The Civil War in America’s narrative

“But perhaps there is a different history of the role of states’ rights in the conflict than the limited one I know”

Nope, you’ve got the correct story already.

I’ve lived in both the north and the south, albeit briefly, and I was floored that southerners still cared about the Civil War. I was often referred to as a Yankee and I could never fully understand why there was any resentment at all towards northerners. In the end you have a hefty portion of southerners who simply hide their racist views behind the states rights/pro confederacy nonsense.

As a story about two generations of constitutional debate that has a veneer of truth, but is still basically a lie– federalism and the slave power had opportunistic overlaps, but the slave power was entirely happy to use central power when it could: the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott, postal censorship of abolitionist literature. As an account of secession and tw Civil War proper, it’s entirely a lie.

That last paragraph was also part of the Cornerstone Speech quote. Don’t know how it escaped my blockquote tag!

The Southern States, that is. Not the overly informed citizens.

David: …although I’m sure some people think that as well, and also that the group of people who think that is particularly strong in the former Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=491

It has been a conviction of pressing necessity—it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us—which has brought Mississippi to her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races. That Declaration is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made. The communities were declaring their independence; the people of those communities were asserting that no man was born—to use the language of Mr. Jefferson—booted and spurred, to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal—meaning the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families; but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body politic. These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for which they made their declaration; these were the ends to which their enunciation was directed. They have no reference to the slave; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment against George III was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do, to stir up insurrection among our slaves? Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the prince to be arraigned for raising up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother-country? When our Constitution was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable; for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the equality of footing with white men—not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three-fifths. So stands the compact which binds us together.

Re Stephens: this is not my field but I don’t think opposing conscription in the Confederacy was exactly a fringe position. In any case Stephens’ differences with Davis et al. during the war don’t need to be read back onto his justification for secession when the war started. The quote Ben selected is perfectly reasonable as an example of standard Confederate opinion. And yes, the citizenship exam lags considerably behind best historical practices here.

I grew up in the South and my family still lives in the South (though I haven’t for over 25 years.) Yankee is still a pejorative word there, and yes, you will still find people there who will argue that the Civil War was about those Yankees poking their noses into our business, never mind that our business was slavery. Many of these same people would consider themselves very patriotic and Christian, as well, with no sense of irony.

I’m a Northerner, but the Davis speech makes a stronger argument than it is PC to admit. The United States was formed in 1776-87 by several colonies/ states where slavery was legal, including states north of the Mason-Dixon line (notably my home state of New York). Several of the odder features of the Constitution, exactly the ones that cause the most trouble today, were put in so that slave states would not be penalized politically by the fact that a good portion of their population was not citizens. Both the Electoral College and the Senate originate from this.

If you had told a typical politically informed person at the time that once the Constitution was passed, the federal government would and could abolish slavery, plus that once they signed up to the pact no state could withdraw from it, ever, you would have been viewed as a lunatic. If even a significant minority of people had actually thought this the Constitution would never had come close to ratification. Incidentally, a recent book has argued that most of the people fighting for independence did so less because Jefferson’s appeal to natural rights in the Declaration of Independence, than what they thought were their historical rights as Englishmen.

So for many white, elite Southerners such as Davis, they were being perfectly true to the ideals of the generation of the 1770s and 1780s, they were happy to keep to the terms of the original deal of the time (a decentralized slave republic) but the Northerners were tying to change it. It was only with the postwar amendments that citizenship of the United States was defined in the document as generating from something other than the laws of whichever state you came from. I think the Civil War was far more revolutionary what what Americans call “the Revolutionary War” but for some reason the national mythology keeps insisting otherwise.

And yes, I am arguing that the vision of the Founders really was quite close to that of the current Tea Partiers, but the point is that the Tea Partiers are trying to restore a republic that hasn’t existed for 150 years, and mostly for good reason.

All we have to go on is what members of the ruling classes said they were doing. Seems pretty clear.

In this case, Stephens wasn’t even close to being representative of so limited a franchise as merely the ruling classes. He was just a raving loon. Whom everybody more or less considered the retarded cousin to be kept in the attic as much as possible. His constituency was the contemporary equivalent of the Tea Party.

Look: the Confederacy was premised on slavery. But quoting Stephens proves nothing, because he has not a shred of credibility as speaking for anyone other than himself as a raving loon. This is just not sound historiography, on every level. When future historians look back on our own age, they are not going to analyze momentous acts of state by looking at Sarah Palin or even Paul Ryan. It’s doubtful Stephens ever had even the purchase of Ryan.

So, the Civil War was about slavery.

But let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say that the “states’ rights as a cause” theory might be justifiable — wrong, still, but justifiable.

I think similar justifiable and yet wrong theories can describe many policy debates. Take, for example, cutting taxes for the very rich. This is a policy that is probably primarily advocated because it will help very rich people. But there is an unproven theory that lowering the taxes on the very rich will lead to more economic growth that will help everyone. So if you asked ‘why did the Bush tax cuts target the very rich?’ and someone said ‘to enhance growth’ or even better ‘because some people at the time believed that it would enhance growth,’ it wouldn’t feel quite right to just score that answer as ‘incorrect’ in a context where you cannot get any further elaboration. It’s wrong, but you might be able to elaborate and make it sensible. “Somebody surely believed those economic growth theories, and maybe if they had not had such theories expounded to them, they would not have supported the relevant policies and the policies would thus have been resoundingly unpopular,” etc.

Similarly, in US history, the idea that the states had freely entered into a treaty with each other that was the US Constitution and thus could legally and unilaterally secede at any time was an untested, unproven legal theory. Jefferson had (arguably, indirectly) claimed that states could unilaterally nullify laws and/or secede in the Kentucky Resolutions. Madison had claimed the same things in the Virginia Resolutions. There was a ‘Nullification Crisis’ in 1833 in which these sorts of issues weren’t really resolved in the legal sense. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court and other branches of government all officially decided that secession was not legal, but it had not heard the issue beforehand.

So, to be rigorous for a sec, let’s construct the appropriate counter-factual. Imagine that U.S. history was exactly as it was, except that throughout, issues of states’ rights, secession, nullification, etc. were definitively decided in the direction of the national government. 1860 rolls around — what happens?

Eh, I’m sick of playing Devil’s Advocate, I’m pretty sure you still get a war. But you can see how the argument runs, anyway: “There were probably a few marginal supporters, particularly among elites, who only supported the secession because the concept of secession had been indirectly supported by Jefferson and Madison. The support of these elites may have been critical to secession’s success.”

If we believe Keynes, we’re all pretty much slaves to the ‘defunct economists’ and theorists of the past. If he’s right, then “states’ rights” is probably an acceptable answer. Which might just show that we are more slaves to the economic structures of today than the defunct economists of yesterday, but at least it’s an open question.

