If the South fought for states rights then why did Southern politicians expand the size and scope of the federal government in the run up to 1860?
The Fugitive Slave Act attacked states rights by creating a branch of slave catchers who acted as quasi-secret police to hunt down escaped slaves in free states. Doesn’t seem like respecting the states rights of free states.
Three Southern ambassadors, including later president James Buchanan, got together in 1854 to draft the Ostend Manifesto, a plot in which the US would attempt to buy Cuba from Spain and, if rejected, would invade to add Cuba as a slave state.
Dred Scott was perhaps the first major case of judicial overreach. Roger Taney basically told Congress that they could no longer regulate the spread of slavery in the Western territories because slaves, as property of their owners, could not be restricted, for to do so would violate the Fourth Amendment. Dred Scott only legislated this in the territories, but it was very clear that the same could easily be applied to Free States.
The South didn’t care about states rights. The South was controlled by a semi-aristocratic clique of slaveholders who sought to oppress the Northern white working class. This is the lesson that is most applicable to today. Your average Union soldier who fought against slavery wasn’t necessarily fighting to free blacks, but he was fighting against the corrupt slaveholders. Every acre of land in the West given to a slaveholder was one less acre available to a free white man. Every job that was given to a slave was one less task for a working class man.
The pro slavery Democrats of the 1850s resemble the pro immigration Democrats AND Republicans of today. Cheap labor express is nothing new to American History. Just look at George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh believed that slavery was the best way for socialism to succeed in the 1850s. He thought that blacks should do all the manual labor in the country while whites would be free to be intellectuals. Fitzhugh also supported the enslavement of poor whites on top of blacks and wrote a book, the Failure of Free Society, criticizing John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.
David Wilmot was one of the founders of the Republican Party and echoed the point about the white working class being negatively impacted by slavery.
Now, we shouldn’t be taking down Confederate statues and the average Southern soldier wasn’t fighting “to defend slavery” as their primary motivation, but to act like the Confederacy was somehow justified or morally superior to the Union is garbage.
I think your argument about “northern working class men” is pretty weak. But, I have never heard that angle, and it is food for thought. Thanks.
You are one the first to make the same points I do...
Dred Scott with a activist Supreme Court decision
And the South was antistates rights in that they wanted the federal enforcing runaway slave laws free states
“Your average Union soldier who fought against slavery wasn’t necessarily fighting to free blacks, but he was fighting against the corrupt slaveholders.”
They were mostly there because they had no choice. The draft and draft riots show this to be the case after the initial fervor.
The fugitive slave act merely codified what was already in the US constitution in such a way as to prevent the Northern states from ignoring it, as they were ignoring Article IV, Section 2 in the US constitution.
Dred Scott was perhaps the first major case of judicial overreach. Roger Taney basically told Congress that they could no longer regulate the spread of slavery in the Western territories because slaves, as property of their owners, could not be restricted, for to do so would violate the Fourth Amendment.
And as a matter of existing law for that time period, Judge Taney was correct in his decision. People don't like it, but that is what the law said at that time.
Dred Scott only legislated this in the territories, but it was very clear that the same could easily be applied to Free States.
And why would it not? Article IV Section 2 makes it impossible to deprive a slave from the "person to whom such labor is due." It specifically says states cannot pass any laws which infringe upon this relationship.
The South didn’t care about states rights.
You mean this presumably because the South didn't think states had the right to pass laws that would forbid slavery in those states? Well guess what? That is exactly what the US CONSTITUTION prohibited them from doing, so no, they didn't have that particular right.
If they didn't like that clause in the US Constitution, then they shouldn't have agreed to it.
The South was controlled by a semi-aristocratic clique of slaveholders who sought to oppress the Northern white working class.
And how, pray tell, were they to accomplish this nefarious goal?
Your average Union soldier who fought against slavery wasn’t necessarily fighting to free blacks, but he was fighting against the corrupt slaveholders.
He was fighting because the chain of command ordered him to fight, and not because he gave a sh*t about slavery or slaveholders. He didn't.
Every acre of land in the West given to a slaveholder was one less acre available to a free white man. Every job that was given to a slave was one less task for a working class man.
Now here we have a bit of truth creeping out from beneath your distortion. Yes, the reason most Northern Whites opposed slavery was because of the threat they saw to themselves in regards to their own labor and wages.
They saw Slaves as economic competition, and therefore a threat to their own livelihood. They actually hated blacks, and did not care that they were slaves. What they cared about was that these blacks might do a job for free that these Northern Whites needed to earn wages.
Heres my take.
There are valid/good reasons for secession and invalid/bad ones.
The south seceded for a rather poor reason, given slavery was going to have to go away soon because it was getting less economically feasible as the industrial revolution propelled non-slave states economies and growth. The immoral aspect of not being regarded as true people for different skin color is not defensible either.
