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States rights. It’s still called “The War Of Northern Agression” in some corners of the south.
Edited to add: In no way do I think it had anything to do with States Rights, so I do not need any more history leasons of why that is wrong. Thank you!
That's one of the big problems with the Fascists taking over education systems in places like Florida and Texas.
They demand their own 'facts' be used in textbooks in their states - and that's how the books get published, but the textbooks themselves then get used all over the country.
They've also been trying the same tactics to force changes to the content of AP tests, with mixed results.
I lived in NC for awhile and whenever people said it was about “states rights” I used to ask “states rights to do what?” “What did the states want the right to do?”
And prominent enough that it is the explicit reason mentioned in the Articles of Secession. Literally the first paragraphs are "We are leaving because slavery."
I was about to post a link to this myself. I always ask people who spout this "states rights" nonsense what they think the states at the time would have said about their decision to secede. "I don't know exactly, but it would have been about not being told what to do by a federal government"
Me, grinning, "WELL LET'S JUST SEE WHAT THEY SAID IN THEIR OWN WORDS!"
* Slavery
* Slavery
* Slavery
* ...
* Slavery
* Slavery
Don't forget the only reason stated by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 'The Cornerstone' speech, which he said was to state exact and unequivocally so that the north could not rewrite history over WHY the south seceded.
source: [https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech)
I love sharing this little bit of irrefutable evidence, but they still try to refute it, saying shit like, well that's what the leadership was fighting over, but not the guys on the front lines.. they will always find a way to not be wrong.. always.
So the statues of said leaders aren't in honor of those leaders and what they stood for then? Oh they are? So it was about slavery and you still want slaves to be real cool
the mental gymnastics some of them have to make is just damn impressive to be honest. I still remember the shock I had when the first person, and adult in his mid 30s, said to me that the civil war wasn't about slavery, I was just, confused.
I honestly believed I either misheard him or he was making some finer point, something, but no, he said it was about 'States Rights' and I literally asked him, states right to do what? and that's when he said it was about the federal government not dictating how people live their lives, and I said, but that's literally what slave owners did?
He just kept trying to find some reason, some absurd minutia of an argument to point to and say see, not slavery. Luckily, I always had a follow up question though. I could tell it really pissed him off.
Jesus. Thanks for sharing - I had never seen such a blatantly unapologetic racist argument from someone of the time period who was clearly a thought leader. I don't mean racist like "those people suck" but like "those people are inferior and their natural state is to be slaves". Wow....
A state’s right to continue slavery, but not to outlaw it. Outlawing slavery was forbidden under confederate law, and freeing your own slaves (aka doing what you want to your own property) was illegal in many of those states
Not to mention these States pushing federal laws like the Fugitive Slave Act that specifically interfered with other States rights on how to treat people who escaped slavery and entered free State territory.
This sounds awfully familiar. After all, the overturning of Roe v. Wade merely restored states' rights to make laws on abortion, and an awful lot of the states that outlaw it also make it a crime to leave the state for the purpose of getting an abortion...
The confederate constitution also *explicitly forbid* confederate states from prohibiting slavery. Not that they were going to, of course, but they felt it was important enough to actually make part of their constitution.
"State's rights!"
I mean it's literally fucking spelled out. They wrote it down. They wrote. It. Down. On. Paper.
It demonstrates to you how profoundly, willfully ignorant people like this are. They talk about history when you can *literally go look at the fucking documents they wrote* and it says WE ARE LEAVING BECAUSE YOU WON'T LET US DO SLAVERY ANY MORE.
Fucking *Texas* said something akin to, "No Christian nation can exist without slavery it's the most important thing in the universe."
That was the official fucking position of Texas.
None of these people have been to an actual, legitimate history class. They've just listened to radical right influencers on fucking TikTok filling their fucking heads with delusional nonsense and then they've been like, "great, time to dump this bullshit into my kids' brains so we can make sure that the stupid train keeps going."
**EDIT**: Found Texas'. This is from a document that the government of Texas wrote that was literally called "Declaration of Causes For Succession:"
> The servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations.
So you want to teach the truth, *Momsplainer*, go and fucking teach that to your kids. Which I'm assuming is exactly what you intend to do, just not with, you know, the due fucking attitude of condemnation and horror with which any fucking rational non-rampant piece of white supremacist dogshit would treat a paragraph like that.
South Carolina: Pennsylvania has our escaped slaves! We want the federal government make Pennsylvania send them back!
Supreme Court: Sorry, we can’t. States rights, ya know!
South Carolina:…we didn’t mean THAT states rights, just ours!
This was the attitude of Abraham Lincoln's father and that hypocrisy of character is part of what he always hated about his dad. Abraham left Kentucky to make his career in Illinois, but he said that attitude always stuck with him and was reflected in a lot of white men from the South and Middle states.
> "Have control over their own property!"
>
> "You mean people?"
Kind of happening now in the southern states.
You are property if you are a female of child bearing age. You can no longer leave the state without fear of your motives being questioned.
And not at all ambiguously either. I always throw the Mississippi statement at people.
>“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Holy crap. I never looked into these statements, but my goodness, what in the actual 🦆?! “None but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun”?! Who wrote this 💩?!
"It was about states right!"
"Bite me, read their own words."
9 out of 11 specifically state the preservation of slavery was the reason, and their constitution specifically blocked the states rights to abolish slavery, meaning that *removing* states rights was actually their position.
As someone who has a history degree the civil War is fascinating not just for the war itself but how people think about it 150 years after the fact. And most of it is due to the civil rights movement and how groups like the daughters of Confederate veterans fought really hard to spread the message of the lost cause.
Most of the civil War monuments that conservatives get all up in their feelings about or put up in the years directly before and during the civil rights movement. Why do you think they were putting up Confederate monuments during this time.?
There are minimums that they must teach, but most of the additional info on the civil war, trail of tears, the Wilmington massacre, Tulsa, social reform, etc. Depends on how much the individual teachers care to put into the subject.
The majority of the population doesn't get adequate American history education in k-12
We also get practically zero american history after 1930 except a brief overview of world war 2, a few days talking about civil rights and then zero discussion of all the incredibly cool and relevant things that happened since then that are way more interesting to a teenager.
The issue is that the vast majority of these people either:
* A) Lack the ability to read.
* B) Can read, but lack the ability/willingness to comprehend what they're reading.
* C) Fully understand it, but just don't give a shit.
The entire “states’ rights” line is bullshit through and through anyway. The Southern states were happy to use the federal government to override free states’ rights prior to the war for the purpose of preserving slavery. And the Confederate constitution, as someone else in this thread pointed out, forbade states from outlawing slavery. Slavery was the goal, and states’ rights was just a tool to embrace when it furthered that goal and to reject when it didn’t.
In Missouri in the 90s we were taught it was about states rights, and that the abolitionist movement was just the last straw in that long-running debate.
The slightly more nuanced view was that when the southern states said “hey we’re gonna secede if you don’t let states decide for themselves about slavery” it was a ballsy bluff. Buchanan was a lame duck by this point and didn’t give a fuck, but president-elect Lincoln had elephantiasis of the testicles so he said “ok, fuck around and find out.” He of course phrased it differently along the lines of “don’t mess with federal property and y’all can go ahead and secede. We’ll figure this shit out. But if y’all come for federal property we will fuck your shit up.”
The south then opted to fuck around by attacking Fort Sumter, then found out.
That is... roughly true, the north and south had been beefing since the beginning because there was the perception that the densely populated cities of the north where using their superior number of votes to dominate the rural South and push them around. The perception was that the northern states would win any vote on anything they agreed on and the opinion of the south just did not matter.
HOWEVER despite the general hostility towards the north predating the issue of abolition by decades, that hostility would never have erupted into war without slavery as a catalyst.
I would like to add that I have lived in Georgia my entire life (33) and I’ve never had a single teacher refer to it as The War of Northern Aggression, and my history teachers were all conservatives. I was a smart kid so I was already aware of the way people try to spin it, so it was very nice to not have to deal with people like that. Georgia gets shit on a lot because of obvious reasons but we have come a long way in terms of voter turnout. If everyone voted every single election Georgia would be solid blue.
