Excuse me, it was about state rights. Sure, sure, the states were making the argument that they had the right to keep slaves, but how is that relevant to your argument?
It’s sad that this is even a debate in 2026, I thought we finally buried the lost cause myth for good already
It’s because different states are allowed to teach different truths to children. So now we have citizens that believe completely different facts. Because facts are no longer universal, perception of reality is fundamentally warped between groups.
Yeah my rural southern school drilled the “it wasn’t slavery” over and over.
They conveniently omitted pretty much every article of secession that cited slavery. Instead just focused on how late the emancipation was and how it avoided emancipating slaves in Union states.
So maybe the North wasnt sufficiently abolitionist, but the South sure as hell thought they were.
Don’t know why that had to be a picture, but yes, and almost every state’s declaration had the same point in it, usually the first paragraph.
But no, my school didn’t teach that. They only acknowledged that the north had not yet absolutely banned slavery everywhere and the states seceeded before they even tried to come down hard on the insitution. They desperately want to erase the fact that the south very much had the moral low ground.
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Still think that everyone in power in the south should’ve been hanged for treason.
It’s not too late.
Not for treason. While the union was on the right side of the slavery issue, I can’t agree with the whole imperialist “you can’t leave this nation, we rule you” stance. Governance should be consensual IMO, though I’m not opposed to military interventions to deal with evil shit like slavery or refusing to allow those who want out to leave (but not to enforce economic advantages).
Though ultimately it doesn’t really matter and the strongest militaries, intelligence agencies, and civil obedience forces will decide in the end, as they always have.
Governance should be consensual IMO
They can’t claim a consensus when half of the population were slaves or freedmen who could not vote. Those people were pro-union for obvious reasons.
When you add up those with the non-insignificant fraction of white southerners who opposed succession then it’s clear that there was no popular consensus to leave the union.
So yeah the Federal government had every right to crush them.
I also think its strange to tell them that the south can’t leave the nation. I dont see why its a good idea to force them to stay.
Yet the shit hole red states virtue signal about the left “indoctrination”
“No, it was about states’ rights!”
“States’ rights to do what?”
"… >:[ "
B̵̃ͅ ̷̰̆U̵͇̾ ̷̪͝Ṟ̶͛ ̴̙͋Ṇ̷̌Article I Section 9(4) of the Confederate constitution:
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Yeah, they specifically restricted state’s rights.
It was explicitly NOT about states’ rights. The Confederacy hated states’ rights. They were the ones pissed they couldn’t enforce their shitty laws in the North. They prevented any of their member states from ever outlawing slavery.
That line isn’t just a cutesy way of hiding the ugly part behind the technical truth, it’s a flat out lie.
You’re absolutely right, and I had no intention to mean otherwise with my memery. Apologies for the misunderstanding!
States’ rights to do what, motherducker!
They why did the confederate state’s formal declarations of succession say that slavery was the reason they were succeeding?
secession, seceding
I don’t think they were succeeding
Fucking autocorrect.
Autoincorrect
Remember when Republicans did shit recently in the name of “state’s rights” to hate and then when states that didn’t want Trump’s bulashit said “oh let’s pass our own laws to undo his cuntery” Republicans and Trump said these states had to follow federal law?
Ra damn Trump and Republicans are hypocrites.
Technically it was over a state’s rights to ban slavery.
The slavers really hated that and wanted to expand as much as possible.
But then, why the segregation, also in the north and in the army?
How could it turn out that free workers were cheaper than slaves?
Farmers who needed labor for a few days, weeks, or months found the use of hired labor decidedly cheaper and more efficient economically
https://www.jstor.org/stable/213510
The war was against slavery, only to transform it into other, more efficient, means of control.
Dude we never said they weren’t racist. Like pretty much everyone has some kind of bigotry we’ve picked up over the years we have to unlearn. Just that they didn’t want slavery to expand beyond the south.
Correct. Still bad and fuck anyone who defends it.
So was the Alamo. Growing up in Texas we’re taught to believe the soldiers were heroes.
Oh yeah. I forgot about the Alamo.
You had one job!
That reminds me, i forgot about 11/9.
Remember remember the 9th of November… wait that doesn’t sound right
Yeah, it’s 11/5/20XX that we’re supposed to never forget
Knock knock
Whos there?
Nine Eleven
I remember the culture shock of going to college in the south and having entire classes of incoming students believe this. And the lost cause shit. And all of the other bullshit.
They still refer to it as the war of northern aggression. A lot
I’m certain they do. Political science education across the south is absolute garbage.
As history? Sure.
As propaganda? It’s top notch.
