this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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There's a problem with this argument.
Confederate states actually controlled the federal government prior to their succession, and strongly opposed states' rights to ignore federal laws like the Escaped Slaves act. Wisconsin and Vermont had judges and legislators who declared any individual who reached their borders to be free.
Abraham Lincoln had declared opposition to slavery, but said that he would not impose federal law on the states, and had not even threatened to free slaves before the war began.
So while the Civil War did have a lot to do with states' rights, the Confederates were opposed to them and the Union supported them. This led to the secession, which sort of flipped the script, because then it was Confederate states demanding the right to leave the Union, and the Union saying "no" to that particular demand. It had very little to do with telling Southern States that they could not keep slaves, although there is plenty of reason to expect that it would have gone in that direction without the Civil War. Abolitionists were gaining ground, and Lincoln was morally opposed to it, so it the Confederate states had a reasonable expectation that they would eventually be forced to end slavery, but it hadn't happened before the start of the war.
To be sure, the Confederacy was a traitorous band of anti-American bigots seeking to create a tyrannical ethnostate of christofascists (fuck, why does that sound familiar?). However, in this case, the answer to Velma's question in this case is not "keep slaves" but is instead "secede."
Just because something is indirect does not mean it isn't ultimately the overarching reason.
Yes, the direct reason was secession, but the reason for secession was slavery.
There was nothing indirect about it. The direct reason was slavery. Slavery was federal law. It was not state law in every state, and the Confederate states did not want to stay in the union if the federal government wasn't going to enforce slavery in states that had abolitionist state laws. The federal government was not trying to tell Conferates that they had to free their slaves, so the Confederates were not on the states' rights side of the slavery issue when they attempted to secede. They opposed states rights to abolish slavery.
When they seceded, they used, in part, the argument that states had the right to secede from the union. They did not, and we fought a big war over it.
Ask yourself this though, if the debate were over something like, the right to own a platypus, instead of the right to own a person, do you think there would have been a war? Of course not, because it wasn't about what was or wasn't written down or any technicality, it was about slavery. It would have been the same outcome no matter what the law said because at the end of the day some people wanted slaves, and other found the practice abhorrent - it was a fatal flaw baked into the founding of the country. And as the scales began to tip against the slave holders they found whatever reasons/excuses/whatever they needed to to retain their power