I should add that I’m just writing too many words on this subject for no reason. States’ rights is an answer on these tests to appease the South. I’m just thinking out loud, trying to figure out why this doesn’t seem to me to be quite as evil as some other Southernisms like using Confederate flags as decor or having fond memories of segregation.

And yes, I am arguing that the vision of the Founders really was quite close to that of the current Tea Partiers, but the point is that the Tea Partiers are trying to restore a republic that hasn’t existed for 150 years, and mostly for good reason.

Well, even if it were so, their vision would be no longer constitutional, given the the Reconstruction Amendments to the constitution that solidified and legitimized the results of the Civil War.

I really don’t want to get into any sort of war, but it is simply not true that Stephens, an experienced and respected politician, and friend of Abraham Lincoln, was a loon or an equivalent of Michelle Bachman. He was the most talented of the old Whigs in the South, which is why he got the job as vice president, plus there was some hope he might be able to negotiate with his old friends in the North.

It’s common, but a little silly, to go back to the writings of the revolutionary/ constitutional era to explain everything. But they’re essentially useless on slavery given that the form of slavery and the arguments for it were fundamentally altered by the opening of the Southwest to cotton growing on large plantations after Andrew Jackson stole the lands from the Indians. (Why pretend that all America can be explained by the so-called founding fathers when Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Dewitt Clinton and such are both more appealing and more significant?)

And I also question the use of the term elite for Jeff Davis, who was after all the lord of a plantation in a state that hadn’t existed when he was born growing a crop that hadn’t been common when he was born and arguing for slavery in terms that hadn’t been developed when he was born. Not to mention that his plantation was apparently managed (very profitably) by his older brother on Fourierist principles. Unfortunately, contrary to his expectations the slaves ran away when they had the chance.

When I was very young my godfather taught me the words to “Hang Jeff Davis from the sour apple tree” as he had learned them in about 1905.

The U.S of A. is still the best country in the whole damned world, isn’t Henry?

He was the most talented of the old Whigs in the South, which is why he got the job as vice president, plus there was some hope he might be able to negotiate with his old friends in the North.

The official influence of a VP who’s making speeches against his own president and cabinet can be basically presumed to be nil, whatever his former circumstances.

“Everybody” meaning, I guess, everybody who kept voting him into office over and over and over again.

Look, people voted Bachmann into office again and again too. And VPs in American history have generally been selected not on the basis of mainstream representation but balancing of other interests not already represented. To take but one extreme example, Andrew Johnson. To take another, how representative was Dan Quayle? How representative was Agnew?

Look: the study of history is not a sermon. We make fools of ourselves when we make it so. It’s a hideous American tendency springing from the earliest moments of Puritanism, and I must say I find it regrettable that a fellow Canadian has adopted this least likeable of Americanisms.

What if there was no slaves? Industrial North, agrarian South; plantation labor is done ‘voluntarily’ by undocumented laborers from Mexico (or wherever) for wages barely enough to keep them alive, but above those across the border. The central government gets captured by Northern interests and starts implementing projects and reforms detrimental to the South (or, rather, to the interests of the plantation owners). What would’ve happened, and what would be the narrative?

HV – I think in that case we skip straight to the carpetbaggers, or an equally resented group of alt-carpetbaggers coming down from the North (federal employment regulation inspectors?). Incorporation by force of bureaucracy. By the time you get to 2011 there are still two different narratives, still a lot of Southern self-pitypride and resentment of ‘Yankees’, and for all I know the Yankee image has migrated from Rep to Dem the same way it did in OTL (Nixon was many things, but I don’t think he was the Mule).

The difference in this TL is that the Southern narrative is more stroppy and resentful, but with a strong self-critical streak that isn’t there in OTL – they lost their Way of Life and they didn’t even fight for it! (Think “Parcel of Rogues”.) Also, there will be much more of a residual consciousness of the states as separate entities, as this won’t have been tabooed by the experience of war. All this might lead to some interesting & even progressive developments over time; Scottish nationalists were written off for generations as a bunch of cantankerous dreamers weeping into their whisky, and look at ’em now. Also, in that TL, when a naive student discovers exactly what the Southern Way of Life actually was, hir reaction is more likely to be mild distaste than incredulous disgust; this will probably be good for inter-state understanding.

I dunno, suppose they all escaped and moved to Brazil in 1850. So, you think: no slaves – no secession, no war?

Myles, I had not realized that your general reactionary tendencies extended even to minimizing and misdirection on behalf of the white supremacists.

Alexander Stephens was the vice-president of the Confederacy. His cornerstone speech is as good a place as any to find the official ideological underpinnings of the confederacy. Your attempts to apologize for him show a new side to you.

But if, for the sake of argument, you want to continue pretending that Stephens was somehow anomalous within the ideological leadership of the Confederacy, then you should simply look at some other official pronouncements of Confederate leaders, for instance:

The address of the Louisiana Delegation encouraging Texas to succeed:
http://americancivilwar.com/documents/williamson_address.html

with its main message that
“The people of Louisiana would consider it a most fatal blow to African slavery, if Texas either did not secede or having seceded should not join her destinies to theirs in a Southern Confederacy.”

and its stirring final summation:

” With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual.”

For more of this, read the articles of secession of Mississippi:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.”

That slavery was the cornerstone of Confederate ideology was not an aberrant whim of Stephens’ addled brain. It was the official view of every major Confederate theorist, and every major expression of the Confederate cause.

Keep trying to explain away Stephens. You tell us more and more about what we should associate with the handle “Myles”.

Not enough people are congratulating you. So I will: Congratulations.

It’s become a lot harder and messier to get naturalized than it was when I did it (Thanksgiving ’78). My “test” consisted of two questions: Who was the first president of the United States? Who was the president at the time of the Civil War? (I assume Jefferson Davis would have been the wrong answer).

I’m not going to argue that it’s states’ rights (it’s primarily slavery, followed by economics, conceptualized in the form of states’ rights)

Sorry, but to the extent it was about economics, that, too, was primarily about slavery. It’s turtles all the way down.

Congratulations Henry! Good Luck!

No, Myles, it is not shoddy argument or poor historiography to cite Stephens as representative of the Confederate ideology when he as in fact entirely representative of the Confederate ideology.

He may have been a total loon in other regards. Perhaps he preferred to wear polka-dots while every other Confederate leader dressed in grey. In that case, it would certainly be shoddy argument and poor historiography to cite his dress as typical of Confederate dress.

But that’s not what Ben Alpers did. He cited him as representative of ideology. And he was representative of ideology, as a multitude of other documents shows.

Sorry–you cannot convincingly argue that Stephens is unrepresentative of the ideology. So you cannot argue that it is in any way poor historiography to cite his views as representative. Why you want to remains a question.

When future historians look back on our own age, they are not going to analyze momentous acts of state by looking at Sarah Palin or even Paul Ryan.

Firstly, and realistically, if it helps whatever argument they are trying to make, they will. It is a pretty good historian who has a grasp of a particular period’s politics good enough to count as well-informed by the contemporary standards of that period.

