"Modern Thanksgiving was first officially called for in all states in 1863 by a presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. [...]Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving on the final Thursday in November, explicitly in celebration of the bounties that had continued to fall on the Union and for the military successes in the war." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving
It's easy to see why the "Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Nothern Aggression" from Lincoln's action. He extended the meaning of the celebration to include victory of the North over the South, and asked the South to observe it, according to wikipedia.
In the actual words he seems to say notwithstanding the loss of life from war:
>Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
Freedom only decreased if you saw black slaves as non-human. They were a majority of the population in many southern states.
"Southern states saw" in the headline is probably ignoring the black population, but I'm not sure. It was only many years later that there were large migrations, after the reconstruction promises passed them over, "vagrancy" was heavily outlawed, and they effectively lost the vote.
>It was only many years later that there were large migrations, after the reconstruction promises passed them over, "vagrancy" was heavily outlawed, and they effectively lost the vote.
That's a really careful glossing over of the coordinated white supremacist terror campaigns that drove newly emancipated black Americans from their homes in the South. Olivia Hooker, the last eyewitness to the only bombs dropped on continental America, passed just last Wednesday at the age of 103.
Her story is an incredible reminder of the sheer capacity for hate that remains unaccounted for in America still today:
The Fourth of July wasn’t strongly celebrated until the 90s (after Gulf War I) in the small southern town I was living in during the 80s/90s. Something about still being bitter about the Civil War (which we were taught was not about slavery, but states rights, ugh).
> The Fourth of July wasn’t strongly celebrated until the 90s (after Gulf War I) in the small southern town I was living in during the 80s/90s
Vacationed in Charleston a few months ago. Dropped into the Old Slave Mart Museum [1]. I learned something, there, that for the first time made the Civil War make sense (from the Southern perspective).
Imagine a Southern plantation owner's balance sheet. What do you think would be the most valuable asset? I used to think it would be land, buildings and equipment. But it wasn't. It was enslaved people. Something like 90% of the wealth of Southern land owners was in their human capital.
Most of those enslaved people weren't owned outright–they were leveraged. Most bills of sale I saw said 1/3 cash down with the rest to be paid in installments. Much of the down payment, it turns out, was also borrowed. (Enslaved people being mobile, fungible assets meant creditors valued them as collateral.)
So, in summary, you had the wealthiest people in these states being leveraged to the point of ruin on their enslaved populations. That meant their banking system depended on the continuing value of the South's enslaved people. (New York, too, though to a lesser degree, but I digress.) So the calculus wasn't "we keep slaves and stay very rich, or give them up and become less rich." It was "slaves or bust." This is why the Gettysburg address hit like a thermobaric blast front--it amounted to a rebooting of the South's elite ranks.
Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought.
I mean, sure, it's clear why the elites wanted the war. But for the average white southern laborer, slavery did nothing but push down wages; It's hard to ask for a raise if the boss can just buy someone to do what you do.
The explanations I've heard were nonsensical (that the average white southern man fought because it was in the interests of the elite southern man) or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.)
I find both of those explanations really unsatisfactory, because they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely.
A lot of people in this thread are trying to flatten a complex situation. This comment is thoughtful: many poor southerners went to war and risked life and limb and stood to gain almost nothing from slavery.
We take for granted our 20/20 view of 1861 and we are biased in our present knowledge of how things turn out. Descendants of slaves, poor white southerners, and northerners all turned out better off, and the U.S. would grow stronger as a whole.
But to look at world and U.S. history from the lens of 1861, that's what the participants of the civil war had to do. Some of it was identity politics. Some of it was loyalty to home turf. Some men DID fight for states rights as much as that is derided as an empty excuse. There has always been concern of the Federal government gaining "too much power" since the Constitutional Convention and Anti-federalism is a well-documented movement of early American politics. For many, the Civil War was viewed as an extension of that cause. (If you want an excellent view on the war by a relatively impartial contemporary, view Lord Acton's account from 1866: https://mises.org/library/american-federalism-and-civil-war)
And sure, rich slave owners had their own motives. And they certainly would leverage the motives driving poor southerners to garner support for the war. That story is as old as time.
Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach. There were likely some familial ties from the average southern white laborer with some who owned slaves or were in the system as overseers.
I also don't see how evil is unlikely, the daily brutality of slavery required a large standing militia to suppress the constant threat of active rebellion of the slaves against the owners, and it's likely the average white adult male would have been a part of said militia. It seems to me that living with that one has to make the moral choice to accept it - for the alternative there was only one John Brown and family and maybe one Free State of Jones situation, for almost everyone else, they either did not see it as evil we see it today and commonplace (so not perhaps evil in their own eyes) or not willing to make the ultimate commitment against it. On the other hand, the United States being probably the last country to outlaw slavery does not speak too well of our country. The poor did not start the war, only serve as foot soldiers and there was a draft on both sides - the elite class served as officers, this notion that the war was initiated by the average person seems counterfactual, most of the time it's elites who want to start war and waging a propaganda campaign to get the populace behind starting a war.
Even today there's no popular campaign today to go to war against Iran or North Korea, but it sure is popular in some conservative think tanks and with our current NSA, John Bolton, it's been his obsession for the last 20 years it feels like.
>Historically in the US, it has been those in power pitting group against group like poor whites against slaves in this case (or one ethnic group versus another in other struggles with labor in the North during the same time period and afterwards), for the purpose of keeping those at the bottom occupied with an easily identified other, versus those with a lot more power and harder to reach.
Yeah, I keep hearing this, and I just... saying things happen because people are too dumb to see their own self interest is... it's just really unsatisfying. It fits the data, but it also tastes like the other times in my life where I've been wrong because I'm arrogant.
It's also unsatisfying because it's not particularly predictive; it doesn't tell me which elites the masses will follow and why.
I can imagine a situation where people feel they have little choice but support the status quo, that does not make them too dumb to see their self interest. There are quite a few reports from the Civil War on both sides of men rising up against conscription as the war dragged on or in the North of whites taking it out on blacks as it was their fault.
There's also the trope of the bonding that takes place within smaller military units that makes them committed not to the cause but to each other.
In addition the other side of people too dumb to see their self interest, I am not saying these people are dumb but we see that today if we turn on the news to see for one example - farmers rationalizing themselves being hurt by retaliatory tariffs on American farm stuffs - they seem cognizant of the problem, aware of the higher order consequences for themselves, and willing to accept them to try what seems to be on some terms a way to attempt for fair trade with China, and still support the President. It may be rationalizing but it's not done out of ignorance or stupidity.
What you are asking for in the end sound like some equivalent to Psychohistory in Asimov's Foundation, which would be a neat idea.
