• KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
    25·
    1 year ago

    It was about states’ rights.
    Specifically, the confederacy took away their member states’ right to abolish slavery.

    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      1 year ago

      From my understanding, it was originally about taxes. The southern states wanted their slaves to count as population for the purposes of representation within Congress, but they wanted the slaves to not count as population towards taxes owed.

      The northern states said fuck that noise so the southern states seceded. Hence the war started, and only then was the emancipation proclamation signed, which stripped rebelling(and only rebelling) states from owning slaves. After the war, the 13th amendment was signed which actually banned slavery.

      Edit:also look into the 3/5ths compromise.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        From my understanding it was much more about the refusal of free states to cooperate in returning escaped slaves than it was about taxes. I’ve never heard of a tax based on the population of a state.

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Slaves were the basis of a lot of rich people’s wealth. The war being about slavery doesn’t mean it wasn’t about money.

      • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Little more complicated (but also less complicated at the same time, somehow) than that. A lot of it also had to do with the inevitability of the United States moving away from slavery as an institution. The Missouri Compromise effectively prevented any further parts of the remaining Louisiana Purchase territories from entering the Union as slaveholding states. The Dread Scott decision overruled this in 1857, but by this point the damage was done and animosity between the two halves of the US was coming to a head. To add to this, Alexander Stephens and others very publicly called for secession on the basis of preserving slavery as an institution. See Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech” and the various declarations of secession made by the former Confederate states themselves for additional details. So, taxes were possibly a component, but the core driving motivator behind secession was in many ways more fundamentally the preservation of slavery. One could even argue that the taxation argument is a way of whitewashing what is fundamentally a motive for the preservation of slavery, as the Revolutionary War was fought on the basis of taxation without representation and the Confederacy wanted to draw explicit parallels to their secession and the United States’ secession from England, however specious that comparison might be.

      • Starbuck@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think the “tipping point” so to speak was much closer though. There was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which took away Northern states’ right to not be complicit in slavery. Then in 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state and the slavers were now out-voted in both the EC and Senate. Shortly after Kansas became a state, they attacked the US.

    • CodeName@infosec.pub
      20·
      1 year ago

      Did you seriously make an account just to make this comment? The Heritage Foundation? Fucking yikes.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        If they piss into the void often enough, someone gets splashed. The mantra of right-wing propagandists.

      • kttnpunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Wait wait wait though. Regardless of this source’s clear bias, he did vote in favor of segrating buses early in his career, and is as “establishment” as you can get imho. Owes me $600 too.

        • xor@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          i will not be clicking on any youtube videos when people are discussing politics…

          but ill give you the benefit of the doubt and say, “cool clip! that scene popped into my head when reading this, too”