Secondly, in the rather unlikely event there did turn out to be a civil war in the USA within the next 5 years, then they would be quite right to do so. A civil war is pretty much never just the result of the actions of sober and serious statespersons making responsible and rational judgements uninfluenced by the rhetoric of loons.

As to states rights and slavery… yes, slavery was the substantive state right at issue, BUT the prevailing ideology in seceding states that the federal government had no legitimate authority to infringe on a state’s right to allow slavery is part of what enabled the war.

Someone was writing about this online recently, maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I don’t have time to chase it down: the Southern states were concerned about their own right to make their own choices about slavery, but also determined to make sure that they also had some say in whether new states allowed slavery, regardless of what the residents of those states wanted. So no one had a right to infringe on their right to decide for themselves, but they had a right to infringe on other states’s right to decide for themselves.

Seems like their affection for states’ rights was … could it be … dishonest and self-serving?

Hmm… When Hitchens became a citizen he had Lou Dobbs apply his flag pin for the first time.

What would be appropriate to pin to Henry and who should have the honor of pinning him?

Southerners (real or virtual) argue now that the causes of their secession were political and economic. True, but irrelevant. The real issue was slavery, which to a Southerner — then as well as now — was part of the moral order, and forcing Southerners to abandon it was, by their lights, immoral. We shouldn’t forget that slaveholders were aristocrats by inclination, if not in fact, and that they had an aristocrat’s contempt for those who worked with their hands. In their view, slavery was an entirely fit station for those who worked their holdings. It was an unshakeable conviction among them that it was God’s own will that these lesser creatures should be their property.

The attitudes of many on the American right — especially, but not exclusively from the South — have always reflected this degenerate form of aristocratic contempt for the droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme. De Tocqueville, writing 25 years before matters came to a head, made some very eloquent observations on the brewing storm, and dwelt at some length on the attitudes which eventually erupted into war. His insights are still very much worth reading today.

Look, people voted Bachmann into office again and again too.

OMG that must mean “everybody” = “everybody less everybody who voted for that person”! The Confederate Congress voted Stephens Vice President, like it or lump it.

There were plenty of loons. Stephens was a loon who disagreed with other loons on certain points. “With malice toward none, with charity for all” was a big mistake.

The loons only got 18% of the vote in the 1860 election and were not a majority even in the South, but because they were willing to use violence and fraud and defy the law, they controlled the agenda. After they lost the war the same people, or their heirs, went back to work and used the same methods to regain control. The South has always been ruled by a small minority, the better class of white people, and the Southern model is becoming increasingly dominant in the rest of the US. Michael Lind’s “Made in Texas”, which claims that G W Bush was the heir of the unreconstructed planter class, is more relevant today than it was when it was written. Just throw in a little Leo Strauss and a little Mont Pelerin neoliberalism, and you have the future of America and the world. Congratulations, Henry.

PG @ 55

Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech was an honest acknowledgement of the depth of this conflict between the South’s understanding of the deal they’d made when their representatives agreed to the Constitution, and the North’s abhorrence of slavery. He understood very well that war could be the only outcome, and said so in the face of a good deal of reluctance from the rest of the North to face what was coming.

We should be equally honest today about the gridlock in Washington, which echoes in large part the conflict of 150 years ago, and is as much a part of our heritage as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.–Lincoln explains the the role of slavery in causing the war, 2nd Inaugural Address.

The Civil War unquestionable was fought “about slavery,” but if you care more about the Rule of Law than about Human Rights, the Confederacy had a decent case that it was justified in seceding from the Union because the compact under which those slave states had agreed to join—the U.S. Constitution—had been broken by non-slave states.

But it’s important to remember that the Southern secessionists didn’t see this conflict between the rule of law and human rights at all. Many Southerners tended to see what we would call human rights as a bit of eighteenth-century nonsense that sensible, modern people like themselves had left behind. You see this same argument at least as far back as the 1840s in John C. Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government.

Lincoln, for his part, absolutely saw a tension between the rule of law and human rights. And his commitment to the Union as such kept him from being an abolitionist in the strict sense despite his anti-slavery views.

(I suppose one could also throw Frederick Douglass into this mix, as an abolitionist who argued that the Constitution was a “glorious liberty document,” opposed to slavery if properly understood and entirely reflective of the values of the Declaration of Independence.)

And of course other abolitionists disagreed with Douglass about the Constitution’s essential position on slavery. Garrison called the Constitution a “Covenant with Death” and publicly burned it.

“treason in defense of the veto rights of the planter class over the will of the people would still be odious.”

Nice! It doesn’t really trip off the tongue, but it has the advantage of being true.

After the first round of secession, the states which had “left” sent commissioners to the remaining southern states in an effort to convince them to join the secession. The arguments made by those commissioners — obviously, arguments which they thought would be persuasive — can be found here. There’s also a book about this incident by Charles Dew.

If you read those speeches, along with the secession ordinances already linked, it’s impossible to deny that slavery was the cause for secession.

The piece at this link emphasizes the thinness of support for the Confederacy and slavery even within the South, and the degree to which the planter minority succeeded in dominating the other whites nonetheless. I am not able to critique it but as it stands, it makes a compelling case.

http://www.correntewire.com/truth_about_confederacy

Oops. Didn’t quite use the italicize function correctly. Ah, well; you get the point.

I am astonished that the fraction of Confederate sympathizers among white Southerners is that low. I think things have changed down there since I was a kid.

growing up, in the Canadian school system, I recall feeling encouraged to argue (as I did!) by a jr. high school teacher that “state’s rights” were the primary cause of the Civil War…this, ahem, peculiar educational perspective deriving, I think, not from a pro-Confederacy or otherwise racist stance but rather, a from generalized cynicism about America’s myths of its own virtuousness (a very Canadian perspective, imo)

Umm…isn’t the persistence of the “states’ rights” myth due to it’s being a code word for the maintenance of segregation?

OTOH the Civil War was not fought by the Union initially with the aim of abolishing slavery, (which arose initially from military necessity), but rather to preserve the Union. So wouldn’t “states’ rights” be the obverse of that, as a constitutional claim to secession? (Given base and superstructure, etc.)

It’s sort of a performative, helping keep the incorrect view respectable.

I like Bloix’s characterization and would add — State’s rights is a completely valid argument argument to make, providing one openly admits to feeling that state’s rights trump human rights. Whenever state’s rights are widely cited (e.g. to deny access to reproductive health care for women), it’s because those state’s rights conflict with human rights.

William Timberman @ 52: that slaveholders were aristocrats by inclination

In fact, many slaveholders were small landowners and even professionals. The former tended not to have white hired men and so on. As for the latter, where in England a few decades later, a professional man could show that he’d “made it” by buying up gilt-edged bonds, in the South at the time, he did so by buying his way into the class of slaveowners.