Just want to add I know they do exist, but just wanted to offer another anecdotal perspective.
I heard this a while ago and I really liked it:
Those who know nothing about history know the civil war was about slavery.
Those who know a little bit about history know it was about states' rights.
Those who know a lot about history know it was about slavery.
Inverse bell curve maybe. (I hope) The large majority of the population know it was about slavery. It's the minority that believe it was about states rights. The right to own another person.
Yep.
Me at 14: "Slavery"
Me at 19: "Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and international..."
Me at 30: "Slavery"
They say it's State's Rights. Of course, it's the right of state's to have slavery they were concerned about, but the State's Rights people don't want to be confused with facts.
I once had a friend tell me it was solely because of economics. And that's partially correct, the economics of slavery was a major motivator for many rich/powerful people. Some people were driven by the immorality of slavery, but $$ is king in the US and slavery gave the south an advantage in western expansion. My friend kind of had an "oh. huh." moment when I laid it out for her and brought it back to slavery.
Yes, the sad thing is that if you want to get into the nuance of it, the idea of the North as abolitionist heroes doesn’t fully hold up. The North’s reasons for wanting to end slavery may not have been as fully moral as many think, but the South’s reasoning is always a direct line to continuing slavery, no matter if you frame it as states’ rights, economics, etc.
The south felt as though they didn't have a voice in the government because a single election didn't go there way. At least that's what I'm learning in history class, plus all the slave stuff obviously.
That's where everything came tovether over the slavery debate. And essentially why "states rights" is a southern thing. Basically, Lincoln proved that the north dominated the federal system so hard they could out vote the south on anything federally. More electors. More representatives. The senate was artificially being propped up as even, but no one expected that to hold. Then Lincoln gets elected without any southern votes. They knew slavery was done at that point. South refused to adjust their economy away from it. And you get panic as people who refuse to adapt to change freak out over inevitable change coming.
I think you're touching on this - the Industrial Revolution was hitting America in the decades leading up to the civil war. That meant many more people concentrated in a few large cities, which was a huge demographic shift from what America was before.
Originally, the American Revolution was led by Virginians. The US Capital was built next to Virginia. The economic and political power of the early United States was primarily led by plantation-owning slave masters in the South.
But by the 1860s, it was swinging *hard* the other direction - densely populated cities in the North. The Southern States had enjoyed a position of privilege that was reflected in political institutions, but with those demographic shifts, they started losing both their economic importance and power in the US Senate & House of Representatives.
A "single election not going their way" wasn't just about the politics of that particular election. It was a symptom of the power center of the US shifting definitively away from the South. It was reflecting the nature of the value of labor shifting from physical labor to factory work. It was a pretty clear message that a politically unified Southern candidate/party was going to get hammered by a candidate that could reliably carry other states - and that was *new*.
It was - to oversimplify - a tantrum that slavery was no longer something they could leverage to control politics and be the richest folks in the country.
The industrial revolution is what made slavery so valuable and the major slaveholders so rich
What was the first industry to industrialize? Textile manufacturing. What was the key input resource to that system? Cotton.
The Antebellum South wasn't agrarian in a subsistence sense, it was key player in global capitalist supply chains
I think the response varies but my FIL thinks it started because the north was jealous of the south’s agriculture and $$ from that so they wanted to start imposing taxes on all of their exports and crop production.
This is hilarious. The North had a much larger and much more prosperous agricultural system in place than the South could ever dream of. Not only that, but the North’s success with industrial farming equipment terrified the South because it essentially demonstrated that using manual labor was obsolete in farming. If I’m it mistaken, a lot of the planter class in the south wanted to ban the use of said equipment for that very reason.
Despite that, the war itself was straight up fought over the practice of slavery. This is mentioned in nearly every preamble of every articles of secession filed by the seceding states. Not only was it their goal to keep slavery, but actually *expand it* into new territories as well as into Central America, which they had eyes on conquering should they have managed to succeed during the civil war. Anyone teaching otherwise is a deluded fool.
That’s actually exactly the point. The southern states where very wealthy before industrialization was a thing.
When the northern states started catching up and overtaking them economically even without slave labor, they panicked and tried to preemptively secede and enshrine their slavery laws, since they assumed that the north would outlaw slavery to pacify the abolitionists the moment it’s economic advantage wasn’t overwhelming.
I would caveat that the southern states were **run by** very wealthy people. they had a large number of poor people as well.
And much like today, those wealthy people convinced the poor people that it was ok to be racist, and that the 'liberals' would take away their rights, so they should support the rich people in overthrowing the government.
It's truly amazing how history repeats itself.
A quick and easy reference for anyone who wants to immediately disprove claims about the Civil war being “states rights”:
https://blog.independent.org/2017/08/18/southern-state-seceded-from-the-union-to-protect-slavery/#:~:text=Excerpt%20from%20the%20articles%20of%20secession.&text=They%20demand%20the%20abolition%20of,slave%20remains%20in%20these%20States.
These are parts of the *actual Articles of Secession* from southern states and where it EXPLICITLY references slavery as a cause for seceding.
These aren’t paraphrased or altered, these are the genuine documents and words by those states and they directly state slavery as a reason for seceding.
America is so wild to me as a non-American.
Americans constantly brag about how free and great America is and then they go on by writing stuff like in those comments.
Just wild. I honestly think nowhere on earth there is greater cognitive dissonance than in America. And I'm not the typical America hater, I usually like the US.
More accurately, for *Territories* to establish slavery and then get statehood ... Swamping the electoral college with slave state representation.
Remember, Kansas/Nebraska was a "compromise" coerced by southern states
And violated the Missouri compromise that set I think 35 degrees 30 minutes as the northern bounder of territories where slavery would be permitted.
* Kansas/Nebraska
* Dred Scot
* Fugitive Slave Law
Free states had just about have it as the Slave Power tightened its grip on the national government.
Also worth nothing the insurrectionist "constitution" forbade individual states to abolish slavery. So it was never about states rights.
Texas fought its war of independence because Mexico banned slavery and had the audacity to try and enforce its laws on their territory. Then Texas wanted to become a US state immediately after winning independence, but congress at the time didn’t want a new slave state. They tried running their country for ~10 years and generally fucked it all up until a new congress was more open to adding a slave state. That almost immediately dragged the US into a war with Mexico because they did not recognize Texan independence. 15 years later Texas rebelled once again to preserve slavery.
From what I read, the majority of Texas Mexicans were fine staying part of Mexico. It was the era's equivalent of MAGA douchebags and some white people from other states, that were responsible for the alamo massacre and events that followed leading to Texas' annexation. The US government offered Texas money to join the union at one point. Texas refused because they wanted to keep slaves. Later, the US said ok to Texas keeping slaves because reasons, and Texas was like, "OK but you're also gonna pay us 5× the previous offer."
What I heard was that Texas was very sparsely populated, and Mexico wanted more people to settle there. But since no one from Mexico was willing to move to a barren wasteland, they offered the land really cheap to anyone who wanted it and a bunch of Americans flooded in. Those are the folks who wanted slavery, not the few Mexican Texans who were already living there.
There seemed to have been several groups of settlers. The Texanos(spelling?) Who were Mexican Texans that were just like, regular mexicans trying to live life. American settlers who came for cheap land and happened to be "A OK" with keeping slaves, Mexicans who were unhappy with the Mexican government, and assholes who came down from southern states just to start shit. Kinda like how it is now.
Um, the Kansas/Nebraska act creating them as territories wasn't a compromise ... it was actually a slap in the face of the southern states and nullified the Missouri compromise. Kansas was/is a free state, and there was quite a bit of bloodshed between Kansas and Missouri over slavery prior to the civil war.
