The above post reminds me why we have a fool and con-artist as president. Life is too complex for the uneducated and they look instead to hidden meanings and complex excuses. It is a world in which it only makes sense if your sense is conspiracy and revisionism. One can believe anything - but does that make it so? It does for those who want it to. It gives an odd and bizarre succor to those for whom reality is too real. A recent excellent history read for the interested is ''The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America' by Greg Grandin.
Civil war stuff below:
States Rights apologies - The Civil War was over Slavery
A few documents and sources about a topic that constantly finds apologists and revisionists. This will be a work in progress as new sources of information are found.
"I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”
I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.
[b]But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19Ball.html
[b]"Her conclusion is that the Americans who fought the Civil War overwhelmingly thought they were fighting about slavery, and that we should take their word for it."
"In this unprecedented account, Chandra Manning uses letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers to take the reader inside the minds of Civil War soldiers-black and white, Northern and Southern-as they fought and marched across a divided country. With stunning poise and narrative verve, Manning explores how the Union and Confederate soldiers came to identify slavery as the central issue of the war and what that meant for a tumultuous nation. This is a brilliant and eye-opening debut and an invaluable addition to our understanding of the Civil War as it has never been rendered before."
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...andra-manning/
"In citing slavery, South Carolina was less an outlier than a leader, setting the tone for other states, including Mississippi:
'Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...s-over/396482/
"Benjamin Franklin, in a 1773 letter to Dean Woodward, confirmed that whenever the Americans had attempted to end slavery, the British government had indeed thwarted those attempts. Franklin explained that . . . . a disposition to abolish slavery prevails in North America, that many of Pennsylvanians have set their slaves at liberty, and that even the Virginia Assembly have petitioned the King for permission to make a law for preventing the importation of more into that colony. This request, however, will probably not be granted as their former laws of that kind have always been repealed. "
WallBuilders - Issues and Articles - The Founding Fathers and Slavery
Southern arguments for and against:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...st.html?cat=37
Argument v Lincoln's position:
http://apollo3.com/~jameso/secession.html
Does the constitution allow secession:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20041124.html
AmericanHeritage.com / How the North Lost the Civil War
SCOTUS ruling on secession:
Texas v. White
Admission of state to union
FindLaw: U.S. Constitution: Article IV: Annotations pg. 16 of 18
"A primary element of this Southern understanding of the Constitution was the right to secede. Nowhere does the original document confer the right to detach from the Union, but Southerners still found the act "entirely legitimate under the terms of the federal Constitution” (Cook 114). Perhaps one could construe the tenth amendment to grant such a right, but Article six states that all government officials must support "this Constitution,” which runs contrary to secession (U.S. Const. 6.0.3 and Am. 10, from Gienapp 435-6). Alexander Stevens used this principle as a premise in his argument against secession (59). Yet, despite this Constitutional opposition, or at least ambivalence, to secession, South Carolina declared that it had such a right. " (from above url)
And an early OP on topic.
John Bingham and the Story of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets the 'Lost Clause'
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....ract_id=343460
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