Quickly scanning, I originally read this header as SLAYER Caused the Civil War!

And I do agree that it was a states' right issue ... the states wanted to keep their rights to have slaves.

At least that's how it is justified.

I wish the South would just get over their butthurt phase already and move on.

From what I've read, Southerners explicitly said it was about slavery. I think the states rights appeals to the North came because that concept actually is in the Constitution and part of how our nation was to work. But it was cover for what it is really about. When they were talking to themselves, it was about slavery and their "way of life" which meant slavery.

The drive behind slavery was economic.

Slavery was the reason, but the reason was grounded on money and the genteel classes in the South, kind of like today's oligarchy, it relied heavily on the crutch of slavery to maintain their wealth and position. Today's oligarchy relies on the debasement of labor instead which is more humane.



For the South, to outlaw slavery would mean an economic upheaval (which happened anyway). That's where the States Rights issue came about. The Constitution didn't expressly prohibit slavery, so they argued it was a state sovereignty issue. When they started to lose that argument, AND new farmland territory was being added to the United States, which would have changed the balance of power in the Senate, that escalated the vitriol.



The religious debate in the United States between the evangelical south (Baptists, etc. who conveniently found nothing wrong with slavery) and the richer northerner Christians (Quakers, Catholics, Episcopalians) who took slavery as a religious issue also split on these lines. Yes that's right; Southern preachers helped spread the vitriol against Yankees in the pulpits and actually argued that it was a God-given right to own slaves.

So the vitriol went to the pulpits, and then nationalism also crept in before the war. The "Godless Yankees" were going to come take your property, your way of life, and oppress you to further their greed and gluttony up in the north. The demonetization was boundless. Us, vs. Them.

When religion was inserted, this put the Southern way of life at stake, along with the sovereignty of their state, so then greased the wheels for all the whites in the South who didn't own slaves, which was just about all of them, to jump into war and kill themselves. The Southern men didn't have a fight to protect slavery at the forefront of their minds, they were more worried about the aftermath IF the yankees did happen to win, and how that would destroy their family and way of life. They saw this as a revolution and to have their own national sovereignty that's totally centered in the South with no more Northern influences.

And that meant they had to keep slavery because that's what their entire economy was based on.



So 3 quarters of a million Americans volunteered themselves for the slaughterhouse.

Well economics that was linked to slavery.

The economics of the South where based on using slaves, so when the North said you can't have them anymore, well it pissed off the money people (slave owners). Remember, only a small percentage of people owned slaves, they just happened to be very rich and powerful and could use the bully pulpit to spread their truth.

Ahh, sorry Mayfair, just read your post. Stated similar stuff...

No, it wasn't about slavery since most Southerns didn't own slaves and never would.

It was about "freedom and equality" vs. White supremacy. The population of the South was not committed to slavery in a philosophical sense but what they couldn't accept was giving up the belief in the inferiority of the Black Africans. Nor did they wish that these people would be their equals.

Oh you mean a license to kill which is worse of course.

Um... I'm just talking about slavery and White supremacy. Which are the ideals pronounced in the Cornerstone Speech by Confederate VP Alexander Stevens:
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 normal condition.Cornerstone Speech - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And of course in the Confederate flag the Stainless Banner:

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r...TY/confed2.gif

The white area symbolized the White race of the South being stainless, that is without "color".

Bear in mind that abolitionists were against slavery, but for the most part had no intention of granting equal citizenship rights to ex-slaves, or freed African-Americans. So, your white-supremacy argument applies to both the north and the south. Additionally, the Emancipation Proclamation DID NOT include Maryland, a slave state that remained in the Union because Lincoln did not want the hoped-for slave uprising to destabilize a Union state.

I don't believe this because plenty of whites in the North didn't believe black folks were equal (and even now some still don't). Slavery wasn't widely practiced in the industrial north only because the North was less agrarian by the 1860s. Machinery took the place of the slave.

The white supremacy movement in the South (i.e. the KKK) did not really gain that much traction until Reconstruction began and the era of Jim Crow started. This aftermath was a South that became way poorer than it was before the War, more illiterate, more ideological and more backward that changed the perception of blacks from a smug dismissiveness to pure naked hatred. The land of the rental farmer (sharecropping) and white poverty created a new xenophobia of black people. Blacks were castigated with everything wrong in Southern society and the thought of black advancement is what fueled the KKK.

Jim Crow then was a political appeasement to all that negativity because if you couldn't get elected on your own merits, then you certainly could stand a much better chance if your platform was putting down the Negro.

During that whole time of Southern poverty (1865 to 1965), white culture in the south romanticized the antebellum South, pre-war. It really wasn't until after the 1940s did Southern society really have to face its demons (the events leading up to civil rights).



What won't be acknowledged in the Deep South is the chain of Southern poverty in many areas of the south actually did not end until after the Civil Rights Act. And since that time, the South has actually grown economically and also in population. Most of our recent presidents hail from the South.

In the south, the Civil War is sometimes referred to as the War of Northern Aggresion.

I think I heard that for the first time about 9 yrs ago by someone telling me, being from Philly, that he was still pissed about that war.
Me: What war?
Him: The war of northern agression

I have also heard it was a states rights issue, but have not heard a compelling arguement against it being the right to own slaves, that was what was most important.

Ahh yes I forgot about that term.

My school history textbooks (which of course, public school textbooks are influenced by whatever the Texas Board of Education chooses to buy, or have editors change for its amusement), referred to both terms, but it did at least put the "War of Northern Aggression" second.