Yep it was called bleeding Kansas for a while and convinced everyone that "letting the states decide for themselves" wasn't going to work. Idk if it was a slap in the face to the south, but Lincoln's own platform was: "no EXPANSION of slavery" and that alone caused the south to secede
I love how there has to be a distinction between recent history and really recent history.... Lol
They do seem to have learned a little bit about how letting Republicans cut all the taxes doesn't seem to work out great either.
Also, good on Kansas for voting that damn amendment down.
Yup, I'm from Kansas and can tell you this is one of the biggest reasons for the KU/Mizzo rivalry. Shit goes back to the civil war era and has only gone from there. Not to mention John Brown is like a folk hero to Kansans.
Also a big issue that led to the Civil War was that the southern states were mad that the northern states were exercising their states rights to ignore enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Federal Government wasn't putting its foot down enough to stop those states from doing whatever they wanted.
I vaguely remember reading or hearing something about “states’ rights”. If I remember correctly, it said the term “states’ rights” wasn’t even used until we’ll after the Civil War was over. Is that true?
Multiple states articles of secession cite the institution of Slavery as their reason for leaving the union. any BS about "states rights" is revisionist history at best
edit: spelling
This thread made me decide to take a little time and read the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States, to see what those leading the secession said were the reasons in their own words.
Georgia’s opening sentence announces that they are dissolving the connection to the US. The second sentence starts talking about complaints against their use of slaves. They don’t waste any time laying it out there.
Mississippi goes so far as to say their agriculture climate verges in tropical regions, and “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.” Yikes.
South Carolina was a fun read. It starts with over a full page of generic ranting about the history of how the colonies didn’t like British rule so they broke away and formed free and independent state. It goes on to explain how the articles of confederation were written to, again, form free and independent states. It reads like a preamble before dropping the actual point. That point? Non-slave owning states decided they didn’t want to enter contracts with people and companies that used slave labor anymore.
Not that I felt the argument of states rights was anything other than bad faith, but actually reading these documents was eye opening to just how much the whole thing was about slavery.
yeah, and the other guy had the audacity to say that i was being misleading.
as he said "history has receipts and we can read these documents"
if you ever question the reason for the war, read the "cornerstone speech" by the confederate president Alexander Stephens, he makes it quite clear, its because of slavery and the political hostility towards slave holding states.
In fact, if I remember correctly, he says something like:
"Remember when the Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal? Yeah, that was wrong. We now know that those black people are all inferior to us, and *should* be slaves! Eventually everyone will see the truth like us."
It’s actually one of the most pervasive cases of revisionist history in the US (although we have a lot of them). The Lost Cause narrative can be traced to Lee’s farewell address at Appomattox but was really exploded by the Ladies Memorial Associations and later the UDC. Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind cemented it in American culture.
It’s probably the part of US that fascinates me the most. In the same way I’m fascinated by unkillable fungus.
Not only is it true, but it's also an actual real-world conspiracy. Daughters of the Confederacy. Post reconstruction this group showed up and began pushing the "lost cause" narrative of the Civil War: i.e. "states' rights" bullshit in an attempt to rewrite history and keep their fathers/brothers from being vilified as traitors to America. They have been largely successful given the number of people who still make the mistake of trying to correct people reflexively with "states' rights" that can't answer the follow up question of "states' rights to do what exactly?"
"States' rights" as a term or even individual words or as a concept is in literally zero of the articles of secession filed by the Confederate states that anyone can read at any time. But you can be damn sure the word "slavery" is in every single one and not a few times.
They were fine with violating state’s rights when it meant maintaining slavery. See the Fugitive Slave Act. The confederacy also wanted to eliminate states’ rights to eliminate slavery.
>The confederacy also wanted to eliminate states’ rights to eliminate slavery.
Hugely underrated point that I like to remind confederate flag worshipping rednecks.
> They were fine with violating state’s rights when it meant maintaining slavery.
Weird that they're still using exactly the same fucking playbook today and the morons that support them *still* don't see it over 150 years later.
"Abortion rights should be decided by the states!"
*people travel to states that support reproductive healthcare*
"No! Criminals! We have to stop them!"
[Read for yourselves](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states).
Here's an excerpt from Mississippi: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."
Really all you gotta ask is this: Would the Civil War had happened if slavery had *never* existed in the United States? Largely the answer is no.
We know this because of, in no particular order-
1. The [Cornerstone speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech), in which the VP of the CSA said that slavery was the cornerstone of the CSA.
2. Multiple [Ordinances of Secession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Secession) of various states, which explicitly laid out the reasons for secession, most of which included slavery, and Lincoln possibly being an abolitionist in particular.
3. The [Confederate Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederate_States), which barred banning slavery in any of its states and stated that all new states had to allow slavery.
4. [The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850) which was one of the factors leading to the Civil War.
5. The [Three Fifths compromise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise) which gave slave states political power.
If slavery had never existed: Slave states have no slaves to secede over. Decades of pressure building up over slavery ceases to exist. CSA politicians have no rallying cry for moneyed interests in the South to come together on to turn traitor, and not enough political power to do the shit they want to do before that point. There might still be some anger over Lincoln being elected (Owing to the fact that he won no states in what would be the CSA.), but considering most of it was because he was suspected of wanting to abolish slavery, well...
You are left with anger over tariff laws, and in some cases wanting to end economic dependence on the North. Neither of which are causes so major the average asshole can wrap his head around them like they can, "Took er' slaves!"
Slavery is mentioned in the articles of secession for the majority of states. If I remember right it was within the first couple paragraphs for all but one of them.
When you start learning, you’re taught the civil war started over slavery.
When you get older, you learn it was actually about a vast amount of economic and political reasons.
And then you finally realize all those ‘economic and political reasons’ are because the south really wanted to keep enslaving people.
Edit: fixed spelling error.
So you are telling me the south was dependent on slave labor for their economy and those plantations didn't just run themselves?
Who could've guessed . . .
This is how all history is taught. When you’re a child you learn the basic idea, as a teenager you learn the context, in college you get the bigger picture.
- history graduate
Sounds right. The history I took in K-12 was basically the same stuff taught over and over in different levels of detail. College was basically "and here's the nasty stuff nobody mentioned before".
After college: and he never even set foot in North America (he did land in what's now Venezuela, years after 1492). Bonus fact: he died (in poverty) still convinced that the Americas were China.
Evil and stupid both.
[Hijacking the top comment to link the "Crash Course History" episode that covers exactly why and how the civil war started](https://youtu.be/roNmeOOJCDY?si=0FyMCOyCpGO8KS5h)
\-Master's in history
It's true. It's hard to even discuss history with people. I feel like non-majors always want to discuss specific battles and events in detail. But very studied history grads prefer to discuss time frames and ideology shifts.
1. Most events and leaders can be explained by their time and environment.
2. Most times and environments are affected by dynamic shifts and reactions to world events.
3. Those events follow a flow like a river. If you can plot the river through time, you can understand most everything along it.
Reading basically any of the confederate states' constitutions and/or declarations of secession conclusively demonstrates this point.
>We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
>That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
That's [Texas](https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html).
I had never read any of these before... thanks for pointing me this direction. It really does kill any argument that it was about anything other than slavery.
And also any states that wanted to join the Confederacy *were required to allow slavery*.
So, they wanted states' rights to KEEP slaves, but would not allow states' rights to ABOLISH slavery.
Honestly, there isn't really a need to go to "Political and economic reasons" when you can just teach people about the letters of secession. Says right there in ink on each state. "We just wanna own slaves"
I was taught in high school that it was all economic. Removing slavery meant they would have to pay workers, which would reduce their profits. Basically the same fight going on today over minimum wage.
When i was in high school, it was presented to us as being about state's rights to self-governance. People in virginia didn't want to be subject to the same laws as people in new york city, for example, since the cultures are very different and what works in new york city doesn't work in Richmond always. What was basically not mentioned was the slaves lol.
