There's a joke I've heard, "In middle school, you learn the Civil War was about slavery. In high school, you learn it was about states rights. In college, you learn it was really about slavery".
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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To join the Confederacy the state had to enshrine slavery in it's constitution. It was actually giving up the right to choose.
It was slavery or union.
The South went out of it's way to make the war about slavery.
Best short explanation I heard, was in college. The cause of the civil war was slavery, the civil war was not fought over slavery.
This helps understand why the south started fighting to keep slavery but the union did not start fighting to end slavery. Some halfway through the war abolition started getting steam but racism and bias continued through and after the war.
Edit: "Sates right's (To allow slavery) is a common misdirect, the same as calling it the war of northern aggression, to not flat out say slavery. But hey they get to say the quiet part out loud now so maybe they wont try and be coy.
God, I'm so glad that states' rights and tariffs only got a passing mention when I was in high school as part of the lead-up to the Civil War. I hope that old canard is dying.
I give it two years, tops, before some states start ban teachers from saying that the civil war was because of slavery. And because the DoE will be dismantled there's nothing stopping them from doing just that
I usually read it as "When you know a little bit... When you know more... When you know a lot..."
More like when you know a little, think you know a little but don't know shit, and actually know what happened.
As a non american I'm curious about these events. I see it as a fact the war ended slavery, but isn't anyone bothered about the winning heroes having used slaves themselves their whole life up until then? More than heroes I see them as ''I'm not bad anymore'' and demonizing their foes as a very hipocrite act.
If I was dealing drugs my whole life I wouldn't raise my voice too high to condemn other dealers just because I recently quit myself, although seems like for some works pretty well.
If you do something bad, and then you stop doing something bad, it's not hypocritical to tell others to stop doing the bad thing. It's hypocritical to not stop, and then tell others to stop.
We agree on that ethically it is right to ask others to stop doing wrong like you did. For me it's different though asking while pointing with a gun. That is hypocrite.
If someone is doing something really bad to you, and someone else came over with a gun to stop them, would you stop the person saving you and purity-check them first?
Slavery was also much less prevalent in the North, and abolished completely ~55 years before the civil war. It's not really equivalent. To borrow your drug dealing analogy (though it's a loose one at best), it's kind of like your local weed dealer helping to remove an unabashed fentanyl dealer from the community
Ofc I would let him save me first. It's what happens after being liberated that concerned me. Before calling him a slave liberator I would definitely make that backgroud check. If i was to find he once dismissed his own slaves without proper compensation based in human rights and equality, then my next moral task would be to prosecute him.
I mean, please correct my lack of american history knowledge if necessary, but the way I see it is really easy to dismiss slave labour only once you get the industrial machinery.
Many states has abolished slavery decades prior. It was highly debated at the formation of the country. It gets weirder that Thomas Jefferson was anti slavery while owning 600 slaves and as president, he abolitioned the international slave trade and advocated to end slavery all togather, but was against voluntary manumission. People are... complicated, often self serving but can recognize how the system is horrible...
States’ rights to legal slavery
State's rights to force the northern states to return runaway slaves. Can't forget that part.
“How dare you disrespect our sovereignty by exercising your own! And during a Civil War that we started over this very issue, no less!”
This country has been half dogshit-brained fuckbag since the first European “explorer” landed here. And while I’m sure, like any society, Native Americans had their share of colorful characters, we’ll hardly hear of them due to the whole cultural erasure which followed the landing of the aforementioned European “explorers”.
“What's so great about discovery? It's a violent penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”
— Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park
Which we still have, but limited to prisons.
California just voted down getting rid of it at the state level.
Yeah that's fucked
It is, but what makes it absolutely mind numbingly fucked is that NOBODY opposed the measure. Every single other measure on the ballot had someone in opposition, sometimes literally just a person was named not an organization, but no one opposed this. Not the warden's, not the guards, not police, not even the ultraconservative mayors in the central valley! How TF does a common sense measure fail to pass with NO OPPOSITION‽‽‽
States rights to do what mf...
That's a good boy...who's the bestest doggie!!!
Good boy
Good boy Tecumseh who wants a whole chicken as a treat.
The Civil War was about Parliament revolting against Charles I when he tried to become an absolute monarch.
What's that watermark on the bottom right?
I too watched a documentary on the US civil war. I learned it was about power, greed and fear. The southerners had complete control over their slaves and losing them meant becoming completely dependant on northern machinery. They likened this to becoming slaves themselves, which was obviously horrifying considering their own behaviour in this regard. So war was their only option, not only to maintain and then grow their properties, but also to destroy or take over the northern industrial capabilities.
Sounds evil, which it was, but at the same time it was a matter of survival, as proven after the war when many plantations and businesses using the former slaves collapsed.
The war happened because the southerners had nothing to lose and everything to gain from it. Or at least, that's how the documentary portrayed it.
Sounds evil, which it was, but at the same time it was a matter of survival, as proven after the war when many plantations and businesses using the former slaves collapsed.
Yes, but not because they became enslaved to northern machinery. Because the slaves left, having been treated horribly, and the post-war planter aristocracy was incapable of luring any but the most desperate back since the aristocracy was darkly hilariously (in the sense of "the sheer gall of asking someone to come back and work for peanuts or goodwill after enslaving them") and gruesomely unwilling to pay their former slaves a fair wage, even as their plantations were overgrown and their properties rotted, unmaintained.
Turns out that when almost half of your labor force up and leaves because you've been a piece of shit, and you're unwilling to stop being a piece of shit even to lure them back, the economy slumps. Who'd've thought?
The materialist analysis is really lacking on the Civil War. It really was a war of ideas. People, including demographics on a large-scale, do not always act rationally, but according to the values set by their societies.