State's Rights or Slavery?

So, I'm not terribly well-versed on the American Civil War or the Antebellum period, but it seems to me like all the "it was about state's rights" people either don't really understand the situation, or are simply excusing the secession with something that sounds more righteous than slavery. For example, it seems that southern states had no qualms about the Dredd Scott trial, despite the fact that it essentially forced anti-slavery states to conform to pro-slavery laws (ironically the same thing the south was worried that Lincoln would do to them). The whole "states rights" thing wasn't really an issue to them until their pro-slavery laws were threatened, which would indicate to me that they were more concerned about slavery than state's rights. But, as I said, I'm not 100% on this part of history, so please explain if I'm wrong and how.

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It was 100% about slavery and anybody who says otherwise is just being revisionist.

Dredd Scott was not an infringement of State's Rights. It was upholding Sandford's constitutional rights, which states could not abrogate.

It was about the major differences between the north and the south, slavery chief among them.
The south was almost wholly agrarian compared to the industrial north and their political power was slipping away as the north grew faster and added more non slave states.
To say that the war is about slavery is asinine. The two regions where headed in opposite directions and men fought for the south as they felt they no longer fit with the north.

That the war was wholly* about slavery. Slavery was a big part of the difference between the two and required for the south as they made themselves.totally dependent on cotton.

state rights to own slaves if they want

Im not American but what always sounds strange to me why an avreage joe southerner would even be concerned about slavery rights since most of them wouldnt own one anyway. It was more a concern for the cotton farm owners as far as im aware. Did the southern politicans have their own propaganda to get the masses moving or was slavery a bigger concern among the normal citizens too?

>what always sounds strange to me why an avreage joe southerner would even be concerned about slavery rights since most of them wouldnt own one anyway

You might not personally own slaves but you might have relatives that did. Back then, families stuck together. If you got a letter in the mail saying that your 2nd Uncle twice removed was starting a revolution so he could keep his slaves, you didn't argue with it, you just did it.

After reading lots on the subject, including the then-contemporary writing, I am of opinion that it was less about slavery and more about the striking racism that was predominant in the South.

The elite of slaveholders screwed the South hard and their economic policy were against the interests of general population. In order to keep control they created the smokescreen of racism. The poor white folk's live was hard. But it was more bearable by the thought that no matter how life was bad, they were as men obviously superior to the Negro.

What enraged the South's poor folk and made them support the secession was not the fear that Lincoln is going to abolish slavery. It was the fear that Blacks would walk around them as equals.

Before the Civil War, slave ownership was becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthy planter elite. The class divide between the planters and the plain folk was increasing and there was no intermarriage between the two groups. Therefore the chance that your cousin owned slaces was decreasing.

It was primarily about slavery, states' rights was pure sophistry.

Clay eaters. Whites so poor they could barely afford to live, yet could say to themselves "Well, at least I'm not a slave."

It was about the state's rights to own slaves.

There was no one cause to the Civil War, as with just about anything, but the chief reason for the tension between the North and the South was the identifying of State governments and their officials with being pro-slavery or anti-slavery. That caused no end of problems, since slavery is generally something someone is either vehemently for or opposed to.

See:
Bleeding Kansas

Southern State's rights to own slaves and go into Northern States to enforce their laws against emancipation of escaped slaves on Northerners.

It was about states' rights, but the main right they were concerned with was the right to practice slavery.

The true story is that during the early 1800s, despite industrialization setting in in the Northern US, they were making less money than their Southern counterparts, who were making a fortune in the international cotton trade. The true motivation for getting rid of slavery was to weaken the Southern economy, so the North would be back on top and have less competition. Going back to the industrialization bit...the only reason the North got rid of slavery was because they no longer needed them (Example: slavery had all but vanished in Massachusetts by the 1790s, but they did not officially outlaw slavery until 1865). Once industrialization spread to the South, slavery would have eventually been abandoned there, too.

tl;dr: the Confederate States of America did not form because of slavery or states rights; it formed to resist Northern greed.

