unrelated to slavery. A slavery only explanation fails to explain the nullification crisis, for example.
The second is the introduction of a third party. A better example would use just a marriage between two people. For example, say a wife is a heroin addict and before she marries her husband she gets explicit agreement that she can continue to use heroin. As the years go by they drift apart, differences arise, and the ties that bind them loosen. Eventually, the wife sees that her husband is going to try and stop her from using heroin, and since the relationship is already strained, she leaves.
Why the couple divorced is a complex question. Clearly the wife’s heroin use caused a strain and is easy to point to as an issue. Yet, it can’t be just that because that issue had been there since before the marriage. The explanation has to include the drifting apart and the loosening of ties. Of course, the easy rebuttal to that is that the wife doing heroin is what caused them to drift apart.
The first ship was carrying soldiers and military equipment. Also, the confederates were provisioning Ft. Sumter before Lincoln gave the order to provision. You are giving half-truths. I will fill you in when I can it is quite a bit to unpack.
Would you mind digging up something to support the hilarious claim that Fort Sumter was not, as every history of it says, build as part of the Third System of fortifications to protect the U.S. coastline, but was build as a tax collection station?
As in a lot of things the perception was more important than the reality. That the survival of slavery was tied to its expansion was a theme of both pro- and anti-slavery writing and thought. To whatever degree it was true people acted as if it were.
The explanation I’ve heard given is the nature of plantation slavery itself exhausted the land. Concentration on cash crops limited rotation options which were already limited by climate. The clover and hay Northern farmers could plant their fields with wouldn’t grow in the South. This left fallow fields more vulnerable to soil erosion (in an area of the country with heavier rains). This also reduced the supply of animal fodder.
Animal husbandry differed in the South in other ways. Cattle fever stunted growth and reduced milk production which was already lowered by the hot climate. With reduced incentives Southerners generally let their farm animals run wild in the shade of the woods rather than pasturing them so they could naturally fertilize the soil. As their fields became exhausted they would burn down woods to open more land. This would provide a one time infusion of fertilizer in the form of ash but further exposed the land to erosion.
I haven’t been out digging the dirt of Dixie myself but that’s the story I’ve gotten from various history books. It seems pretty logical to me. Plantations became less and less productive as time went on but slavery remained important in more developed areas because plantation owners could maintain their lifestyles by selling labor down the river. I don’t know much about the slave economy of the Caribbean islands. Perhaps they had better land to begin with. The soil in the South tends to be more acidic than in America’s “breadbasket”. The islands might be flatter as well slowing erosion. I’m not sure.
There may have been talk, but it was all about slavery and protecting the states right to choose to keep slavery legal. Everything else was a side issue to the real issue.
Yowza. There are any number of facts which conclusively disprove this assertion, but I’ll just point out two related ones.
First, in the 1862 midterm elections, the Republican party got shellacked, and went from having 59% of House seats to 46%. Though they maintained de facto control of the House due to the presence of the Unionists, that just doesn’t happen to ruling parties in dictatorships.
More impressively, the alleged dictator himself, Abraham Lincoln, stood for reelection in '64, the first time a chief executive anywhere had done so during a time of civil war. On top of that, it was an election that he figured to lose until fairly late in the game – he was making plans for a big push to win the war in months between the election and inauguration because he expected to be voted out of office. Again, not what happens in a dictatorship.
There’s always assorted talk and action, but mild side issues were not the reason. But don’t ask me, a modern man, instead read the words of the Vice President of the Confederacy, who said:
I haven’t read the whole thread yet, but I think the answer is “slavery”.
I’ll go read thru it now to see if I had it right.
Ah, I have a great quote for that. It’s an oversimplification, perhaps, but it comes from John C. Calhoun, Senator during the Nullification crisis. Senator for South Carolina for part of crisis, which would, decades later, be the first state to secede. He seemed to think that was kind of about slavery, too (phrase “domestic institution” and context tell us so) and it being the source of wealth in the South.
