Author: Mikey <[email protected]>     Reply to Message
Date: 5/11/2017 4:15:35 PM
Subject: RE: Explain the confederacy

Like I said, slavery was the catalyst for secession, but it has to be viewed in the context of the conflict between north and south politically generally at the time.

An important piece of context is that before the Civil War, people _did not_ consider themselves "americans" first. They would've considered their 'country' to be their state. so you were a citizen of New York or Virginia before you were an American citizen. This is verifiable. Even within the Confederacy, they self-identified as a group of states with common cause.

The south saw that the political climate and general attitudes of the north were headed towards abolition. They didn't want abolition, obviously. So the slave states decided that given they had the right to self-government, they would be better off forming a new political coalition that would give them the policies that they want. This required separating from the rest of the union - with which they now had irreconcilable differences.

Lincoln and the northern states decided that they were unwilling to allow this separation, and waged war to prevent it. So the war is very strictly fought to prevent secession, and not to abolish slavery.

Once the conflict had started, if the north had said "OK, you can keep slavery" the South would likely not have returned to the union voluntarily despite that concession. Because they were no longer fighting over slavery at that point, but rather their right to independent self-government.

The south was fighting for the freedom of self-determination - maintaining slavery is simply what they would've chosen to do with that self-determination. This is also why a (now very politically incorrect) term for the civil war in the south is 'the war of northern aggression.'

The fact that slavery is such a reprehensible and abhorrent practice confuses the central issue because it crystallizes the south as easy 'bad guys'. But they were living in a different time and with a different understanding of right and wrong, and of racial equality.

I have no issue with people who demonize the slave-owners of the South, but if you want to understand why the south fought for the confederacy you have to understand that they were motivated by a desire to repel what they saw as an invasion that was very analogous to the war for american independence.
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