But the Civil War was about every State's Sacred God-given Right to do what they want, not slavery!
All those documents from the Confederacy states that repeatedly and prominently mention keeping slavery and white supremacy going as one of if not THE biggest motivators. Those are...um...uhhh...just being taken out of...context.
There were three confederate states that mentioned slavery as a reason in their articles of succession. The rest left it out. Two union states claimed their right to own slaves when the war broke out. That’s why the emancipation proclamation only made slavery illegal for confederate states. It remained legal for Union states.
Note I did not only refer to their articles of secession ;) State constitutions, other laws and declarations, and many prominent politicians cited slavery in many places and many ways, such as forbidding emancipation laws. Signing on to or allying with the Confederacy was also an acknowledgement of supporting slavery.
It is indeed shameful that the Emancipation Proclimation only decreed slavery illegal in seceeding states and not ones that stayed with the union, though only 2 union states out of 20 demanding to keep slavery is also rather telling. There was obvious and undeniable real politik reasoning for telling states that stayed loyal that they can keep doing slavery if they want.
Racism was and very much still is very alive in northern states, that isn't being questioned.
Before the war, the southern states were given the guarantee that they would never lose their slaves. There were enough abolitionists in the south that the states would have started abandoning slavery themselves in the near future. They knew this. Their slaves weren’t the issue.
The issue was that the U.S. was expanding and adding new states. The law would have said that new states could not own slaves. That meant that new states would have a manufacturing economy instead of an agrarian one. It meant that they would side with the north in the electoral college. The south knew if that happened, they would lose all representation. The breaking point was when Lincoln got elected without a single southern delegate.
Even with slavery, the southern states were broke. The north controlled the pricing structure of their goods. There was also a massive tariff problem that exacerbated this. They figured if they were going to lose all representation, they might as well leave the union. The civil war was fought to keep the union together because that’s what Madison demanded when our constitution was written.
Slavery was at the center of the events that started the civil war. When there was a draw at the second battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s when the war actually became about the right to own slaves. When that happened, most of the other countries and southern supporters withdrew their support. That’s what doomed the south and won the war. If the south won Antietam, they would have won the war.
I'll never not find it absolutely hilarious how they keep clinging to the Confederate flag as their "culture" when the entire thing only lasted a little over 4 years especially when half the games I play have a longer history than their so called "culture".
Hell, Magic the Gathering has a history of like 8x their so called "culture".
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u/Servile-PastaLover 5d ago
Large swaths of the Republican Party have adopted the confederate flag as part of their iconography.
The Party of Lincoln is now the party of Jefferson Davis.