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Col. Dash wrote:
Yet talk to a lot of people and they will ardently defend that that was the sole cause. Especially northerners in the US I have noticed.

Simply put, the south seceded in order to preserve slavery because they correctly thought the northern population wanted to abolish slavery. This linked the survival of slavery to the outcome of the war.

Although the north went to war with Lincoln stating it was to preserve the union, the abolition of slavery was seen by much of the population as an important war aim. The sacrifices of the war intensified abolitionist sentiment leading to the adoption of abolition as a war aim.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Simply put, the south seceded in order to preserve slavery because they correctly thought the northern population wanted to abolish slavery. This linked the survival of slavery to the outcome of the war.

Although the north went to war with Lincoln stating it was to preserve the union, the abolition of slavery was seen by much of the population as an important war aim. The sacrifices of the war intensified abolitionist sentiment leading to the adoption of abolition as a war aim.

Abolition was such a fringe position in the North there really is nothing correct about the belief (though it was held).

The immediate triggers for the first round of Secession states was;

1). The victory of a Republican presidential candidate in Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party being the first American political party of significance to take a staunch anti-slavery stance. The party did not endorse Abolition as a goal, but it was very adamantly against the spread of slavery into the western territories which in the South was tantamount to wanting to free all the slaves everywhere. While not abolitionist, the party did adopt a lot of Abolitionist language and treated slavery as a moral wrong, which was conflated with a desire to end the institution.

2). The loss of Federal control. The Democratic party was the South party in a lot of ways, but the election of 1859 saw the emergence of a serious contender for the first time since the collapse of the Northern Whigs, and the result was that the Democratic party lost the ability to dictate Federal politics. The South had long associated control of the Federal government when assurance of the institution of slavery.

There's a few other triggers (Federal to State political relationships), but those two are high and above the most relevant. The North became increasingly anti-slavery from 1850 onward, but there's a difference between being anti-slavery and being an Abolitionist.

Australia is fairly similar to the US in the context of this thread. We have little history as a nation. What Australian history they try to teach is incredibly dull, and does a lot to turn kids off history. You get taught about the British discovery, about the first fleet landing, and about the convict ships. Then it jumps to the gold rush, with a big focus on a single miner’s strike that was violently put down. Then it jumps to WWI, with almost all focus on Gallipoli.

If you stick with history, by the time you get to your last two years of highschool they don’t even bother with Australia any more. We did 20th century Russian history and then 20th century Chinese history.

The Tariff of 1812 is the spark that led to the Civil War, which was a war about states rights for the South, and slavery for the North. It was a major tariff on imported goods and equipment. This tariff majorly impacted the South who was trying to mechanize and the North did not want that to happen since it made so much income off of Southern cotton. Ironically the mechanization of the south would have reduced the need for slaves and likely would have ended the practice eventually anyway.

The tariff of 1832 was supposed to lighten the load and was so bad that South Carolina was talking about leaving the Union. They responded with Nullification to negate the tariff to which President Andrew Jackson called treason and started strengthening forts. In 1833 he got passed the Force Bill which allowed him to send troops and ships to enforce acts of Congress.The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun worked to devise a compromise tariff. Both sides later claimed victory. Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina claimed a victory for nullification, insisting that it had forced the revision of the tariff. Jackson's followers, however, saw the episode as a demonstration that no single state could assert its rights by independent action.

Calhoun, in turn, devoted his efforts to building up a sense of Southern solidarity so that when another standoff should come, the whole section might be prepared to act as a bloc in resisting the federal government.

This is just a little of the early parts leading up to the war. States rights very much was on the minds of most Southerners. Even the last vets of the war interviewed in the 1900s were quick to say it. They didnt care about slavery, they couldnt afford them anyway. They fought for their rights which were being infringed on by the more politically powerful Northern states.

State's Right to do what? People from the south, especially those that fought for the south, would not want to say 'we were fighting to preserve slavery' so we can't really take testimonies otherwise at face value. Saying the war was about slavery is an oversimplification that ignores a great deal of the complex events and cultural differences that caused it, but saying the war wasn't about slavery is just whitewashing things.

Col. Dash wrote:
The Tariff of 1812 is the spark that led to the Civil War,

That Tariff was abolished before 1830.

It was a major tariff on imported goods and equipment. This tariff majorly impacted the South who was trying to mechanize and the North did not want that to happen since it made so much income off of Southern cotton. Ironically the mechanization of the south would have reduced the need for slaves and likely would have ended the practice eventually anyway.

