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General Comments / Re: anyone other than DJQuag believe "the Civil War wasn't about slavery"?
« on: March 29, 2017, 11:20:16 AM »
North had a larger number of abolitionists and progressives, but they also had blatantly racist laws preventing free black people from actually getting rights as citizens. And also, lynch mobs. The North was (and still is I'd say) so prejudice that white people even discriminated against other white people [the Irish at the time].
Town Line, New York succeeded from the union and never even came back until 1946 (granted that was mostly because of draft riots, they were mad that free blacks were exempt from the draft but white people had to pay $300 to get out of it).
Clearly the central reason for the fight over states rights was slavery, but ultimately the reason they thought they were so justified was that they didn't feel the federal government was within its constitutional rights to legislate against slavery.
In some ways arguments about this are splitting hairs... but anyone who thinks that regardless of the semantics it wasn't chiefly about slavery is probably more than a little misinformed.
Town Line, New York succeeded from the union and never even came back until 1946 (granted that was mostly because of draft riots, they were mad that free blacks were exempt from the draft but white people had to pay $300 to get out of it).
Clearly the central reason for the fight over states rights was slavery, but ultimately the reason they thought they were so justified was that they didn't feel the federal government was within its constitutional rights to legislate against slavery.
In some ways arguments about this are splitting hairs... but anyone who thinks that regardless of the semantics it wasn't chiefly about slavery is probably more than a little misinformed.