>why an avreage joe southerner would even be concerned about slavery rights since most of them wouldnt own one anyway.
You mentioned propaganda. Here is a likely one: "If all the slaves are freed, their uncontrollable impulses will be unleashed on your wives and daughters."

NO. SINGLE. CAUSE. why is that so fucking hard for people? Many different forces were at work, which coalesced around the slavery issue because it had the most emotional appeal. Federalist vs antifederalist. Aristocracy vs Plutocracy. Nativism vs Open Immigration. Slavery vs Emancipation

It was about state's rights

Specifically, the right to own people

Pure ideology

Slavery gave the poorest white man moral standing over any black man, even if it devalued his labor

but that's how it should be

white people are naturally superior, genetically more intelligent

africa was literally in a perpetual stone age until the superior white man came

That's not true at all, Africans had metal industry and agriculture

The Nok culture of Nigeria discovered ironworking before most of Europe

Africa never enjoyed the benefit of the Eurasian technological and ideological marketplace because it's so fucking far from everything

what no....Europe was already surpassing Africa by the time of the middle ages

In fact there has never been an African scientist that had the same influence as Sir Isaac Newton

Lifestyle over centuries, not genetics over millenia, determines IQ. This is proven by the IQ studies of Ashkenazi Jews versus similar populations and urban Chinese versus the Vietnamese

the Ashkenazi Jews have higher iqs than any other group of jews, and they are also the sect of jews that have the most European white blood in them

really makes you think

They certainly were, but it took them a very long time to get there. A thousand years earlier, that divergence didn't exist. The only parts of Europe which truly developed in antiquity were those closest to the Mediterranean-Near Eastern network of exchange.

If development was truly purely genetic, how come Iceland and Finland spent the vast majority of their history as entirely rural subsistence farming societies, largely unchanged from 800 to 1800?

They also have higher IQs than pure whites

Really makes you think

The fact there has never been a black african scientist that had the influence Isaac Newton had on all of science

makes me think intelligence is quite a genetic thing

The "isolation from Euroasia" argument for why Sub Saharian Africa never advanced doesn't work because Meso-American societies developed quite well

but yet there has never been a jewish scientist that had the influence that Newton had on science...even Einstein said Newton was superior to him

a white man, Isaac Newton

really makes you think

You ever wonder why there weren't any Sub-Saharan, Middle-Eastern, Asian, or Native American scientists in our textbooks written from an almost exclusively Western perspective from the fall of Rome to World War 1? Nah, me neither.

The thing is the Jew is good at math and science but has no cultural or literary achievements

the Asian is good at memorizing but lacks creativity

the Black has accomplished nothing, besides its affinity to music, which i admit has a natural affinity too

The Arab had a golden age, mainly powered by the works of the Great Greeks, but they become nothing but sand degenerates


The White has accomplished greatness in all fields, culture, military, science, literature. We sailed the seven seas, tamed the beast...we are greatness personified

because they didn't do much?

most of modern science and mathematics developed in Europe, starting with Galileo, Kepler and culminating with Newton who ushered in classical mechanics

the same with mathematics

these cultures simply did not contribute anything to modern science and math, at least not alot..


again Newton's Principia is a more influential science book than any Sub Saharian, Middle Eastern, Asian or Native American science book

but you probably don't know alot about Isaac Newton

here's a wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

I don't know whats worse, the racist spouting off in this thread

or the other people that honestly think all races are equal?

>Charles Darwin was a contender in a race to innovate with several fellow scientists studying the same thing
>through a variety of good decisions and some luck, he found himself in a position to get his work published and reviewed first
>because of the way social consciousness works and the way culture spread before the Information Age, few people today know about his fellows, foreign or otherwise
>thus England is the only country that is good at science and all its competitors are stick-chewing monkeys who deserve to be conquered, subjugated, and wiped out as England desires.