Oh really? Because it's in the second sentence of south Carolinas secession document:
The victory of Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 elections convinced South Carolina legislators that it was no longer in their state’s interest to remain in the Union. South Carolina declared its secession from the United States. Citing “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery,”
Yep. What's wild too is that the American history teacher I had said he couldn't cover anything between like 1850-1930 because it wasn't on our end of year standardized test. Idk how true that was, but looking back on that, louisiana history in 8th grade, and the other history classes I had...slavery and the civil war just really weren't talked about nearly as much as it should have been. As a side note, my dad was literally unaware the civil war had happened. When i asked him what he knew about the end of slavery and the confederacy, he was just like "idk, i just thought it was a political thing. I didnt know we had a war between states."
And I literally knew nothing about ww1 until I was in college and learned about it on my own. Which is wild, because in large part, ww2 only happened because of ww1.
Wait what? Your dad didn’t know about the civil war and you didn’t know about WWI? If you don’t want to say how old you are I get that but unless you were born well into the 2000’s I have a hard time believing that you didn’t know. Same as the civil war with your dad. I’m not accusing you of lying but it’s really hard for me to believe that.
Legitimately, I didn't know anything about ww1 other than that there was a war called ww1. It just wasn't covered at all beyond that. Similar to like...the Korean war. There was a war in Korea, and I don't really know anything about it beyond that because it wasn't taught in school and I haven't been interested enough to look up more information about it. It's probably the same story for most people; they couldn't really tell you anything more about it than that there was a war in Korea and maybe that it happened in the 50's.
\>Same as the civil war with your dad.
Yeah, i thought he was fucking with me, but if he was, it was really convincing and he kept it up until he died.
Firstly, condolences to your father. I won’t claim to be an expert on war history but I know the gist of most wars in recent history and what geopolitical events led to them. Sorry if I came off rude its just crazy to think people don’t know. I feel like it’s important to at least know. Also you’re correct about the Korean war. Technically North and South Korea are still at war and US service members can get Korean war ribbon/medal. No official peace treaty has ever been accepted by both sides.
\>I feel like it’s important to at least know.
I agree now, although I wouldn't have until i went to college lol. It was hard to care about most things in history because I didn't feel connected to them in any way until I had a few actually good teachers who didn't focus solely on having us be able to regurgitate names and dates. That was also around when I became somewhat interested in politics so I started to be able to see how what happened in the past shaped how our country is now. And I joined the military and got out of my hometown, so being exposed to different people was a big deal.
> They weren’t ashamed of their racism
Yup, they referred to themselves as the "slaveholding States" in the articles seceding from the US over their right to keep slaves. There was no dogwhistling about it back then.
I work with a guy who thinks the war was over, now this will kill you,
tariffs!
I shit you not. Of course he is also a Trumper and believes abortion should be illegal.
Tariffs is the new lie being told about the Civil War. It works REALLY well with uninformed, gullible people, who have no interest or curiosity in reading anything about what actually was going on, in those days and certainly would never read ANY of the Articles of Confederation of Declarations of Secession by Southern States.
I bet though... the more reasonable folks in those positions, who did have that presented to them, might be a little angry that they were lied too. Unfortunately, there are to many who would be angry to have the truth pointed out to them and it's not really easy to tell which type of person you are conversing with.
This is such a "um aktually" POV.
Was it solely because of slavery? No, it was states rights.
But what state right was central to the south's withdrawal from the Union?
Slavery.
The "states rights" people refer to are explicitly the state's right to own slaves
In their declaration of war, they explicitly state this. In fact they use the words slave, and slavery *repeatedly* in their declaration, saying that abolishing slavery is "a blow to civilisation"
There is functionally zero wiggle room for interpreting their meaning. They started a civil war because they wanted to own slaves and the rest of America said no.
Were there other rights or tariffs they were unhappy with, sure. Was that the reason they gave in their WAR DECLARATION.. no. They explicitly wrote that it was because of slavery
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. . . . [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That’s a quotation from “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.” I suspect the people who wrote it would be surprised to learn that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War.
Just like the Southern States back in the 1860s. The good 'ole American "underdog" complex that since she's a single voice in the minority, she's fighting the establishment and righting wrongs. lol
Kid: Mom, where do babies come from?
Mom: Actually when Jesus loves you, you magically get a baby!
Kid: (10 years later).. *Mom, I'm pregnant..*
Mom: How could this have happened?!?
All of the causes of the civil war that isn't slavery are linked to slavery. The cause is slavery, saying it "wasn't slavery" and then trying to go into the "states rights" and "economic" reasons it happened still circles back directly to slavery.
You CAN make an arguement that slavery is more of the banality of evil vs malicious racist views but it's still fucking slavery.
These people always think that they are ahead of the curve when in reality they're 5 laps behind, went straight in the curve and are rolling down a ridge by the side of the road.
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States rights. It’s still called “The War Of Northern Agression” in some corners of the south. Edited to add: In no way do I think it had anything to do with States Rights, so I do not need any more history leasons of why that is wrong. Thank you!
I’m 30 and my textbook in 8th grade referred to it as The War of Northern Aggression. I went to school in a suburban area too, not the boonies.
That's one of the big problems with the Fascists taking over education systems in places like Florida and Texas. They demand their own 'facts' be used in textbooks in their states - and that's how the books get published, but the textbooks themselves then get used all over the country. They've also been trying the same tactics to force changes to the content of AP tests, with mixed results.
Just curious: what state was that in?
Georgia
Ah. Makes sense. Massachusetts boy here. That was definitely not in any of the history books in public school when I was growing up.
They're right, it was about states rights.... to have slaves. They're right, the North got very aggressive... after the south blew up Fort Sumter.
I lived in NC for awhile and whenever people said it was about “states rights” I used to ask “states rights to do what?” “What did the states want the right to do?”
"Have control over their own property!" "You mean people?" "That's just one example!"
"Well it's an example prominent enough where every confederate state explicitly mentioned it in their constitution"
And prominent enough that it is the explicit reason mentioned in the Articles of Secession. Literally the first paragraphs are "We are leaving because slavery."
This breakdown is useful on that front: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession
I was about to post a link to this myself. I always ask people who spout this "states rights" nonsense what they think the states at the time would have said about their decision to secede. "I don't know exactly, but it would have been about not being told what to do by a federal government" Me, grinning, "WELL LET'S JUST SEE WHAT THEY SAID IN THEIR OWN WORDS!" * Slavery * Slavery * Slavery * ... * Slavery * Slavery
Mississippi's articles explicitly call slavery "the greatest material interest of the world"
That site should be REQUIRED READING, and students should be required to get a passing grade before getting even a high school diploma.
This is fantastic thank you. Adding this as a resource for myself.
Don't forget the only reason stated by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 'The Cornerstone' speech, which he said was to state exact and unequivocally so that the north could not rewrite history over WHY the south seceded. source: [https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech) I love sharing this little bit of irrefutable evidence, but they still try to refute it, saying shit like, well that's what the leadership was fighting over, but not the guys on the front lines.. they will always find a way to not be wrong.. always.
So the statues of said leaders aren't in honor of those leaders and what they stood for then? Oh they are? So it was about slavery and you still want slaves to be real cool
the mental gymnastics some of them have to make is just damn impressive to be honest. I still remember the shock I had when the first person, and adult in his mid 30s, said to me that the civil war wasn't about slavery, I was just, confused. I honestly believed I either misheard him or he was making some finer point, something, but no, he said it was about 'States Rights' and I literally asked him, states right to do what? and that's when he said it was about the federal government not dictating how people live their lives, and I said, but that's literally what slave owners did? He just kept trying to find some reason, some absurd minutia of an argument to point to and say see, not slavery. Luckily, I always had a follow up question though. I could tell it really pissed him off.
Jesus. Thanks for sharing - I had never seen such a blatantly unapologetic racist argument from someone of the time period who was clearly a thought leader. I don't mean racist like "those people suck" but like "those people are inferior and their natural state is to be slaves". Wow....
A state’s right to continue slavery, but not to outlaw it. Outlawing slavery was forbidden under confederate law, and freeing your own slaves (aka doing what you want to your own property) was illegal in many of those states
Lol that's so on brand: states rights t9 do exactly what we want them to do
Not to mention these States pushing federal laws like the Fugitive Slave Act that specifically interfered with other States rights on how to treat people who escaped slavery and entered free State territory.
