re: On this day 158 years ago, Vicksburg surrendered to Union forces (July 4, 1863)

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The war was fought over state rights

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States rights to do what exactly?

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The war was fought over state rights


States rights to do what exactly?

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Sometimes the right war can be fought for the wrong reasons

The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.

—G.T. Yelverton, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention, (January 25, 1861)

LINK

edit- Link is to The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Spare me the whole South as victim nonsense. The South was an economic backwater going into 1860 and I suspect the powers that ran things saw this even before, but Southern leaders were slow to react to changes in economic reality.

Why did the South not embrace rail and a unified system? Why was overall development in the South so far behind even areas in the mid west that settled at least at the same time as places in the South? It might have been about money, but it was the other way around, the South saw the writing on the wall. The South was stagnant in population growth, it was not easy to get around, there was very limited manufacturing. Additionally southern planters were depleting the soil because of, wait, get this, COTTON. which is why you had such a vicious fight for Kansas and its valuable farmland. The Southern planter class wanted to diversify their crops but they wanted slave labor to do it.

The election of 1860 was an attempt by the Southern planter class to do the same thing that happened in 1824 and send the election into the House of Representative and hope they could broker a deal that would at least get possibly John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party in a brokered set up. Breckenridge would not have been acceptable to Northern Democrats or Republicans.

Sucks to make bad calculations. Start a war against an enemy with 3X the amount of fighting population with a growing manufacturing base that once ramped up could dwarf anything the South could do. If you are going to start a war make sure you don't have to import because if your enemy has a navy and you don't, well, you are toast. In the end it's always about money and yes the North had grown tired of constantly capitulation to Southern demands that the ratio of slave to free states stay constant with the ability of the Southern Planters to send bounty hunters out to essentially recover los "property" with no repercussions in Northern states where slavery was illegal. The Southern planters hated the fact that slavery had become as
a majority unpopular, nationally.

Why do you care so much? Are you a Yankee or Black?

Hooray for the good guys

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It's not why they were fighting...nowhere in any war speech or any diary did a grunt say "I'm fight to keep my slaves"

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The South Carolina Declaration of Secession literally mentions the hostility to the institution of slavery by non-slave states.

Lincoln did things he did not have the power to do and things that today would have gotten him impeached convicted and likely locked up. Suspended habeas corpus. Declared martial law and allowed civilians to be tried by military courts.

The man would do anything to preserve the Union. Ending slavery was a means to an end.

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Ending slavery is just. Using it as an excuse to expand federal powers beyond what's constitutional is unconscionable.

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Wait what???… statement makes no sense… Slavery probably one of the only excuses to expand beyond the constitution… obviously the constitution wasn’t outright forbidden slavery

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The war was fought over state rights

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Only the most unread, gullible and ill informed person thinks slavery was not the overriding reason. Just read the articles of secession. Additionally, it's not like the south had a chance, we got our as___ whipped like Bama humiliates Mississippi State in football.

Mississippi

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 have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Texas

The servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations.

South Carolina

Those [Union] States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.

Georgia

That reason was [the North's] fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.