The Southern Lie

[marjaerwin]

No, the war was not about "states' rights," it was about slavery.

For decades the slaveholders in the South had sought to expand slavery into the West and impose slavery on the North.

If they had cared about "states' rights," they wouldn't have forced the Fugitive Slave Act and the Mexican War, and wouldn't have sent federal marshals to force Massachusetts to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act. If they had cared about "states' rights" they wouldn't have invaded Kansas in 1854 and neutral Kentucky in 1861. If they had cared about local autonomy they would not have invaded eastern Tennessee or western Virginia in 1861.

But they went to war for slavery, by their own admission. It's in the various articles of secession and the Cornerstone Speech.

Now it's easy to understand why Southern institutions push this lie, but it's harder to understand why the wider public has bought into the lie. I think it absolves the Southern politicians for the war, but just as importantly, it absolves their Northern counterparts for turning their backs on reconstruction, land reform, and civil rights for the freed victims of the slave system.

Inspired by the recent Salon excerpt from Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/the_south_still_lies_about_the_civil_war

And by James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=22520482

By the way, tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day. Given the topic, let's remember that Saint Patrick was himself enslaved by Irish raiders for six years before escaping.

Comments

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

". . . No, the war was not about 'states' rights,' it was about slavery."

How is a claim like this supposed to be evaluated? It's obviously true and easily documented that the Confederate government, and before that the politicians who went on to run it, cared mainly about perpetuating and expanding slavery, and very little about "states' rights," local autonomy, etc. It's also clear, and I think also easily documented, that when the war started, Lincoln, his war cabinet, and his generals did not raise their army or invade Virginia with the intention of ending slavery, but rather because they regarded secession as treason, had their own nationalist and materialist reasons for wanting to keep the Southern states under the control of their government, and intended to use overwhelming force to restore the political status quo ante, including the preservation of slavery in the South and its enforcement by means of federal bayonets. (Not even to get into the complexity of talking about the views and motives of people other than the politicians who were also caught up in the Civil War.) Part of that changed, years later, as the war dragged on; views also changed, somewhat less, on the Confederate side (remember Loewen's discussion of the increasing incoherence of Southern newspaper editorials in the late war). So what are we supposed to say that the war was "about"? The thing that inspired secession? The thing that inspired the attack on Ft. Sumter, or the retaliatory invasion? The things that sustained the war, either on the winning side or on the losing side? Because it seems to me that these aren't all the same thing -- the motives and practices weren't equal-but-opposite mirrors of each other.

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

Marja,

Thanks for this. And I didn't mean to suggest that you were trying to defend Unionist war aims. I just think it's important to stress the worst-of-both-worlds character of the motives on each side of the war -- partly because it's indicative of something pretty generally true about wars between governments, but also because of the concerns I have about how the usual mirror-image models of what the war was or wasn't "about" tend to feed off each other, and actually strengthen Nationalist, neo-Confederate and reconciliationist accounts, at the expense of the truth (and of accounts that might get a glance at the war through more marginalized eyes). I am on the whole an old Garrisonian about the whole thing, and think that peaceful disunion would have greatly aided the cause of emancipation by substantially destabilizing the Confederate states' ability to go on enforcing slavery; but meanwhile the collapse of the system from within would have laid the material and political groundwork for a much more positive post-emancipation outcome (both for former slaves who would be in a much stronger position to claim their due, and also for the poor whites who were fairly mercilessly in the cross-fire throughout the war).

Slavery

[catskillmarina.livejournal.com]

Have you ever been to John Brown's fort in Harpers Ferry ? I sometimes run the hill across from Harpers Ferry - when i am there i like to walk across the bridge and see that little place.