Some say Haley was wrong for not mentioning slavery as the cause of the civil war

It was a stupid question and a stupid controversy.
Haley's 'Slavery' Controversy Is Utter Nonsense

Phil Boas, Arizona Republic

 

Every Confederate state seceded in order to preserve, protect and defend the institution of racist slavery.

The VP of the Confederacy stated that the main purpose of their new nation's existence was to preserve White Supremacy and the inferior position of black people in society.

 

Buddy, while that is cute as a button, I've referenced more primary sources about this than anyone else in the forum. No one here has spent more time studying this topic than I have, and it shows.

 

I do not think Haley is racist, but I think she believes some of the votes she needs are

 

And we have newspaper articles during the 1860 election talking about how it was all about slavery. And the democrats split their party over slavery because the Northerners were not pro-slavery enough. And we have the Crittenden Compromise, the Confederate constitution itself (the only major change being more protection for slavery), letters and speeches from the Secession officers, the design notes from the guy who actually made the Confederate flag (and made it clear it was dedicated to slavery and white supremacy), the peace summit, etc. etc. Every single primary source from the period makes it clear this was about slavery. The declarations of causes and the Cornerstone Speech, as you rightly point out, are the best pieces of evidence, but you can't throw a rock at a pile of documents from the time period without hitting a piece of paper from a Southerner confessing the true cause.

 

Ah, good! A real scholar! Please be good enough to tell an ignorant clod like me where in the Constitution it says that any state is FORBIDDEN to leave the United States. All I need is a simple reference because, believe it or not, I can understand the language it was written in.

In a broader perspective, I'd like to know if a person with your cut-in-stone belief that slavery was THE cause of the Civil War understands that slave owners were only a small minority of comparatively wealthy citizens of the Southern states! Why was it so bloody important to the vast majority of Southerners whether or not a scattering of 'fat-cat' slave owners kept their labor force or not?

That same 'vast majority' of Southerners worked long and hard, typically six days a week, with their own manual labor or that which they had to hire, in order to make their living... why would they leave their homes and families on farms, or leave their businesses for months or years on end to protect "slavery" from which they derived little or no benefit from at all?! Did you ever think about that?!

BUT -- this same 'vast majority' of Southerners remembered all too well the arrogant tyranny inflicted on the American colonists by the English Crown only a few decades before -- and seeing exactly that same kind of overbearing totalitarian dictatorship being thrust on them by Northern political forces, they turned out by the tens of thousands to fight for as long as it took, and to die, for STATES RIGHTS!

Did I even make a dent...?

 

Every declaration of secession by the Confederate states mentions preserving slavery as their primary reason for leaving the Union.

 

Nope, slavery.

 

Brilliant. I'll bet it took you all of five seconds to type that. (You're in the lead!)

 

Shifting the goalposts already? Really?

Hey, at least now you are kind of being topical. So, no, it wasn't "only a small minority." In the very first two states to secede, almost HALF of all households were slaveholding households. In addition to getting that part wrong, you also are under the mistaken assumption that only slaveowners cared about slavery, which is just historically vapid.

You would have made a dent if you had actually read up on any of this. I'm honestly not even sure where to start. So let me just start with a few questions regarding your STATES RIGHTS garbage:

1) If the cause was states' rights and not slavery, why did the seceding states say it was about slavery?
2) If it was about something other than slavery, why did the South make slavery central to their attempts to negotiate to remain in the Union and, later, to rejoin the Union?
3) If it was about something other than slavery, why is their flag literally dedicated to slavery?
4) If it was about something other than slavery, why did the VP call slavery the cornerstone of the nation?
5) What "states' rights" were the South willing to fight for that didn't involve slavery?
6) And this is the most important one . . . if the Confederacy thought that states' rights were more important than slavery, then why did they make it illegal for their states to decide the issue of slavery? And why did the Southern dems split from the Northern dems when the Northern dems said to just leave the issue of slavery up to each state?

 

Please enlighten us as to why we should ignore . . .

Newspaper articles from the time period
The platforms of the 1860 parties
The comments made by the seceding states in the documents that were created for the explicit purpose of providing their causes of secession
The Crittenden Compromise
The cornerstone speech
The design of the Stainless Banner
Speeches and essays from secession officers
The Confederate constitution
The peace summit at the end of the war

 

That was the primary concern for the south (State's rights, sure, but the "right" of concern was the preservation of slavery). Slavery was not the primary concern for the north, as explicitly stated by Lincoln. The primary concern of the north was to prevent the south from being a separate country. Mostly in hindsight do we try to justify the horrific slaughter by saying it was to stop slavery. In reality, abolition was a strategic move by Lincoln to manage foreign intervention into the war. Europe had already moved beyond slavery, and the north being the anti-slavery side made it less appealing to aid the south.

The consequence of the civil war is the unhappy marriage of north and south continued. And this unhappy marriage is exactly why such a question would be asked.

 

If there was no reason to believe the union was going to abolish slavery, or limit the spread of slavery, the Confederate States would have never seceded.

The End

 

It refers to territory, not just property.