In the 1840s Georgia had the second largest Textile industry in the country, second only to Massachusetts. The industry collapsed not because of anything the North did, but the innate volatility of the Cotton market. Cotton prices were horribly unreliable. They'd boom one year, and drop in another. See my quote from James Huston earlier in the thread for why the presumption that slavery would have been eliminated by industrialization is presumptuous.

The tariff of 1832 was supposed to lighten the load and was so bad that South Carolina was talking about leaving the Union.

And got South Carolina the Compromise Tariff of 1833.

Seriously. This is like reading a Civil War history from 1903. Southerns won resoundingly pretty much every tariff battle fought in Washington. The tariff of 1812. 1832. The Black Tariff in 1842. The Walker Tariff in 1845. Tariffs didn't trigger the war. Tariffs were just an element of the larger economic conflict, which still just swings back the economic power of Southern planters and slavery. No one seceded after Lincoln's election because of tariffs. If anything of the most significant triggers of the war was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which people in the North and the South simultaneously interpreted as a betrayal by Federal law makers of sacred compromises over where and how slavery could spread*. Once the faith that compromise could be achieved collapses, it was only a matter of time before one of the two sides did something. Just so happened it was the South who rage quit because a staunchly anti-slavery party was swept into power.

*Stephen Douglas, the great compromiser, had pushed heavily for the law and made it happen because he believed the best resolution to the conflict over the spread of slavery was to let the people of the territories decide its fate, which honestly for the time is completely reasonable. Unfortunately North and South didn't have any faith that the other side would abide by such conventions. Bleeding Kansas has convinced the South the North would violently attack slave holders, and the north interpreted the events (including the later Lecompton Constitution) as the Federal government overwhelming willingness to back slave holders under any circumstance. Harper's Ferry didn't help. The Kansas-Nebraska Act while such a noble idea, became a death kneel to the functionality of Federal politics. This is the corner stone of the argument that the Civil War was born of a failure in Federal government, but even that failure inevitably goes back to slavery.

States rights very much was on the minds of most Southerners..

States Rights is nothing more than a post-war apologetic invented by Jefferson Davis and embraced by people desperate to push the issue of slavery into the periphery of the conflict. You can't separate the conception of states rights from slavery, and you can't separate the Civil War from the curious institution. And while the South was desperate to pretend their conflict was just about the reserved powers of the 10th Amendment, they certainly weren't complaining when they forced the Fugitive Slave act on states where slavery was illegal, or when the Dred Scott case practically made every state a nominal slave state by rending laws abolishing slavery de facto unconstitutional (and threatened to negate the entire concept of reserved powers).

States rights in the Civil War is about slavery and little else. It's potato - pohtato.

The southern states that seceded explicitly call out the institution of slavery as the main reason for seceding in their respective declarations of secession.

"States' rights" my bottom.

The constitution of the Confederacy was nearly identical to the constitution of the Union. The key difference for the purpose of this discussion is that the Confederacy added a clause to ban the creation of laws to abolish slavery.

This strongly argues that the Confederacy was founded with the purpose of preserving slavery.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The constitution of the Confederacy was nearly identical to the constitution of the Union. The key difference for the purpose of this discussion is that the Confederacy added a clause to ban the creation of laws to abolish slavery.

This strongly argues that the Confederacy was founded with the purpose of preserving slavery.

To expand on this, a fundamental aspect of the 10th Amendment being written, and indeed the very basis of states rights as a concept, was the fear that the Federal government could some day ban slavery. People weren't blind after the Revolution. Everyone saw that many of the great figures of the time like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Franklin held reservations about slavery. Part of why the amendment was written in the first place was as a behind the scenes assurance that the Federal Government didn't, and wouldn't, have the power to end slavery. Slaveholders were the political elite of the early United States, not just in the South but in the North as well. Everyone less concerned with the ethics of slavery (most people at the time) wanted assurances that their financial well being couldn't be threatened. It was easy to get behind at the time, as there were far more states with a prevalent interest in slavery (slavery was alive and well in New York, Rhode Island*, and Pennsylvania through the 18th century).

*Nicholas Brown Junior, a co-founder of Brown University, was one of the most prolific slaveholders and traders in the United States, and lived in Rhode Island. He was one of the few men to be convicted of violating the ban on the International Slave Trade passed by the Federal Government in 1804.

I drive past this absolutely massive 800 year old Norman castle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrickfergus_Castle) every day like its totally normal.

But its crazy. It's more than a big old hunk of stone. It's a fortress that's seen countless conflicts, defended people, oppressed people, imprisoned people, empowered people.

It's a fine example of Northern Ireland's divided political/cultural landscape. Depending on who you identify with you'd maybe have very mixed views about.