“their will was going to be implemented by Washington”

Their will about what issue, Bianca? Internal improvements? Construction of a transcontinental railroad? Tariffs? Aid to manufactures? Indian policy? A national bank? What shared “will” did Arkansas and Virginia have that was opposed to a “will” shared by Minnesota and New York?

State’s rights is a completely valid argument argument to make, providing one openly admits to feeling that state’s rights trump human rights.

Oh, come on. States rights is a completely valid argument argument to make, period.

Should states have the right to institute gay marriage? Should Vermont be able to institute a single payer health care system? More to the point, should states have the right to secede?

Southern extremists had much less ground in actual reality for their fears. But they’d worked themselves into what turns out to be a very characteristic state in American right-wing extremism: the conviction that they’re being oppressed unless they’re being actively cheered on and materially supported by everyone else. Coexistence won’t do it. Legal protection won’t do it. If they know that others dislike them, that’s oppression to them, just as it is to their heirs in the modern Republican Party.

It was never a matter of “state’s rights”–it was a dispute over who would be able to use the power of the federal government to override state preferences. The Fugitive Slave law was a huge violation of state’s rights–the Constitution required states to enforce the return of fugitive slaves, but the South insisted that enforcement be done by the federal government, on the grounds that some states weren’t sufficiently enthused about carrying out their Constitutional duties. The South wanted to expand slavery to the West, and by annexing big chunks of Latin American and the Caribbean. The election of Lincoln brought about the war, not because the South thought he would abolish slavery, but because his election showed that the South was not going to win the battle for control of the federal government.

In this context, it makes perfect sense to say that the was was caused by slavery, even though abolition of slavery was no part of the initial war aim of the federal government. Indeed, the only way the president had the constitutional power to issue an Emancipation Proclamation was in his role as Commander-in-Chief, as a war-making measure

Given this, what on earth possessed you to want to become an American?

One – admittedly lesser – cause of secession was Southern hurt feelings that Northerners, generally, and abolitionists, specifically, looked down on Southerners. I have lived in several Southern states, as well as slave-holding Missouri, for most of my life; often, I have heard Southerners express their bitterness at Yankee condescension towards them.

Should states have the right to institute gay marriage?

States shouldn’t have the right to prohibit gay marriage. In fact, this is an example of “state’s rights” to prohibit gay marriage currently trumping the human right to marry one’s life partner and derive the social benefits this country affords to that partnership. That’s morally wrong. Gay rights are human rights, which ought to come before the interests of the state.

Should Vermont be able to institute a single payer health care system?

I’ve never heard anyone argue that Vermont shouldn’t be able to institute a single-payer health care system on anti-federalist grounds. A “state’s rights” argument is much more specific than “states have the right to do stuff.” A “state’s rights” argument specifically puts forth that a state has the right to take away the rights of its populace (rights = rights as recognized under federal law), and that the federal government cannot act to countermand that state-level restriction except by Constitutional amendment (and perhaps not even that). It’s not “states have rights,” it’s “states have the specific right to overrule the rights that have been granted to their populace by federal law.”

More to the point, should states have the right to secede?

No, they shouldn’t and don’t, except perhaps by national referendum.

Salient – I think your answers make some unwarranted assumptions about the federal government. Should states have the right to permit or forbid certain types of marriages?

One alternative view is that the federal government should have the right to permit or forbid marriages and the states should have no involvement. On that view, given that the DOMA is still law, same-sex marriages would be forbidden nationwide for all purposes, not just federally.

Another alternative is the view that no government should be involved in permitting or forbidding marriages. But this view by its nature only talks about a certain type of marriage (namely, one that comes with no legal benefits) that is already available to same-sex couples in virtually all jurisdictions. (Perhaps some countries governed by religious law forbid even the non-legal marriages, as the military code has.)

As for single-payer health care – I believe the question is related to the fact that the healthcare reform act signed by Obama requires every state to have a certain composition of exchange, and that single-payer insurance systems violate this rule. There’s a proposal to allow states to institute alternative plans as long as they provide coverage to a high enough percentage of the population, which reinstates a certain kind of right to the state. But you’re right, it’s rarely phrased that way in terms of “states rights”, except in response to the rightist uses of the term.

Salient, the “states rights” argument is about the rights of the state governments vis-a-vis those of the central government. Therefore your “States shouldn’t have the right to prohibit gay marriage.” and all the stuff that follows is a non sequitur; you are not addressing the issue.

A “state’s rights” argument specifically puts forth that a state has the right to take away the rights of its populace

Seriously? Whose definition is that?

I wrote up a summary of evidence about the Southern leaders’ views on succession back in 2002, at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.bridge/browse_thread/thread/44d148e4113650dc/4ce7a59bae894055?q=Jefferson+Davis+author:NOSPAMdave%40sebastian9.com#4ce7a59bae894055 .

Here is the key stuff, with updated links, since Epperson’s web site has moved in the mean time:

Lincoln was not initially proposing to end slavery in the
states where it currently existed. What he *was* proposing to do was to
prevent the further expansion of slavery to the territories that
were not yet states, and the new states that would be carved
from those territories. Politicians on both sides understood
that this policy, if carried out and not reversed, would mean a gradual
decline in the political power of slaveholding states, followed by
the *eventual* end of slavery in the US. The prospect terrified Southern
politicians so much that they turned to sucession to try to prevent it, which
brought on the war. While there were other issues, slavery was by
far the biggest issue, and the only one that could not be satisfactorily
addressed through the normal political process.

If you doubt that slavery was the primary cause of the war, I recommend
reading what leading Southern politicians had to say about
the issue on the eve of the war. You can find many of these documents
online at James F. Epperson’s “Causes of the Civil War” site
(http://civilwarcauses.org).

For starters, there are the Declarations of Causes for Secession
passed by four of the secession conventions in order to explain
their actions to the rest of the world:
(http://civilwarcauses.org/plat.htm).

Although a few other issues do get mentioned in one or two of the
declarations, the vast majority of the grievances cited have to do
with slavery. Then there is the Crittenden Compromise, which was
proposed by Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky in December 1860
in a last minute effort to resolve the crisis:
(http://civilwarcauses.org/cc.htm). Note that each part of
his proposal had to do with ensuring the continuation of slavery – he
certainly seems to have thought that slavery was the primary issue.

There were other proposals to resolve the crisis,
(http://civilwarcauses.org/comp.htm), including one by Jefferson
Davis, who was soon to become the President of the Confederacy:

Resolved, That it shall be declared, by amendment of the Constitution,
that property in slaves, recognized as such by the local law of any of
the States of the Union, shall stand on the same footing in all
constitutional and federal relations as any other species of property
so recognized; and, like other property, shall not be subject to be
divested or impaired by the local law of any other State, either in
escape thereto or of transit or sojourn of the owner therein; and in
no case whatever shall such property be subject to be divested or
impaired by any legislative act of the United States, or of any of
the Territories thereof.