> for the alternative there was only one John Brown and family and maybe one Free State of Jones situation, for almost everyone else, they either did not see it as evil we see it today and commonplace (so not perhaps evil in their own eyes) or not willing to make the ultimate commitment against it
John Brown was one of many anti-slavery militants who was involved in Bleeding Kansas, and far from being the extremist he's portrayed as today, he was widely considered a hero in the North, with songs being sung in his honor by Union troops during the war, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown%27s_Body). Others defied federal law in attempts to free slaves and secret them north towards Canada.
The resolve and radicalism of the abolitionist and free-stater movements shouldn't be underestimated. Many Americans in the antebellum years perceived slavery as an unconscionable evil just as we do today. A few undertook great personal risks to resist it, while many, many more worked through the political system to resist slavery.
Many of our contemporary perceptions of antebellum America are somewhat biased by the historical revisionism of neo-Confederates.
> or assume the southerner was just... evil (the average white southern man fought so that there would at least be something below him.)
This gets down to Arendt's idea of the banality of evil: people who do bad things (usually) aren't mustache-twirling masterminds, they're otherwise "normal" people for whom the morally wrong course of action is either easier or more compelling (including for reasons of racial superiority). My opinion: we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness.
When you consider that the average white sharecropper in the antebellum South inherited both social and political structures that granted him legitimacy in contrast to black slaves, it makes sense that such a status suffices for supporting war -- it's a matter of identity.
> we shouldn't privilege the word "evil" by associating it with some kind of deep instrospection leading to immoral action -- lots, if not most, of the evil in the world stems from mundane small-mindedness.
(Arendt's book is on my list; haven't gotten there yet.)
I guess I use a definition of evil that is more utilitarian than I am. Evil, I think, is when someone does something that harms another person far out of proportion to the benefit the perpetrator receives. It's different from something that is merely wrong in that it diminishes utility for all parties involved rather than increasing utility for one party and decreasing it for the other.
I mean, a stupid/extreme example would be that a starving person stealing bread from a wealthy person isn't very evil, maybe isn't evil at all, while a well-fed person stealing bread from the starving would be very evil.
(Note here the diminishing marginal value of wealth; your first loaf of bread is worth rather more than your second million dollars.)
As part of this definition, I am mostly only acknowledging material benefit; I would see it as much more evil to kill someone for fun, say, than to kill the same person for access to food, shelter or other material necessities, even if you are receiving quite a lot of utility in terms of emotional pleasure or what have you from the former act, and even if I feel the second act is wrong. The second act is still a lot more understandable.
So, especially if you are already living with what I'd call desperate poverty, in a situation where both your access to food and shelter was insecure, giving up material wealth (including access to food) in exchange for a kind of social status that seems disgusting to me, seems to me like irrationally harming another person in a way that harms yourself, too- thus, stupid and evil. But maybe I undervalue social status? But more likely, I am missing part of the story
" Sure, that explains why the elites fought; what I still don't get was why the average white southern enlisted man fought."
Wars were always fought by average people for the benefit of the elites.
I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win.
>I can't find the exact quote but there is one that pretty much says when a peasant goes to war the best he can hope for is to come back to the same life whereas for the king it's a huge win.
The thing is, 'peasant armies' are largely a modern thing; Throughout history, arming your pesants without raising their station was... a little like giving slaves guns.[1] Most armies for most of history were composed of people who were higher class than peasants; for that matter, for much of history, your position in society was largely dependent on your ability to project force. (and that itself had a lot to do with wealth; a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive for most of history. And fighting is something that it takes time to get good at like anything else; if you are a substanance farmer, even if you are equally armed, (which you won't be, a decent suit of armor was incredibly expensive) and equally big and strong (which you also won't be; having enough food matters a lot when strength training) you are gonna have a hell of a time fighting a guy who grew up wealthy who spent his time training.)
My understanding was that nearly all ancient and medieval societies had mechanisms for successful warriors to rise up the socioeconomic ladder; be that tournaments (some societies had rules where if you were able to overcome a better armed/armored opponent in the mele, you'd be able to keep some of his arms/armor) or in war (really, until the modern era, if you participated in the sack of a city, you got to keep some of the stuff your side stole. Certainly, in the medieval era, if you captured a rich dude in war, not only could you keep the stuff he had on him, you got to ransom him back to his family) - and of course, there are direct promotions; do well enough, and your leader is gonna make you a knight or something.
The idea is that if a society treated it's warriors poorly enough, they'd find, ah, 'Klingon promotions' on their hands; If they didn't align power with violence, they'd find themselves with new leaders.
(In a way, this is an amazing thing about modern democracies. The army, in many cases, remains subservient to the civilian state, even when it sure looks like it has a decisive choice in the matter... But, historically, this is the exception, not the rule.)
All that said, if you were poor, if you were sent to war, if you were used in battle, you probably wouldn't be armed/armored enough to be particularly effective, in part because your leaders would be just as afraid of you as of the enemy, in part because you were unlikely to be particularly effective against properly trained/armed/armored people, and in part just 'cause in the pre-industrial era, arms and armor were ridiculously expensive. (I mean, I guess you might compare a mounted knight to a modern MBT... the difference being that you were expected to go to war with your own stuff, not the government's stuff. Imagine a world where the only people who could be tankers were dudes who could afford to buy said tank... and a world where those guys expected said tank to pay for itself in booty.)
My understanding is that as a medieval peasant, wars happened to you. You didn't really go to war except in the most desperate actions. You were seen, really, as part of the land; almost property that turned fallow fields into productive farmland.
You could argue that the end of this system was Napoleon; I mean, it had been in decline for a while; more and more of the equipment used by armies was government property rather than private property, even to the point of the muskets being owned by the government rather than the soldiers, but... Napoleon decisively trounced the old system. You could argue this was a big part of why Napoleon conquered so much of the world; at a time when the rest of the world had an extremely class-based military leadership system, and where the men under arms were strictly limited, in part due to trust, Napoleon had an army (in part thanks to the preceding revolution) pretty much full of regular dudes, lead by officers largely promoted on merit. (Oh yeah, and because of this trust, Napoleon had a massive army)
You could look at the 'levee en mass' which gave France it's numerical superiority as enabled by the fact that the French trusted their poor in ways that the rest of the world didn't;
[1]which did happen; I mean, there are ancient sources suggesting that several bronze-age societies had elite units composed of slaves, even... but clearly these weren't your regular slaves; the status of being an elite soldier meant a lot more then than it does now. And throughout history, most of your army was a class above your laborers- It's hard to use force to make things shitty for the people who are applying said force for you.
