I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?

  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    While the Southern states were ultimately fighting for slavery as an institution, the question the war was trying to answer wasn’t whether states can have slavery; it’s whether states can secede. If the North was willing to accept secession (which would’ve been a massive mistake don’t get me wrong) the war wouldn’t have happened. The Southern proposition that made the North go to war was, at least to my shallow understanding, “I’ll make my own Union with blackjack and (slave) hookers”, not “I wanna keep owning slaves”.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The Southern proposition that made the North go to war was, at least to my shallow understanding, “I’ll make my own Union with blackjack and (slave) hookers”, not “I wanna keep owning slaves”.

      It was “I’ll make my own Union with slaves.” Explicitly. It was written into the secession documents of every single Confederate state, clearly and in no uncertain terms, that the reason for secession was specifically to maintain and defend the institution of slavery. Period, end of.

        • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          On this point it makes sense people are eager to explicitly identify slave owning as the primary driver for secession, because it’s the truth and there is still an active attempt to cover it up

          The lost cause argument is something racist losers came up with after the war where they try to say it was more about states rights (and oh by the way slavery wasn’t so bad, many slaves like being slaves)

          Some schools still teach this, I went to a “Northern” school and still had textbooks making this argument.

          Your post seems to echo this by saying the South’s main thing was they wanted to be separate, even though that happened to include slavery, there were other reasons too. That’s not the case. When they seceded the south explicitly identified slavery as THE reason why they were doing it.