Maggie's Farm

"the right to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government.”

Which shows that using "states' rights" to justify secession is an attempt to square the circle. Recognition of "states' rights" means that one recognizes that when one leaves State A to State B/ Territory B, that one is no longer governed by the laws of State A. Which means that your chattel in a slave state is a free person when not in a slave state.

Ditto trying to capture fugitive slaves in free states. That was an attempt to apply the laws of Southern states to the North. If you are living free in a Northern state, your slave status in a Southern state should be of no account.

The South could not accept slavery confined to the South.

Unfortunately it took the blood of a very high percentage of white Southern males of ages eighteen to forty- 10%-20%- 40%?- to resolve the conflict. Admittedly, most of those who fought for the Confederacy were fighting to defend their home territory, not to preserve slavery. That is not the motivation of those who engineered secession. Secession came about in large part because when Lincoln was elected without Southern support, those in power in the South realized the South could not longer control the national dialogue and agenda. It wasn't "states' rights," but a case of taking one's ball home because one wasn't going to win the game.

I recall that decades ago, National Review compared those who fired on Fort Sumter to the Weathermen. Don't start a war you don't want to finish.

My family tree runs the gamut, from slaveholders who were the biggest landowners in the county to yeoman farmers North and South, to a follower of John Brown killed at Harper's Ferry, so I have long been exposed to both sides of the argument.

Yes, the Civil War is still a controversial issue.

The election of Abraham Lincoln was the trigger for secession. If states' rights was the reason for secession, please inform me in what way the election of Abraham Lincoln violated the rights of Southern states.

Blacks were not allowed to be anything except manservants in the union army, and those were all slaves to the masters they were serving ...

From Teaching With Documents:The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War: [government archives]
By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease. Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers. Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman (photo citation: 200-HN-PIO-1), who scouted for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.

Because of prejudice against them, black units were not used in combat as extensively as they might have been. Nevertheless, the soldiers served with distinction in a number of battles. Black infantrymen fought gallantly at Milliken's Bend, LA; Port Hudson, LA; Petersburg, VA; and Nashville, TN. The July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, SC, in which the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers lost two-thirds of their officers and half of their troops, was memorably dramatized in the film Glory. By war's end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor.

My mother told me that having heard those of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations refighting the Civil War when she was growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, she decided to not refight the Civil War. If you are going to refight the Civil War, perhaps you should learn about it first.

The war was simply one about control of resources.
The south had most of the natural resources and agricultural production the north needed to maintain its standard of living, so it couldn't be allowed to gain its independence and start selling those goods for competitive prices.

The North prospered during the Civil War, when the North didn’t have access to Southern “natural resources and agricultural production the north needed to maintain its standard of living.” This shows that “control of the Southern market” was not needed for the North’s prosperity. See my comment that discusses Southern slaveholders being the inventors of the “Third World” Marxist arguments regarding “economic dependency,” [010-08-12 19:16], and the well-thought out reply to it.

Before the Civil War the South accounted for 70% of US exports, according to Wikipedia. It is therefore absurd to claim that the North had a stranglehold on the fruits of Southern production, as a substantial proportion of Southern agricultural production went overseas. As the South dominated US exports, it is absurd to claim that the North didn’t allow the South to “gain its independence and start selling those goods for competitive prices,” as the South was already selling overseas at competitive prices.

According to the same article in Wikipedia, the North accounted for 90% of US industry in 1860. You might ask yourself why industry didn’t develop in the South. Industry in the South had the same tariff protection that industry in the North had. See my remark at [2010-08-12 19:16], and the reply to it, on speculations regarding why the South didn’t develop industry to the degree that the North did.

Agriculture of the United States in 1860: compiled from the original returns of the Eighth Census has some interesting data. In 1860 the “cash value of farms” in the United States was $6,645,045,007. [Source: page xv]. Summing up the “cash value of farms” for the eleven states of the Confederacy, I found that the total cash value of farms in the Confederacy to be $1,851,344,071, which is less than 30% of the total value for the US. IOW, while the Confederacy was an agricultural powerhouse, the North was not exactly chopped liver when it came to agriculture. From 1850 to 1860, grain production in the Midwest increased 65%, much of this increase due to building or railroads and to farm mechanization. This shows the dynamism of the North. [Source: page clxviii].

I bought The Latin Americans: their love-hate relationship with the United States in its original Spanish edition when I was working in Venezuela, where its title translated into English is “From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary.” There is an appropriate passage for this thread on the Civil War: [ p 194-195]

The conditions and the development of the Spanish American world invite, as already mentioned, certain parallels with the American South. These two slave societies have interpreted their history in a similar way; or rather, they have required the same self-justification. In 1816, the fledgling North American republic imposed tariffs to protect the development of its budding industry against the massive influx of English manufactured imports, The most ardent among the protectionists were the Virginians and the North and South Carolinians, who felt that with their inexpensive cotton and cheaper manpower, the Southern states would become textile producers able to rival Manchester…..

Barely fifteen years after Southern Congressmen such as Calhoun and Lowndes of South Carolina had established themselves as effective spokesmen for tariffs on goods bought from Great Britain, the South began its subsequent failure [to industrialize] by charging that protectionism had been invented by the North as a means of enriching itself at the expense of the South. Southern leaders stirred up their audiences by claiming that of every hundred bales of cotton sold in Boston or New York, forty had been “stolen” from the South. The argument became more heated, and the North found itself charged with having accumulated capital in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth by defrauding the South through financial trickery. One contemporary writer says” When they (the Southerners)see the flourishing villages of New England, they cry, ‘We pay for all this.’A myth was manufactured that attributed Northern prosperity to the South’s paralysis, and vice versa. Southerners went to war in 1860 quite convinced that if they succeeded in breaking their dependence on the North, not only would they prosper miraculously; the abhorred Yankees, deprived of raw materials and the southern market for their manufactured goods, would be condemned to an economic crisis as well.

Thus, well before the birth of Hobson, Hilferdig, and Lenin, the “Third World” arguments had been invented by Southern slaveholders.


The South had the same possibility of industrial development as the North, after tariffs were passed. The South had closer and thus cheaper access to cotton than the North, it had ample water power in the falls lining the the descent of the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain, and it had a supply of cheaper slave labor. With all these advantages, it blamed the North for not industrializing. Perhaps we should also blame Yankee Eli Whitney for the Civil War, for his invention of the cotton gin made cotton production much cheaper and thus made slave ownership more profitable.