If you had “continue battling the Confederacy” on your 2020 bingo card, you may have won a prize. As for me, I’m dumbfounded that anyone today would intentionally defend that short-lived bastion of slavery, not to mention that they continue using the same arguments that have been debunked and/or countered a hundred times. Why is this so difficult?

But here we are. The same talking points and pro-Confederacy claims keep popping up, very often in the mouths or tweets of Republican politicians but also swirling around laypersons and incels. Nothing about the Confederacy was worthwhile.

I’ve tackled a few of these lies/myths/claims individually in the past, sometimes on my blog and sometimes on social media (on accounts that no longer exist). In 2020 it made sense to me to put all these on one page. If I’ve missed any, please let me know in the comments or via email.

Claim: Removing Monuments Is ‘Erasing History’

Any time someone advocates for removing monuments and/or statues that honor the Confederacy — or suggests renaming streets, schools, parks, U.S. Army bases, etc. named after Confederate “heroes” — someone always responds with the “erasing history” bit. It’s perhaps the least helpful and most dishonest talking point of the pro-confederate side, but it’s so common that major news corporations produce segments on it (here is NBC’s). The idea is that history is somehow changed or revised, or in danger of being forgotten, or even literally “erased”, if these statues and monuments are torn down or moved off public grounds into a museum, or if we begin naming schools and streets and parks and military bases after people who weren’t Confederate generals.

The claim not only isn’t true, it’s such a bonkers thing to say that I honestly thought it didn’t require debunking. Like if someone said to me that eating Cheerios in Texas would cause a unicorn in Australia to grow warts that look like Jesus and then die of cancer. It doesn’t make any sense, or have any bearing in reality.

For example, when Mississippi legislators debated about finally removing Confederate imagery from its state flag, state senator Melanie Sojourner (Republican) said: “When we remove our history or set our history aside, then we lose the opportunity to educate and inform and to have a conversation about what the true meaning of things are.” Fellow legislator Chris McDaniel (also Republican), who has long worried the Mississippi flag might change, called it a “slippery slope”, adding that “attempts are being made nationally to challenge the nation’s founding and history”.

Note that literally no one in Mississippi (or elsewhere) has suggested removing or setting aside or challenging “the nation’s founding and history”. In that sense, it’s a straw man: they are arguing against something that isn’t even on the table. None of these Confederate apologists has been able to explain — ever — how any history is changed, challenged, revised, or erased in these cases.

But just in case someone does actually need it spelled out for them, it is fairly easy to explain how we’re NOT erasing history, or changing it in any way.

History is contained primarily in books these days, but also on the internet, in journals (both professional and private), letters, diaries, periodicals, and (sometimes) in movies or documentaries. Not to mention bountiful official documents required to be maintained by government officials (some of the same ones who are complaining about “erasing history”). Statues have never contained, remembered, or transmitted history — aside from the very short ALL CAPS descriptions on their plaques. And it does nothing to “preserve history” to keep the names of Confederate generals on our nation’s largest military bases. History is taught in schools, read in books, discovered online. No history teacher has ever told her class: “well, the only way to learn history is to walk around town and look for statues and monuments, plus scan a list of military base names, so get to it.”

One more related fact here is that in almost every case, the monuments and statues to the Confederacy were never intended to store, share, relate, or otherwise affect history. If anything, they had an anti-historical bent. Almost all were erected several decades after the Civil War, once white supremacists had re-secured power in the South and enacted a slew of Jim Crow laws. It was a defiant anti-progress act aimed squarely at intimidating any Black American who might walk past.

No, removing those statues/monuments (or renaming those streets and sites) won’t solve racism, but it absolutely needs to be done. And it won’t affect history one bit — except the part where future historians will note that we finally did it.

Claim: We’re Mistaken To Judge Historical Figures By Today’s Morality

When we use disparaging terms to talk of our slave-owning “founding fathers” or their successors who later founded the Confederate States Of America, someone always pipes up with “it’s not fair to use today’s moral standards to judge people in the 1700s or 1800s” (or some variation of that).