It certainly seems that Jefferson Davis thought the primary issue was
slavery.

Next, one can read the open letter from Georgia governor Joe Brown to the
citizens of his state http://civilwarcauses.org/jbrown.htm).
In his analysis of the consequences of Lincoln’s election, it certainly
seems that Governor Brown thought that the future of slavery was the main
issue. Governor Moore of Alabama seems to have felt similarly
(http://civilwarcauses.org/govmoore.htm). There is the First
Message of Governor Isham Harris to the Tennessee Assembly
(http://civilwarcauses.org/harris.htm), in which he provides
his analysis of the crisis, and endorses the Crittenden Compromise as
a condition on which the slave states could remain in the Union.
Virginia Governor John Letcher also proposed conditions for resolving
the crisis (http://civilwarcauses.org/letcher.htm), all
concerning slavery.

Finally, one may refer to the “Cornerstone Speech”
of Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy and chair
of the committee that drafted the CSA Constitution, of which the
key segment is at: http://civilwarcauses.org/corner.htm.
He refers to the question of slavery and the status of African-Americans
as “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
Reading his comments may be enlightening in understanding the
reasoning behind the post-Reconstruction “Jim Crow” laws in the south.
Now if all these Southern leaders were convinced that slavery was
the primary cause of the crisis, I’m not going to disagree.
Yes, there were other issues involved, but slavery was by far
the biggest, and the only one that could no longer be compromised away.
Any historian who thinks otherwise is either ignoring this documented
record, or attributing ulterior motives to the speakers.

State’s rights is a completely valid argument argument to make, providing one openly admits to feeling that state’s rights trump human rights.

Right; and this is a basic standard premise of everyone who is not an anarchist–the state has the right to do things that individuals cannot do.

Right; and this is a basic standard premise of everyone who is not an anarchist—the state has the right to do things that individuals cannot do.

Yeah, I guess I really should have explicitly acknowledged that in some cases it’s a perfectly sane and good thing to argue, and that one is not thereby compelled to argue that state’s rights trump all human rights or that state’s rights always trump human rights. The human right to not be imprisoned is a pretty clear example of such a human right.

What “state’s rights” advocates get away with is avoiding the hard work of directly arguing that a state ought to have the right to violate some set of human rights of its citizens: they sidestep that by instead arguing about some technical right of the state to contravene national law.

It’s kind of like an ambassador arguing that international legal authorities have no right to prevent the abmassador’s nation from slaughter its elderly citizens, because international law has no right to overrule a nation’s rights. They might be technically/legally correct according to whatever specific laws they reference, but it’s kind of morally moot. What they’re actually arguing is that their nation has the right to slaughter its elderly, and we shouldn’t allow them that rhetorical slight of hand!

Yes, the Civil War was about slavery, but it was not therefore about human rights. Most Northerners didn’t care enough about blacks to go to war in order to liberate them. But the prospective expansion of slave labor west and south from an independent Confederacy undermined the economic prospects of both capital and labor, as well as white small farmers.

Also, as noted above, white planters had to dragoon much of the non- or small-slaveholding Southern white population into the war. There’s a good recent book about this: Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams.

Salient,

Actual “states’ rights” arguments (more often called “federalist arguments” precisely because of the association of the phrase “states’ rights” with slavery) that have been made recently in the U.S. Supreme Court:

That the state of California has the right to allow its citizens access to medical marijuana, and this right overrides the federal law prohibiting the growth, distribution, use and possession of marijuana (Raich v. Ashcroft);

That the state of Massachusetts has the right to institute a boycott of Burma due to that regime’s gross violations of human rights, and this right overrides the federal government’s Constitutional power to conduct foreign policy (Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council);

That the state of Georgia has the right to regulate and punish predatory lending more strictly than the federal government does (Watters v. Wachovia).

Do you really believe that in all of these cases, the right of the state is in *opposition* to human rights?

CBrinton at 91 is quite correct. There was a long anti-state’s rights tradition in the U.S, emerging out of Federalist nationalism, but also influenced by the Nullification Crisis, a href=”” http://realignmentproject.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/union-and-liberty-why-progressives-should-resist-secession/“”>”Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” etc.

Henri – regarding “human rights,” it absolutely is the case that “state’s rights” post-14th Amendment are absolutely about the right to violate people’s rights, namely the civil rights of black people in the South. The 13-15th amendments are relatively unique in that not only do they recognize human rights and enshrine them in law, but go on to explicitly empower the Federal government to act against states that violate them.

And while we’re on the subject – the 14th Amendment is also the lodestone for the establishment of equal rights for gays into law, through the Equal Protection clause.

Geo – the right to majority rule through the franchise is a human right.

Regarding state’s rights and health care: autonomy cuts both ways. The ACA limits state’s rights to deny people living within 133% of poverty access to Medicaid as well as requiring an exchange open to private plans that pass muster with exchange regulations, and offers a waiver. The point is that as it stands, a state’s rights argument for complete autonomy on health care might empower Vermont to go single-payer, but poor people in Mississippi and Alabama would suffer for it. Far better to have negotiated autonomy, where the Federal government has the leeway to offer exemptions, so that the Federal requirements become a floor not a ceiling.

We don’t have a lot of html codes to choose from do we? Let me try again:

What “state’s rights” advocates get away with is avoiding the hard work of directly arguing that a state ought to have the right to violate some set of human rights of its citizens: they sidestep that by instead arguing about some technical right of the state to contravene national law.

That seems to be the nub of it right there. I’d add that there’s the other side of the inequality (in some circumstances at least) so that human rights are trumped by states rights are trumped by Federal rights are trumped by human rights. Rather tricky, and why these sorts of assumptions have to be made explicit rather than letting rhetoric do the heavy lifting.

It’s true that in the century or so after the Civil War, nearly all claims for State rights argued for violations of human rights. But that’s a contingent fact, as the examples above show.

What is true and is relevant to the post is that hardly anyone cares more about state rights (for or against) than about the outcome of the particular issue in question. If the supporters of medical marijuana (for example) could get the Federal government to legalise it nationally, their support for states rights would disappear overnight, and vice versa for the opponents.

* racial minorities.

It’s very important to keep the slavery conversation focused on the racist justifications for it. That way we can pretend we’re done with it. Because we’re no longer overtly racist in our social institutions generally.
So we’re not racist, and slavery is racist, and so therefore, there is no slavery, here.
Letting the “market” set the value of labor, when there is a surplus of laborers such as we’re soon headed for, is tantamount to allowing slavery back in the house; but since slavery’s now by definition racist, and we’re no longer are a racist society….
This as distinct from the current Publican +250K$ no-taxes, let the unproductive bottom-dwellers pay for their own entitlements sort of jackassery.
Which is not slavery, nor is it racist.
What it is is the same crap that gave us the Civil War at the get.
Inhuman chancers rigging the system any way they can, regardless who or what suffers as a consequence. Which is what slavery’s really all about, isn’t it?