A different reason for secession, a better one, a moral one, would have me holding a different opinion about cw1. Lets say the northern states demanded slavery and the south seceded because they didnt want slaves. Now that would be a good/moral reason to secede. Our self secession from Great Britain was good and moral.
Although I have not heard this angle until today, and I will definitely think about and study on this angle, you also seem to forget that the United States was NOT doing their part in protecting many part of what became the Confederate states.
In Texas, the US Army was all but completely pulled away to protect the gold in California, which left the border areas of Texas open to increased raids from Mexicans, Native Indians and the general refuse that could now band together to raid entire towns - this was noted in the Texas Secession letter. In general, the taxation on the southern states was OPPRESSIVE (with the south paying nearly 80% of ALL taxes into the Government treasury) and this too was mentioned in several State secession letters.
To act like slavery was the ONLY reason there was a Civil War goes back to the heart of what this article is stating: there were reasons for mass SECESSION and then there were reasons for the WAR.
There were MANY reasons the Confederate states left the Union. Yes states rights was among them, even the RIGHT to slavery, but also the right to be protected as was required in the Constitution, the right to equal taxation as in the Constitution, etc... Slavery was in every State secession letter, but so too were many, MANY more reasons (all of which were as dangerous to the Confederate states as the possibility of losing slavery).
The glorious and always conscience-cleared history of the United States says that the WAR was over slavery, and yet there was still slavery in the United States. The Commanding General of the (fighting against slavery) Union HAD slaves. While the Commanding General of the (we are fighting to keep slavery) Confederates had NONE. Talk about an INCONVENIENT TRUTH! Our history books just gloss over this and act like it isn’t important - but it is VERY important, because it is PROOF that the whole “Civil War was over Slavery” is a stretching of the truth. Leaving out details to weave your version of the truth - is to LIE!
The cause of both the secession of the Confederate states and the actual Civil War that followed is multifaceted. The SECESSION looks to have been caused PRIMARILY because of slavery - no doubt that was one of the main reasons the South departed ways. However, the WAR looks to have been caused by the North’s refusal to give up the agricultural income, the ports, the land, etc... of the South. Slavery was USED by the Union, towards the END of the war, in an effort to continue support for a war that was supposed to only take 90 days!
The fact that only ONE of the MANY reasons for secession is mentioned in the history books, is because the WHOLE TRUTH would make the cause of the Civil War look “less than pristine”. And the WHOLE TRUTH would further undercut our self-congratulatory history!
How would the victory of the Union look if history told how 600K fellow Americans were killed for nothing more than the basic imperialistic purposes of taking land, taxes and ports; not imperialism against those “wild savage Native Indians” and not against those “other outsiders” (Mexicans, French, etc...), but imperialism against our own FELLOW FREE AMERICANS?!?
Nope, let’s keep it simple. Everyone agrees slavery was bad, so “WE FOUGHT TO END SLAVERY” became the WHOLE History.
In every civil war there are two agendas, the popular cause and the hidden purpose. For the south the popular cause, the one for which Johnny Reb marched away to war, was states’ rights. The hidden purpose, the one which most affected the pocketbooks of the south’s leadership, was to preserve the “peculiar institution” of slavery. For the north the popular cause was preservation of the union. The hidden purpose was to eradicate slavery. The hidden purpose of the union became the stated purpose as the conflict evolved. For the southern soldiers, states’ rights remained their primary focus.
If you believe that “The South didn’t care about states’ rights”, you should ponder why the South established a Confederate system of government, echoing the failed “Articles of Confederation”, with sovereign States associated via a weak central government. I view the Civil War as being about States’ rights ...to have and extend slavery. The two are inextricably linked; it’s foolish to argue one over the other.
“The South was controlled by a semi-aristocratic clique of slaveholders who sought to oppress the Northern white working class.” I’ll go along with the clique of semi-aristocrats leading the South into perdition, but I doubt they gave a thought to northern industrial labor. The aristocrats tended to be deeply in debt, land and slave rich but cash poor, and determined to find outlets for the slaves they already had in profusion. Even in Washington’s day, in states like South Carolina and Virginia there were far more slaves than productive enterprise for their labor. Preserving the value of slave capital required relocating slaves into the “Deep South”; once this zone too was saturated, Old South slaveholders wanted to outplace operations into the West and Caribbean, or liquidate their capital stock of human beings by selling into those markets. The expansion of slave territory was the desperate need of the greedy bastards, and States’ Rights to maintain and expand slavery was their key issue.
Not only was the failure to enforce the reprehensible Fugitive Slave Act a valid stand for states’ rights, the Confederate constitution prohibited its states from making their own laws regarding slavery and so showed less respect for states rights than did the US Constitution.