I do in fact agree that morality changes over time, not only for individuals within a lifetime but for societies and cultures. In fact, I have even wondered what future people will think and say about us and the evils we as a human species are committing now. However, just as future humans will rightfully judge us for the things we do that we already know are wrong (like mass incarceration or destroying the ecosystem), we are right to judge people of two and three hundred years ago for owning human beings — because they knew it was wrong at the time.

Not only did the enslaved populations know it was wrong, but so did many free abolitionists in the U.S. Additionally, there is quite a bit of evidence that the slave-owners themselves were aware too. For example, slave-owner (and slave-rapist) Thomas Jefferson wrote in his initial rough draft of the Declaration Of Independence that slavery is a “cruel war against human nature itself”, and listed the slave trade as one of the colonies’s complaints against the King of England. He called the trade “this execrable commerce... this assemblage of horrors”. John Adams, the president before Jefferson, did not own slaves, calling slavery “an evil of colossal magnitude”. The president prior to Adams was George Washington, who did own slaves but knew it was wrong. Even before the Constitution was ratified, he promised himself he wouldn’t buy another slave and said he wished the country to abolish slavery.

So, if 60-80 years prior to the Confederacy, even the slave-owning founding fathers found fault with slavery, believed it to be “repugnant” (Washington) and “execrable” (Jefferson) and “an evil” (Adams), then there is no credible ground on which to argue that people in the 1860s didn’t know slavery was wrong. No, we can judge them by their own morality and by the known standards of their own time.

Claim: Confederate Imagery Isn’t About Racism Or ‘Hate”, But ‘Heritage’

“Heritage Not Hate” is one of several rallying cries for United States citizens who adore displaying Confederate symbols and imagery. The idea is, they say: the flags and associated paraphernalia aren’t about racism or white supremacy, but about the fond memories of a friendly and genteel Dixieland. I suppose each might imagine that heritage differently; some might be thinking of their own childhood, others of an imagined and idealized yesteryear.

But there is no definition of “heritage” that makes sense in this context. “Heritage” is either something one inherits — the way Robert E. Lee inherited slaves, for example, or “something transmitted by or acquired from a predecessor”, as in a legacy or tradition. The legacy and tradition of the South is brutal chattel slavery, followed by decades of white supremacist terrorism, resisting Reconstruction, passage of Jim Crow laws, thousands of lynchings, and calling in armed soldiers to prevent school segregation. Of course it’s true that if a person was perfectly perceived as “white”, then one could safely ignore all that heritage and focus only on cutoff jeans, swimming holes, dirt roads, and pickup trucks. And that very ignoring is part of the heritage too; people pretending to be “good” while staying silent about the oppression all around them.

To this day, the South continues to find workarounds to oppress minorities, whether it’s closing 1,200 polling places (usually targeting Black and Latino populations, like the disaster in Kentucky recently), continuing to protect Confederate monuments, or pretending their state flag isn’t directly inspired by the Confederacy.

It is a heritage OF hate, and little else.

Claim: Robert E. Lee Never Owned Slaves

(This section was once a standalone blog entry, published in 2017; here it has been edited and somewhat condensed from its original form.)

Every time Robert E. Lee is mentioned, some ignorant-of-history person will jump in to claim: “But Lee was AGAINST slavery!” Some claim Lee never owned slaves. They often add that his Confederate military service wasn’t defending slavery but rather out of loyalty to “his beloved Virginia.”

To clear the air, Lee did own slaves, he didn’t free them when he could have, he wasn’t kind to his slaves, and he only freed them when he had to.

First, Robert E. Lee owned slaves. Of this there is no question. It is well documented that he and his wife inherited a plantation full of slaves (“about seventy”) from his wife’s father George Washington Parke Custis.

Second, Lee did not free his slaves when given the opportunity. His father-in-law’s will was clear that — after clearing his estate’s debts and giving money to his daughters — the slaves should be “emancipated” — “to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease”. The “five years” was the limit, not a minimum. And Custis had already told his slaves they would be freed.