When I think of The USA I think about European Colonialism, I think about French and British and Spanish and Portugese settlers invading and appropriating indigenous people's territory all over the Americas.

I think about my own people crossing the Atlantic, Ulster Scots Presbrterianism becoming the basis for the American constitution and Potato Famine victims fleeing the atrocious conditions in Ireland and forming a major part of the modern American cultural make up.

But all of this is such ancient history.

I also think about American influence on Irish independence and I suppose our own more recent Northern Ireland peace process.

I suppose its the same point about perspectives. This has been my perspective for many years but globalisation I believe is beginning to break down some of the cultural bubbles that have allowed countries to hold onto their myths about themselves, especially those perpetuated in history classrooms, I'm talking about cultural imaginaries and political spin from warmongering governments. I'm just waiting for the day when they won't get away with it quite so unchallenged by the mainstream media who are slowly being infiltrated by independent reporting from global perspectives.

Some day some of the national perspectives we cling to now might be as repulsive to future generations as racism and sexism have become to us but weren't so much for our grandparents' generation.

Yeah, about that...
Happy day of going to South America to steal gold and genocidenatives! (Aka Dia de la Hispanidad)

 aldo wrote:
Yeah, about that...
Happy day of going to South America to steal gold and genocidenatives! (Aka Dia de la Hispanidad)

Oh, we call that "Columbus Day" over here, and it really isn't openly celebrated anymore. When I was a kid, we used to get Columbus Day off from school (or, more accurately, the closest Monday to Columbus Day) but 1992 was the last time that happened in my school district. We took a field trip to the Smithsonian to look at their 500 year anniversary exhibit celebrating 1492, but that was already very controversial. We didn't get Columbus Day off in 1993, and by Columbus Day 1994, nobody in my class knew it was Columbus Day without being told by a teacher first.

I still advocate renaming Columbus Day to Leif Erickson day

Maple Syrup Discovery Day

 LordofHats wrote:
I still advocate renaming Columbus Day to Leif Erickson day

I'd back that with all my might. Leif Erickson was a boss. I did my 5th grade biography project on him.

Numerous times I have not realize Columbus day arrived until after it had already passed, if at all. Nobody cares anymore, which is probably a good thing.

Well the Federal government cares because it gives everyone the day off

Yeah but they took a whole week off over playground-level bickering when they shut it down so I think its force of habit rather than actually caring.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
The southern states that seceded explicitly call out the institution of slavery as the main reason for seceding in their respective declarations of secession.

"States' rights" my bottom.

I have a stack of letters, written in the field, from relatives that fought in the Civil War for the North. In one of them is described an exchange between some Confederate prisoners, where they complained of Yankees coming to take away their slaves. The reply they got was that the the regiment didn't care about the n word, but the preservation of the Union.
There are other letters describing trouble between Union soldiers and Blacks, and of soldiers being hauled in front of drumhead trials because of charges from Blacks.
In this regiment, at least, there seemed little love between the two groups.

Relapse wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
The southern states that seceded explicitly call out the institution of slavery as the main reason for seceding in their respective declarations of secession.

"States' rights" my bottom.

I have a stack of letters, written in the field, from relatives that fought in the Civil War for the North. In one of them is described an exchange between some Confederate prisoners, where they complained of Yankees coming to take away their slaves. The reply they got was that the the regiment didn't care about the n word, but the preservation of the Union.
There are other letters describing trouble between Union soldiers and Blacks, and of soldiers being hauled in front of drumhead trials because of charges from Blacks.
In this regiment, at least, there seemed little love between the two groups.

Indeed.

Opposition to the institution of slavery should not be solely understood as opposition to racism, or disagreement with white supremacy. Abolitionists were a minority from 1800 on wards. Many in the North didn't care if slavery existed so long as it didn't get in the way of their interests. Throughout the war, unionism was a more driving factor for Northerners than a desire to free the slaves. Even once emancipation became a war aim, it was more seen as a punitive action intended to punish insurrectionists and weaken resistance to reunification rather than as a purely altruistic aim for most people.

I don't think anyone would doubt that most Northerners weren't enthusiastic abolitionists, or that there wasn't plenty of racism and racial animosity in the North, but slavery and racial supremacy, with both fear and disgust at the very notion of racial equality, were at the very core of Southern Secessionism. The fact that the Northerners were far more interested in preserving the union than the abolition of slavery speaks volumes about the echo-chamber that the Southern political class lived in.

The Southern doctrine spelled out in detail in the southern states declarations of secession as Almighty Walrus noted, we can look at Texas as a prime example.

Texas Declaration of Secession wrote:We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that 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; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.

As I said: "'states' rights' my bottom."