If Canada and the U.S. reached a deal to sell Point Roberts to Canada, they would have to secure permission of the state of Washington. If they wanted to sell the entire state, I assume they would still need to get the state's permission to completely leave the United States.

It makes sense to me that Donald John Trump won't be able to sell California to Mexico without the state's permission.

Lincoln trampled a lot of the Constitution that never contemplated a civil war. But states rights never included the right of a state to secede. My interpretation of Article IV, Section 3 is that leaving the union requires an act of Congress and approval of the state.

Article IV, Section 3:

"New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.

The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular state."​

So, if a CSA state wanted out, they had to get permission of Congress. They didn't.

 

They should have asked Congress to pass legislation letting them leave the union. Instead, they decided to secede without asking and it cost them dearly.

 

We may disagree about the real cause and the fundamental reason the South wanted so desperately wanted to leave, but at least you are much more civil and usefully expansive in explaining your viewpoint, and I salute you for that.

 

So the Union fought for the righteous cause of abolition, even though:

1. It took 2 years and nearly losing the war for there to be a proclamation freeing the slaves in regions that were no longer part of the Union;
2. It conscripted young men to fight and die for it, and held young men hostage to a military "contract", which are just alternative forms of slavery;
3. After the war, the same Union soldiers, led by the same political leaders who were supposedly moral crusaders against treating people as animals, went on to genocidally cleanse the west of Native Americans.

Slavery is a horrendous crime, no matter if it's "legal", but I doubt that many, if any, fought and died to end it in the South.

 

It makes no difference what each one of them was fighting for. The WAR was about slavery. I'm sure recruiters were very imaginative as to how to enlist men to fight for either side. But that is of very little relevance in what concerns the REASON for which the Civil Ware was fought.

 

Oh, I see, half the citizens of states in the South owned slaves... right? OK, that would explain why they may have had "skin in the game". NOW, do you have any credible data that clearly shows that half the civilian population of the seceding Southern states owned slaves? Ooh... that would be interesting to see.... You must have access to quite an interesting data base to be able to make such a declaration... but please, spare us any of this "it is estimated that...." crap which is clearly (and laughably) after the fact! You made the claim -- NOW -- back it up!

And please be so good as to reference sources from at or before 1860.... Then, at least, we may understand WHY ordinary, working-class subsistence farmers and others who comprised nearly all of the population of the South would put their 'lives and fortunes' at risk to defy the Northern juggernaut! Truth? They turned out in massive numbers to defend 10th Amendment-guaranteed STATES RIGHTS! But you and your faction won't accept that.

 

We have products being sold in the US, right now, that are slave produced by the Slavers in Beijing, so before you start sitting in judgment, make sure your house is free from slave produced goods.

Haley was the Gov of South Carolina. SC was the first to leave the Union and the first to fire on the US and here is the opening lines of why they say they left the Union:

The declaration laid out the primary reasoning behind South Carolina's declaring of secession from the U.S., which was described as "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery".[2] The Declaration states, in part, "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
​

I don't know why Haley wanted to dodge that, and her questioner directly asked her, and she really didn't answer the question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Declaration_of_Secession

 

The tariffs of 1824 and 1828 sewed the seeds of secession long before slavery was a concern anywhere but in the hearts of a few abolitionists.

 

And what evidence do you have that it was about slavery other than your own feelings and media opinion pieces?

 

And what judgment was I sitting upon?

Yes, it's clear that slavery was a major reason for some of the Southern states to secede. But that doesn't mean that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

 

The percentage of households with at least one slave was something like 25%. It ranged up to around half in Mississippi.

 

There have been numbers generated from data much closer to the time of the Civil War that indicate only 1.6% of the population were slave owners, but that data is corrupted by the fact that it included populations of states in which slavery was not legal... but 25% is incredibly high.

If you only focus on who actually and technically owned slaves, though, a better metric would be to evaluate the proportion of slave owners in the 15 states where slavery was still legal in 1860. About 5% of people in those states (where slavery was legal) were considered slaveholders, the more credible data shows. That’s nearly three times higher than the 1.6% number, but nowhere near the 25% you mention -- or the astonishingly insupportable 50% number that others have come up with.

Except for the White plantation "aristocracy" the vast majority of Southerners were poor people who lived a hardscrabble, rural existence, and slaves were very expensive in the economy of the day, especially to anyone who wasn't already wealthy.

Why would a poor Southerner, who works endlessly just to feed his family, be willing to leave his home, take up arms, and go fight, perhaps for years? For a klatch of 'rich guys' with hundreds of acres and without a care in the world, relaxing in the shade on the verandas of their lavish mansions, 'sipping mint juleps'? That assumption simply defies every rule of human nature I've ever heard of....

But that same poor Southerner would fight to the death against a tyrannical dictatorship that was attempting to inflict unconstitutional power over him -- very much as his grandfather and great-grandfather fought against the tyranny and injustice of the King of England not so many years before....

Slavery was an essential ingredient in the entire issue -- no one disputes that. But "the straw that broke the camel's back" was the North's denial of States Rights, and its attempt to use the Supremacy Clause to mangle and cripple the rights reserved to states forever, using its power and force to wreck the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.