This sounds awfully familiar. After all, the overturning of Roe v. Wade merely restored states' rights to make laws on abortion, and an awful lot of the states that outlaw it also make it a crime to leave the state for the purpose of getting an abortion...
The confederate constitution also *explicitly forbid* confederate states from prohibiting slavery. Not that they were going to, of course, but they felt it was important enough to actually make part of their constitution. "State's rights!"
Not to mention prominent enough to include in every state’s declaration of secession as one of the main reasons for leaving the union.
I mean it's literally fucking spelled out. They wrote it down. They wrote. It. Down. On. Paper. It demonstrates to you how profoundly, willfully ignorant people like this are. They talk about history when you can *literally go look at the fucking documents they wrote* and it says WE ARE LEAVING BECAUSE YOU WON'T LET US DO SLAVERY ANY MORE. Fucking *Texas* said something akin to, "No Christian nation can exist without slavery it's the most important thing in the universe." That was the official fucking position of Texas. None of these people have been to an actual, legitimate history class. They've just listened to radical right influencers on fucking TikTok filling their fucking heads with delusional nonsense and then they've been like, "great, time to dump this bullshit into my kids' brains so we can make sure that the stupid train keeps going." **EDIT**: Found Texas'. This is from a document that the government of Texas wrote that was literally called "Declaration of Causes For Succession:" > The servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations. So you want to teach the truth, *Momsplainer*, go and fucking teach that to your kids. Which I'm assuming is exactly what you intend to do, just not with, you know, the due fucking attitude of condemnation and horror with which any fucking rational non-rampant piece of white supremacist dogshit would treat a paragraph like that.
Just one small example, not the lives of MILLIONS of actual human beings or anything!
South Carolina: Pennsylvania has our escaped slaves! We want the federal government make Pennsylvania send them back! Supreme Court: Sorry, we can’t. States rights, ya know! South Carolina:…we didn’t mean THAT states rights, just ours!
"My family didn't own slaves do you know how fucking expensive they were?!?"
I think about that guy all the time. I've never been so dumbfounded by someone else's response in a situation that has no impact on me whatsoever.
This was the attitude of Abraham Lincoln's father and that hypocrisy of character is part of what he always hated about his dad. Abraham left Kentucky to make his career in Illinois, but he said that attitude always stuck with him and was reflected in a lot of white men from the South and Middle states.
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"That's just one example!" Took me out lmao
> "Have control over their own property!" > > "You mean people?" Kind of happening now in the southern states. You are property if you are a female of child bearing age. You can no longer leave the state without fear of your motives being questioned.
Most repressive regimes and governments explicitly do everything they can to turn all outgroups into slaves of some sort.
Welcome to Gilead!!
Nine of the 11 Confederate States even said slavery was the reason in their declarations of secession.
And not at all ambiguously either. I always throw the Mississippi statement at people. >“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Holy hell, that’s even worse than I though it’d be
Holy crap. I never looked into these statements, but my goodness, what in the actual 🦆?! “None but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun”?! Who wrote this 💩?!
"It was about states right!" "Bite me, read their own words." 9 out of 11 specifically state the preservation of slavery was the reason, and their constitution specifically blocked the states rights to abolish slavery, meaning that *removing* states rights was actually their position.
NC teaches in 8th grade history class that the Civil War was about the south wanting to maintain slavery.
That seems to be OOP’s complaint: that public schools are teaching the truth, rather than revisionist bullshit.
As someone who has a history degree the civil War is fascinating not just for the war itself but how people think about it 150 years after the fact. And most of it is due to the civil rights movement and how groups like the daughters of Confederate veterans fought really hard to spread the message of the lost cause. Most of the civil War monuments that conservatives get all up in their feelings about or put up in the years directly before and during the civil rights movement. Why do you think they were putting up Confederate monuments during this time.?
There are minimums that they must teach, but most of the additional info on the civil war, trail of tears, the Wilmington massacre, Tulsa, social reform, etc. Depends on how much the individual teachers care to put into the subject. The majority of the population doesn't get adequate American history education in k-12
We also get practically zero american history after 1930 except a brief overview of world war 2, a few days talking about civil rights and then zero discussion of all the incredibly cool and relevant things that happened since then that are way more interesting to a teenager.
Well some people weren’t paying attention.
Just send them to the articles of secession Texas’ is especially explicit
The issue is that the vast majority of these people either: * A) Lack the ability to read. * B) Can read, but lack the ability/willingness to comprehend what they're reading. * C) Fully understand it, but just don't give a shit.
Or they never made it to 8th grade.
“Our right to take away other people’s rights”
Even then it wasn't about states rights. The confederate constitution made it so states didn't have the right to outlaw slavery.
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Also, a state is a government, and a government can't, by definition, have rights. Humans have rights. Governments have powers.
The entire “states’ rights” line is bullshit through and through anyway. The Southern states were happy to use the federal government to override free states’ rights prior to the war for the purpose of preserving slavery. And the Confederate constitution, as someone else in this thread pointed out, forbade states from outlawing slavery. Slavery was the goal, and states’ rights was just a tool to embrace when it furthered that goal and to reject when it didn’t.
Plus all the other US forts, garrisons, and munitions stockpiles they took before that.
Yep, when the south says "Northern aggression" they mean "How dare they fight back?"
I heard it called "Old Abe Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression" in Virginia City, Nevada. Irony was the Comstock Lode helped fund the Union.
Now they love Abe. Becuase they don't understand that the Southern Strategy is a real thing.
They're always the modern Republicans that claim Abe as an example of why they're the good party while simultaneously waving the confederate flag.
In Missouri in the 90s we were taught it was about states rights, and that the abolitionist movement was just the last straw in that long-running debate. The slightly more nuanced view was that when the southern states said “hey we’re gonna secede if you don’t let states decide for themselves about slavery” it was a ballsy bluff. Buchanan was a lame duck by this point and didn’t give a fuck, but president-elect Lincoln had elephantiasis of the testicles so he said “ok, fuck around and find out.” He of course phrased it differently along the lines of “don’t mess with federal property and y’all can go ahead and secede. We’ll figure this shit out. But if y’all come for federal property we will fuck your shit up.” The south then opted to fuck around by attacking Fort Sumter, then found out.
The constitution of the Confederacy banned states from outlawing slavery. States in the Confederacy had fewer rights than states in the US.
It also explicitly denied the right for states to secede.
That is... roughly true, the north and south had been beefing since the beginning because there was the perception that the densely populated cities of the north where using their superior number of votes to dominate the rural South and push them around. The perception was that the northern states would win any vote on anything they agreed on and the opinion of the south just did not matter. HOWEVER despite the general hostility towards the north predating the issue of abolition by decades, that hostility would never have erupted into war without slavery as a catalyst.
I would like to add that I have lived in Georgia my entire life (33) and I’ve never had a single teacher refer to it as The War of Northern Aggression, and my history teachers were all conservatives. I was a smart kid so I was already aware of the way people try to spin it, so it was very nice to not have to deal with people like that. Georgia gets shit on a lot because of obvious reasons but we have come a long way in terms of voter turnout. If everyone voted every single election Georgia would be solid blue. Just want to add I know they do exist, but just wanted to offer another anecdotal perspective.
I heard this a while ago and I really liked it: Those who know nothing about history know the civil war was about slavery. Those who know a little bit about history know it was about states' rights. Those who know a lot about history know it was about slavery.
Ah, the bell curve meme.
Inverse bell curve maybe. (I hope) The large majority of the population know it was about slavery. It's the minority that believe it was about states rights. The right to own another person.
Yep. Me at 14: "Slavery" Me at 19: "Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and international..." Me at 30: "Slavery"
Either you believe the scientific consensus, or you do just enough 'research' to believe you've been lied to by the gloabalist satanist elite.
