"The Civil War was about slavery"

States rights meme is completely idiotic because the CSA during the war was a far more tightly centralized country than the USA. The best part of it all is modern lolbergtardians becoming neo-Confederates, praising a heavily statist country that was on the verge of becoming a military dictatorship.

How long are you going to keep posting this?

but how could USA morally justify going to war just to preserve the Union, when they fought for independance from Britain just a bit earlier

A Seceding state is a threat to the US. That's simply a fact. You don't ignore threats to your sovereignty because 'its your turn.' In addition, a seceding state would subtract huge amounts of resources, manpower, and money from a nation that would inevitably clash with European powers again. "A house divided cannot stand" refers to the weakness of two feuding states, at a time when conquering the continental United Stated by land was still a very real possibility.

Moral justification is a mere afterthought in political dynamics.

"For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy."

From South Carolina's Declaration of Secession. Pretty clear they were pissed at the idea of giving up sipping mint juleps on the porch while black folks sweated for free in cotton fields. gtfo

I understand the geopolitical reasons, what i don't get is how can they possibly justify it morally.
Is it a case of might makes it right?

Why would they need to?

for domestic stability and good external relations

Are you a fucking idiot?
>inb4 not an argument
My argument is that your understanding of the material is so fundamentally wrong, you cannot even begin to argue about it. It's a shame all the rhetoric surrounding the conflict - the raison d'etre for the conflict - was about the economic importance of slavery.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
For something that ISN'T about slavery, this is assuredly about slavery and its symbolic importance. Secondly, the CSA was the creation of a small cadre of plantation-owning elites who didn't want to compete with Northern manufacturing and were terrified of the open settlement of the Louisiana Purchase's territories, which threatened also their agriculture.

DO IT AGAIN SHERMAN

Nobody gives a fuck about morals.

Sure they do - don't be edgy. You'll cut yourself.

No, no country ever gave two shits about morals and no country ever applied the same standards to themselves as they apply to their enemies.

How did the US morally justify the japanese internment camps?
They didn't even try at the time, and everyone involved in that came out just fine.

>i understand the geopolitical reasons

>UK causes Bengali famine, starve Boer women and children in concentration camps, slaughters innocents all over the world
>somehow assumes moral highround when talking about the Holocaust, communism or slavery
Come on now.

>says broad qualifier of nobody
>move the goalposts
Weak. I remain correct.

: )

Show me a single country that consistently applied moral principles to everything, even to their own detriment. Hard mode: no fictional countries.

Not that user, so are you saying that at that time the Confederate States and secession in general was a majority elite position? It was it like today where every common moron was chanting about the South rising up? Honest question, maybe not phrased the greatest...

Federal Republic of Germany

>doesn't even read the post he's commenting on
Good job!

...

DO

>when they fought for independance from Britain just a bit earlier
Because in the Americans' minds British secession was caused by several things: 1. the unresponsiveness of a government thousands of miles away and 2. being ruled by a ""tyrannical"" king and a legislative body that would cede the colonies no legislative rights while taxing the colonies without their consent 3. unfair mercantilist policies hurting american traders and manufacturers.
also while the american revolution was still only a generation or two before it was by the time of the ACW at a safe distance that the circumstances of the two conflicts seemed to distant to each other, though the Confederates certainly saw this as a continuation of that tradition. I suppose Unionists would have focused more on the Aftermath of the revolution; i.e. the instability of the articles of confederation and states having too much power, the need for a strong federal government to defend the interests of the states against external enemies and unnecessary squabbling among themselves (the congress giving them a more legal forum to resolve their differences and conflicts with one another)

IT

>attacks Brazilian economic protectionism
>has its own protectionist zone called the EU
There you go.

>attacks Brazilian economic protectionism
proof?

You're right. Its not about slavery.

Its about state's right. The state's right to slavery.

Didn't find the Brazilian reference but here they are criticizing American protectionism:
dw.com/en/german-minister-trumps-protectionism-a-threat-to-germanys-economy/a-37372041

again

I genuinely, 100% believe that it wasn't about state rights at all. If Union amended the constitution to mandate slavery for every state while taking away all states rights, Southerners would take it in a heartbeat.

