Cause of Civil War

Hi, Theodoric. So, I basically agree with your position, but I think you may have made an error here.My understanding (though I am admittedly out of my element here) is that the Confederacy didn't have a problem with what the Constitution said about states' rights: their problem was with the way the Lincoln government was abusing or misinterpreting (according to them) the Constitution.So, I don't see that the lack of changes in the CSA Constitution is particularly informative.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. If slavery was just the "poster child" for the greater issue, then there is a meaningful distinction to be made.The stereotypical conservative stubbornly defends every little tradition they can when they perceive that their way of life is under attack. The opposition to gay marriage as part of the "Chrisitianity is under attack" worldview is a good example of this.Most Southerners today effectively believe that slavery was the "marriage is between a man and a woman" of the secessionists. They of course won't say this, because it is more a negative commentary on than a defense of their way of thinking: but this is the implication of their argument.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Theodoric. You're right, I should have said anticipated abuses.My point still stands: it wasn't the Constitution that they took exception to, so why should we expect them to have changed it?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. I can see how slavery could be seen as an archetype of states' rights, but I can't see how states' rights could be seen as an archetype of the slavery issue.----- My second form of identification is a literary license.----- To them, it is. Surely what they think is the only thing that is relevant to the search for their motivation, right?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Theodoric. But, what would they have changed to fix this?They already have the text of the Tenth Amendment. And, they already got rid of everybody they thought had the motivation to abuse the Tenth Amendment.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Dr A. Point taken.----- But, the perception is that the union was not a constitutional construct, but a cultural construct derived from a flawed interpretation of the Constitution.They don't change the Bible when they disagree with how somebody else interprets it (usually): why should we expect them to change the Constitution?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. So, when gay-rights proponents argue the "pursuit of happiness" clause, is this also just a smokescreen of principle around an ultimately selfish argument? Or is it actually about the principle?The fact that there is a principle that could, in theory, defend their position, and that it is the very principle that they appeal to, should at least give you pause in ruling on their motivation.This is the situation: the state has a major economic investment in slavery, but the combined political power of the nation (and the world) is making it harder and harder for the institution to continue. Then, the Republican Party pushes a platform of halting the spread of slavery, which means the state with a vested interest in slavery would forever be in the minority in the government, and would likely face a situation in which the rest of the states could force it to act against its own best economic interests by limiting or abolishing slavery.It’s very difficult to say whether it was really about slavery, or about states’ rights. Was the Confederacy founded on the belief that white people are superior to black people, and that black people were thus born to be enslaved? Or was it founded on the fear that the states’ economy could be ruined by loss of political power?From their perspective, they wanted to preserve their own political and economic power, and the Union just wanted to take it away.
From our perspective, we wanted to abolish slavery, and they just wanted to exploit and subjugate black people.I think anybody can clearly see that slavery was a major, central focus of the war, regardless of whether it was just the poster child for the underlying concerns.But, if it was just the outward manifestation of a deeper concern, then I think Southerners may have a legitimate case that their participation in the war was actually about the deeper concern, and not about slavery. I personally think it’s glossing over the facts, but I can understand the position.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Dr A. Doesn't this mean that it's you who isn't arguing with me? You're right, though. I only joined this thread because I felt like one side was getting overwhelmed too easily, and I wanted to see a little more of the topic than Artemis giving up in frustration after 3 posts.I can only keep it up for so long: I'm not going to try to push it any further.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Theodoric. I thought we had just established that they were claiming abuses by a future system. You just nailed me on that one in your previous post.They thought the Republicans were going to illegally change the status quo, and that there was nothing they could do about it, so they started a country where they could keep their status quo.-----P.S. Your next post will be your 1865th post: I think it would be fitting for it to happen in this thread.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. It's still a principle behind an argument, though.----- The results of the grassroots campaign seem to have been divided regionally. This effectively means one region was dominating the other region.If secession under these conditions is the "sore loser" principle, then anybody wanting to separate themselves form a group that was dominating them are also just "sore losers," aren't they?The Poles who wanted their own country after WWI were just "sore losers."The Croatians, Bosnians and other peoples in Yugoslavia who didn't want to be ruled by the Serbian majority in the 1970's-1990's were just "sore losers."The American colonists in the 1770's and 1780's who didn't like British administration of their lands were just "sore losers."