Another southern politician:
Link for more on that [here](Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 - William W. Freehling - Google Books preston “the slave question will be the real issue”&f=false)
And here is a web page with various quotes from people at the time. You can see the URL and judge the accuracy and bias for yourself.
Are you saying that the Confederates were shipping supplies to Fort Sumter? (What sort of supplies?)
Or was Major Anderson buying some food from local vendors and you are now claiming that meant “the Confederates” were “provisioning” Fort Sumter?
Or do you refer to the supplies to the civilian workers who were engaged in completing construction of the fort, (authorized and funded by the Federal government months before), that was interrupted when Anderson moved his men from Fort Moultrie?
Or is there some other action that you claim was occurring?
Do not accuse others of half-truths when you make vague references without supporting citations.
Southern states opposed secession when New England considered that act during Mr. Madison’s War, claiming that they would be willing to shed blood to preserve the Union if New England considered secession subsequent to the Hartford Convention. Although Calhoun was a prominent politician and proponent of Nullification, the actual consideration of that action was pretty much limited to South Carolina. It was not a “Southern” movement. The South also fiercely attacked nullification when Northern states sought to ignore or bypass Fugitive Slave laws.
In the fledgling United States, there were frequent challenges to the understanding of the Constitution and Nullification was one of the issues. However, the South was not consistent in its attitude toward nullification and there was no serious movement to invoke it leading up to the war.
Yeah, when thinking on this, I keep coming back to the idea that the South seceded because a group of jerks couldn’t be bothered to find a new job that didn’t involve owning another person. I try to figure out another angle that makes sense with the facts of the situation, but I can’t find one.
And they were wrong that they couldn’t keep farming cotton profitably without employing slavery. Fort Worth became a prominent city in the cattle trade after the Civil War, and Dallas became prominent city in the cotton trade around the same time. People still grew plenty of cotton in the south after the war, and some got rich doing so. Migrant farm workers like my grandparents picked cotton, no slavery necessary. Yes, they could be described as my cotton-pickin’ grandparents, should you desire to do so.
Were they non-union cotton pickers who were hired during a strike by the Cotton Pickers Union?
But this wasn’t the argument that the southern states were making. They explicitly said they wanted a strong national government that would actively support slavery - even in states that didn’t want slavery. They were arguing that slavery was a nationally protected right and no state could infringe on it.
You were a high school senior when you asked this?
If I was your teacher, I’d’ve felt tempted to say “Yes, and the Whig Party were fanatically anti-baldists.”
Soooo, they were the original [political] climate change deniers?
And the kicker is, regardless of how justified the Feds would have been in saying that, they weren’t actually saying that. Even the North agreed that, much though they might like to prohibit slavery, they didn’t have the authority to do that (absent a Constitutional amendment that stood no chance of passage at that time). The South wasn’t upset about something that the Union was actually doing; they were upset about something that they worried that the Union might do at some unspecified future time. But by golly, they were upset right now about it.
Now, the Union might have been able to pass that amendment at some point in the future, if enough more new free states got added than new slave states (as looked likely to happen). So the South’s fears on that score weren’t entirely ungrounded. But if it did happen, then (contrary to those states’ claims) it would have been perfectly legitimate, since amendments are part of the Constitution.
And it’d take a lot of new states before that happened. If the South wanted to actually react to that event when it happened, they could just as well have waited until all those new states were added, and then secede. Presumably, they didn’t wait because that would have made their propaganda lies (that the government wasn’t allowed to do that) more bare. Well, and because they were spoiling for a fight.
Was it this forum where I read a discussion of what the optimal date for the South to secede and succeed (more specifically, being able to win a war, not being able to avoid one)?
Not sure about that - while there definitely was some talk about what the Federal government was allowed to do, there was a lot more about slavery being God-ordained, natural, right and moral. I don’t know that they felt they needed much smokescreen at the time.
It makes sense now! Why were all those slave owners known as Master?!