While a small and discredited minority of historians may still question slavery’s central war in the conflagration that was the Civil War, most historians, the vast majority and all of the serious ones, place the institution of slavery as the key reason for the war. Most people have vaguer notions if they have notion at all, but still tend to see slavery as central to the story (though what about slavery is a different question) of the war. That being said there are still redoubts of the Lost Cause and they are getting more attention than they deserve, including by this blog. If they weren’ t so pernicious I’d ignore them, if they didn’t find echo in the Teabaggers and anti-immigrant brownshirts one could just laugh them off. But talk of ‘state’s rights’ has always been code for white rule in this country. It wasn’t just slavery and Jim Crow, in the 1830s it was evoked to to ignore the Supreme Court and remove the Cherokee, in current times it is proclaimed in enacting anti-immigrant laws. Etc. Etc. The gala ball held recently to commemorate South Carolina’s slaveholders rebellion, the Sons of Confederate Veterans television ads peddling racially coded falsehoods wholesale, the kerfuffle over Virginia’s official declaration on the sesquicentennial, all these and many more even before we’ve reached Sumter’s anniversary opening the War in April, bodes poorly for the public discourse on the war. It is hard to dignify some of the characterizations of the causes of the US Civil War brought up by this week and the way they were largely handled by the mass media. The media’s shaky footing is a reflection of the continued myopia this country has on the War; on our history in general for that matter. The only question on the US citizenship test with two correct answers is ‘what was the cause of the Civil War?’ Both ‘slavery’ and ‘state’s rights’ are counted right. Wrong. full: _http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/secession-what-was-it-all-about/_ (http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/secession-what-was-it-all-about/) State’s rights? Southern elites had no problem with Dred Scott extending slavery’s writ to every state whether they liked it or not. State’s rights? Sure, the right to own and trade in slaves and the right of new states to as well. I’ll let James McPherson give the argument in the video below on the causes of the Civil War and how and why views on the causes changed over time. McPherson may have mellowed a little, but he remains invaluable. All of his books are worth finding and, unlike many of the best works on the period, available at your local library. Comrades who haven’t yet could do no better than to pick up McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom- perhaps the best single volume of history in the last 40 years- to read during the period of the anniversary.
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