This is literally the origin of the nobility. Many pre-modern cultures had class system consisting of clergy, warriors, and commoners; the warrior class eventually turned into a nobility class whose martial role eventually elevated to that of officers. Even today, members of the British Royal Family, of a certain age, are expected to perform military service; Prince Harry served in Afghanistan flying Apache attack helicopters, while Prince William flew search and rescue helicopters in the RAF. (Traditionally this was true only for men, but times change faster than you think; Queen Elizabeth II, before becoming Queen, was briefly a military lorry driver during the Second World War.) Similar things happened in i.e. Japan (where the samurai became a ruling class).
In retrospect, it's kind of obvious why the clergy and warrior classes would gain power: clergy, by dint of education and spiritual authority, and warriors, by dint of being well-armed and good at killing people, both have a natural degree of power over others.
Another important point is that this tended to occur only in settled civilizations (which, admittedly, was most of the world by the 18th century or so.) Settled civilizations prior to the Industrial Revolution needed an educated clerical class and also large numbers of farm workers (because agriculture was labor-intensive) meaning only a few people could devote themselves to being really good at fighting, or alternatively wearing ridiculous clothes, throwing lavish parties, and marrying their cousins for political reasons, as the case may be. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies tended to have the entire male population not only more physically fit than even most knights and nobles, but far more practiced at hunting and warfare, with enough overlap in the relevant techniques (e.g. horsemanship, use of weapons, etc.). Many settled civilizations were dominated by nearby hunter-gatherers--the Greek city-states by Alexander's Macedonian Greeks, the Chinese by the Mongols--because there's really no way for a pre-industrial civilization to hold their own against hunter-gatherers. Hell, even as late as the 1870's, large amounts of the United States and Mexico were effectively off-limits to white settlers because of the power of the Comanche, who only fell because (a) like many fallen American Indian peoples, they had plenty of enemies who were more than willing to help the whites defeat them and (b) the United States at that point was just barely no longer a pre-industrial civilization. Oh, yeah--and, as of the American Civil War (to bring this full circle!), it was now possible to enlist large numbers of common people and send them to war instead of risking a smaller ruling class of nobles.
> (In a way, this is an amazing thing about modern democracies. The army, in many cases, remains subservient to the civilian state, even when it sure looks like it has a decisive choice in the matter... But, historically, this is the exception, not the rule.)
For Europe. For China, this was the rule. It did lead to some military disasters -- I understand that the Qing conquest of China relied on northern Chinese generals betraying their country -- but soldiers and the military were held in very low esteem and got not much in the way of power or authority. New dynasties were established by force and in that context generals became emperors, but that happened about every 200 years, and it didn't lead to an improvement in the prestige allocated to the military (except under the Mongols, who didn't really buy in to the Chinese system).
The answer is a bit more complicated than one might imagine, or the popular conceptions would suggest. Arguably, there are a couple different answers for the antebellum period, the initial days of the war, and then later on in the war. Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchical Republic: The Secession of Georgia[0] weighs the internal class conflict that helped precipitate secession. Keri Leigh Merritt's Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South[1] is another fascinating read on the subject that I'd heartily recommend along with Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.[2] Finally, James McPherson's wonderful Battle Cry of Freedom[3] touches on these matters throughout the book, albeit from a more general perspective.
There's no question that poor southern whites and yeomen farmers both saw their wages depressed by slavery and recognized it as the direct cause of their woes. In the antebellum South--particularly during the two decades leading up to the Civil War--there was a significant class conflict that that represented a clear internal conflict to the planter/master class. Not only was the number of slaves increasing, they were also starting to be used in non-agricultural industries. And even when they weren't, slaves were a constant threat to poor white workers' efforts to try and push for wage increases as slave-strikebreakers.[4] Northern abolitionists repeatedly highlighted this conflict and hoped to use it to create division in the South; in 1838, Charles Olcott of Ohio famously observed "[a]ll of the evils of slavery are great evils; but one of the greatest is, that it injures the free as well as the enslaved."
In the years leading up to secession, the master class embarked on a major propaganda campaign to get poor whites to overlook the class conflict and see themselves as beneficiaries of slavery, and later, secession. They argued that abolitionists and "Black Republicans" would force freed slaves to be viewed as the equal of whites, to the latter's everlasting detriment. The common points were that black emancipation would flood the labor market and depress wages for poor whites to starvation levels, the ensuing class conflict/race war would kill thousands of those whites who didn't starve to death first, and of course, there was the constant specter of miscegenation. James Furman, a South Carolina Baptist preacher, predicted that "[a]bolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands...submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!!...Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism" (McPherson).
None of these attitudes were new. Fear of a slave rebellion had been a constant in slave states, and it touched slaveowner and yeoman alike; non-slaveowning whites figured they'd be at risk just the same as slaveowners. Then John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859, and the worry about hypothetical slave revolts turned into an orgy of fear and paranoia; the master class saw an imminent threat, with non-slaveholders in cahoots with Northern abolitionists even as non-slaveholders felt the same fear. John Brown was tried, and as the North started to lionize the man as a martyr and saint, the South went nuts in anger. McPherson likened the Southern panic in 1860 to France's Great Fear in 1789.[5] These arguments clearly had a profound impact on Southern society, and were embedded so thoroughly that they'd be lodged in the collective Southern psyche for the next century. But alone, they weren't enough to push through secession.
For the master class, secession was seen as both a means of protecting the peculiar institution and eliminating the internal threat posed by poor whites. The propaganda and constant fear helped lay the groundwork, but they succeeded mainly by managing to push through before internal opposition could solidify and organize. They were also helped by poor whites being apathetic voters, as they knew they lacked the power of the master class. In the end, secessionists pulled out all the stops to ensure nothing could stop the movement:
> The ultimate choice of disunion, therefore, was a choice made by the master class. By the early 1860s, the Deep South’s slaveholding interests were using every possible method to force people with no ties to slavery to support the institution. Politics became dominated, as Shugg wrote, by “farce and fraud; the knife, the sling-shot, the brass knuckles determining ... who shall occupy and administer the [public] offices.” Poor whites, along with many other non-slave owners, made it completely clear that they opposed disunion. The state conventions, of course, were all dominated by the master class, who deliberately chose to ignore public will. While proving the efficacy of manipulative violence, slave owners simultaneously invoked more concern from Northerners. To Americans residing in free states, it seemed as if a small but powerful band of slaveholders were the only Southerners desiring disunion. Poor whites certainly did not want war. They had no desire to fight and die to protect an institution that had long injured their own prosperity and well-being. Despite all of the weight scholars have afforded white supremacy, it was simply not enough to unite the white South over slavery and disunion (Merritt, 303).