If you really look at the historical essays that focus on the Buchanan presidency (right before the War), you'll see a bit of a clearer picture.

The explanations for why the war began is more described like a taco.


On the deep inside, the war was about economics (money and wealth). Standing on it is slavery, which supported the agrarian South, because at the time the South was a heavy exporting region of the United States; Europeans were gobbling up Southern cotton, tobacco and grain products.

Slaves were not expected to stick around once they got legislative freedom. Southern white men did not consider the slave to be a person, only property. To have slavery outlawed with the stroke of the pen equated to a lot of the genteel classes losing productive property on their plantations. This would cause all of Southern society to take a huge hit to their economy at once.

People were saying lots of things, but their actions were mostly motivated by their pocketbooks. Those who had no business with farming were surrounded in an economy totally based on farming, and little machinery was involved in farming in the 19th century. If anything, the Cotton Gin worsened the plague of slavery because the processing of cotton fibers was sped up by this piece of machinery, but there was no machinery for planting and pulling cotton from the plants. The Cotton Gin directly contributed to a huge increase in slavery in the South.

So, if the plantations suffered with the sudden abandonment of this labor, or plantation owners are forced to pay the slaves wages that poor white laborers get paid, most everything else in the economy would suffer.

This alarmed Southerners, and got them plenty angry. 100% of the population is about to become poorer in a hurry. That's more than enough motivation to dial up the rhetoric and the retribution.


On top of that, the States Rights issue was the core argument Southern congressmen used to justify their actions. Southerners argued that their states held supreme sovereignty on the question of slavery, because it is not enumerated in the Constitution. Northern states against slavery argued that rights (to be free) can be given and are given to all the people, and freedom is plastered all over the Constitution, and no state can step in and thwart the rights of a United States citizen, much less its own.

On top of the argument were the new states coming into the Union, which Southern states tried to control the outcome of those states: whether or not they would be a slave state or a free one. This created very heated debates in the US Senate, and filibusters. This fighting would happen in Congress each time new territory was up to be annexed, beginning with Texas in 1836 (which became a slave state).


West Virginia exists because of the Civil War. The counties west of the mountain ridge line seceded from the rest of Virginia.

Also, when the bodies were piling up, Congress authorized Robert E. Lee's former home in Washington D.C. to be used as a burial ground because all the other cemeteries in the capital where filling up, and the caretaker (a Southerner who hated the South and its decision to go to war) started burying the bodies yards away from the front door. His own son was buried in the rose garden.


That property is today known as Arlington National Cemetery.

FWIW I'd include lynching with slavery and white supremacy.

In the same vein, Battle Monument is oft referred to as "The Monument to Southern Markmenship".

Those are just Southern terms of endearment http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/fo...lies/smile.png

The Ken Burns series which most everyone has seen has really been a wonderful tool at getting people to look at the civil war differently than the platitudes people were raised with before he made that documentary. Before 1990 I would say most everyone's view of what the war meant was clouded in simple little paragraphs when it really was nearly a half century of events before that which really brought it about, especially the final 10 years before the first shots were fired.

The Civil War wasn't just "about slavery" nor "about states rights". The latter concept is hard for schoolchildren to even grasp anyway. If the war was "about slavery" then why did it take 100 years after the founding of the country to finally have a war about it? If it was about "states rights", then what specific rights were taken away from the states that forced them to leave the union?


When you look at the classical view of why most wars happen... wealth and power, the picture is more accurate. It's about wealth, which is about slavery, which is about states rights.



Four long years of the North blockading all of the South so the Southerners could not trade with any foreign nations, the North destroyed Atlanta which was the most important transportation hub of the South, Sherman's March to the Sea pillaged what remained of Georgia, and most of the wealth of the South had been consumed in the war, huge population losses, large spreading of disease, runaway slaves not planting the crops---the South lost all its reasons to continue fighting the war.

There was no more wealth to fight for.

WHYY has been running Burns' series the last couple of week in commemoration of the war. I had forgotten how good the series was.

I just never became a civil war buff and consider it a war where pre-revolutionary tactics were being used 100 years
later. Thanks for the Ken Burns' series heads up and will look for it on WHYY.
The US war for independence and Vietnam were my wars for study along with Korea. You guys covered the gist of that
war and all I can add is some research info in case your family was involved, and I'm sure on my dad's side mine had to be
but I haven't checked yet:

AP ~ The National Archives and Ancestry.com published newly digitized Civil War records online for the first time Wednesday
(Apr 6, 2011), allowing users to trace family links to the war between the North and South.

further... Ancestry offers a 14 day free trial before surrendering your first born bobblehead...

http://i991.photobucket.com/albums/a...ort_sumter.jpghttp://i991.photobucket.com/albums/a...0/ftsumter.jpg

edit ~ these were the Union officers http://i991.photobucket.com/albums/a...r-officers.jpg

Keep in mind we almost had hostilities between the Feds and a state decades before the Civil War. Read up on the Nullification Crisis. The causes of the Civil War covered decades and many issues.

Whether they believed it or not is one thing but a Black man in the north was the legal equal of a White man. Many in the North may not have wanted it but that is the way it was with some exceptions. (We should point out that a Gay man is the equal of a Straight man with some exceptions.)

The foundation of the Confederacy was announced with the Cornerstone Speech. Every CSA soldier was fighting for White supremacy over the Black African. This same belief carried into the founding of the KKK in 1865 which coincides with Reconstruction and Jim Crow is the Confederate victory.