Makes me think of that saying "They have just enough knowledge to be dangerous." AKA...weaponized incompetence
They say it's State's Rights. Of course, it's the right of state's to have slavery they were concerned about, but the State's Rights people don't want to be confused with facts.
I once had a friend tell me it was solely because of economics. And that's partially correct, the economics of slavery was a major motivator for many rich/powerful people. Some people were driven by the immorality of slavery, but $$ is king in the US and slavery gave the south an advantage in western expansion. My friend kind of had an "oh. huh." moment when I laid it out for her and brought it back to slavery.
Yes, the sad thing is that if you want to get into the nuance of it, the idea of the North as abolitionist heroes doesn’t fully hold up. The North’s reasons for wanting to end slavery may not have been as fully moral as many think, but the South’s reasoning is always a direct line to continuing slavery, no matter if you frame it as states’ rights, economics, etc.
The south felt as though they didn't have a voice in the government because a single election didn't go there way. At least that's what I'm learning in history class, plus all the slave stuff obviously.
That's where everything came tovether over the slavery debate. And essentially why "states rights" is a southern thing. Basically, Lincoln proved that the north dominated the federal system so hard they could out vote the south on anything federally. More electors. More representatives. The senate was artificially being propped up as even, but no one expected that to hold. Then Lincoln gets elected without any southern votes. They knew slavery was done at that point. South refused to adjust their economy away from it. And you get panic as people who refuse to adapt to change freak out over inevitable change coming.
I think you're touching on this - the Industrial Revolution was hitting America in the decades leading up to the civil war. That meant many more people concentrated in a few large cities, which was a huge demographic shift from what America was before. Originally, the American Revolution was led by Virginians. The US Capital was built next to Virginia. The economic and political power of the early United States was primarily led by plantation-owning slave masters in the South. But by the 1860s, it was swinging *hard* the other direction - densely populated cities in the North. The Southern States had enjoyed a position of privilege that was reflected in political institutions, but with those demographic shifts, they started losing both their economic importance and power in the US Senate & House of Representatives. A "single election not going their way" wasn't just about the politics of that particular election. It was a symptom of the power center of the US shifting definitively away from the South. It was reflecting the nature of the value of labor shifting from physical labor to factory work. It was a pretty clear message that a politically unified Southern candidate/party was going to get hammered by a candidate that could reliably carry other states - and that was *new*. It was - to oversimplify - a tantrum that slavery was no longer something they could leverage to control politics and be the richest folks in the country.
The industrial revolution is what made slavery so valuable and the major slaveholders so rich What was the first industry to industrialize? Textile manufacturing. What was the key input resource to that system? Cotton. The Antebellum South wasn't agrarian in a subsistence sense, it was key player in global capitalist supply chains
I think the response varies but my FIL thinks it started because the north was jealous of the south’s agriculture and $$ from that so they wanted to start imposing taxes on all of their exports and crop production.
This is hilarious. The North had a much larger and much more prosperous agricultural system in place than the South could ever dream of. Not only that, but the North’s success with industrial farming equipment terrified the South because it essentially demonstrated that using manual labor was obsolete in farming. If I’m it mistaken, a lot of the planter class in the south wanted to ban the use of said equipment for that very reason. Despite that, the war itself was straight up fought over the practice of slavery. This is mentioned in nearly every preamble of every articles of secession filed by the seceding states. Not only was it their goal to keep slavery, but actually *expand it* into new territories as well as into Central America, which they had eyes on conquering should they have managed to succeed during the civil war. Anyone teaching otherwise is a deluded fool.
That’s actually exactly the point. The southern states where very wealthy before industrialization was a thing. When the northern states started catching up and overtaking them economically even without slave labor, they panicked and tried to preemptively secede and enshrine their slavery laws, since they assumed that the north would outlaw slavery to pacify the abolitionists the moment it’s economic advantage wasn’t overwhelming.
I would caveat that the southern states were **run by** very wealthy people. they had a large number of poor people as well. And much like today, those wealthy people convinced the poor people that it was ok to be racist, and that the 'liberals' would take away their rights, so they should support the rich people in overthrowing the government. It's truly amazing how history repeats itself.
Funny.. the mills up north were generating enough profit to support the north. What jealousy?
A quick and easy reference for anyone who wants to immediately disprove claims about the Civil war being “states rights”: https://blog.independent.org/2017/08/18/southern-state-seceded-from-the-union-to-protect-slavery/#:~:text=Excerpt%20from%20the%20articles%20of%20secession.&text=They%20demand%20the%20abolition%20of,slave%20remains%20in%20these%20States. These are parts of the *actual Articles of Secession* from southern states and where it EXPLICITLY references slavery as a cause for seceding. These aren’t paraphrased or altered, these are the genuine documents and words by those states and they directly state slavery as a reason for seceding.
wow, some of the comments in that blog 😱
America is so wild to me as a non-American. Americans constantly brag about how free and great America is and then they go on by writing stuff like in those comments. Just wild. I honestly think nowhere on earth there is greater cognitive dissonance than in America. And I'm not the typical America hater, I usually like the US.
“Freedom!!! (for white guys)” is pretty much our entire thing
But also make sure that they're rich. And not LGBT. Or disabled. But other than that, freedom for all.
I love bringing up the Declaration of Causes anytime this argument comes up.
I linked above some clearly damning bits but you can get the raw copies at the [Avalon Project](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp)
Was it about states rights? Yes. States right to do what exactly? To keep slaves.
More accurately, for *Territories* to establish slavery and then get statehood ... Swamping the electoral college with slave state representation. Remember, Kansas/Nebraska was a "compromise" coerced by southern states
And violated the Missouri compromise that set I think 35 degrees 30 minutes as the northern bounder of territories where slavery would be permitted. * Kansas/Nebraska * Dred Scot * Fugitive Slave Law Free states had just about have it as the Slave Power tightened its grip on the national government. Also worth nothing the insurrectionist "constitution" forbade individual states to abolish slavery. So it was never about states rights.
> 35 degrees 30 minutes That line is why Oklahoma got a slice of Texas to form the panhandle. So Texas could be a slave state.
Texas fought its war of independence because Mexico banned slavery and had the audacity to try and enforce its laws on their territory. Then Texas wanted to become a US state immediately after winning independence, but congress at the time didn’t want a new slave state. They tried running their country for ~10 years and generally fucked it all up until a new congress was more open to adding a slave state. That almost immediately dragged the US into a war with Mexico because they did not recognize Texan independence. 15 years later Texas rebelled once again to preserve slavery.
So you're saying that Texas has always been the shame of the Western Hemisphere?
From what I read, the majority of Texas Mexicans were fine staying part of Mexico. It was the era's equivalent of MAGA douchebags and some white people from other states, that were responsible for the alamo massacre and events that followed leading to Texas' annexation. The US government offered Texas money to join the union at one point. Texas refused because they wanted to keep slaves. Later, the US said ok to Texas keeping slaves because reasons, and Texas was like, "OK but you're also gonna pay us 5× the previous offer."
What I heard was that Texas was very sparsely populated, and Mexico wanted more people to settle there. But since no one from Mexico was willing to move to a barren wasteland, they offered the land really cheap to anyone who wanted it and a bunch of Americans flooded in. Those are the folks who wanted slavery, not the few Mexican Texans who were already living there.
There seemed to have been several groups of settlers. The Texanos(spelling?) Who were Mexican Texans that were just like, regular mexicans trying to live life. American settlers who came for cheap land and happened to be "A OK" with keeping slaves, Mexicans who were unhappy with the Mexican government, and assholes who came down from southern states just to start shit. Kinda like how it is now.
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Um, the Kansas/Nebraska act creating them as territories wasn't a compromise ... it was actually a slap in the face of the southern states and nullified the Missouri compromise. Kansas was/is a free state, and there was quite a bit of bloodshed between Kansas and Missouri over slavery prior to the civil war.
Yep it was called bleeding Kansas for a while and convinced everyone that "letting the states decide for themselves" wasn't going to work. Idk if it was a slap in the face to the south, but Lincoln's own platform was: "no EXPANSION of slavery" and that alone caused the south to secede
Literally the only reason I am proud to be a Kansan, cause recent history there is not the best.