Once everyone accepted that war was inevitable, both sides tried to downplay slavery as the immediate cause. For the North, it was to avoid antagonizing the border states. For the south, it was because they needed a more palatable rationale for non-slaveholders to accept. The Confederacy also expected King Cotton to persuade European governments to quickly support them, but they figured avoiding mentioning slavery would give foreign governments a useful figleaf to hide behind on slavery. It was a complete fiction, but a useful one for each side. And in 1861, everyone believed it would be a short war. Southerners believed that their martial superiority would carry the day, and one Southern soldier could whip a dozen or two Yankees.
Some fought because of cultural beliefs about courage and the glories of war or the fear of the shame of cowardice (or the physical threat of hanging deserters). Others because the immediate enemy--Northerners--was a more tangible threat than the political power of the planter class. But at first, that wasn't a huge issue. In 1861, "almost half of all the South’s enlistees 'either lived with slaveholders or were slave owners themselves'" (307). That changed later on with conscription, the "Twenty Negro Law" (in part, tied to the fear of slave rebellion), and the hiring of substitutes who were mostly poor. And throughout the war, desertion was a constant challenge for southern armies. Eventually, the Confederacy would try to limit some of the class tensions that were hampering the war effort, but even after, they were always a factor. Finally:
> The master class’s fear mongering surely helped convince a number of them that maintaining slavery would keep their families safe and their wages stable. By playing to their basest, most irrational anxieties, masters suc- cessfully used racism to push reluctant poor whites into an unsustainable war. Moreover, many of these men, who oftentimes lived hand to mouth during slavery, actually looked forward to the prospect of making a steady wage in the Confederate military [...] Other poor whites were seemingly coerced into enlisting due to the fact that they depended upon certain slaveholders for employment, land rental, or loans. Some simply concluded that allying with the powerful master class was in their best interest. Yet another often-overlooked incentive for antebellum era men to join the armed forces was the historic precedent of the government granting land to veterans [...] Finally, cravings for honor and respect undoubtedly led some poor white men to try to prove their own self-worth and masculinity through combat. And once the war actually began, slaveholders could shift their campaign of racial hysteria into a campaign about honor and patriotism. Once the fighting commenced, the region’s politicians could stop talking about miscegenation and race wars and begin talking about heroism and virility. And poor white men, who had spent most of their lives without a sense of honor, finally found a way to feel valued by their society. By protecting their homes, families, and communities, poor whites were able to elevate their social status. Furthermore, as David Potter found, most Southerners had more loyalty to the war and the troops than to the Confederacy itself, largely due to their emotional attachments to “home" (318-320).
Apologies for the length, my reply got away from me.
Thank you. I've got to get up early tomorrow for a flight, so I don't have time to properly respond at the moment, but this was by far the most thoughtful and useful response I've heard to this question, and I've read many books on the civil war, but most of what I've read is from the perspective of and about the educated elite (north or south) - most recently, I read Trudeau's "Like Men of War" and I think before that, Grant's memoirs. (come to think of it, I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I read a civil war book from a white southern perspective) - but while I was certainly aware of the fear of a slave revolution (a fear that seems rational, and was certainly universal among slave-owning societies, and that perhaps contributed to the fact that I only know of one long-term successful slave revolution, Hati)
I just bought 'masterless men' and I'll read it on my flight tomorrow. I'll evaluate the rest of the books you cite later.
But.. there needs to be something better than an upvote. Like an upvote you can give once a year or something. This was a really good, and really helpful comment.
I’m not sure why you find this unlikely. There’s explicit racism by the whites, which could be termed “loss of status”. In-group/out-group has been a long historic motivator.
As far as as why the poor would die for the elites, well that’s also existed from the beginning of time. Pretty much every war is like that.
The War Of The Roses was a family feud that lasted 32 years, and cost lives of somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000, all to decide which inbred guy gets to sit on a chair and boss everyone else around. Almost no one that died in that war, had anything to gain, or lose.
Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]?
People go off an die determine which religious bureaucracy will collect a monetary tax from a group. There’s no benefit or harm to any individual about this.
>Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]?
There are a lot of ways of looking at world war 1. There are those that view it as largely a war of German aggression; that Franz Ferdinand was merely a convenient excuse.[1] - I dunno, if I was a French person and the Germans were marching on my home in Paris, I might think I had something to gain or lose.
At any rate, I think that the schlieffen plan (i.e. We're going to war with Russia, so let us roll over France preemptively) evinces a kind of extreme arrogance that is... well, it certainly says something that isn't good.
As an aside, I find it super interesting how the Germans took a very similar tack in world war two, with an army that was by all accounts, vastly inferior as far as training and equipment went, (I mean, adjusted to their enemies/the technology of the day) but with superior tactics. And while the attack was... similar, in the first war, the attack succeeded against Russia[2] and bogged down in France - and in the second the war, they succeeded against France,[3] and bogged down in Russia. - there is an argument to be made there that the victories were as much about politics and organization and motivation as anything else. Of course, there's also a strong argument that it's just technology. Taking ground with world war one era technology was really hard, as the attack moved forward at the speed of a walking man, while the defender moved men around at the speed of train. armored and motorized units in world war 2 allowed attackers to exploit breakthroughs again, breaking that huge advantage that the defense had.
I mean, in favor of your point, it might not have been completely clear that had Germany won, that the citizens of the conquered nations would be treated so roughly as it was in the second round of that conflict. But still, I think that the civil war was very different, because the union war aims were pretty clear, and those aims would not have been served by treating the southerners as a conquered people.
(One can make the argument, in fact, that we'd all be better off, especially the southerners, if we had treated the south as conquered land, and if reconstruction continued; if the north put together a marshal-plan style rebuilding effort that reconstructed the south as a functional society. But it didn't continue, in part because treating the southerners as a conquered people went against both the war aims and the ongoing goals of the north.)
[1] Certainly July 5 showed that Germany was not willing to put any effort at all into preventing the war from escalating; At a pen stroke, Wilhelm 2 could have had a pretty good chance of making world war one a localized conflict, preventing world war two and the cold war in one stroke. Instead, he said "we'll back you up no matter how far you take it" I personally think history treats the man much more lightly than he deserves.
