The South Does It Again

For some prominent Southerners, the matter of states rights was superseded by devotion to the Confederate cause. Former Vice President of the United States, John C. Breckinridge gladly joined the Confederacy even though his home state of Kentucky remained in the Union.

 

While part of me agrees with the "they were treasonous bastards" thing, there's another side of me that remembers they were fighting on their home ground, to protect (insert whatever — slavery, states' rights, cotton money, to ward off northern aggression — here). These guys weren't John Walker Lindh, who went out of his way to turn his back on his country.
Most of the guys that fought for the South didn't have shit before the war and had even less after it. I have great respect for how hard those guys fought — and a few ancestors from Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia are among them — if not for why. And I think it's bullshit to look at and judge their reasoning through the lens of 150 years of history and progress.
I certainly hope that if I were around when the Star of the West made its way into Charleston harbor, I would have been wise and decent enough to object to the cause, or at least see the futility of the fight. But who knows? Maybe I would have wanted to kill some Yankee sumbitches and live on hardtack.

 

Damn Southerners ...

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2013/09/confederate_flags_increasing_a.html

 

Correct.

 

One man's hero is another man's criminal.

 

The same argument can be (and has been) made about American soldiers who fought against the British in the 1700s. Most any war involves a split of loyalties.

The idea of loyalty to one's state, as opposed to a larger union, is very much alive. I know people who consider themselves, first and foremost, Texans or Louisianas or whatever, and Americans a distant second. Part of that stems, IMO, from a feeling of alienation by the federal government while their own state holds closer to their personal principles.

Civil War, as I understand it, started because the people of the southern states did not want certain things imposed on them by the federal government and felt it was in their own best interest to form a separate country. I can definitely see that happening again.... hopefully minus the war part.

 

Go ahead and fly your *^$^# rebel flag all you want. But if you do, you thereby abdicate any and all rights to fly the Stars and Stripes or to sing Lee Greenwood lyrics.

 

If slavery had been banned early on - even perhaps when we were still British colonies - there never would have been a Civil War. And states' rights would have centered around arcane, who-really-cares issues like tariffs on candles and where to draw a boundary in the middle of a river.

In fact, without the South declaring itself a seperate nation, slavery would have lasted a lot longer. Lincoln didn't have the votes to make it unconstitutional and the Northern states never would have backed any sort of war to get rid of it.

 

The confederacy was a bad idea in 1861 and for those wanting to relive history, the outcome will be the same in 2013.

 

Probably. But I also agree with the person who said slavery probably would have died out within a generation or less as machines became more common in agriculture and there wasn't the same demand for physical labor.

 

Slavery was at the heart of the Southern states wanting to secede. States right did get debated but not the way people think it was.

The northern states wanted the federal government to impose high tariffs to protect their industries, which the southern states objected to. They objected because the southern states produced a lot of raw materials and wanted to be able to sell them to European nations without high tariffs being assessed. For example, there was the ordeal over South Carolina attempting nullification of a tariff when Andrew Jackson was President (and even Jackson, known for positions that went against federal government being too strong, thought SC's move was absurd).

The debate over tariffs gets turned into the "states rights" argument, even though the Constitution gave Congress the power to tax, unless it was direct taxation (which tariffs are not).

As for slavery, the northern states weren't heavily in favor of abolitionism. Many of the northern politicians argued against slavery in new states for economic and political reasons. The economic reasons dealt with wanting more states that would be likely to develop economically so they would side with the interests of the northern states already in existence. The political reasons dealt with that "three-fifths" rule for representation.

How was that important, you say, if freeing slaves meant southern states could suddenly count the freed slaves as a full citizen for purposes of representation in the House? Because freed slaves might choose to live in another state and southern states would lose House representation. But as long as they remained slaves, southern states could find ways to control the slave population and get more House seats at the expense of the North.

To sum up: The reasons the southern states seceded were complex in nature, but the reason at the top of the list was slavery -- but it wasn't because the northern states were sympathetic to the slaves and wanted them free out of the goodness of the hearts. There may have been the abolitionists, but they represented the minority in the North. The sad truth is the majority of Northerners didn't give a shit about the slaves.