I refuse to take any more of this bait.

ok first of all, the only person that was close to Darwin was Wallace, and he was a fellow Englishman

we do not know of any other continental European biologists that were as close to Darwin on Natural Selection


WTF does that have to do with Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of all time

He's just being humble. Einstein and Newton are absolutely comparable. Feynman is comparable as well.

Look, if you're trying to argue that a group is superior to another group, individual anecdotes aren't the way to go. We need to look at populations.

If Isaac Newton had died infancy, by your own argument the absence this one Christian genius would prove the superiority of Jews.

No Asians either, yet Asians do better than whites on every IQ test

Outliers don't prove a point

Mesoamerican societies weren't much more advanced than contemporaneous urban West African societies or the Kongo kingdom. The presence of metalworking and currency makes Songhai and Mali in some respects more developed than any Mesoamerican people.

We simply don't romanticize African history like we do Native American history. It's not part of the popular consciousness.

>states rights or slavery
Both

The southern way of life was based on slavery but the idea of what the federal government could and could not dictate to states goes back to the very founding of the country see: the Nullification Crisis and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The Kentucky one is radical as it called for outright secession if the federal government overstepped its authority; even more radical considering it was written by Jefferson while he was VP.

well the best mathematician of the 20th century was not an asian

but a white jew named Grothendieck

No cultural or literary achievements? What are you talking about?

In music there's Mahler, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Goodman, Copland, Gershwin, Herman, Bernstein, Reich, Glass, Phil Spector, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Howard Shore.

In literature there's Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Joseph Heller, and perhaps the greatest writer of the past century, Marcel Proust.

In film there's Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, and the Coen Brothers.

Africans would rek mesoamericans if they ever came into contact m8. Mesoamericans were good at monumental architecture, and agriculture. Africans surpassed them at just about everything else.

The social organisation and urbanisation achieved by mesoamericans was impressive and better than any single African polity but technology-wise the Africans have the advantage.

When you look at rape statistics that's about right though

I've been reading about the Aztecs and they were based af, what do you recommend to read about in regard to African kingdoms?

Cringe

I like Africans by John Iliffe

Unesco has a very cool series of medieval African history available for free online

basically this
the north had more power and was using it to transform themselves into a more industrialized nation. it wasn't so much that they were all bleeding hearts who wanted to free all da slaves, they just didn't really need them- their climate (poor farming conditions in comparison with the temperate south) and economy (more widespread factories and industry) didn't support or require the use of widespread slave labor

the south basically just said "fuck it, we're gonna do our own thing now" and lincoln said "yeah nah"

Ideological contradictions about slavery were very miserable to start a war. Its hard to belive that sides werent agree to keep their own slavery laws without mutual shit-posting.
I think more important reason was british efforts to separate South from USA.

Industrialisation doesn't universally develop within a nation, even among the most highly-industrialised nations. Why would industrialisation occur in any significant way in the South when its economy was already dominated by agriculture, and slave-fueled agriculture, at that? It's like claiming that industry should've developed in southern France or Ukraine or Argentina.

And for that matter, the Southern economy was never as strong and robust as you claim. The banning of slavery didn't mark any real transition away from the conditions of slavery; black plantation workers were still effectively serfs compensated almost nothing for their labour for nearly a century after the supposed banning of slavery. The spice plantations of the Caribbean and Indonesia were extremely profitable for their owners and the empires they were a part of, but the economies of these places were not self-sufficient or powerful, and became increasingly less so as their products decreased in value.

You're not Newton, you're a white man trying to claim you're superior because you belong to the same race as someone that made actual accomplishments. Would you claim that you're superior to a black man that was 30 IQ points smarter than you?

Racism is an idiotic way of segregating people. I would respect a collection of a hundred geniuses of any race more than I would respect a collection of a hundred statistically typical individuals of a single race.

Go to Detroit or SAR, scrub.

You're not even bothering to refute or pay attention to what I said. It doesn't matter if blacks really do have an inferior IQ on average, because there will nevertheless still exist smart blacks and retarded whites; that is the nature of populations. I would rather have a society that restricts membership to people above a certain IQ threshold of any race than a society that only accepts people of any IQ from a single race.