[2](in part due to their support of Lenin... you could argue it wasn't really a military victory, that Germany succeeded against Russia in the first world war by funding Lenin until he took down the Russian government and sapped their will to fight. I mean, there were a lot of factors here; even in the second world war, Germany seemed to do really well against Russia... until they hit lenningrad and stalingrad, and things bogged down. - It's possible that a Kerensky or even Kornilov lead Russia[2a] would have pulled off something similar and fought the Germans to a standstill. The technology of the day favored the defense, after all. of course, you could also put this in part on Wilson for not propping up kerensky the same way the other allies were propped up with food and ammo. A well-timed and full throated "we will not let you starve" from America and some machine guns from the UK would probably have saved Russia from the Bolsheviks. I mean, some of it is on Kerensky; he wasn't aggressive enough against Lenin when he had the chance, and he had given up control of most of the armed forces (and unwisely armed some of the wrong people) by the time it was really clear that Lenin was a German-supported traitor.) but... Germany certainly wasn't doing badly militarily, you could argue that they would have won against a Kerensky government that didn't have a whole lot of allied support.)
[2a](as an aside, I see the conflict between Kerensky and Kornilov as one of the great tragedies of history. If the two would have worked together, we would probably have had a mostly-democratic Russia... in 1917. Kerensky was understandably super suspicious of Kornilov, but all evidence later was that the man would have been a soldier loyal to the Russian government, even one lead by Kerensky.)
[3]and why? France had more and superior tanks and a much larger army. It was in part tactics, certainly. Ohler argues that it was methanphetamene; He thinks the drug allowed the germans to plow through the ardennes and roll over France while sleeping something like 1/3rd as much as people without the drugs, thus ending the battle before the French had time to formulate a response. Of course, one could also attribute it to an airpower advantage on the German side; while the French had a larger army, more and better tanks, the Germans had an airpower advantage that may have been decisive. There's also the theory that war weariness from the first war just had a hugely different effect in Germany and France, and that was the root of the French defeat the second time around. My favorite book on the subject is, of course, Bloch - but while it is an incredible book, it doesn't really come to a real conclusion as to why France lost against an enemy that was by all accounts inferior.
You have a lot of claims, but I want to say the germans did not have vastly inferior equipment but better tactics. they had pretty excellent equipment but no ability to mass produce it like others (us mostly). You seem to have a lot of indepth knowledge but that claim is so counter to my own knowledge of history.
To be clear, I am claiming that germans in world war one had better equipment (relative to the time) and training than Germans in World War Two. I'm not saying that the allied equipment was in general superior to the German equipment in the second world war. My understanding is that the German army of 1914 is generally considered one of the best fighting organizations ever fielded; they lost due to the dual problems of taking on the UK while depending on food imports via sea and that they were the aggressor in a war where the tech vastly favored the defender, a problem they didn't have in the second war. (as I was saying, an attacker's breakthroughs moved at foot-speed; the defender moved reinforcements at rail speed. Tanks restored the balance between the movement of the attack and the movement of reinforcements.) - that, and taking on the whole rest of the industrialized world in a war of production, especially without a credible navy is usually going to end badly.
The only specific claim I'll stand behind about german vs. allied equipment in ww2 is that at the outset of the battle of France, the Germans had worse tanks than the French, and that the French had a larger army. the Char, for example, was more than a match for anything the Germans had. (In skilled hands, a fair number of anything the Germans had.) It was way more expensive, (as one would expect for a heavier, better-protected tank with a bigger gun) and harder to support and keep in the field (sort of the opposite of the later situation with the Panzer4 and the Sherman, much later in the same war, where you needed several Shermans to take on one Panzer.) but it was very well protected, and had a very large gun for it's day. It was cast, rather than made from wielded plates, further increasing it's cost and it's protection (and further complicating repair)
I mean, "Better tank" is a funny thing to say; the allies later won the war with tanks that were inferior even to the panzer of the time, if we are using that standard. It was totally fine you needed several Shermans to reliably take out one panther, because the allies had such an advantage in material and logistics that they could reliably get numerical advantage after D-day.
But one on one, the Char, as I understand it, could be expected to beat the Panzer of it's day with ease. It was built for those one on one fights, and excelled at them... when it had the chance. My understanding is that the Char was an 'infantry tank' - it was built to sit and slug it out, essentially. It seemed that the idea of a heavy 'infantry tank' went out of style pretty fast after world war two started up; it looked like lighter tanks for exploiting breakthroughs (and simply being on the battlefield in quantity) which were called 'calvary tanks' at the beginning of the war seemed to be the tank design that proved most useful. I mean, turns out, these "medium tanks" were simply more useful than either giant or tiny tanks, and this wasn't known at the outset of world war two, as there weren't a lot of large scale tank battles in the Polish campaign or in the spanish civil war to learn from.
Look up Pierre Billotte in the Battle of Stonne for one particularly dramatic example of the Char in skilled hands in action against Panzers. (and if you find a good book about him in English, report back)
But, my point here is that France did not lose through inferiority of numbers nor through inferiority of equipment.[4] It was something else. Perhaps they just weren't prepared for the German army sending their tanks out faster than their supply lines in ways that the French were utterly unprepared for? But really, I think it might just be Tactics. The French were fighting world war one, perhaps fighting it acceptably well. Germany had been through a number of smaller wars meanwhile, and could see how the new technologies upended the old rules of war, and those technologies made decisive the time it took France to figure out that the rules had changed. (There's a view, in fact, that the same thing happened in the first world war; The French started out in bright red trousers and white gloves, that they were dramatically less prepared for the sort of war that the new technology created than the German aggressors were. But the technology of the first world war meant that they were not overrun before they figured out the new rules, and in the end, a willingness to fight, short supply lines, and a large population carried the day.)
(as another aside, I consider the idea that the French are somehow less willing to fight under unpleasant conditions or more likely to surrender than other countries, that "the last brave frenchman died during Napoleon's retreat from Russia" to be... ahistoric. )
May's "Strange Victory" isn't as good as Bloch's "Strange Defeat" - but as I recall (it has been some time) May seemed to suggest that much of this seemed like chance on the German side, too. That you had ridiculously overconfident people in charge, that a lot of the Germans who should have been listened to thought the plan to invade France was way too risky, way too likely to fail. but that somehow, perhaps because the technology of the day allowed for fast and deep breakthroughs and the French leaders were still thinking in world war one terms, that confidence worked out better than could have been reasonably expected. Or maybe it was a low probability event; a fluke. Low-probablility events do occasionally happen.
[4] Unless that inferiority was in airpower; The Germans had decisive air superiority on the continent at that time. And it could have been what made the difference; You could easily argue that air superiority made the decisive difference. - I mean, having arial surveillance could have gone a long way towards mitigating the French confusion at the command level, if nothing else. But air superiority alone doesn't seem like it was decisive in other theatres, so you have to come up with some reason why it made the difference here and not, say, against Russia.
(also I want to point out that while I am of the opinion that the Germans can be considered the aggressors in world war one, and you can reasonably make that case, it's not a universally accepted opinion as their culpability for world war two is.)