The civil war was about state rights vs federal rights when it comes to slavery.

everyone in this thread got their education about the war from jews and yanks
its all just fucking anti-south propaganda
sickening

S H E R M A N

The Confederacy's secretary of state was a Jew tho

But that's what the proposed amendment was and the South still told the North to fuck off.

propaganda
>[citation need]

The CSA was a jew-friendly, nigger-friendly shithole full of jews and retards cosplaying as feudal aristocracy while the white laborers lived in squalor.

dont hate jews bro, just the globalist ones in power that want to destroy the west

But the secretary of state was a Jew who was in power.....

>muh good jews
Fuck off back to r/the_cuckold

The Civil War was about state's rights.

Specifically, a state's right to preserve slavery.

There is a difference of having certain regulations (EU), and threatening trade war to bully other nations, like Trump does

Basically it was a lil bit of both.
I mean slavery did fuel southern economy but there are documents which date to somewhere near the end of the war cant remember what year tho, in which it is stated the Southern government was considering abolishing slavery themselves.
However you wont learn this in any school cuz history is written by the victors amirite famalam
and cuz >muh evil dixie slavers

t. (((Judah))) P. Benjamin

Who cares what it was about?
>Rebellion happened
>Rebellion was ruthlessly crushed
>Rebel descendants cry endless tears about their failed rebellion like a bunch of Irish

No there isn't. I keep getting buttraped by the customs every time I order something from China or India.

summarizing:
>who has the sovereignty, states or congress?
that's the question
>why were they asking the question?
slavery

That's it guys.

>there are documents which date to somewhere near the end of the war cant remember what year tho, in which it is stated the Southern government was considering abolishing slavery themselves.
It's not "stated" it was a congressional meeting where Jefferson Davis and co. were debating abolishing slavery in a last ditch effort to gain British support for Southern Independence. Davis and actually a lot of others supported the measure. It's discussed in "Battlecry of Freedom", so it's not fucking "hidden".

I think you're right in a way that Southerners, at this point, were willing to give up slavery if it meant winning the war and establishing the independence of their political class from the north. But, for one thing, they never did abolish slavery in those last days and, furthermore, the extreme circumstances of those final months of the war, where the Confederacy was clearly losing, had forced them into this position. Had they really given up slavery in the end it STILL would have been extremely reluctantly and with great reservations.

>152 years later, they're still mad

Who gives a fuck why they're asking it? When you're teacher asks you two plus two, you fucking answer it. You don't get to skip the test because you don't like the framing.

>worrying about "answering the question right"
never gonna make it

He should have let them secede.

Curious about this. Do the states in USA vary in how they teach the Civil War?

>avoiding questions altogether because of their framing

may as well turn in your white privilege card and move to namibia

>the war wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights!
>look at this proposed amendment to help guarantee states rights! and look how the South still told them to fuck off!
So your argument is that the war wasn't about slavery, but rather the South just being populated by retarded manchildren?

most of the people that fought in the war were poor farmers who believed in southern independence and shit. the big wigs pulling the political strings were trying to keep their oligarchy, which would have been impossible without slavery a

The civil war was about slavery. Don't take our word for it. Take it from the secessionists themselves.

civilwar.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession

>a country needs centralization when facing a bigger power

Woah

So americans don't give a shit about freedom and would rather have security, right?

>excuses
National draft, outright ignoring state governors, hyperinflation, fiat currency, deficit spending, national enforcement of slavery, high taxes, government regulated infrastructure, etc. You should look into the quarrel Joseph Brown had with Jefferson Davis, Davis was arguably even a bigger centralist than Lincoln and this goes back into pre-war days. Hardly the Jeffersonian Democrat people portray him as nowadays.

DESU Brazil's protectionism is just next-level retarded.

Here's some personal experience.

> Import duties on product that we sell is over 200%
> Completely not price-competitive with domestic Brazilian competitors, despite the fact that they make a piece of shit.
> Management decides to partner with a Brazilian company to license produce our product in Brazil (which is what the tariffs are supposed to encourage)
> Discover none of the Brazilian companies have the expertise to make the parts we need
> "We'll just ship them the finished sub-assemblies (tariffed at a lower rate), have the Brazilians do big-boy lego final assembly, and slap a "Made in Brazil" sticker on.
> Every part has to be cleared by Brazilian customs for every shipment, same part, repeat shipment, needs re-clearance. Delay between parts sent from our side to receive at Brazil site often reaches a month
> Customs clearance would be granted, then revoked, at random
> Brazilian customs has it in for one our parts that we licensed from a German company
> Refuses to even let the part into the country, says it's a "finished product" and subject to their absurd tariffs.
> Management finally says fuck it after half a decade and countless millions sunk into Brazilian operations. Poach the good Brazilian employees with American visas
> Brazilians still using their shitty domestic goods today.

