The word is secession, no succession, and no, my great-grandfather did not fight for slavery. He fought to defend his home and state from Northern invasion.
What does it matter? We won’t be a country much longer at the rate we are going.
Forget modern Marxist ‘interpretations’ of the Civil War and just READ the Articles of Confederation.
The whole thing is about slavery—period.
What do they say about opinions?
Applicable.
The South disagreed, believing that the Federal fugitive slave law should preempt states' rights.
Thereupon the Southern states seceded in order to form a new federal government of their own, under which states were not free to make their own laws regarding slavery.
So yes! the Civil War originated out of a states' rights issue.
Slavery was a collateral factor. The sectional conflict was basically about whether the Northern business interest or the Southern agrarian interest would control the policy of the federal government. It had been a simmering conflict for decades. The extension of slavery and slavery itself were the occasion but not the underlying cause. Northerners were no less “racist” than southerners, but slavery meant power, economically and politically, for the South.
The answer would yes and no.
Well, I stopped reading when the poster wrote ‘succession” instead of ‘secession.” If you can’t even get the operative term right, you have no credibility.
Part of the “Prager University” series, which looks to be pretty good.
I would like to see a tax on blacks to pay restitution to families of northern soldiers that died to free them from slavery.
SRSLY?! I mean, a CW thread, from an exerpted blog? One more topic to pit FReepers against each other? For what purpose?
The civil war was about the Federal Government telling the states what they had to do.
Imagine if the issue was not telling states they had to end slavery, but instead telling them had to.. oh, I dunno.. buy health insurance
Well this should be fun. Getting my popcorn.
Not this again.
original posting:
http://www.prageruniversity.com/History/Was-the-Civil-War-About-Slavery.html#.Vcpa9PlcK4o
“What caused the Civil War? Did the North care about abolishing slavery? Did the South secede because of slavery? Or was it about something else entirely...perhaps states’ rights? Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate.”
transcript:
“Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later this remains a controversial question.
Why? Because many people don’t want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn’t.
The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War — for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, “the extinction of slavery,” and called on all who were not prepared to, “surrender the institution,” to act. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s victory, they did.
The secession documents of every Southern state made clear, crystal clear, that they were leaving the Union in order to protect their “peculiar institution” of slavery — a phrase that at the time meant “the thing special to them.” The vote to secede was 169 to 0 in South Carolina, 166 to 7 in Texas, 84 to 15 in Mississippi. In no Southern state was the vote close.
Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the Confederacy’s Vice President clearly articulated the views of the South in March 1861. “Our new government,” he said, was founded on slavery. “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, submission to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Yet, despite the evidence, many continue to argue that other factors superseded slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
Some argue that the South only wanted to protect states’ rights. But this raises an obvious question: the states’ rights to what? Wasn’t it to maintain and spread slavery? Moreover, states’ rights was not an exclusive Southern issue. All the states — North and South — sought to protect their rights — sometimes they petitioned the federal government, sometimes they quarreled with each other. In fact, Mississippians complained that New York had too strong a concept of states’ rights because it would not allow Delta planters to bring their slaves to Manhattan. The South was preoccupied with states’ rights because it was preoccupied first and foremost with retaining slavery.
Some argue that the cause of the war was economic. The North was industrial and the South agrarian, and so, the two lived in such economically different societies that they could no longer stay together. Not true.
In the middle of the 19th century, both North and South were agrarian societies. In fact, the North produced far more food crops than did the South. But Northern farmers had to pay their farmhands who were free to come and go as they pleased, while Southern plantation owners exploited slaves over whom they had total control.
And it wasn’t just plantation owners who supported slavery. The slave society was embraced by all classes in the South. The rich had multiple motivations for wanting to maintain slavery, but so did the poor, non-slave holding whites. The “peculiar institution” ensured that they did not fall to the bottom rung of the social ladder. That’s why another argument — that the Civil War couldn’t have been about slavery because so few people owned slaves — has little merit.
Finally, many have argued that President Abraham Lincoln fought the war to keep the Union together, not to end slavery. That was true at the outset of the war. But he did so with the clear knowledge that keeping the Union together meant either spreading slavery to all the states — an unacceptable solution — or vanquishing it altogether.
In a famous campaign speech in 1858, Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” What was it that divided the country? It was slavery, and only slavery. He continued: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free... It will become all one thing, or all the other.” Lincoln’s view never changed, and as the war progressed, the moral component, ending slavery, became more and more fixed in his mind. His Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 turned that into law.
Slavery is the great shame of America’s history. No one denies that. But it’s to America’s everlasting credit that it fought the most devastating war in its history in order to abolish slavery.
As a soldier, I am proud that the United States Army, my army, defeated the Confederates. In its finest hour, soldiers wearing this blue uniform — almost two hundred thousand of them former slaves themselves — destroyed chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women, and children from human bondage, and saved the United States of America.
I’m Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor and Head, Department of History at the United States Military Academy, West Point for Prager University.”
http://www.westpoint.edu/history/_layouts/wpFacultyBios/DisplayBio.aspx?ID=433c7a9d-de5d-4ae7-bdd0-04eabe14bf09&List=39ae5a4f-305e-4a47-a6b4-273bab42a63d
“Colonel Ty Seidule assumed duties as the Professor and Head of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2013. Previous duties at West Point include the Deputy Head; Chief, Military History Program; Chief, International History Program; and Academy Professor. Prior to his arrival at West Point, he commanded 3rd Battalion, 81st Armor at Fort Knox KY. He was commissioned as a Distinguished Military Graduate from Washington and Lee University. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the Ohio State University.
COL Seidule’s previous assignments include platoon leader and company executive officer in 5th Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, 8th Infantry Division, Mannheim Germany; adjutant and battalion maintenance officer, 3rd Battalion (Airborne), 73rd Armor, 82nd Airborne Division; commander, A Troop, 1st Squadron (Airborne), 17th Cavalry, 82nd Airborne Division in Southwest Asia during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm; Squadron Operations Officer, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment; Executive Officer, Light Infantry Observer/Controller Team (Airborne), Operations Group, National Training Center; and Crisis Planner, Allied Forces South (NATO), during operations in the Balkans.
COL Seidule’s military education and training includes Airborne, Ranger, and Jumpmaster Schools, Armor Officer Basic and Career Courses, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and a National Securities Fellowship to the Naval Postgraduate School. He also served as a Picatinny Arsenal Research Fellow.”
I remember even as a wee lad in school thinking that attributing the entire civil war to slavery grossly oversimplified the event.
Lincoln himself did not claim the war to be a war to free slaves...instead he stated it was a war to ‘preserve the union’.
Lincoln later used emancipation as a weapon against the south...but without genuine interest in freeing slaves. How do I know that? For starters, the proclamation did not apply to any slave holding union states.
Historically speaking, in the 19th century, nations just flat did not invade other nations over ‘social issues’. I don’t think a politician or general of the era could resist howling with laughter at the notion the north would invade the south over slavery. Its silly to project 21st century values to a 19th century conflict.
"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection."
Abraham Lincoln’s election was the direct cause of secession and the Civil War. And that was because he opposed the extension of slavery in the territories / new states, which meant slavery was doomed.
So yes it was about slavery and it was brought to a head by the election of Lincoln.
What individual southerners fought for is another matter. Once the confederate states seceded the North was going to invade to preserve the union, meaning many indeed fight to resist what they viewed as northern aggression.
NO!