The United States as we know it now didn't really exist. Every State in 1860 was basically a country with its own culture and history. The Civil War was instrumental in making the US into one country with one government. Before 1860 it was more a loosely held together alliance.
Southern whites who weren't slaveholders tended to be economically dependent on slaveholders for their livelihoods, in a much more direct way than northern whites were dependent upon capitalists. The Southern economy was pre-capitalist in nature, dominated by a de facto hereditary, landed aristocracy, many of whom were descended from actual aristocracy who migrated to colonial America.
Also, there's a natural human reaction to seeing invading armies occupying your home town, regardless of the rationale behind that action or one's previous or preexisting attitude towards their present ruling class. I mean, there's a spectrum of reactions, but a large chunk of that spectrum includes hostility.
Related, from Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely
What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status.
The South was run like a feudal society:
“Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed.
Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key
More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced.
In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“
Yeah, well the problem there is that the slaves were not freed until long after the war was started. Hence Lincoln's letter to Greeley http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley...
wherein he writes 'If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.'
The South went to war not because the slaves were going to be freed, but because Lincoln did not agree with Slavery as a moral good.
As per the Cooper Union address: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper....
where he said 'what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them.'
I knew, of course, that slaves were integral to the economy of the south, and to the wealth of elites. But I had not known, though it is obvious in retrospect, how intertwined the trade was in the banking sector (like the real-estate market). All the more perverse.
Emancipation was an economic boon for the North. It was the right thing to do sure but it also meant a new cheap labor force for the Northern factories. Black people left the cotton fields of the South for slums in the North. But at least they got payed now and were free.
"States' rights" is actually one of the valid answers to question 74 on the naturalization civics test. ("Name one problem that led to the Civil War.")
Now I wonder what process led to these 100 questions, and their valid answers. (I just took the test a few weeks ago, and becoming a U.S. citizen on Monday.)
Yes, this is main way that States Rights affected the Civil War: northern states ignoring federal law and federal court rulings about returning escaped slaves.
I can see several folks in this very discussion who might be surprised by this bit of history.
Edit: so far two different people think I am mischaracterizing what Southern states said at the time about their state's rights. I wasn't talking about that at all. I was talking about how I (and many modern historians) think about Southern states' reaction to Dred Scott and how Northern states ignored it. Please respond to what I said, instead of something I did not say.
This is also wrong. The Civil War was about slavery. There's a speech in which a defining characteristic of the confederacy is slavery. Keep playing revisionist history.
I believe the "Civil War was about states' rights" line began in the 19th century [1], around the same time as "the number of Confederate memorial installations peaking around 1910 — 50 years after the end of the Civil War and at the height of Jim Crow" [2].
In reality, "Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery" in "Northern states [failing] to 'fulfill their constitutional obligations' by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage" [3].
Unless you have a very subtle point that I'm missing, I think you got tripped up with the numbering of the centuries. The "19th century" started in 1801 and ended in 1900 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century) putting the Civil War itself in the late-middle of the 19th century.
The North was willing to let the South keep slaves. Why then did the South feel it necessary to secede? A major grievance of the South was the North's failure to honor the fugitive slave act. Had the Northern states not exercised this right (weather they legally had it or not), we might not have had a civil war.
Granted, I doubt this is what the South has in mind when citing State's rights as a justification.
Furthermore, the Fugitive Slave Act would have been more honestly named the Kidnap Northerners Whenever We Feel Like It Act. No proof was required that the people abducted in this way were, in fact, escaped slaves. The threat to black northerners should be obvious.
So, this would be an example of the South using the power of federal government to impose its will on the North. It was only after it looked like they had lost the power to do that anymore, that they started a war.
>I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.
I'm familiar with that letter, and I guess we read it differently than each other.
For me, that's a whole lot of subjunctive "ifs" that refer to alternate realities, not actual negotiating positions or offers. When Lincoln says, "What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union" he is referring to his conviction that the Union cannot possibly be saved without an end to slavery.
If Lincoln's election did not cause the South to secede, his attempt to abolish slavery almost certainly would have.
Prior to the civil war, there were numerous compromises between the North and South whereing the South got to keep slaves. In March of 1861, Congress passed the the Corwin Amendment (requiring a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate; which is even more impressive given that 7 states had already seceded and therefore did not vote) t, which was endorsed by both presidents Buchanan and Lincoln.
I don't know if the Corwin amendement would have been ratified by enough states, if not for the Civil war, but given the timing, it is impressive it managed to amass even the 5 ratifications it did.
For what it is worth, I agree with the South's assesment that compromise was not going to be tenable long term, but the North certainly was trying.
As the certainty of a military victory became clear, along with the costs of the war, the opinion of the North began to change to a much less compromising abolishanist stance; which should not be suprising.
States rights wasn't good enough for them. Before the Civil War, many people in the South wanted to expand slavery to more places including new US territories and Nicaragua [1].
If they hadn't been so eager to have their way nationally, it's possible the Civil War could have been avoided.
You don't have to be a libertarian (in fact, it rather helps not to be) to recognize that “capitalism” refers to the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th Century, which was largely abandoned because of the widespread misery it caused in favor of the modern mixed economy in the developed world by the mid-20th century.
OTOH, the test is of ability to parrot the mythology of the dominant political groups in the country.
FWIW, I've found that on the other hand, northern schools teach little about the non-slavery motivations for the Civil War.
Many people don't realize that both the Confederacy and Union had slavery, or the the Emancipation Proclamation specifically exempted the Union's slaves (as it had to).
This triggers a lack of balanced historical perspective and understanding. E.g. many of the naive arguments for razing Confederate history can be applied to US history, European colonist history, Native American history, etc. Without nuance, the conversation becomes a one-sided "we are good and our history is good vs they are bad and their history is bad".
It would be more correct to say that there were slave states that didn't succede from the USA. The president couldn't free slaves within the USA by executive order because they were not at war with the USA (enemy territory being where the president could use their power as commander-in-chief)...that instead required the 13th amendment.
I went to school in the North as well, and in my opinion, they simply didn't dwell on the Civil War for as long as my Southern school did (a whole semester vs. a couple of weeks). It makes sense...the Civil War doesn't have much locality in Seattle while it has a lot of locality in Vicksburg.
> It would be more correct to say that there were slave states that didn't succeded from the USA.
Absolutely. Succession (being part of issue of "states' rights") was a huge part of the Civil War.
> The president couldn't free slaves within the USA by executive order
Indeed; I pointed that fact out myself. There's no question that the man Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery but could not himself end it. There's also no question that the man Robert E. Lee opposed Virginia's succession but not himself stop it.
The fact remains that as a whole the Union still had slaves, and that didn't change for the entirety of the Civil War. In fact, assuming you believe the Union's authority was legitimate, slavery was outlaws in the South years before it was in the North.