But if sacrifimg slavery in favour of winning the war was an option, which it clearly was, this means that keeping slavery was not the objective. You don't sacrifice your objective to win a war because then that means there's no victory.

Importing from China and India is hell easy, you must be doing something wrong or ordering specific goods that do get monitored.

objectives change over time. they're not a unchanging set of principles. as i said, by the time this slavery had come up for discussion the Southern elite had already committed significant resources and emotional investment in their cause. They were willing to win at all cost. One of the reasons was pride, but fear probably played just as much a part. Many wondered whether their losing the war would also mean losing their heads, losing their economic and social status. If winning the war meant freeing the slaves, it might also raise their standing among the white troops they sacrificed in the tens of thousands. Besides that, the Union already threw in the gauntlet by declaring freedom of southern slaves unilaterally, so abandoning slavery might have preempted a much feared slave revolt or a further mass defection of slaves (which was already happening) had the southerners won. Then there's the fact the blacks could be made into soldiers, as southerners proposed promising their freedom for fighting on their side. Blacks slave also were hugely important in field hospitals, canteens, transport, in the crash industrialization programs and the whole homefront effort. So it's not so simple as saying the Southern elite ultimately had good hearts. The course of events forced them to rethink their position, even if that original position was what the war was fought on in the beginning.

>South supported free trade because "didn't want to compete with Northern manufacturing"
>North pushed high tarriffs because they didn't want to compete with british manufacturing

really activates your almonds

fpbp

>specific goods
Yes, medicine.

Yea well no shit, the Chinese equivalent of the FDA is pretty worthless, and moreover too understaffed to deal with all of China. Customs wants to make sure what you are bringing into the country is actually not medicine and will do what it's supposed to do.

It seems historians are adamant with absolutes. The war was about slavery or it wasn't about slavery at all. No nuances allowed. Which begs to question why so many confederate officers, from the highest rank, and soldiers wanted to free the slaves in exchange for military service? If the only goal was to maintain slavery, why abolish, or put it on a definitive course towards it, in order to win the war?

>In January 1864, General Patrick Cleburne and several other Confederate officers in the Army of Tennessee proposed using slaves as soldiers in the national army. Cleburne recommended offering slaves their freedom if they fought and survived.

>...whenever the subjugation of Virginia or the employment of her slaves as soldiers are alternative propositions, then certainly we are for making them soldiers, and giving freedom to those negroes that escape the casualties of battle.
>Nathaniel Tyler in the Richmond Enquirer

>On January 11, 1865 General Robert E. Lee wrote the Confederate Congress urging them to arm and enlist black slaves in exchange for their freedom.[39] On March 13, the Confederate Congress passed legislation to raise and enlist companies of black soldiers. The legislation was then promulgated into military policy by Davis in General Order No. 14 on March 23, 1865.[40] The emancipation offered, however, was reliant upon a master's consent; "no slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman."[40] According to historian William C. Davis, President Davis felt that blacks would not fight unless they were guaranteed their freedom after the war.[41]

>After the war, the State of Tennessee granted Confederate Pensions to nearly 300 African Americans for their service to the Confederacy

> The war was about slavery or it wasn't about slavery at all. No nuances allowed.
>source: my asshole

If the war was about slavery why did so many men fight while at the same time lobbying for emancipation trough military service? It clearly stands to reason that their primary aim of the war was not maintaining slavery but independence even at the cost of slavery.

also, fuck off faggot

first of all, see pic related. then, all of the things you post are dates at THE END OF THE WAR for the reason, because the course of events forced their Confederate's hands. They were short on manpower, the emancipation proclamation opened the prospect that slaves would increasingly defect and they hoped for British support at the promise of ending slavery. And as your own sources say
>was reliant upon a master's consent;
Indicating that the decree was a very tentative step which falls under the expression "too little too late". It's not clear whether Davis could have forced the elites to accept emancipation and whether such an emancipation would be a sleight of hand, as it very much was in the South after the war with the sharecropping system.