(Note that I managed to not list any Nazi examples).In each of these cases, regional majorities that were minorities on the national level, broke away from the mother nation simply because they didn't get their way.Surely you won't argue that rebellion is universally based on the "sore loser" principle, so it becomes an academic exercise of deciding which cause is noble enough that its proponents are not "sore losers." The subjectivity involved in such a decision is too much for me to think it can realistically be made.A party that feels like they are being oppressed, or feels that their trust has been violated, surely has the right to take action against it, just like any minority has the right to take action against any perceived oppression against it. In the case of the Civil War, I think secession was an extreme action, but I can understand why they thought they didn't have a choice. What else can a party that has been rendered politically impotent do? Accept that they lost and get over it?If they had really believed in the principles of the Declaration of Independence (and the principles of freedom they vocally espoused), surely they would have agreed that the rights of black people took precedence over the economic and political wellbeing of the state in which the people live. But, because their concern was probably more about their own political and economic situation, and not about the morality of slavery, their priorities were different.-----Now, after that tirade, it's concession time. I’m beginning to see that you were right all along: it’s too hard to meaningfully distinguish slavery as the cause of the war from states’ rights as the cause of the war because they were too intertwined. It’s all a matter of perspective and emphasis. But, in the end, slavery was still at the heart of it, so the war clearly was about slavery.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Theodoric. Because he seemed rather frustrated in his last post. I would be too if I logged on to find 12 posts containing evidence that I had to go through and refute. Dr Adequate wins a lot of debates by attrition (i.e. frustration), because nobody can keep up with him.I was tempted to give Artemis a "5" for his response to Dr A, because I liked how he set up his argument, but then I got to the end when all the frustrations and insults came out, and I couldn't do it.----- I agree.----- I agree again.This is a shame, because I think it's an interesting debate topic that I don't know enough about. I figured the best way to keep the discussion going was to take a controversial stance, so I found a possible hole in the majority side and joined in.I don't think I can keep it up though, because I think my argument is weak and probably wrong.I'm grateful to you, Dr A and all the others for the good information you provided here, though.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. We've subtlely switched from talking about whether the Southern cause was legitimately based on principles to talking about why they were unsuccessful.Your arguments seem to be leading to the conclusion that the war and its outcome were the result of the practical failures of the Confederacy in matters of politics, and their unwillingness to concede these practical failures.It's certainly a much less glamorous view of history than the other views from this thread, which deal wih the ideological failures, but I'm sure there's merit to your position as well.My only real complaint is that your argument tends to favor a "might makes right" principle, which I tend to view as a much poorer principle on which to base an argument than the "sore loser" principle.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, NWR. They would argue that they were on the right side of a different moral argument, and that the propaganda (what you called a "grass roots campaign") had convinced everybody that it was a less important moral debate than the one about slavery.That's why Southerners are still disgruntled about the whole thing today: they feel like Lincoln used a popular stance on one moral issue to hide the fact that he was trampling all over another, less popular and less well-known moral issue that they felt was nevertheless bigger and more important.Since the "confederation" concept---the "moral" states' rights issue---had not been a particularly successful one in the monarchical political climate that predominated in Europe over the past 200+ years, most of the international community was not convinced that it was worth defending, so the Confederacy never really had a hope of convincing anybody that states' rights was a moral issue.Granted, whatever moral issue one uses to justify slavery is going to have a hard time getting an audience over the glaring feedback noise that slavery is going to cause, just like whatever legitimate scientific issues one uses to justify creationism is going to have a hard time getting an audience over the glaring feedback noise that creationism is going to cause. That much is a given.But, to the descendants of the Confederates, that feedback noise effectively masks, even to today, the fact that a very important moral right was quashed in the process, defeating the entire point of creating the United States in the first place.-----My take on states' rights, however, is that it wasn't the escape from tyranny that modern Confederates pretend it was, but just an attempt to shift the tyranny one level down the totem pole. Citizens of, for example, Georgia, would be as subject to a the tyrannical rule of Georgia as they had before been to the tyrannical rule of the Union. Consequently, the whole issue is a vaguely academic study on where the proper balance of centralized order and diffused freedoms lies, and could hardly be argued to be a moral issue at all.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Theodoric. I think I can agree with you on this.You've all convinced me. The rebels gave up on the union too easily, and thereby sacrificed any possibility of proving that states' rights was a legitimate complaint. Because of that, they made themselves look like NWR's "sore losers."Clearly, if it really was about states' rights, as their descendants claim, they did a very poor job of demonstrating this fact to the world, and did a very poor job of dealing with it.The next question that comes to my mind is whether or not it was actually about slavery from the Union side. What I've gathered from this discussion and a few cursory Google/Wiki searches on the Civil War is that there was a window between the first phases of the conflict and the Emancipation Proclamation in which the motivations of Lincoln and the Union might feasibly be questioned.What can we say about the Union perspective during that time period? Was Lincoln's interest in the conflict originally about slavery? Or was it originally about something else, and only came to be about slavery as a political move later on?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.