When Custis died in 1857, Lee (then stationed in Texas with the U.S. Army) tried to hire an overseer for the Custis planation but failed to find a good one. So Lee took a leave of absence from the Army and went to Virginia himself to run the place. Believing they were free, a number of the slaves ran away after assuring Lee to his face that they were free men. Lee had them captured and jailed. Then Lee sent the jailed slaves to a slave trader and instructed him to find another owner for them.

Third, Lee wasn’t kind to his slaves (as is so often mythologized about slave-owners). When Wesley Norris, along with his sister and a cousin, escaped in 1859. Norris himself later wrote that Lee demanded to know why they’d run, and that the slaves answered that they were free.

“[Lee] then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to ‘lay it on well’, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Historians disagree on how much of that account is true, but broadly agree that (1) the runaway slaves were recaptured and returned, and that (2) at least some of them were punished physically upon Lee’s orders. Too many independent accounts agree on those two details.

Fourth, Lee only freed the slaves when he had to. On Dec. 29, 1862, two months past the five-year deadline set in the will, the Custis slaves were freed. That was three days before they would have been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

The source of the misinformation about Lee seems to be a single letter Lee wrote to his wife in 1856, in which he included the phrase: “...slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country.” But even in the same letter he derided abolitionists and shared his belief that only civil war would free the slaves. He opined (in the same letter) that slavery was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race” and that “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race.” Then he waxed poetic about how Jesus would work through the white men to eventually emancipate the slaves, though he noted that it might take as long as “nearly two thousand years”.

In my mind, if you say you are for a specific societal change, but do not act to effect that change, and in fact act against that change, you are not actually in favor of that change. It doesn’t matter whether the topic is climate change, civil rights, women’s equality, or any other issue on which progress still needs to be made. If you are actively working to slow or stop the progress, you are not in favor of said progress.

My best guess is that very few people have read the entire letter, but instead trust the websites and “books” (pamphlets, really) of Confederate apologists who quote only the single phrase.

When it comes to Lee commanding the armies of the Confederacy and allegedly doing so for benevolent reasons, I think this comes from revisionist history books in many public schools (like the ones I had in Texas). In reality, Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and joined a separatist movement that only existed to protect slavery. (See below for the claim that the Civil War was about anything other than slavery.)

You don’t voluntarily join a cause that you think is “a moral & political evil”. You refuse to join that cause. When someone asks you to join it, you simply refuse. “Sir, your cause is evil, and I want no part of it”, Lee would have said if he had been an upstanding person.

I do recognize the possibility that some of the individual Confederate soldiers didn’t understand the larger issues of the war. They fought for their homes, families, and pride. It is true that many of them were poor white people who did not own slaves, though even poor families in those days sometimes owned at least one — according to the 1860 Census 32% of white families in the South owned slaves — as high as 49% in Mississippi, not only the wealthy elite. But the leaders of the Confederacy were very clear about their purpose and their feelings toward the “inferior black race”. Lee was educated, informed, and connected. He moved in the halls of power and was well aware of the causes of secession, even if the average man on the street might not have been.

Claim: The Civil War Was About Anything Other Than Slavery

(This section was once a standalone blog entry, published in 2014; here it has been edited and condensed from its original form.)

One false claim that’s been around a long time — I was first exposed to it in high school textbooks — is that there were multiple causes of the Civil War and that slavery was only one of those causes, even a minor one. There was the issue of states rights, the economy, different ways of life, tariffs, and so on. Some people even refuse to call it the “Civil War”, using terms like “The War Between The States” or (as I heard frequently when I lived in Arkansas) “The War of Northern Aggression”.

What to call the war depends mainly on whether one believes the C.S.A. was still a legal part of the U.S.A. at that time. If so, then it was a civil war. I’ve seen interesting arguments about this but I confess I care little as to what it’s called. (“Civil War” is shorter, easier to pronounce and type. It is also used in an overwhelming majority of historical texts, reference books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, scholarly journals, and mass media, since long before I was born.)

As for the causes of that war, here is where revisionists pour the majority of their energy. There is no shortage of websites promoting “southern pride” and historical nostalgia for the “good old days” of the South. I won’t link to any of them here because I consider them egregious sources of misinformation. But they have names like “Confederate American Pride” and are “dedicated to Americans who are proud of their Confederate heritage”. Some of them call themselves “Confederate nationalists”, and work diligently to convince confused readers that the Civil War was not caused by slavery.