If you want a legitimate argument for what “states rights” is supposed to cover, it’s much better expressed in terms of subsidiarity, that is, if its possible for people in different states (or whatever) to make different decisions, without adversely affecting each other then that’s what should happen. That doesn’t say that the state qua state has any particular rights (I’d extend this to nation-states, but my black helicopters are still in the shop)>

For example, there’s no good reason why every state should have the same educational curriculum or testing procedures. Drug laws are trickier. Prohibition in one state is presumably made more difficult by legalisation in another, but it seems reasonable to say that medical marijuana doesn’t have much of a spillover effect,.

Hang on, Southern states providing lower welfare or UI or Medicaid benefits doesn’t necessarily hurt anyone outside that state – but it’s still wrong.

bianca steele @ 82

Precisely. The culture of a slaveholding aristocracy, fabricated out of whole cloth though it largely was, corrupted the entire South. You should have seen the Beaux Arts balls and cotillions of my youth, where the belle of the ball might well have been no grander in fact than the daughter of the county’s largest Chevy dealer.

What we aspire to marks us as indelibly as what we are, and nowhere was this more true than among the white folk in the South, whatever their true station.

State’s rights actually referred to just one right: the right to secede from the Union legally. If you read the South Carolina statement of secession, the first state to secede, this is laid out explicitly over several paragraphs at the beginning of the document. The whole, entire, and complete point of the state’s rights argument was that they were not rebelling against the U.S., they were legitimately exercising their Constitutional right to secede as a state, a right granted implicitly by the way in which the Constitution had been adopted, and consequently any attack or other retaliation by the North would be an unwarranted aggression against an independent country. Playing to the European audience to some extent, of course, but also to the people of the North – after all, they didn’t really want war with the North, when it came right down to it – and the South – waverers be reassured! This is completely legal!

It had nothing to do with slavery, nullification, state – vs – federal laws, etc. That’s all post-war stuff stuck onto the admittedly rather neat phrase “state’s rights”. Doesn’t mean there can’t be some interesting discussions about the modern definition and its implications, though.

It’s true that in the century or so after the Civil War, nearly all claims for State rights argued for violations of human rights. But that’s a contingent fact, as the examples above show.

I’m not following you on this one. Could you explain what you mean by a “contingent fact” in these circumstances? AFAICT, just about everyone already agrees that the various “rights” are not absolute rights. Presumably this applies not only at the individual level, but at the state and federal level as well.

What is true and is relevant to the post is that hardly anyone cares more about state rights (for or against) than about the outcome of the particular issue in question. If the supporters of medical marijuana (for example) could get the Federal government to legalise it nationally, their support for states rights would disappear overnight, and vice versa for the opponents.

Hmmm. I don’t know too many people like that. They tend to argue like an old-school libertarian circa 1976 that nobody has any business regulating the growth, sale, and use of marijuana. Substitute tomatoes for marijuana in these arguments and you’ll see why; nobody argues that the federal government doesn’t have a preemptive stake in the sale and traffic of genuinely dangerous drugs. But could the government extend this sort of control to tomatoes simply by choosing to classify them as a dangerous drug? Of course not, any more than calling a tail a leg means that dogs have five legs.

Geo – the right to majority rule through the franchise is a human right.

But accepting that, you promptly get back to the underlying subsidiarity and rights questions.

So, majority rule through the franchise:
1) At what level of aggregation? The majority of voters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the USA would disagree on a large number of policies.
2) On what subjects? Can the majority decide to confiscate your land and build a road?

A consistent states-rights view (more generally, a subsidiarist view) rates the ability to have more preferences reflected locally more highly than a consistent nationalist.

Steven – Of course they could; the principle for them was that the people of those territories had joined they Union voluntarily, becoming sovereign states in the process, and could choose to leave voluntarily too. And there was even an amendment to cite, albeit for a different line of argument but with the same conclusion: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” includes the right to secede, since it wasn’t explicitly prohibited.

It’s been a couple of years since I read it, though, so I left some stuff out. The justification for seceding was actually an appeal to contract law:

“By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. ”

Blah slavery blah slavery, slavery slavery blah blah blah, summarized by “you broke the contract, so we get to leave.”

* and Alabama, don’t know why I left that out.

Steven – I struggled mightily against my baser instincts, but can resist no longer… must type…

I can think of several reasons to leave Alabama out, but it’s in now, so it’s too late.

No hurt feelings, I hope!

I think the endurance of the wasnt-about-slavery thing actually has little to do with the past. It has to do with the present. The lines are slightly different, OK you could say very different because now all the neo-Confederates *are* Republicans.

And what do Republicans want? The things that center around reducing taxes (or any sort of regulations) on rich people to zero (and eliminating all regulation of what they can do with “their” money). That’s also the most direct path to aristocracy, and basically we’re already here.

If you were to insist on historical consistency, you might say it’s been all about aristocracy all along. Aristocracy for a few, slavery for the rest.

A consistent states-rights view (more generally, a subsidiarist view) rates the ability to have more preferences reflected locally more highly than a consistent nationalist.

Taking this progression to it’s logical conclusion, you end up with the individual uber alles.

Well, that’s certainly a different road to libertarianism; or at least, not one I’m familiar with.

Several people in this thread have mentioned Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories where it did not yet exist, adding that many Southerners realized such a position probably meant an eventual end of slavery altogether since geographical expansion was necessary for its long-term survival, but that Lincoln did not have the emancipation of the slaves as an initial war aim. Well, yes. All this is, AFAIK, accepted and uncontroversial. But to say that the war was “about slavery” is not to deny any of this. Obviously there were deep divisions within both North and South — at least one author (probably a lot more than one) has remarked that there was a ‘civil war’ within the North between abolitionists and unionists before there was a civil war between North and South. But these internal divisions do not negate the point that the war was ‘about slavery’; to say it was about slavery is not to say it was initially about freeing the slaves (except in the minds of abolitionists who, though significant in many ways, were a minority of the population), and no one, AFAIK, is saying that.

rpl @ #126 said:

It seems that only a few of you have touched on the origins of the Civil War as I see it. Or perhaps I read the wrong historians when I studied this. From the Lincoln-Douglas debates up to the secession, the main issue was not slavery in the existing slave states of the South, it was about the extension of slavery to the Western territories as they sought statehood. The rural agriculturally centered south (cotton interests in particular) clashed with the rapidly industrializing North primarily over the future of slavery, not over it’s existence. Lincoln did not set out to free the slaves. Emancipation was a result of the Civil War and not Lincoln’s original aim.

That is correct. The adulterated Civics course and the Crooked Timber CW are both wrong , or at least beside the point, about the causes of the Civil War.

The South went to war because it feared being overwhelmed, politically and economically, by the relentless expansion of the Yankee Manifest Destiny. The Civil War was essentially a last ditch stand waged by Southern aristocrats against the encroaching power of Northern industrialists.

