Seems like lumping everyone in certain pigeon holes is a specialty of yours. Like the pigeon hole that says the common folk of the south were fighting for slavery. How ridiculous is that? Maybe they believed in states rights over all.
That's an amusingly non-self-aware statement.
Like the pigeon hole that says the common folk of the south were fighting for slavery.
The "common folk" of the South didn't all fight for the Confederacy. Quite a few fought for the Union.
Those who did fight for the Confederacy fought - in principle - for the Confederate Constitution, which guaranteed perpetual slavery in all its territories.
Maybe they believed in states rights over all.
"States rights" is an inherently incoherent notion. States are governments. They have powers, not rights.
Only individuals have rights.
Allow me to quote the Vice President of the Confederacy, in a public speech in Savannah, soon after President Lincoln was inaugurated:
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions — African slavery as it exists among us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.
Was the Vice President of the Confederacy wrong? Did this speech - published throughout Southern newspapers - excite controversy and disagreement?
Did any other Confederate statesman come forward and say: "With all due respect, Vice President Stephens is wrong. This conflict has absolutely nothing to do with slavery! It's all about the states rights!"
They did not. Because the Confederate Constitution weakened the states that joined it by taking away their power to decide whether slavery was legal or illegal within their boundaries.
That power was taken out of the hands of the states by the federal government of the Confederacy, giving the Confederate federal government more power over its states that the United States did.
The Confederate Constitution specifically stated that it was a permanent federal government and contained the same provisions as the US Constitution regarding federal supremacy and federal authorization to put down insurrections against the federal government.
Actually we don’t assert that the common people were fighting for slavery. Rather we assert that the political class started their insurrection to further and extend the cause of human slavery, because they wrote that they did so.
The common people of the south, after having long been coerced to performing slave patrols, were coerced into fighting for the slave power, while large slave owners were given deferments from conscription.