“Technically the 10 causes listed are reasons for Southern secession. The only cause of the war was that the South was invaded and responded to Northern aggression.”

Well. The 10 “causes”? (1) an unfair sectional tariff, (2) centralization versus states rights, (3) Christianity versus secular humanism, (4) cultural differences, (5) control of western territories, (6) northern industrialists wanted the South’s resources, (7) slander of the South by northern newspapers, (8) New Englanders attempted to instigate massive slave rebellions in the South, (9) slavery, and (10) northern aggression against the southern states.

I read through a bunch of these sites (in 2014, for my original entry) and it was clear to me that 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 (cultural differences, control of western territories, slander of the South, fear of slave rebellions, and slavery) are all covered under one word: “slavery”. So five of the ten causes are just slavery. The first was a minor matter at best and could have been solved in Congressional debate. Three is a red herring; Christians in the North were just as abundant as Christians in the South — the only difference was that many of them had become abolitionists. Six is unsubstantiated; the north had plenty of “resources”, which is often listed as one of the reasons it won the war. Number 10 is what most nations do when a giant block breaks away.

That leaves only states rights and slavery. While “states rights” is still something that conservatives yammer about in the 21st Century any time a federal policy tries to implement any progress, in the 1800s the states rights argument was inextricably tied to the slavery question.

Again, motivations might have been different for many of the rank-and-file Confederat soldiers, but for the men in charge of the secession, and the men who ran the Confederate States of America, slavery was the primary cause of their break from the Union and their willingness to war over it. This is unquestionable and documented. When South Carolina’s government explained on Christmas Eve 1860 their reasons for secession, slavery was foremost on their minds. Not only did they mention “other slaveholding states” as South Carolina’s peers, but it says that the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) was a primary cause of joining the union in the first place, that they would not have originally been a part of the Union without it. And further:

“For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution... Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.”

The document names several northern states that passed individual laws against the federal Fugitive Slave Clause, and complains that these states aren’t honoring federal law. (Wait! Is South Carolina against states rights? Yes, if doing so promotes slavery.)

Three other southern states — Texas, Alabama, and Virginia — also mentioned the plight of the slaveholding states at the hands of the North, when they announced secession. Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas each published lengthy explanations similar to South Carolina’s, all of which mention slavery as a primary reason. From Mississippi’s document:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

It also complains of a growing “hostility”, which “advocates negro equality, socially and politically.”

Texas’ explanation for secession points out that she was a slaveholding state from the beginning,

“...maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”

Any time states rights are mentioned in these documents, it is in direct reference to being able to own slaves. Most of them specifically mention the “black race” or “negroes” specifically. Imagine going to war over something BESIDES slavery, yet writing all these documents solely about slavery being the reason.

After secession and the formation of the C.S.A., newly elected Vice President Alexander H. Stephens (governor of Georgia after the war) said in 1861:

“...the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions — African slavery as it exists among us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution... Our new Government is founded upon ... its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

And, according to Jefferson Davis (called by one neo-Confederacy site “our Fist President”):

“My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses... We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him, our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude... You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.”

So yes, the civil war was about slavery.

Claim: Republicans Freed The Slaves; Democrats Are The Party Of The KKK

This one is of course true, as far as it goes. However, it’s never been said or posted in the past 50 years with the intent of clarifying anything or actually fighting against racism or the Confederacy.

In the past month alone, I’ve seen dozens of social media posts with this claim, including very poorly crafted memes with photos of Abraham Lincoln (Republican) and well-known white supremacist politicians (all Democrats). The history of the Democratic Party is longer and more muddled than that of the Republican Party, and definitely includes some of the most overtly racists U.S. presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and James K. Polk. It’s true that the KKK and other white supremacist groups that rose to power in the aftermath of the Civil War were composed of Democrats, and that it was a Republican president (U.S. Grant) who fought against them.