My point is there's obviously things going on here other than just a war to end slavery, and it's important not to downplay that either.
> The fact remains that as a whole the Union still had slaves, and that didn't change for the entirety of the Civil War.
If you believe in rule of law, this makes complete sense. They had no way to outlaw slavery without an amendment.
> My point is there's obviously things going on here other than just a war to end slavery, and it's important not to downplay that either.
It is true that the USA would have held onto slavery a little longer without succession. But the South read the writing on the wall, it was going to be outlawed sooner or later, so they decided to rebel.
The South wouldn't have succeeded if slavery wasn't in danger of going away, the Union wouldn't have fought the South if the South hadn't succeeded. But yes, slavery was the cause of all of this, even if indirect.
> FWIW, I'd call Seattle "the West".
My white Vicksburg classmates called me a yankee even though I was born out west, it didn't matter if Washington wasn't even a state at the time. As long as I had that standard midwestern accent (the one that the west and midwest basically have), the west not being the north wasn't relevant. (Ironically enough, my friends from Boston were even more racist than my southern white friends, but that is a story for another time)
Friendly historian nitpick: you mean to be discussing secession, seceding, and that the South seceded, not succession or succeeding. Had the South succeeded, we’d be having a wholly different conversation about the Civil War.
The first day I saw more US flags than Confederate flags in my small southern town was the day after 9/11.
As you said, the fervently believed myth was that the confederacy was about states rights - growing up I only met one person in twenty years who even went so far as making a rasict joke, and I knew plenty who flew a Confederate flag and absolutely believed that all men were created equal.
I think maybe the myth ended up being a useful way of letting people keep their old flag and old team allegiance, while completely changing the what they actually believed.
That said, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving were always celebrated.
Ya, I think the first gulf war was a turning point in Southern patriotism, and 9/11 even more so (though I wasn't in the south then). Its funny how the stereotype today of the south is of ultra-patriotism when it wasn't too long ago that the exact opposite was true.
Yeah, that's consistent with what I've experienced too. Though I almost wonder if its association with Dukes of Hazzard that really cemented it's place as an "identity" symbol for a certain group of southerners (lower/working class white male).
The run on US flags after 9/11 was something else. I remember when my mom begrudgingly bought a flag magnet 2 weeks after it all. Apparently the neighbors were giving her side-eye for having the only flagless pickup truck on the street.
It's just true enough to not be an outright lie, while being enough of a lie of omission to serve its purpose as propaganda.
Yes, the Civil War was about states' rights. Yes, the South was fighting for independence from what it saw as Northern political bias and Federal overreach. But all of those ancillary issues were about defending slavery as an economic and cultural institution.
It's misleading even then, when you look at the actual complaints of the states (as expressed in their declarations of independence). For example, most of them complained about the free states' pushback to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was also a states' rights issue - but the one where interests of the slaveholders aligned with a stronger federal government strong-arming states; and they didn't have any qualms about that.
Similarly, in the Confederate constitution, there were some provisions added that specifically restricted the ability of the states to handle slavery in their jurisdiction - e.g. the "right of transit and sojourn" (which essentially meant that free states were forced to respect the "property right" of any slave-owning citizen of another state who comes to reside there) - this, of course, was in response to Dred Scott.
Well said. The meme of "it wasn't at all about states' rights and if you think it was you're a (racist|revisionist|CSA apologist)" is more confusing than persuasive.
And that's my perspective as someone who grew up with "war about slavery" as the default interpretation, only learning about contemporary states' rights arguments in later history classes at my (public Virginia) high school. (And then only learning from HN/reddit that "Northern aggression" / "states' rights" propaganda was even still a thing.)
I expect someone raised on that propaganda would be even more confused, likely enough to conclude that the speaker is lying or misinformed.
Saying it was about slavery is also misleading (although less so than just saying states rights). At the time the civil war started, the North was willing to compromise on the issue of slavery [0]. The North did not fight to abolish slavery. Had the South surrendered earlier (or never seceded at all), they would have been able to keep their slaves [1]. The reason the North fought was to preserve the union (apparently not an answer on the citizenship test).
I actually think that preserving the Union is, in some sense, a more technically correct answer, since the South did not start the war [2]. The South declared its independence. The North started the war to prevent the South from gaining its independence [3].
As an aside. Independent of my actual interperatation of history, I think it would be highly unreasonable to deny citizenship to someone for holding a controversial belief that is shared by a significant portion of the country. Like it or not "states rights" is an American interpretation of the Civil war, even if it is one that is not historically accurate. And we really do not want the government to be in a position of dictating the "correct" history.
[0] You could argue about how trustworthy the North was. I would argue the main cause of the Civil war was that the South lost confidence that the North was (or would continue) to compromise on this issue.
[1] At least for a while. With hindsight, I am sure that slavery would have eventually been abolished in the South as well, and it probably would have been the North that was the primary political force behind it.
[2] Fine, they did open the attack of Fort Sumter when the Union refused to withdraw. You could therefor argue that the South did technically start the war, but I find that to be a bit of a stretch.
[3] As I mentioned above, this was the primary motivation of the North. The North, at the start, did not continue this sentence with "...so that they could abolish slavery".
> Like it or not "states rights" is an American interpretation of the Civil war, even if it is one that is not historically accurate.
More accurately, “states rights” was, at the time of the Civil War, a code word for protecting slavery that was revived during the Jim Crow era as a broader code for protecting segregation and systematic discrimination, and the faction which uses it that way has always been strong enough to play a major role in shaping the national mythology.
Secession was starting the war. You can't declare independence and expect a country not to respond. The southern states knew that secession was illegal and would bring about war. The Confederacy started the war in every important way, claiming anything else is revisionism.
This was not established law at the time of secession. Lincoln should have sued the seceding states to determine the legality of secession before beginning hostilities [0]. It was not established as law that leaving the union was illegal until 1869, when Texas argued in Texas V. White that secession was unconstitutional, and therefore the confederate legislature of Texas during the war was illegitimate. Therefore, the state still owned the bonds that it had (allegedly) sold to fund the war.
Further, Texas V. White was not a unamious decision. In the dissenting, Justice Grier wrote [1]:
>is Texas one of these United States? Or was she such at the time this bill was filed, or since?
>This is to be decided as a political fact, not as a legal fiction. This court is bound to know and notice the public history of the nation.
...
> I do not consider myself bound to express any opinion judicially as to the constitutional right of Texas to exercise the rights and privileges of a State of this Union
...
> I am not disposed to join in any essay to prove Texas to be a State of the Union when Congress have decided that she is not. It is a question of fact, I repeat, and of fact only. Politically, Texas is not a State in this Union. Whether rightfully out of it or not is a question not before the court.