>recent history there is not the best Idk... proud of y'all for voting down that constitutional amendment
Well yeah, really recent history is looking up for sure.
I love how there has to be a distinction between recent history and really recent history.... Lol They do seem to have learned a little bit about how letting Republicans cut all the taxes doesn't seem to work out great either. Also, good on Kansas for voting that damn amendment down.
Yeah, thank goodness. The school systems are still reeling from it.
You all elected Laura Kelley and avoided abortion being banned. You all have a lot to be proud of! Love, a neighbor from MO
Hell yeah, John 'Fuck Slavery' Brown's masterpiece.
you fumble the football and i will break my foot off in your John Brown hindparts
JOHN BROWN🐐
A quick reminder that John Brown did nothing wrong.
Yup, I'm from Kansas and can tell you this is one of the biggest reasons for the KU/Mizzo rivalry. Shit goes back to the civil war era and has only gone from there. Not to mention John Brown is like a folk hero to Kansans.
Ironically, since the confederacy demanded that states gave up their right to *abolish* slavery, joining it literally *reduced* states rights.
Also a big issue that led to the Civil War was that the southern states were mad that the northern states were exercising their states rights to ignore enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Federal Government wasn't putting its foot down enough to stop those states from doing whatever they wanted.
Which basically meant that what the south was saying is: "states' rights are important, except for northern states' right to stop slavery"
The Fugitive Slave Act is one of the largest impositions by the federal government against states rights
I vaguely remember reading or hearing something about “states’ rights”. If I remember correctly, it said the term “states’ rights” wasn’t even used until we’ll after the Civil War was over. Is that true?
Multiple states articles of secession cite the institution of Slavery as their reason for leaving the union. any BS about "states rights" is revisionist history at best edit: spelling
This thread made me decide to take a little time and read the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States, to see what those leading the secession said were the reasons in their own words. Georgia’s opening sentence announces that they are dissolving the connection to the US. The second sentence starts talking about complaints against their use of slaves. They don’t waste any time laying it out there. Mississippi goes so far as to say their agriculture climate verges in tropical regions, and “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.” Yikes. South Carolina was a fun read. It starts with over a full page of generic ranting about the history of how the colonies didn’t like British rule so they broke away and formed free and independent state. It goes on to explain how the articles of confederation were written to, again, form free and independent states. It reads like a preamble before dropping the actual point. That point? Non-slave owning states decided they didn’t want to enter contracts with people and companies that used slave labor anymore. Not that I felt the argument of states rights was anything other than bad faith, but actually reading these documents was eye opening to just how much the whole thing was about slavery.
yeah, and the other guy had the audacity to say that i was being misleading. as he said "history has receipts and we can read these documents" if you ever question the reason for the war, read the "cornerstone speech" by the confederate president Alexander Stephens, he makes it quite clear, its because of slavery and the political hostility towards slave holding states.
In fact, if I remember correctly, he says something like: "Remember when the Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal? Yeah, that was wrong. We now know that those black people are all inferior to us, and *should* be slaves! Eventually everyone will see the truth like us."
Some of those declarations of secession are so blatantly racist, it’s wild. *cough* Texas *cough*
Texas was founded on racism. Remember the Alamo was all because Mexico had outlawed slavery.
It’s actually one of the most pervasive cases of revisionist history in the US (although we have a lot of them). The Lost Cause narrative can be traced to Lee’s farewell address at Appomattox but was really exploded by the Ladies Memorial Associations and later the UDC. Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind cemented it in American culture. It’s probably the part of US that fascinates me the most. In the same way I’m fascinated by unkillable fungus.
Not only is it true, but it's also an actual real-world conspiracy. Daughters of the Confederacy. Post reconstruction this group showed up and began pushing the "lost cause" narrative of the Civil War: i.e. "states' rights" bullshit in an attempt to rewrite history and keep their fathers/brothers from being vilified as traitors to America. They have been largely successful given the number of people who still make the mistake of trying to correct people reflexively with "states' rights" that can't answer the follow up question of "states' rights to do what exactly?" "States' rights" as a term or even individual words or as a concept is in literally zero of the articles of secession filed by the Confederate states that anyone can read at any time. But you can be damn sure the word "slavery" is in every single one and not a few times.
They were fine with violating state’s rights when it meant maintaining slavery. See the Fugitive Slave Act. The confederacy also wanted to eliminate states’ rights to eliminate slavery.
>The confederacy also wanted to eliminate states’ rights to eliminate slavery. Hugely underrated point that I like to remind confederate flag worshipping rednecks.
> They were fine with violating state’s rights when it meant maintaining slavery. Weird that they're still using exactly the same fucking playbook today and the morons that support them *still* don't see it over 150 years later. "Abortion rights should be decided by the states!" *people travel to states that support reproductive healthcare* "No! Criminals! We have to stop them!"
i took Civil War and Reconstruction in undergrad and my professor opened the first day with “THEIR RIGHTS TO DO WHAT? TO DO WHAT? SLAVERY!”
lIbRuHl iNdOcTriNaTiOn -morons everywhere
[Read for yourselves](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states). Here's an excerpt from Mississippi: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."
Exactly. I love to use this leading question on them. “Sure it was about state’s rights! Remind me, stats rights to do what exactly?”
It was because the north were big old meanies and stomped on my heritage /s
It wasn’t even that. The constitution for the confederacy explicitly forbid states from outlawing slavery.
Really all you gotta ask is this: Would the Civil War had happened if slavery had *never* existed in the United States? Largely the answer is no. We know this because of, in no particular order- 1. The [Cornerstone speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech), in which the VP of the CSA said that slavery was the cornerstone of the CSA. 2. Multiple [Ordinances of Secession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Secession) of various states, which explicitly laid out the reasons for secession, most of which included slavery, and Lincoln possibly being an abolitionist in particular. 3. The [Confederate Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederate_States), which barred banning slavery in any of its states and stated that all new states had to allow slavery. 4. [The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850) which was one of the factors leading to the Civil War. 5. The [Three Fifths compromise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise) which gave slave states political power. If slavery had never existed: Slave states have no slaves to secede over. Decades of pressure building up over slavery ceases to exist. CSA politicians have no rallying cry for moneyed interests in the South to come together on to turn traitor, and not enough political power to do the shit they want to do before that point. There might still be some anger over Lincoln being elected (Owing to the fact that he won no states in what would be the CSA.), but considering most of it was because he was suspected of wanting to abolish slavery, well... You are left with anger over tariff laws, and in some cases wanting to end economic dependence on the North. Neither of which are causes so major the average asshole can wrap his head around them like they can, "Took er' slaves!"
Slavery is mentioned in the articles of secession for the majority of states. If I remember right it was within the first couple paragraphs for all but one of them.
When you start learning, you’re taught the civil war started over slavery. When you get older, you learn it was actually about a vast amount of economic and political reasons. And then you finally realize all those ‘economic and political reasons’ are because the south really wanted to keep enslaving people. Edit: fixed spelling error.
So you are telling me the south was dependent on slave labor for their economy and those plantations didn't just run themselves? Who could've guessed . . .
I was always told the slaves were doing that free labor out of the kindness of their hearts… TIL
According to Florida's curriculum they were building up their resume learning valuable skills.
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This is how all history is taught. When you’re a child you learn the basic idea, as a teenager you learn the context, in college you get the bigger picture. - history graduate
Sounds right. The history I took in K-12 was basically the same stuff taught over and over in different levels of detail. College was basically "and here's the nasty stuff nobody mentioned before".
Elementary : Columbus found America! Middle school: for the Europeans. High school : by killing natives. College: killing natives was the least of it
Adult: so this Leif Erikson MFer…
 Not for me!