The only way the South could maintain its relative power was to maintain the institution of slavery to the new states of the union. It wanted the “state’s right” to extend slavery to the new Western territories, and to territories conquered in the Mexican wars.

The South’s demand for an extension of slavery was unfair, unreasonable, even ridiculous, in the context of world-history, when even the Tsar was emancipating the serfs. But they could not stand the thought of being bossed around by those “damned Yankees’. The only thing worse would be “uppity n*****s” in their midst.

The North bent over back-wards to accommodate the South’s attachment to this peculiar institution, with an endless series of compromises and provisos to fob off Southern reactionaries. But the Southerners were driven to desperation by the their untenable political situation.

The South really had no one to blame but itself for the situation it put the union into. But they can’t bring themselves to admit their fault which is why they are always trying to re-write the history books putting themselves as poor, woebegone under-dogs.

But not you, Myles. Morals are so awfully vulgar. Really not quite the thing. No, on the whole, a chap ought to set things on a rational basis, and work out what makes the most money, eh what?

I’m comfortable pleading guilty to the charge that when it comes to slavery, I’m mainly concerned with the moral dimension.

Tom: The Civil War was a war of a primarily moral dimension. Slavery.
Dick: No it wasn’t. Manifest Destiny. Free-soil. Jeffersonian constitution.

What on earth are you talking about? The word ‘moral’ has been used in this context by only one commenter (Salient). As for poor drowned-out ‘Dick’, the idea of the right to secede as a Jeffersonian constitutional principle has been mentioned by one poster, nerdbound @21, whose argument was that
the “states’ rights as a cause” theory might be justifiable—wrong, still, but justifiable.
Manifest Destiny has also been mentioned once, by Jack Strocchi @149, who wrote
The only way the South could maintain its relative power was to maintain the institution of slavery to the new states of the union. It wanted the “state’s right” to extend slavery to the new Western territories, and to territories conquered in the Mexican wars.
And nobody’s mentioned ‘free soil’ at all.

Any chance of engaging with this discussion rather than the one that’s apparently raging in your head?

Slaver was an abdominal, cruel think. But I sometimes wonder what if it had never happened. The world would have remained a segregate place and probably a more dangerous place. Perhaps it was the only way to integrate the world, because the white world would not have accepted the black race any other way.

Without American blacks and the struggle they experienced there would never have been Jazz.

LFC, many here have claimed that the civil War was about State’s rights. I agree with you that it was about slavery. And the speculative rights of states that did not yet exist. Lincoln hadn’t challenged the right of South Carolina to keep it’s slaves when the Civil War began.

The South’s demand for an extension of slavery was unfair, unreasonable, even ridiculous, in the context of world-history, when even the Tsar was emancipating the serfs. But they could not stand the thought of being bossed around by those “damned Yankees’. The only thing worse would be “uppity n*****s” in their midst.

This is what I was half-seriously referring to as genetic in an earlier post. It seems that there is a certain person who will find all sorts of weird excuses for not doing the right thing, with one of the big guns being the “you’re not the boss of me” card. A few years back we had one of our relatives hit another one’s car and then refuse to pay up on the strength of that one. “This isn’t about me refusing to pay damages, this is about you thinking you’re the boss of me. Well, you’re not . . . and to show it, I’m not going to pay one nickel.”

Right up there with the “We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you” that so many marriage counselors here day in and day out, and also another favorite of that crowd.

Jack Strocchi: “The only way the South could maintain its relative power was to maintain the institution of slavery to the new states of the union.”

That implies that Southern politicians identified the South with slavery, “our peculiar institution.” California might be geographically southern, but it was not Southern without slavery, in their view. The Confederacy was based upon slavery, lock, stock, and barrel. The war could not but be about slavery.

There’s a weird rhetorical trick going on when people argue for states’ rights: it permits them to sidestep arguing for a policy on its merits. And that’s generally the purpose of a states’ rights argument, I think, at least in practice.

I don’t think this is the case of Californians arguing about medical marijuana. By their lights, they’ve already argued for the policy on its merits, and they won–that’s how the state law regulating the distribution of marijuana on medical grounds was passed. The states rights argument is used because they don’t want to argue the merits of the policy with people outside the state.

Henry:

I read Ernst Renan’s famous dictum “Forgetting … historical error … is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” this week in light of the contempraneous and simultaneous Fort Sumter editorials in the NY Times and Richmond Dispatch.

We FORGET that the North said it wasn’t about slavery but the South said it was. That’s the price we pay for the nation we created afterwards.

Yes, I thought that anyone who wasn’t a self-righteously moralizing liberal understood the economic underpinnings. The notional market value of slaves was overwhelmingly the largest part of the “capital” stock of the Antebellum U.S., which means that not only was it crucial to finance, as providing the collateral for borrowing, but also crucial for the international balance of payments, whereby the export of the produce of slaves counter-balanced the import (and swindling) of British capital to develop the country. So both Northern and Southern elites, despite their differences, were joined at the hip vis-a-vis their interests in slavery. Further, there was something of a bubble aspect, since the import of slaves had been banned, in that the breeding of slaves yielded higher returns than the actual direct product of slaves. Hence the drive to expand its territory, (even though the new territories would not have provided likely fertile soils for its implementation). The opposition was between the “slave power” and “free labor”: i.e. it was a dispute over (the terms of) land tenure and the distribution of agricultural surpluses, (since the Bourbons and their slaves would have seized once again the best lands and the productive surpluses accruing to them, at the expense of white free holders and land speculators). Though the economic situation belongs to the cause(s) and not the Cause(s) of the Civil War. But what’s for sure is that the dispute over the White Man’s Republic remained thoroughly White supremacist/racist, and scarcely anyone really gave a damn about amending the condition of the blacks, except as an after-thought.

Another cliche is that it was the overwhelming industrial might of the North that crushed and foredoomed the South. And there’s a grain of truth there, especially since the main industrial cities of the South, such as St. Louis and Baltimore, remained with the Union. But the most proximate cause of the defeat of the C.S.A. was the huge rate of desertion from the Confederate Army. It seems that poor whites had a limited willingness to die for the cause of their “betters”, even as they would nurture ample resentments ever after.

I’m a little surprised that with all these smart people commenting on the Civil War (and I’m not being sarcastic), no one has mentioned Bleeding Kansas, the rehearsal for the Civil War.

Also not mentioned is that the Articles of Confederation explicitly prohibited secession, but government under the Articles was broken up when all the states except Rhode Island effectively seceded by nullifying the Articles and signing the Constitution. (The Articles allowed nullification, which was one of the reasons it came to be considered “less perfect”.)

The Articles were more than a little inspiration to the Confederate constitution, which I’ve heard it said is why they are not usually taught in school history curricula.

Also, during the Civil War, West Virginia seceded from Virginia, and it still remains seceded today.

