Thread:User talk:ColbertFan/No offence.../reply (20)


 * The Confederacy was founded mainly on states' rights
 * Yes, this is a partly true statement.


 * Abe didn't care about slavery as much as people think he did
 * Also true.


 * The Union at that time could be easily compared to the Great Britain under King George III with regards to secession movements.
 * This is not even wrong.

Let's talk about this.

What you fail to understand about the Confederacy was that the reason the Southern states seceded was because they felt that their way of life was mortally threatened by the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was an anti-slavery (not an abolitionist, of course) Northerner. Their way of life included economic, political, and social elements--some historians even contend that the North and South were not simply different economic regions, but two entirely separate civilizations--and differed from the North in all of these elements. One government could no longer contain both societies, especially given the expansionist tendencies of both (c.f. the wp:Ostend Manifesto and wp:Kansas-Nebraska Act and its repercussions), so the South saw no choice but to break away. What you specifically fail to realize is just how integral the institution of slavery was to Southern socioeconomics, and how the subjugation of blacks was not simply an economic policy but a societal necessity. The Confederacy, the culmination of the seceding states' effort at housing their society in a new government, is simply inextricable and inseparable from that subjugation.

You correctly point out that the chief reason given for secession by the Southern states was that under the "compact" theory of the Constitution, it was a "state's right" to secede. Lincoln, the North and ultimately the Supreme Court affirmed the "contract" theory of the Constitution, meaning that the federal government was supreme. This issue was put to bed after the war in a legal sense, but persists to the present day in the political invective in conservative Southern states. States' rights were the legal foundation of the Confederacy. But the moral, economic, and social foundation of the Confederacy was the aforementioned subjugation of blacks. That's not to say that states' rights were not vitally important to the Confederate States--they were, and that probably helped them lose the war--but that the Confederacy was created to preserve the Southern way of life, their civilization if you will, which was based on the subjugation of blacks in all respects. States' rights were merely a justification of their continuation of that way of life.