It’s worth pointing out, the Confederate states actually opposed state’s rights. Part of the articles of secession were based on the federal government’s failure to enforce federal law in states that did not return escaped slaves. The southern states controlled the legislature, and states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire wanted to exercise their states’ rights to free black people from slavery. Lincoln didn’t even make emancipation a priority until two years into the war, and even then it was only in the states that tried to secede.
“State’s rights” became a conservative cause celebre during the civil rights movement when federal law was used to force southern states to integrate. There is nothing inherently conservative or progressive about states vs federal power, and it changes depending on who holds power where.
People who want to make the Civil War about state’s rights vs the federal government overreach are confusing two different eras of racism.
You just hit me with that fat education. My brain thanks you.
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I want to start by saying you’re about 90% correct, and I’m glad that people have found your post to be very educational (bad experiences in the past with being misunderstood).
In both pre-civil war era and the civil rights era, the south wanted to have their cake and fuck it too. They were crying ‘states rights’ when we established the Missouri Compromise, but whined about the weak federal government with regards to the fugitive slave act. One of the primary drivers for the Emancipation Proclamation was actually escaped slaves after the outbreak of the civil war. The North didn’t know what to do with slaves that escaped, were liberated, or surrendered (slaves were sometimes conscripted instead of the slaveholder fighting). It was a situation that was starting to get unmanageable because of political pressure and the number of slaves, so essentially the Emancipation Proclamation was a last ditch effort to divert Southern forces into defending their slaves while solving a real problem in the North (it actually was fairly successful in this sense).
In the civil rights era, it was states rights when it came to integration, but a failure of federal to allow MLK’s nonviolent direct action to occur (yea, I know about COINTELPRO; perception vs reality etc etc).
The connection between the 2 and the modern day? They were all conservatives. The “Democrats” during the civil war were the same as the Republican party from the 1920s to now. The hypocritical rhetorical methods being used by conservatives to argue against the right to abortion has existed since Locke published Two Treatises of Government.
My mother, who was educated in the 90s in the south, was taught the “war of northern aggression” was fought because the north was paying less for cotton than Europe and tarriffing exports to Europe.
Not that I believe or ever googled any of this.
They still taught that into the 2000s
Don’t forget that Confederate states could not make laws against slavery via their constitution.
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Let’s play a game, look up the states articles of secession and see how many words you can make before you see a word starting with ‘slave’
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
By my count, Texas maybe goes the longest before mentioning it, but they all do.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–
Fucking yikes Mississippi.
It’s definitely a blow for the “the civil war wasn’t about slavery” crowd lol. Like I’m all for not judging the past by modern morals and acting like confederates weren’t as human as the rest of us… but pretending the civil war had nothing to do with slavery is simply a farce.
It had 100% to do with slavery. The south would not have been the cotton king with out them.
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*secession, succession is something else entirely.
thanks, fixed
Fucking yikes Mississippi
I mean, what can one expect from a state who’s state flag was this until less than 3 years ago?
I forgot they changed it quite frankly. The old one suits their current government more accurately.
Also check out Alexander H. Stephen’s (Vice-President of the Confederate States) Cornerstone speech.
“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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.”
It’s amazing the amount of mental gymnastics slavery apologists commit to considering the wealth of primary sources describing how the succession and war were directly related to slavery.
That’s some heritage they had going.
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Yea it seems like NC was trying to fence-sit and basically got knocked off the fence by the battle of Fort Sumter.
States rights to um… protect the um… economic…
institution of…
um…
no I’m not a racist… it was states rights!
/s
States rights to choose which federal laws they want. Like maybe they dont want EPA or the FBI or OSHA or black people or big government regulations.
Oh yeah we’re gonna go visit Oregon later on this year too
States rights to support pro-choice? I support it as an independent.
Fuck the radical right.
The states who are pro choice do not associate with a loser’s flag.
honk!
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “removed, removed, removed.” By 1968 you can’t say “removed”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “removed, removed.””
That guy advised Reagan.
Look at this guy using the hard R-word.
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My favorite rebuttal to the idea that the Confederacy seceded in order to preserve States’ Rights is this excerpt from the Confederate constitution:
Article I Section 9(4): No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
If states rights were so important to the Confederacy, I have to wonder why their constitution stripped the states of the right to abolish slavery in any capacity.
Technically, it stripped ALL legislatures of the ability to restrict slavery in any way, making slavery a permanent feature of the Confederate government.
The rights argument is trivial to rebut, just like you did. Pick any letter of secession sent to Congress and you’ll likely find the institution of slavery listed as the top concern.
Here go Mississippi:
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Out of context, it doesn’t even really make sense to be “pro states rights.” Whether or not the state has a right to do the thing is literally the entire question. Nobody is for the state’s right to do anything.
The argument is specifically that the state has a right to decide a given thing, and thus the thing itself is the entire question, not the existence of rights out of context.
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“Our new government['s]…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.”
Alexander Stephens, Vice Preident of the Confederacy in March 1861
And unsurprisingly they found ways to keep their slaves until it was properly outlawed in the 1940s, not because it was the right thing to do, but because the administration feared that the US treatment of black people would be used in propaganda against them.
I’d say “stay classy” but the US has never been classy in its short but bloody history.
As a states rights fan, I hate that they’re largely positioned as a conservative platform. Or should I say, I hate that conservatives have co-opted states rights to further their regressive, religious agenda. I put a lot of stock in the laboratories of democracy idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
Nice, good to see that community make it over to the Fediverse somewhere.
Honk honk motherfuckers
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