>the north fought to free the slaves

The civil war was the death of states rights.

You make a terrible argument for white supremacy

The South attacked the North to keep their slaves. The North defended itself.

Not a single historian holds that the civil war was
>100%
over slavery.
It's causes were a large complicated mess of sectionalism that usually plagues every country at some point or another.

State's rights to slavery.

So yes, it was about state's rights. It was also about economy, political representation and cultural differences. An economy based around slaves, political representation based on slave ownership, and cultural differences about slavery.

/thread/

Remember, it is always justified to resist the Eternal Unionist and his parasitical ways.

Everyone hated black people. The fear of black people running around was potent in the North, in the South where there were far more of them, the idea was far more horrifying.

The south left mostly over slavery and the North mostly fought against states rights

But, the south was largely left alone until Ft. sumter.

RIIIIGHT, so why were the only changes in the confederate constitution regarding slavery?

It was very important to the southern economy.

The southern jackasses that started the war cried endlessly about how they wanted to keep their slaves. It was about state's rights in the sense that the south wanted the right to own slaves.

This. The South was pretty much an oligarchy run by a small elite who owned slaves and perpetuated ran Southern politics for their own benefit.
The Civil War was a war between the ideals on which America was founded and a small cabal of aristocrats that ruled over their serfs by appealing to an Us vs Them mentality.

But America was founded upon the ideal of slavery. Had it not been, Article 3, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution would not have been a thing.

Article IV*

No. Slavery is incompatible with democracy. Even in ancient Greece the Athenians came to realise they couldn't keep their fellow Greeks as slaves.

Good thing the United States isn't a democracy and was purposely structured to safeguard against it.

It was about both. States rights included the right to slavery. Or at least the right to decide on a state level what slavery should do/be, as opposed to the Feds 200+ miles away.

The South was happy to abuse Dred Scott when it suited them, so basically they were all about states rights only when it benefited them. And those rights were almost always about owning slaves.

So yeah, a lot of it was slaves. On one side, anyway. At first.

Focusing on a single cause so much helps people align their reality with their ideology.

>"Most of modern science and math originated in Europe"
"Modern" science, maybe, but a lot of the work on math after the Greeks was taken on by the Indians and Arab world.

That's a load of shit. 4 of the first 5 presidents were planters and John Locke was heavily invested in the early slave trade. If slavery were actually against the ideals the country was formed founded on they'd have ended it and not make it part of their constitution & don't give me shit about "they thought it would end eventually" because Robert E. Lee said the same thing.

That's also a load of shit. They never outlawed slavery and the vast majority of residents (including non-slaves) were disenfranchised.

Wheres the picture literally from the succession papers that cites slavery as their reason for leaving.

The problem with that line of thinking is that the South was basically arguing over and over again that there was a threat against their right to maintain their property. And what was that property? Slavery. In nearly all of the secession documents they stated that slavery was one of the big reasons why they were leaving. If slavery hadn't had happened, then it could have been possible that the South would have industralized like the North, or slavery wouldn't have been the bedrock upon which a lot of Southern society was based on. Yes few people held slaves, but nearly all of those who held political power did hold slaves, and a lot of those people who didn't own slaves wanted to be wealthy and own slaves like the Planter class did.

ITT Johnny Rebs trying to revise history

Fuck Billy Yank

Better watch that tongue turncoat, else we might come marching to Georgia again

The South 100% fought for Slavery. State's Rights wasn't a thing until the Lost Cause after the war was over. In fact, if anyone had more of a State's Rights claim, it was the abolitionists, who fought for States to not have to follow the Federal law (fugitive Slave act or respecting property of citizens from other States)

Fuck you Yanks. This time for sure we can take on 10 of you for every one of us

>you need elites to trick you into being racist

simple answer: state's rights to legalize or ban slavery. so states rights but also slavery