I had a history professor in the south that had his own theory based on congressional deadlock over the construction and route of the transatlantic railroad. Made everyone buy a copy of his “book” from a local copying shop for like 150 bucks, it was just a packet of copied paper that you had to put together in a 3 ring binder.
Dropped that class after 2 weeks.
it was just a packet of copied paper that you had to put together in a 3 ring binder.
I’m not sure how many pages a packet is. But I had a few classes that had a whole book of loose-leaf pages that had to be bound by ourselves. But they were legitimate.
It was his self published book, it was not legitimate in any way. He also had a scheme where you had to turn in all assignments in a specific blue paper folder that was only sold at the same copy and print shop for 25 bucks, otherwise he wouldn’t accept it.
College was a fucking racket.
I wasn’t allowed to submit my own lab reports when I was in college. I had to pay 125 dollars for a subscription to a website that I would enter my lab data in, and then it would write the lab report for me. I’d been writing my own lab reports for about 5 years at that point, so I wrote my own and submitted it and I got a 0 because I didn’t use the website.
I dropped out later that year. The constant grifting just killed higher education for me, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Ouch, did they charge you lab fees on top of that? I worked the whole time I went to school and remember annoying the hell out of my professor about lab fees. Like, I will clean this tiny lab up for you and order supplies, I don’t understand why a biochem lab fee is like 400 bucks. None of the reagents we use are expensive.
I don’t even remember.
I had another class, I think it was psychology, where you had to get the book. The book sold for about 50 bucks used, or 350 new, but if you got the used one, you also needed to shell out 300 bucks for the one-time site access code that was included in the back of each book, and that site was where you got your homework and assignments from.
I feel like every millennial is due a 150% refund of their student loans. Everything was a fucking grift, the quality of education, and the promise of well-paying careers did not pan out for most people. Fuck it, throw GenZ in there too, they’re getting the same fucking scams.
350 new, but if you got the used one, you also needed to shell out 300 bucks for the one-time site access code that was included in the back of each book,
Oh yeah, I remember those coming out. Before that they did the same thing but instead of an access code the back of the front cover had a cd taped to it.
Fuck it, throw GenZ in there too, they’re getting the same fucking scams.
Yeah… Poor bastards got hosed during COVID. I know at the University my wife teaches at they were charging lab and room fees for online classes.
Sounds like an absolute douche. A fucking coffee shop?
Copy and print shop, basically a store that just sold access to a big office printer with the ability to scan/copy and fax. It was a little mom and pop one that was located next to the university. They had deals with a couple of the sketchier professors who had their own little shelves that they would sell overpriced class supplies and expensive prints of their required readings.
Oh, lol, I misread.
But, yea, super sketchy. Note that I’ve had my professor texts before but those books were actually published by someone reputable and are otherwise important in the field.
Yeah his book was basically a giant rant claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the civil war, and it had been copied from copies so often that it was barely legible.
Jesus. As a professor, some people out there certainly aren’t fit for the position.
Yeah… He was definitely just there for the paycheck. I guess you gotta appreciate the hustle on some level.
Don’t make us sing John Brown’s Body at you. I’m high as fuck I’ll do it
My eyes have seen the Glory
OH NO YOU DON'T
JOHN BROWN’S BODY LIES A MOULDRING IN THE GRAVE
But his soul goes marching on!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of John Brown /
He is whipping all the slavers and then driving them downtown /
Where we’ve got a red woodchipper that is never slowing down /
His soul goes marching on
The civil war was about a power struggle between ruling wealthy factions that used poor Americans as cannon fodder. These factions pitted brother against brother and destroyed countless families.
Slavery was the topic, but the reality was a dramatic failure to govern and how the American people are nothing more than pawns to the ruling class.
No, just read the articles.
What the fuck does that have to do with rich people using propaganda to pit Americans against each other. The civil war was a great example of the American people getting owned by the rich as always.
Instead of the wealthy sorting it out they used Americans as pawns in a senseless war. It was a garbage war that produced garbage results.
We still treat blacks like second class citizens to this day.
https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convictions/
Saying the civil war was only about slavery is a bunch of bullshit. Primary reason, sure.
It was all about slavery. But it would also be a mistake to think it was those who wanted to keep slavery on one side, and those who wanted to abolish slavery on the other. The abolitionist position was still a minority one in the North at the time of the war. The South didn’t just want to preserve slavery, but wanted to expand it westward. Most in the North - including Lincoln himself - were fine with letting the South keep their slaves, but didn’t want it to expand as that would foreclose much of stolen western lands to white yeoman farmers (i.e. the Free Soil movement). IIRC Lincoln offer the Southern states the right to keep slaves in perpetuity so long as they stayed in the Union.