Robert E. Lee was indeed against slavery, but he was an exception to the rule among the southern political and economic elite (the two being nearly indistinguishable anyway.

also forgot to mention that by this time the Union had CAPTURED the most slave intensive parts of the country, namely Mississippi Louisiana and other plantation regions heavily reliant on slavery. Not to mention that those areas suffered a lot of economic destruction or abandonment from raiding, requisitioning, pillaging, burning and the like. In other words, the union destroyed the southern economy thereby taking the most important reason for slavery, namely their economic value. You're also forgetting that there's a difference between saying something and executing or doing something. To put it another way, it's one thing to talk about freeing slaves, its another thing to actually put it into action. The southerners never put radical plans for slaves into action despite the possibility of doing so and arguably, their ultimate hesitation to do so DOES prove that they were too wedded to slavery rather than doing everything necessary to secure independence.

>union offers the south to have slaves
>still chimps out and attacks the union unprovoked
>OP tries to argue how the union was in the moral wrong for retaliating and how they could even think that they could justify such a heinous and inhumane act
>even though it's a text book case of chat shit get hit

I really hope your family was in the direct line of Sherman.

user, why are you buying medicine over the internet, from China?

Seriously? I thought certain states were threatening to secede from the CSA and go it alone when they didn't get their way. While Abe could wield power throughout the federal government and issue orders to armies in the field, Davis was kinda just making strongly worded suggestions. Was this an incorrect understanding?

>confusing the claim 'it was about slavery' with the claim 'it was about ending slavery'

>So americans don't give a shit about freedom and would rather have security, right?

Most of them yes. The NSA and the Federal Reserve still exist.

>[citation needed]

>Lincoln assured the South and outright said he would keep slavery if it meant preserving the Union, that still wasn't good enough and they chimped out

Because he would ONLY keep slavery in the Southern States. Every new state admitted under him would be free, and the balance of power in the Senate between slave and free would be radically tipped in favor of free. Even if slavery itself was untouched, with a majority of Senators voting Free, and House already long gone, stringent policies could be enacted to make slavery and thus the whole agrarian economy of the south non-viable. Tariffs on imported goods for the sake industry, special taxes on cash crops, non-enforcement on slave retrieval legislation, bureaucratic legislation to slow down the exportation of certain goods, public works projects to create avenues of trade which bypassed the South and rerouted them North. Instead of swift destruction, it would be the slow dissolution Southern life, and the economy.

wtf I love North Dakota now

>I'm fighting for my "freedom" to keep other people as slaves.

Then why did they secede? What right were they were concerned about losing? Tell me dixieboos I'm waiting.

The USA seceded from the empire because they weren't allowed to have a single seat at the parliament in London.

The CSA seceded from the Union because they wanted to keep niggers as their property.

not that guy but Battlecry of Freedom describes this

You make some good points, but I think you give the South too much credit for their frankly self-serving behavior. You make them out to be victims when, as a whole, they ruthlessly exploited their power as a section in the US government starting in 1889.

> Every new state admitted under him would be free, and the balance of power in the Senate between slave and free would be radically tipped in favor of free.
Yes. But let's consider what happened and what alternatives there were. Let's consider how the Southern politicians in Washington ruthlessly pursued aggressive foreign policy to secure the future of slavery, needlessly provoking the crisis in the name of an imperialist ideology, "Manifest Destiny," by attacking a fellow republic, Mexico, and seizing its territory. Consider how many times Southerners tried to annex Cuba (something like a dozen times prior to the ACW iirc).
In short, forcing Imperialist expansion made the question of slavery more prominent than it need to have been. If North and South had resolved to stop expanding, consolidate what they had, and settle for the balance of power in Congress as it had already existed, the issue of slavery need not have exploded as it did, nor did it have to force Northerners to reconsider their attitudes toward it (remember, a lot of Northerners didn't care, liked slavery because it kept blacks from stealing northern industrial jobs and there was a popular movement for settling slaves back to Africa through philanthropic operations. Radical abolitionism had VERY little support, even during the Civil War).

1789*

>says slavery is good
>somehow this means the war is about slavery