This is reflective of a general political fact that sovereignty is not a legal question. Had the South won the war, we would not be having this arguement. It would be an undisputed fact that the Confederacy was a sovereign nation not subject to US law. It takes 2 sides to wage a war, and the North started the war because it found the South's political decision unacceptable [3]
Further, if we look at the post-war history, it was northern republicans who argued that secession was possible, as this is what allowed them to treat the former confederate states as conquered territory and therefore subject to direct congressional rule.
The southern Democrats (along with more moderate republicans) argued that secession was illegal, and therefore they were still full states in the Union, which would make laws such as the Reconstruction Acts [2] unconstitutional
[0] Not that it would have made any practical difference.
[2] As an unrelated matter, the North did repeal the Habeas Corpus Act 1867 in order to prevent the courts from ruling on the constitutionality of such reconstruction measures. Given the precedent set in Texas V. White, the southern states were likely correct that much of reconstruction was unconstitutional.
[3] That is not to say that the North was not justified in starting the war.
> But all of those ancillary issues were about defending slavery as an economic and cultural institution.
It's insane how often this is disputed when the Confederate states explicitly asserted this in their various declarations of secession. Mississippi's, for example, begins[1]:
> In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
Federal law protected these rights, and the rights to retrieve fugitive slaves. The southern states objected to northern states ignoring Dred Scott, which was a federal court ruling.
Legally, yes. Just because it is legal doesn't mean it is right though.
Moreover, the US was way behind Euope on this issue and I suspect they wouldn't have lasted long until sanctions were imposed on slave-produced goods, especially tobacco and cotton.
No doubt, it was about slavery. However, it was also about economics. Slave labor really changes the equation when manual labor is needed for production. This is especially relevant in the current model, where businesses of a certain size can afford to overcome shipping costs and enjoy lowered costs of production in emerging economies.
Indeed. Tariffs (primarily affecting manufactured goods) was a huge point of contention, rivaled only by the slavery issue.
During the Civil War there was "Cotton diplomacy" [1] where the South tried to pull Britain and France onto its side, under the presumption that their need for cotton would win out. Despite the cotton famine [2] they managed to stay neutral.
I've never really bought that story, in that form. It tacitly suggests that the South's economy was stronger with slavery than without. It seems more likely to me, though, that reliance on slavery was part of why the South's economy ended up being so weak in the first place. It allowed money to remain concentrated in the hands of a small, landed elite. That worked out extremely well for them relative to their neighbors, but also would have fueled a sort of falling tide that sinks all boats.
Which isn't to say that it doesn't change the economic equation if you take it away. But it's more tenable to say that the reason people were willing to go to war over it was more about the economics of power than about economics in general.
There is just as much "ugh" in saying that it was about slavery instead of state's rights. Either way, you're leaving out important things. This misleads by oversimplification.
You'd be better off saying it was about geography! There is a band of soil running along today's black belt that is unusually good for growing certain labor-intensive crops, particularly cotton. That lead to a non-industrial economy. Meanwhile, water power to operate machinery was widely available in New England.
So right off, you have a huge conflict over things like tariffs, and you'd have that even without adding the issue of slaves. The north preferred to have tariffs on manufactured goods, and the south preferred to have them on raw materials. The "state's right" in question was actually the nullification of a tariff.
BTW, the usual story about slavery in the USA also leaves out the awkwardness of stuff like this slave owner:
Instead of after-the-fact musings on the role of geography, it would be smart to read what the Confederate states themselves said their reasons were for seceding.
For instance, Mississippi [1]. The first two sentences of the Mississippi secession document read:
"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."
This argument always trots out Mississippi's declaration. Show me evidence from the CSA leadership as a whole, and I'd let the point stand without contention.
The GP quote is supported by the CSA constitution [1]. Search “slave” and read every mention. The institution of slavery was such a big deal that it needed to be ensured by their constitution. Why would they do that?
This is an interesting subject. The 4th of July is not celebrated in Utah as it is in other states: instead that same energy and celebration goes into Utah's "Pioneer Days." This divergence from the rest of the nation provides some insight into the history of Utah and the people who settled it, and their relationship to the greater United States. Personally, I don't think it reflects positively but that's just my opinion on another interesting divergence in national tradition.
More: The Mormons were intending to leave the United States and start their own country. When they came to Utah (1847), much of it was still Mexican territory. They celebrate the day that commemorates them trying to leave the US as hard as they celebrate the 4th of July.
Note well: This does not make Utah Mormons less patriotic... just a bit historically schizophrenic.
As an Iranian Jewish-born atheist who grew up in Iran and now lives in the U.S, I celebrate Hannuklah, Nowrooz (Iranian new year), Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any other fun holiday you would throw at us.
I think we live in a world that nobody gives a fuck about reasons and true meanings behind things. Fuck history I wanna party!
Well, for what it's worth, I think the west needs more Muslims. I mean, why do we have weekends? It's basically Saturday because of the Jews, and Sunday because of the Christians. Well, the Muslims' holy day is Friday. Three day weekend every week? Yeah, sign me up.
This is not an endorsement of Islam as a theology. But culturally, I'm down.
tldr; Thanksgiving was traditionally celebrated in the north, with "northern" food, and after it was made a national holiday by Lincoln the confederate states refused to acknowledge it.
I'm curious about Native Americans though. A lot of their culture and resistance has been lost today, but back around the birth of the holiday I can imagine them finding it offensive and being vocal about it, if not due to politics and tradition, due to the hypocrisy of it.
I'm just saying that Native Americans are still around and still vocal. Native Americans are still politically active and the first Native American women were even voted into office this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Native_Americans_in_th...
Realise that Thanksgiving as we have mythologized it today is entirely synthetic. There are only one or two sentences about it on the Pilgrim history, and those are sparse on facts.
The traditional menu is one that happened to be served one year at Harvard. For some reason lost to history, it became the de facto traditional menu.
Thanksgiving is commonly known as a celebration of a good harvest, but the reason why the harvest was good is seldom remembered.
Plymouth Colony was originally communal. Marx was far from the first to think that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" might be a good idea. Such thinking dates back to Plato at least, and in 1620 the colony actually tried it. Nobody wanted to do the work, though everybody had needs. After 2.5 years, with half the colony dead, Plymouth governor William Bradford decided to prioritize survival over the ideals of socialism. The resulting harvest was plentiful, giving reason to celebrate Thanksgiving.
It's easy to see why the "Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Nothern Aggression" from Lincoln's action. He extended the meaning of the celebration to include victory of the North over the South, and asked the South to observe it, according to wikipedia.