Wasn’t the Fugitive Slave Act also a big reason? The North was not OK with Southern states coming up and kidnapping freed slaves
Yes certainly.
When you say he was going to let them keep slaves, do you mean just keeping it as a state issue as it was before? Because that was the issue to begin with for the south. The south didn’t want their people be able to abolish slaves.
Sort of. He would have allowed the contemporary slave states to keep slavery should they choose, but future states out west would not necessarily be given that choice. Keeping slavery boxed in in South was totally unacceptable to southerners.
I’m not sure I understand yeoman in this context, I just know it in naval/military contexts. Little help?
Sure - meaning a small-time farmer who typically doesn’t hire anyone to work the land (usually . doing it themselves). Not quite subsistence farming as the goal is to have a small surplus to be able to pay for stuff you can’t just make yourself.
Americans like Thomas Jefferson had this vision of the country - in its ideal form - being an entire nation of yeoman farmers. One reason stealing more native land was important was the rich could always promise the (white) poor that they could improve their lot in life by moving west and becoming a yeoman farmers.
from what i’ve dug up, yeoman seems to refer to a now nonexistent middle class? i don’t know, it’s fifteen minutes of research without coffee, i can’t verify the accuracy of my work.
As posts over in Piefed are saying, it was about the state’s rights to have slavery. Very specifically, it was about the right for new states to have slavery. Till that point, the political divide was along slave states VS not slave states, a divide which partially exists to this day. As such, to maintain the balance of political power, each new territory added as a state would alternate between being a slave state and free state. However, with expansion into the west, a representation of progress and freedom, the federal government proposed a ban, not on slavery, but the enacting of new slave states. All existing Southern states would still have slavery.
Fun fact! Utah entered the union as a slave state but did not secede (because they thought seceding would invite federal attention and they had enough of that in the Mormon War). I’m not sure what makes the fact fun, but it’s on the list
Instead they tried to contribute nothing to the union cause.
Another unfun fact, Oregon wasn’t a slave state, because their black exclusion laws defined that slavery and involuntary servitude shall be forever prohibited in Oregon and than any “negro or mulatto” residing in the state for more than six months would receive 39 lashes.
It was amended a few months later due to the lashes being seen as “excessive” so that instead the punishment was to “publicly hire out” the individual for the “shortest term of service” after which they would need to be removed within 6 months.
It really set the template for the sort of “just slavery with extra steps” that became the 13th amendment and post-emancipation US.
Another unfun fact, that’s why Oklahoma has a panhandle. Texas wanted to enter the Union as a slave state, but it wasn’t allowed below a certain line of latitude. So Texas gave up some of its territory to ensure it could enter as a slave state, and a portion of that territory became the panhandle.
Mormon history is so exceedingly bloody and fucked up that is actually kind of amazing how thoroughly they’ve been able to reverse that completely and convince outsiders that they’re just peaceful, pleasant people.
you must be mormon if you think that they’ve convinced outsiders they’re pleasant
I think most people see them as super polite teetotalers. Most Americans are completely oblivious to the violent history.
It was about the governmental balance of power, of course. But it was also about slaveholders wanting to expand their wealth. While chattel slavery in the antebellum south wasn’t capitalism, with the invention of the cotton gin and de facto “industrialization” of cotton production, these slaveholders were generating large surpluses that needed to be reinvested i.e. capital. Couple that with the fact that slaves literally reproduce themselves and they need to have somewhere to work in order to generate profit or at a minimum preserve themselves, southern slavers eyed the west greedily. They needed western states to be slaves states so they could purchase large tracts of land and move their slaves out there. Forcing slavery to exist only in the south would create a situation where slaveholders would not only not have outlet for capital reinvestment, but also no outlet for a growing slave population.
Exactly. The cotton gin is so often an under looked invention in American history, but it single-handedly solidified the power of slave owners and their reliance on slave labor. The promise of new lands to extract value from via plantations must have been extremely tempting to the slave owners.
slaveholders wanting to expand their wealth. While chattel slavery in the antebellum south wasn’t capitalism
How was it not capitalism? They literally bought and sold people.
Wage labor - and a class of workers who have nothing to sell but their labor - is a part of what defines capitalism. I mean, I don’t want to be so rigid as to say the economic system in the South was nothing like capitalism though, these things don’t always have firm boundaries.
Edit: I’m literally a communist, in no way should my explanation be considered “defending” capitalism. Chattel slavery and capitalism were inexorably entwined together, I’m just getting into the weeds on definitions.
Kind of an important point. It’s so weird how people are ready to accept the assumption that the government suddenly started caring about actual people just for the civil war.
It’s always about labor.
Female orgasims arent a myth they are very much real
I love female orgasims.
Something that I don’t already know!