Based on that, there was a movement for the northern counties of California and the southern counties of Oregon to secede from their respective states and form a new state called Jefferson. The movement peaked immediately before Pearl Harbor, at which point it was abandoned, so the question of whether that would be permissible was not fully determined. But the people who live in that region certainly have not forgotten about it.

Lincoln did not launch the Civil War on the issue of secession, but on the bombardment of Fort Sumter, on which he had a much better legal case as a clear act of rebellion. The right of the government to put down rebellions by force had already been established by putting down previous much smaller rebellions. Thus Lincoln did not have to base his actions on whether secession was or was not permitted by the Constitution, although this was obviously the underlying cause.

#158 said

Strocchi’s remark makes no sense since, unless I have missed something, no one in this thread has, e.g., said that emancipation was Lincoln’s original war aim. It was not…The war was about slavery. It was not (at least not to begin with) about emancipation. No one here (unless I have missed something) has said anything to the contrary, Strocchi and rpl notwithstanding.

Most posters on this thread, and in CT in general, have missed the point about the causes of the Civil War in their instinctive attempt to lump Red State folks into the red-neck mould. CT’ers always want to visit the sins of the Southern fathers onto their sons.

There are plenty of good reasons to criticise the Old South. But lets take aim before letting them have it with both barrels.

Saying that “the Civil War was about slavery” is true enough as far as it goes. But it does not go far beyond “truism”. Its like saying that Middle East conflict is “about oil” in some way. You don’t say.

The burning question is the way in which slavery became an issue worth splitting the union. rpl, Western Dave and I have argued that it was the South’s attempt to extend slavery which was the caused the North dig its heels in. Up till then the North had tried all kinds of ways to appease and fob off Southern reactionaries.

But the South’s attempt to make California a slave state was a bridge too far. Its not so much that Southerners wanted to lord it over the black man, although that was a strain in their culture.

Southerners do not want to be lorded over by rich Yankees. The ante-bellum South was haunted by the fear of economic ruin, echoes of which were so well captured by writers like Faulkner, McCullers, O’Connor and Tennesee Williams. And of course the Carpetbaggers confirmed the South’s worst nightmares.

The only way they could prevent this was to increase the number of Southern slave states. But the North would not allow this. So secession seemed the only option.

The idea that the Southern gentleman could simply abolish slavery and actually work for a living did not occur to them.

From the original post:
Hence, I started paying a different kind of attention when I read that ‘states rights’ is one of three acceptable answers to the civics question ‘name one problem that led to the Civil War’ (slavery and economics are the other two).

After a bit more reflection on this, I think that there is nothing especially wrong with this framing itself, i.e., states rights — considered as a shorthand for the general issue of federal-state relations — as one issue that led to the war. The problem arises when people say — as in some comments received by T-N Coates in one of the posts Henry links to — that slavery had nothing to do with it, that it was all or only about states rights. The statement that the war did have to do with slavery may be a ‘truism’, as Strocchi @173 calls it, but there are apparently still people (see the comments reported by Coates) who deny it.

That’s why it’s apparently still necessary to repeat this ‘truism,’ and why Strocchi, in addition to being exercised by CTers who “want to visit the sins of the Southern fathers on their sons,” should also be concerned about those people who persist in claiming that the secessionists were only fighting for what they saw as “freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government” and not also for “the right to own slaves [and] the liberty to take this property into the territories.” (Quotes from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p.241)

The two best books that I have ever read about the causes that led to the Civil War were by the Johns Hopkins University professor William H. Freeling in the last decade:

“The Road to Disunion: Secessionists At Bay” Vol.I, and
“The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumph” Vol. II.

Freehling widely quotes the actual debates in the Southern states’ legislatures from 1776 to 1861. Long, complicated, but good!

* Caton. Stupid auto-correct.

Steven, I agree that the Progressives were calling upon the federal government to do many things.

However, they also called upon the Supreme Court to allow the states greater latitude in experimenting with new social and economic laws.

The point of course is that this is an example of a request for greater states rights for the purpose of progressive programs. So the use of a states rights argument has not been entirely for the cause of conservative programs, or simply in opposition to civil rights. There have been significant occasions where arguments for states rights have been deployed on the other side.

The narrative of America has never flowed seamlessly and the issue of states rights vs federal power has long been debated in this country. And the issue of slavery fell into the domain of states rights.

As I’m sure Henry learned in his civics classes leading up to his citizenship, the first government of the United States, established in 1777, was a confederation of states, one that operated with a weak federal government and granted more power to the individual states. It was a failure, and in 1787, the country abandoned the Articles of Confederacy in favor of the US Constitution, which strengthened federal powers and diminished certain states rights.

That did not put an end to the issue of states rights, and the early work of the Supreme Court is filled with cases that attempt to define the parameters and boundaries of states rights vs federal power. [We still see this tug and pull today, as in 2007, when Indiana and the feds were going to grant BP the right to dump more toxic waste into Lake Michigan and the surrounding states protested.]

In the south, slaves were considered property that also happened to provide free labor for their owners. Employers today tend to react negatively to the suggestion of an increase in the minimum wage; the abolishment of slavery was going add significant labor expense to the operations of a cotton plantation.

The issue of slavery was not just moral, as defined by abolitionists; for the South, it was an economic issue too. That the federal government was seeking to seize their property was obviously a hot button topic in antebellum America, one that led to the most divisive war in our history.

I think Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary said it best. The Civil War transformed us from a nation consisting of a plurality of states – “The United States are…” to one nation – “The United States is…” But up until the Civil War, the US was an “are” – not an “is.”

[Another interesting challenge to the American narrative is that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, which celebrated the equality of all men, owed his wealthy lifestyle to slaves and debt, using both assets to prop up the never-ending renovation of Monticello. When he died, he was so deeply in debt that his family could not afford to free the slaves,as George Washington had done upon his death. Though he did free a handful of slaves related to Sally Hemmings.]

I understand Steven, and I agree with you. My point isn’t that Progressivism was a set of policy initiatives more heavily weighted towards states rights than federal power or programs. Rather, my much more modest point is simply that arguments for states rights have at times been deployed in the name of progressive causes. The struggle with the Lochner court, which used the 14th Amendment to destroy various progressive laws at the state level, is simply one example.

I chose Brandeis’s dissent in New State Ice as an especially eloquent statement of the progressive case for allowing the states the latitude and freedom to experiment with different laws and policies – not as evidence that Progressivism was really, really about states rights all along.

I believe it is worth noting, as well as accurate, that (a) the original national flare-up over states rights had to do with enabling Georgia and some other Southern states to take over Indian lands in defiance of valid treaties with the Federal government, many signed while the land in question (not in Georgia, obviously) was still territorial rather than state land and (b) white supremacy in the first half of the nineteenth century, and often since, was not a moral failing or a case of bad manners or political incorrectness, it was an economic theory and practice.

@Western Dave – thanks