The Civil War Really Was About Slavery. Really. It Was.

[Igel]

17. That's pretty much a really poorly constructed straw man.

One that really is so trivial to disprove that it asks the questions, Why bother? and Why boast when it's done?

You get two things out of the various declarations: Slavery was under attack; and in so doing, the rights of the slave states were under attack, as they had been, with slavery, one of the unenumerated rights under the Constitution (however loathsome that may be) as the pretense under which Northern political, banking, and manufacturing forces trying to use the government to "utterly subjugate" the slave states, something the South had been suspicious of for the previous 20 years but for different reasons.

This led to sectionalism--a new word for me, but which seems to mean having the North and South divided, and insisting on the territories being "divided" so that instead of both sides having access to the entirety of the territory they were divvied up into sections.

The Civil War was about slavery. But some declarations make the relationship of slavery to the Civil War and their motives pretty much surface, others make it a bit deeper. The question to be asked, though, is if the Civil War was about slavery and nothing else, show where slavery was about to be defeated by Congress and Lincoln, and how wonderful this Union had been, otherwise, for the South. Otherwise, the relationship isn't yes/no but something else, something else worth splitting the Union over; or the Union was much weaker than we like to think it was, so a light and trivial suspicion was sufficient to rive it.

Otherwise we're left with cardboard. We're living flesh and blood beings, complex and with nuance; but those opposed to us are lifeless, bloodless cardboard cutouts. First you dehumanize your enemy ...