But reciting all that true history ignores (as the memes and tweets ignore) the history of the two parties in my lifetime. Something changed. Longtime Southern democrats began voting for Republican presidential candidates, and national democrats began openly championing the civil rights and progress that they’d previously ignored. Some point to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly remarked to an aide: “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” Others note that it began earlier, when Truman advanced a pro-civil rights platform in 1948, prompting the “Dixiecrats” to walk out — a prologue to the 1960s. The 1960s and 1970s saw overlap as Black southerners began voting Democrat and white southerners began switching to Republicans. (Many of my own family members were Democrats up through the Carter administration, and then switched to the GOP for Reagan.)

Notably, today both parties make a public show of denouncing racism, praising Martin Luther King Jr., and parading minority candidates. However, only the Republican party has recently been endorsed by vocal white supremacists, including David Duke, infamous former “grand wizard” of the KKK. When votes are tallied in state legislatures on topics like voting rights, or removing Confederate emblems, or resolutions to proclaim that Black lives matter, there’s typically an astounding imbalance, with Democrats falling on the anti-racism side and Republicans... less enthusiastically so. When a sitting politician today makes an egregiously racist statement, it is much more likely to be a GOP president, a GOP representative from Iowa, or a GOP senator from Arkansas. Sometimes, it’s an ultra-regressive millionaire donor to the Texas GOP.

None of this is to say that today’s Democrats are perfect or ready to dismantle systemic racism, or that every Republican wants to own slaves. The point is that the oft-shared “wisdom” about the history of the parties is a red herring. The only intent of interjecting the claim about Democrats in the KKK or Republicans freeing the slaves is to distract from the current conversation and waste the time of anyone who attempts to debunk it. Clearly there has always been and still is overlap between the parties, but just as clearly, the two parties as a whole switched sides on the racism issue in the latter half of the 20th Century.

Conclusion

It’s been on my mind for some time that “the Confederacy never actually lost the Civil War” in most ways that count. On paper, the war lasted four-point-something years, and the Confederacy lost, yes. It became illegal to own human beings, to buy and sell them. But in many other ways, it sometimes seems like the Confederacy just kept going... Or actually won in a subversive sort of way.

It turns out I wasn’t the only person who thought this; Rebecca Solnit wrote on the topic in 2018. Of course, today’s “Confederacy” isn’t a geographical region drawn by the boundaries of 13 separatist states; it’s more of an imagined nation-state, spread across the internet in a myriad of ways. Steve King is a Senator from Iowa, not Georgia, and Confederate sympathizer Donald Trump is allegedly from New York (did he ever show his birth certificate?), not Mississippi. Regardless of where today’s Confederates hail from, they are active. Redlining continues; school segregation continues; voter suppression continues; mass incarceration continues; lynchings continue.

In Solnit’s words:

“In the long run we need to end the war with a decisive victory for an idea of a pluralistic, e pluribus unum union, with an affirmation of inclusive values and universal human rights, and of equality across all categories.”

In the meantime, don’t let these Confederate myths, lies, and/or mistaken claims go unchallenged.

 

Original Comments Under Blog Entry On Robert E. Lee

Anderson Connors, 2017.11.01, 19:52

People defending Lee (or anything else Confederate) are just using slang. What it translates to is “I’m a white supremacist”. Fuck them.

Tom Forehand, Jr., 2018.06.08, 11:42

Before you accept the Norris story as fact, you should read some history about what the Norris family was doing at the time Wesley Norris came out with his accusation that Lee was a slave whipper. [link removed by Wil C. Fry] Thanks, Tom Forehand, Jr.

Wil C. Fry, 2018.06.09, 10:12

Thank you for the comment, Mr. Forehand. Your article is similar to a few I found while researching the above blog entry. The point seems to be: because the Norris family was petitioning to gain possession of part of the Lee estate, his story of being whipped is extra-suspicious.

In general principle, I stipulate/agree that in any situation where someone stands to gain, we must be on the alert for exaggerations, obfuscation, and even outright falsehoods. (Coming immediately to mind are oil companies sponsoring research that shows global warming isn’t occurring, while most other research shows that the Earth IS warming at a startling rate.)