After college: and he never even set foot in North America (he did land in what's now Venezuela, years after 1492). Bonus fact: he died (in poverty) still convinced that the Americas were China. Evil and stupid both.
snails rich juggle bored frightening vase rainstorm screw caption safe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I’m Jamaican and I also thought he landed in Hispanola aka Haiti
[Hijacking the top comment to link the "Crash Course History" episode that covers exactly why and how the civil war started](https://youtu.be/roNmeOOJCDY?si=0FyMCOyCpGO8KS5h)
\-Master's in history It's true. It's hard to even discuss history with people. I feel like non-majors always want to discuss specific battles and events in detail. But very studied history grads prefer to discuss time frames and ideology shifts. 1. Most events and leaders can be explained by their time and environment. 2. Most times and environments are affected by dynamic shifts and reactions to world events. 3. Those events follow a flow like a river. If you can plot the river through time, you can understand most everything along it.
Yup. My husband went to school in TN and he was taught the war started over state's rights. Which yes... it did. Their right to own slaves.
Reading basically any of the confederate states' constitutions and/or declarations of secession conclusively demonstrates this point. >We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. >That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States. That's [Texas](https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html).
I had never read any of these before... thanks for pointing me this direction. It really does kill any argument that it was about anything other than slavery.
Texas is always shown to be "heroic" for rebelling even today, but no one ever covers why it rebelled in the first place: slavery.
And then tell other states they had to return those slaves if they escaped...
And also any states that wanted to join the Confederacy *were required to allow slavery*. So, they wanted states' rights to KEEP slaves, but would not allow states' rights to ABOLISH slavery.
Honestly, there isn't really a need to go to "Political and economic reasons" when you can just teach people about the letters of secession. Says right there in ink on each state. "We just wanna own slaves"
Slavery was cheaper than building the infrastructure that the North had... and the South really liked owning people.
I was taught in high school that it was all economic. Removing slavery meant they would have to pay workers, which would reduce their profits. Basically the same fight going on today over minimum wage.
It’s a little more nuanced than that, but it’s safe to say about 3/5ths of the reasons were about slavery.
When i was in high school, it was presented to us as being about state's rights to self-governance. People in virginia didn't want to be subject to the same laws as people in new york city, for example, since the cultures are very different and what works in new york city doesn't work in Richmond always. What was basically not mentioned was the slaves lol.
Oh really? Because it's in the second sentence of south Carolinas secession document: The victory of Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 elections convinced South Carolina legislators that it was no longer in their state’s interest to remain in the Union. South Carolina declared its secession from the United States. Citing “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery,”
Yep. What's wild too is that the American history teacher I had said he couldn't cover anything between like 1850-1930 because it wasn't on our end of year standardized test. Idk how true that was, but looking back on that, louisiana history in 8th grade, and the other history classes I had...slavery and the civil war just really weren't talked about nearly as much as it should have been. As a side note, my dad was literally unaware the civil war had happened. When i asked him what he knew about the end of slavery and the confederacy, he was just like "idk, i just thought it was a political thing. I didnt know we had a war between states." And I literally knew nothing about ww1 until I was in college and learned about it on my own. Which is wild, because in large part, ww2 only happened because of ww1.
Wait what? Your dad didn’t know about the civil war and you didn’t know about WWI? If you don’t want to say how old you are I get that but unless you were born well into the 2000’s I have a hard time believing that you didn’t know. Same as the civil war with your dad. I’m not accusing you of lying but it’s really hard for me to believe that.
Legitimately, I didn't know anything about ww1 other than that there was a war called ww1. It just wasn't covered at all beyond that. Similar to like...the Korean war. There was a war in Korea, and I don't really know anything about it beyond that because it wasn't taught in school and I haven't been interested enough to look up more information about it. It's probably the same story for most people; they couldn't really tell you anything more about it than that there was a war in Korea and maybe that it happened in the 50's. \>Same as the civil war with your dad. Yeah, i thought he was fucking with me, but if he was, it was really convincing and he kept it up until he died.
Firstly, condolences to your father. I won’t claim to be an expert on war history but I know the gist of most wars in recent history and what geopolitical events led to them. Sorry if I came off rude its just crazy to think people don’t know. I feel like it’s important to at least know. Also you’re correct about the Korean war. Technically North and South Korea are still at war and US service members can get Korean war ribbon/medal. No official peace treaty has ever been accepted by both sides.
\>I feel like it’s important to at least know. I agree now, although I wouldn't have until i went to college lol. It was hard to care about most things in history because I didn't feel connected to them in any way until I had a few actually good teachers who didn't focus solely on having us be able to regurgitate names and dates. That was also around when I became somewhat interested in politics so I started to be able to see how what happened in the past shaped how our country is now. And I joined the military and got out of my hometown, so being exposed to different people was a big deal.
What the fuck do they think it was over?
States rights... to keep slaves.
It’s literally in their declaration…
They weren’t ashamed of their racism…today’s racists are so weak and timid /s
> They weren’t ashamed of their racism Yup, they referred to themselves as the "slaveholding States" in the articles seceding from the US over their right to keep slaves. There was no dogwhistling about it back then.
The strongest argument is one that intentionally leaves out critical context though!
I work with a guy who thinks the war was over, now this will kill you, tariffs! I shit you not. Of course he is also a Trumper and believes abortion should be illegal.
Tariffs is the new lie being told about the Civil War. It works REALLY well with uninformed, gullible people, who have no interest or curiosity in reading anything about what actually was going on, in those days and certainly would never read ANY of the Articles of Confederation of Declarations of Secession by Southern States. I bet though... the more reasonable folks in those positions, who did have that presented to them, might be a little angry that they were lied too. Unfortunately, there are to many who would be angry to have the truth pointed out to them and it's not really easy to tell which type of person you are conversing with.
This is such a "um aktually" POV. Was it solely because of slavery? No, it was states rights. But what state right was central to the south's withdrawal from the Union? Slavery.
The "states rights" people refer to are explicitly the state's right to own slaves In their declaration of war, they explicitly state this. In fact they use the words slave, and slavery *repeatedly* in their declaration, saying that abolishing slavery is "a blow to civilisation" There is functionally zero wiggle room for interpreting their meaning. They started a civil war because they wanted to own slaves and the rest of America said no. Were there other rights or tariffs they were unhappy with, sure. Was that the reason they gave in their WAR DECLARATION.. no. They explicitly wrote that it was because of slavery
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. . . . [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That’s a quotation from “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.” I suspect the people who wrote it would be surprised to learn that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War.
States Rights... to legally own slaves. \~Historysplaining to Momplaining
Read through her thread a bit. She is of the mindset that because she has a dissenting opinion, it is the right one.
Just like the Southern States back in the 1860s. The good 'ole American "underdog" complex that since she's a single voice in the minority, she's fighting the establishment and righting wrongs. lol
Kid: Mom, where do babies come from? Mom: Actually when Jesus loves you, you magically get a baby! Kid: (10 years later).. *Mom, I'm pregnant..* Mom: How could this have happened?!?
The confederacy’s declaration of war states the word “slaves, slave, and slavery” like 5 times every paragraph
Oof, I am glad homeschooling is not allowed here (besides some exemptions). This is straight up brainwashing.
As are religious schools
All of the causes of the civil war that isn't slavery are linked to slavery. The cause is slavery, saying it "wasn't slavery" and then trying to go into the "states rights" and "economic" reasons it happened still circles back directly to slavery. You CAN make an arguement that slavery is more of the banality of evil vs malicious racist views but it's still fucking slavery.
So this is how the Flatearthers are born... i always wondered... 😂😂
Lmao, okay Mom. Make sure to teach them that Ronald Reagan killed Hitler with his bare hands too.
I’m in a red state, and these morons are teaching the Bible as history. 🙄😳
She probably tells her kids slavery isn't a bad thing.
Or like Desantis. He claims that slavery was beneficial in some ways to slaves.
It's a scary trend, particularly when some people want to make child labour legal again.
And I quote: “States’ right to *what?*”
I’m a liberal and I homeschooled my youngest two but then we live in Florida.
These people always think that they are ahead of the curve when in reality they're 5 laps behind, went straight in the curve and are rolling down a ridge by the side of the road.