Reply To: Fly the flag of the Confederate States of America?

You know, when I was down in Louisiana, I discovered the people there do not call it the “American Civil War”. They call it the “War of Northern Aggression”. They also claim some of the northern states still had slaves, and that the war was fought because the north was losing out on import taxes etc when the southern plantations decided to develop and use a southern port instead of transporting their produce up to the northern ports.

Yes, I’ve heard “War of Northern Aggression” before myself. They’re actually right about northern states; some were still slave states but didn’t secede for one reason or another. (Keep talking to these folks and they’ll claim Lincoln prevented secession votes in those states by force of arms.) The Emancipation Proclamation specifically excluded slaves held in Union territory. Since the Confederate areas didn’t consider themselves bound by anything the United States government did, it therefore had no immediate effect. Only by having union forces gain territory covered by the proclamation were slaves freed by it. (Slaves escaping and crossing the lines, however, were instantly free men.)

Nevertheless I reject Southern-sympathisers claims that the war was not really about slavery. All the tensions that led up to it were over the south’s increasing butthurt over the number of non-slave states that were being admitted to the Union; they clearly felt threatened by that more than anything else.

I’ll see these sorts of arguments erupt in internet fora that I am a part of, and it’s striking how the southern side of the argument will cite Northern sources talking about “preserving the union” but the northern side of the argument cites the statements of southerners as to why they had seceded (e.g. the Mississippi constitution and secession declaration). The most neutral statement I can make on the basis of all of this is that perhaps the North really just wanted to preserve the union, but the south left because they feared slavery would be abolished if they did not. So the north’s issue was causally secondary to the south’s issue.

The south may have asserted their right to run their societies as they please (“states rights”) but my response to that is quite simply, you don’t have a collective right to violate someone else’s right. Rights are individual, you don’t gain new ones that supersede others, by the act of banding together and voting on them. That’s why, for instance, it’s fucking jackassical (and infuriating, to me) for some biblethumper village in Tennessee to complain that they have a right to establish their religion and the small minority of non-Baptists that has managed to put up with their bullshit for generations, can pound sand.