On the other hand, if the account was even remotely true, one would expect it to be brought to public light at the times in which it was published. (For example, during political campaigns, long-dormant stories about the candidates suddenly come to light, even if they occurred many years before. While there is clearly a motive — winning the election — it doesn’t mean the stories aren’t true.)

Also, please note my disclaimer above:

“Historians disagree on how much of that account is true, but broadly agree that (1) the runaway slaves were recaptured and returned, and that (2) at least some of them were punished physically upon Lee’s orders. Too many independent accounts agree on those two details.”

Understand that I read more than a dozen sources on this particular point and found several disagreements. Due to it being a minor point in my entire entry, I condensed those sources into this one short paragraph, noting the disagreement but also the general consensus on two points. If my entire point had rested on this one account, I think I would have expanded this section, listing all the sources and the specific disagreements and conclusions. However, since this part was more a point-of-interest rather than the foundation of my argument, I kept it small and light so I could focus on the main points.

Again, the main points of my argument: (1) Lee DID own slaves. (2) Despite a will instructing him to free said slaves during a five-year-period, he steadfastly refused to do so, only freeing them AFTER the five-year period and only days before they were to be freed anyway via the Emancipation Proclamation, (3) Lee was an educated, informed person, and was well aware of the causes of the Confederacy — the primary one being to maintain the institution of slavery — and could have easily refused to support this cause, but instead threw the entire weight of his intellect and skill behind the cause.

Original Comments Under Blog Entry On Civil War Caused By Slavery

Zane, 2014.11.18, 19:53

I think wars are incredibly complex things that get boiled down into chapters in history books and hour specials on TV until they congeal into oversimplified statements. I agree with you though, the main underlying cause of the war was slavery and the economy that was based on the slaves. But, I’m sure that all of those millions of men had their own reasons for fighting, and ideas on what the war was about for them at the time. Perhaps our ancestor’s reason was personal gain.

I think most of the “southern pride” and nostalgia today is just regional pride based on simple ignorance or racism. However, some of it might stem from those who actually fought for the Confederacy and felt strongly about why. When the war was lost, there must have been a lot of resentment and hatred that remained for a lot of people, and I think that has been passed down through the generations. When those Confederate men went home from fighting they still thought they were right, and maybe we’re still dealing with it.

Zane, 2014.11.18, 19:57

All of the crap on those websites could be just translated as “we were right all along, but we lost the war.”

Shari, 2014.11.18, 22:14

Looks like you’ve done some good research here. This is one of those areas that can be touchy, and I have heard some arguments for State’s Rights as the point of the war. I haven’t taken the time to look up the original documents you’ve quoted from, as I should have.

Wil C. Fry, 2014.11.19, 07:28 (in reply to Zane)

Much like today, I think there’s a wide gulf between Average Joe’s motivations and Joe-in-Charge’s motivations, even when the action might be the same — which I alluded to above.

(With continuing apologies to anyone named Joe…) Average Joe Voter has different reasons for wanting Obamacare repealed than the reasons that motivate someone like, say, Ted Cruz. And I’m sure it was the same in those days. In the case of the Civil War, it was Joe-in-Charge who wrote down his motivations in official documents that survive.

To take the case of a non-slave-owning, non-racist, non-political farmer in the South, it’s easy to imagine his motivation being: “I’m afraid the North’s armies will lay waste to my possessions” or something else entirely, maybe even something sublime as “My friends will think I’m a coward if I don’t join up.”

Wil C. Fry, 2014.11.19, 07:35 (in reply to Shari)

It does look like States Rights was a major factor, but (as noted above), the question was inextricably tied to slavery in those days. There was really no other issue about which states disagreed on a year-to-year basis, at least not to the point of suggesting secession — which had been suggested for a couple of generations prior to the Civil War.

And it really looks like States Rights was a completely different question back then than it is now. Now it’s usually a hypocritical cry. The same governors don’t shout “States Rights!” when a president or Congress of their own party passes a nationwide law, but use it any time the opposing party does.

But yes, in the end, I looked up these resources to answer the questions in my own mind. :-)